Jul 15, 2017 03:55 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/the-grotesque-is-...s-laughing
EXCERPT: [...] Commercial interests and political institutions have, in our own age, hijacked carnivalesque events such as Mardi Gras, flattening them into carefully policed occasions marked by bar-crawling and souvenir-hawking. In Rabelais’s age, however, carnivals were simply subversive, turning upside down the official feasts and pageants regularly staged by throne and altar. Laughter laced these festivals that larded the medieval calendar. Under the walls of castles, crowds would crown jesters as kings, while in churches the junior clergy would mock pontiffs. Lords of misrule would make a mockery of royal pronouncements and practices, while monks would subvert sacred rituals into scatological riffs. During these great pauses, the institutional machinery of feudal society shuddered to a halt, enabling the vast majority of men and women, their lives shackled to scarcity and submission, to revel in the taste of abundance and lack of inhibition.
What better reason for laughter? Not only did it defeat despair, but it also overturned the symbols of state power and violence – a dizzying liberation from time and place. The laughter provoked by carnival, Bakhtin announced, consecrates the profane and ‘celebrates temporary liberation from prevailing truth’. In this monde à l’envers, he concludes, all that is ‘terrifying becomes grotesque’.
Is it possible, though, that in our own time, the grotesque has become the terrifying? While the grotesque is difficult to define, we know it when we see it [...]
[...] The distance travelled between Rabelaisian and Trumpian carnivals could not be greater. Bakhtin believed that the carnival-grotesque form freed medieval man ‘from conventions and established truths … from all that is humdrum and universally accepted’. Today, however, the carnival that has been catapulted into power promises a lasting, and not passing, liberation from established truths that, until now, guided our world. Alternative fact, once the nonsense spouted by fools who were crowned for a day as kings, now informs the worldview of a man, long dismissed as a fool, crowned for four years as president. In his send-up of pre-modern scholasticism, Rabelais captures the insanity of our post-truth world: ‘Why should you not believe what I tell you? Because, you reply, there is no evidence. And I reply in turn that for this very reason you should believe with perfect faith. Faith is the argument of non-evident truths.’
Medieval carnivals existed, for a limited time, to bring forth laughter. They were haw today, gone tomorrow. The postmodern carnival, on the other hand, risks becoming no less mirthless than relentless...
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-grotesque-is-...s-laughing
EXCERPT: [...] Commercial interests and political institutions have, in our own age, hijacked carnivalesque events such as Mardi Gras, flattening them into carefully policed occasions marked by bar-crawling and souvenir-hawking. In Rabelais’s age, however, carnivals were simply subversive, turning upside down the official feasts and pageants regularly staged by throne and altar. Laughter laced these festivals that larded the medieval calendar. Under the walls of castles, crowds would crown jesters as kings, while in churches the junior clergy would mock pontiffs. Lords of misrule would make a mockery of royal pronouncements and practices, while monks would subvert sacred rituals into scatological riffs. During these great pauses, the institutional machinery of feudal society shuddered to a halt, enabling the vast majority of men and women, their lives shackled to scarcity and submission, to revel in the taste of abundance and lack of inhibition.
What better reason for laughter? Not only did it defeat despair, but it also overturned the symbols of state power and violence – a dizzying liberation from time and place. The laughter provoked by carnival, Bakhtin announced, consecrates the profane and ‘celebrates temporary liberation from prevailing truth’. In this monde à l’envers, he concludes, all that is ‘terrifying becomes grotesque’.
Is it possible, though, that in our own time, the grotesque has become the terrifying? While the grotesque is difficult to define, we know it when we see it [...]
[...] The distance travelled between Rabelaisian and Trumpian carnivals could not be greater. Bakhtin believed that the carnival-grotesque form freed medieval man ‘from conventions and established truths … from all that is humdrum and universally accepted’. Today, however, the carnival that has been catapulted into power promises a lasting, and not passing, liberation from established truths that, until now, guided our world. Alternative fact, once the nonsense spouted by fools who were crowned for a day as kings, now informs the worldview of a man, long dismissed as a fool, crowned for four years as president. In his send-up of pre-modern scholasticism, Rabelais captures the insanity of our post-truth world: ‘Why should you not believe what I tell you? Because, you reply, there is no evidence. And I reply in turn that for this very reason you should believe with perfect faith. Faith is the argument of non-evident truths.’
Medieval carnivals existed, for a limited time, to bring forth laughter. They were haw today, gone tomorrow. The postmodern carnival, on the other hand, risks becoming no less mirthless than relentless...
MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/the-grotesque-is-...s-laughing
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