The #grotesque is back – but this time no one is laughing | Aeon Essays
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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?