University of Southern Mississippi

Rabelais and Gogol: The Art of Discourse and the Popular Culture of Laughter
Author(s): Mikhail Bakhtin and Patricia Sollner
Source: Mississippi Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, Essays Literary Criticism (Winter/Spring, 1983), pp.
34-50
Published by: University of Southern Mississippi
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20133922
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 Mikhail Bakhtin

RABELRISANDGOGOL
THEARTOF DISCOURSEANDTHE
POPULARCULTUREOF LAUGHTER

Translator's Note: Mikhail Bakhtin defined his concept of discourse and his
model for literary study in his first work, Dostoevsky's Poetics. Written in 1929, it
was an early call for a change from the linguistic model used by the Russian For
malists. Bakhtin illustrated how the study of prose fiction-and the novel in par
ticular-lay outside the scope of linguistics. First of all, Bakhtin did not understand
language to be neutral and abstract, but the voices of individuals, voices that reflect
a full "semantic viewpoint." Bakhtin described language as "embodied" because it
is marked both by an individual and social accent (of a certain society, subset of
society, culture, historical time, geographical region, and individual psychological
make-up). Secondly, Bakhtin suggested that linguistics is not equipped to study how
these semantic viewpoints are portrayed in prose, because it cannot investigate how
the voice of the author and the character sound in the same utterance. Bakhtin
described this phenomenon as the "double-voiced word" and considered it to be the
hallmark of prose: the author must present the speech of the characters but in his
own language. The double-voiced word is especially evident in parody, where the
voice of the author is strikingly different from that of the character, or in the skaz'
where the narrator is clearly less educated than the author. But the double-voiced
word is equally important in less visible cases where the voice of the other person is
not directly heard, but rather is perceived through the manner in which the speaker
shapes his remarks for someone else. The double-voiced word indicates a dialogue
even though the interlocutor may appear hidden (Bakhtin shows, for example, how
the narrator in Dostoevsky's epistolary novella Poor Folk structures his letters
around the anticipated response of his reader and how the narrator in The Double
fashions his words for another part of his personality.)
Bakhtin discovered that Dostoevsky's use of the double-voiced word had far
reaching implications for the artistic and philosophical basis of Dostoevsky's work.
When Bakhtin called Dosteovsky's novels polyphonic, he referred less to the
multitude of voices that sound in the novels than to the method of presentation. All
the voices in a polyphonic novel (including the author's) appear on the same plane.
Dostoevsky rejects all privileged points of view that claim access to superior

Copyright 1975 by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. From Voprosv Literaturi i Estetiki. Translated with per
mission of Am-Rus Literary Agency andV.A.A.P.

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 Mikhail Bakhtin 35

positions of knowledge, power, and authority. No one voice pronounces the

ultimate truth in his works. Instead, all themes are re-shaped as they pass through
the voices (and hence the semantic viewpoints) of the characters. It is not the speech
of any individual character that is as important as the "dialogical angle" at which it
encounters the voice of another character and illumines both itself and the other
voice (Zossima and the Grand Inquisitor carry on such a dialogue). Bakhtin believed
that this use of the double-voiced word points to a certain kind of character who is
important for the way in which his voice interacts with other voices and is, in this
sense, not a finalized character, but one who is always "becoming." Bakhtin also
discovered that the plot is contrived of unstable situations in order to provoke the
characters into interaction (market squares, scandalous events, and all extreme
situations). Thus the plot, characters, and style reveal the central theme of
Dostoevsky's work-the importance of understanding the "otherness" of another's
speech: "The orientation of one person to another person's word and consciousness
is, in essence, the basic theme of all Dostoevsky's works."2
Since Bakhtin felt that linguistics is unable to handle
the complexities of the
double-voiced word, he developed his own method for investigating literary texts.
Like the Russian Formalists he included a close analysis of how the intrinsic features
of the text interact to form meaning, but in addition he tried to understand how the
formal qualities fit into and are defined by other and perhaps larger systems of
meaning, primarily those of cultural and literary history. Whenever Bakhtin
discovered a new concept, such as the double-voiced word, he searched through
other literary sources for examples of it and for the kind of culture that manifests
such a form. Bakhtin's exhaustive study of literary history is apparent throughout
all his works (note the wide range cited in the following article; he draws on
examples from French literature, philosophy, Ukrainian folk and ecclesiastical
literature, and ancient comedy). His study of cultural matrices grew from the one
chapter devoted to it in Dostoevsky's Poetics to become the focus of his later work
on popular culture and grotesque realism.
In his later studies, Bakhtin chose the genre and cultural tradition that most fully
revealed the double-voiced word and the concept of dialogue. As opposed to direct
presentation in the drama, Bakhtin believed the novel to be the genre specifically
suited for the re-presentation of characters' semantic viewpoints and for the
refraction of their voices through the artistic vision of the author. In his essays on
the novel (translated in The Dialogic Imagination),3 he gives examples of these
dialogues of embodied voices (what he calls novelistic tendencies) in various literary
sources. Researching the historical background of the novel's sources, Bakhtin came
to the conclusion that novelistic tendencies have arisen during the breakdown of
major cultural eras when a multitude of voices can be heard.
The concept of dialogue plays a fundamental role in his study of popular culture
and grotesque realism. In Rabelais and His World, he fully develops the many ways
in which popular culture and its manifestation in literature indicate continual
dialogues between the most unlikely interlocutors. By breaking down social and
class hierarchies, holidays and fairs create a unique space and mode of com
munication. Popular culture, in its opposition to official culture, always makes for a
dialogue instead of a monologue. People are no longer separated into spectators and
actors; all are participants in carnival. Much like the characters in a Dostoevsky
novel, characters meet and interact in the same place. A new kind of language is
possible, a language of familiarity (which includes abuse among its intimate forms
of address). Parodies and travesties of official and sacred texts are also possible
during carnival.
Furthermore, Bakhtin asserts that this new form of language has tremendous life
giving power. Due to the nature of the grotesque image, carnival is more than
"simple relaxation." By parodying, abusing, and degrading the lofty truth, by

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36 Mikhail Bakhtin

bringing it down "to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their
indissoluble unity,"4 the participants in carnival are restored to life. The grotesque
image presents the powerful forces of life and death simultaneously; it is am
bivalent. Without erasing any of the differences between death and renewal, it erases
the boundaries between them so that life becomes death and death becomes life. As
an example, Bakhtin cites an image of a senile pregnant hag who is laughing. She is
dying, but at the same time she is joyously full of life. The notion of "light-hearted"
death marks the utopian nature of grotesque realism; it is based on the never ending
renewal of humanity. Bakhtin points out that this optimism was possible for
popular culture until just after Rabelais' time, because people still believed that the
individual was not lost forever in death, but reborn in the collective life of the
people. Note that this image for the concept of death and renewal is concrete and
material rather than abstract. The comparison to the human (collective) body is a
literal one with cosmic significance. Bakhtin refers to this kind of metaphor and
grotesque image as "primordially-materialistic." The material earth and body
(especially the "lower strata" of reproduction and digestion) are literally and
metaphorically regenerative and life sustaining. And it is only that which is
material-or has been "degraded" to the material-that has access to regeneration.
Thus, images of the underworld and the devil-as representations of the lower
body-take on cosmic regenerative value. 5
In Rabelais and Gogol, Bakhtin sketches in shorthand his sense of the grotesque
image and the carnival in general.6 Together with Rabelais and His World, the
article is devoted to a semiotic study of how a cultural and literary tradition shape
language before it is shaped anew by a speaker.7 The article is also a significant
addition to the scholarship on Gogol. It provides a method for reading Gogol in
which contradictions are seen as part of a popular tradition that thrives and gains
new life from the juxtaposition of contradictions. Scholarship on Gogol has often
tried to avoid these contradictions by focusing on one aspect of the work and
ignoring others. Nineteenth-century Russian "social" criticism saw Gogol as a
realist who depicted the lower side of life and defended the poor and the down
trodden.8 It paid little or no attention to the fantastic elements and stylistic ab
surdities. The Russian Formalists emphasized Gogol's style.9 Bakhtin's method
allows us to investigate both style and theme, for it focuses on the use of alogical
language, the fashioning of speech for a recipient, the representation of characters
in the same plane, the vision of grotesque realism. Acutely aware that the in
terpretation of literature relies heavily on the background and education of the
reader, Bakhtin evolved a criticism which would overcome the reader's cultural and
historical isolation. He consistently rejected abstract formulations in favor of
concrete investigations of the cultural, literary, and historical matrices which in
formed the production of utterance in a literary text. As Julia Kristeva remarks,
what engages Bakhtin is the status of the poetic word within history and culture.
"The poetic word, polyvalent and multi-determined, adheres to a logic exceeding
that of codified discourse," Kristeva writes.

[It] fully comes into being only in the margins of recognized

culture. Bakhtin was the first to study this logic, and he looked
for its roots in carnival. Carnivalesque discourse breaks
through the laws of a language censored by grammar and
semantics and, at the same time, is a social and political
protest. There is no equivalence, but rather, an identity bet
ween challenging official linguistic codes and challenging
official law. 'I

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 MikhailBakhtin 37

Notes

'Skaz is a narrative characterized by stylized or conversational speech. See

Dmitry Chizhevsky, About Gogol's "Overcoat," trans. Robert Maguire, in Gogol
from theTwentieth Century, ed.Maguire (Princeton, 1974), p. 299.

2M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. Rostel (Ann

Arbor, 1973), p. 171.

'M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl
Emerson and Holquist (Austin, 1981).

4M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge,
MA, 1968), p. 19.

'In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin devotes a chapter to the ambivalence of
popular-festive forms. People are beaten up or dismembered; kings are uncrowned.
All, in one way or another, fall to the earth to become renewed. Actions, apparel
changes of clothes, disguises, masks which reveal first one aspect of a character and
then another-these are also ambivalent. Certain characters are by their nature
ambivalent: clowns and fools offer a folly superior to wisdom. In addition, these
figures are primordially-materialistic since they are often clowns and fools in real
life and "as such. . .represented a certain form of life which was real and ideal at the
same time" (Rabelais and His World, p. 8).

6Rabelais and Gogol, originally a chapter of Bakhtin's doctoral dissertation

Rabelais and the History of Realism, was written in 1940 and revised in 1970. The
chapter first appeared as an article in 1972 in Kontekst and reappeared inNauka in
1973. More recently it was included with five other essays selected by Bakhtin in
VoprosyLiteratur iEstetiki (Moscow, 1975), pp. 484-95.

7Bakhtin's concern with how a characters' language in a text is shaped not only
by its content but by its attitude to an addressee, makes him a precursor of later
theorists like Wolfgang Iser who study how the literary text as a whole is structured
according to the anticipated response of a reader. Like Iser, Bakhtin views the novel
as an epistemological model, as a way of coming to know the total "otherness" of
an "alien" consciousness. See Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic
Response (Baltimore and London, 1978).

8See V. G. Belinsky, Letter to N. V. Gogol, trans. Ralph Matlaw, in Belinsky,

Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism, ed. Matlaw (New York,
1962), pp. 83-92.

9See Boris Eichenbaum, How Gogol's "Overcoat" isMade, trans. Maguire, in

Maguire, pp. 267-93.

'?Julia Kristeva, Word, Dialogue, and Novel, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic

Approach to Art and Literature, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice
Jardine, and Roudiez (New York, 1980), p. 65.

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38 Mikhail Bakhtin

In the book on Rabelais' we tried to show that the ancient

popular culture of laughter forms the basic principles of this great
artist's work. One of the major shortcomings of contemporary
literary criticism is its attempt to fit all literature-the Renaissance
in particular-into the framework of official culture. And yet some
work, Rabelais' especially, can be understood only against the
background of popular culture which has always-and at all stages
of its evolution-opposed the official culture and created its own
unique world view, its own forms of figurative representation.2
Literary criticism and aesthetics try to squeeze the laughter of the
Renaissance into their own limited conception of laughter, a
conception that originated in the narrow and impoverished
manifestations of laughter characteristic of the literature of the last
three centuries. Such conceptions, we might point out, are far from
adequate even for an understanding of Moliere.
Rabelais is the heir and culmination of a thousand years of
popular laughter. His work is the indispensable key to the entire
European culture of laughter in its most intense, profound, and
original manifestation.
In this article we will touch on the most significant phenomenon
of the culture of laughter inmodern times-the work of Gogol. We
are solely interested in the elements of the popular culture of
laughter in his works.
Our concern will not be the question of Rabelais' direct or in
direct influence on Gogol (via Sterne and the French school of
naturalism). What matters here are the aspects of Gogol's work
which are independent of Rabelais' influence and are shaped by a
direct link with popular-festive forms of his native soil.
Gogol was well-acquainted with the popular holiday festivities
and fairs in the Ukraine, and these shape the majority of stories in
Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka: Sorochinskaya Fair, May
Night, Christmas Eve, and St. John's Eve.
THE THEME OF THE HOLIDAY ITSELF AND THE
UNRESTRICTED ATMOSPHERE OF HOLIDAY REVELS
FORM THE SUBJECT MATTER, IMAGES, AND TONE OF

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 Mikhail Bakhtin 39

THESE STORIES. The holiday, popular beliefs connected with it,

its special atmosphere of license and light-heartedness, releases life
from its everyday rut and makes the impossible possible (marriages
that were impossible earlier become possible). Light-hearted
deviltry, profoundly related in character, tone, and function to
many carnival apparitions of the underworld and diableries, play
an essential role in those stories we call purely festive and in others
as well.3 Food, drink, and sex have a festive carnivalesque
Shrovetide character. Again we emphasize the enormous role of
various disguises, hoaxes, beatings, and debunkings. Finally, IN
THESE STORIES, GOGOLIAN LAUGHTER IS PURE
POPULAR-FESTIVE LAUGHTER. It is ambivalent and
primordially-materialistic. In spite of its significant subsequent
evolution, the popular basis of Gogolian laughter remains intact
throughoutGogol's work.
The prefaces to Evenings (especially those for the first part) are
close to Rabelais' prologues in construction and style. They are
fashioned in a tone marked by familiar banter with the readers. The
introduction to the first part begins with lengthy abuse (true, not by
the author himself, but by the reader, whose enthusiastic abuse is
expected): "What's this? I've never heard of such a thing! Evenings
on afarm near Dikanka? What sort of evenings could they be? The
whole thing was slapped together by some sort of bee keeper... !"
Badmouthing, typical of popular culture, follows: "some scruffy
kid or other is rooting around in the backyard. . ." Oaths and
imprecations are included too: "For the life of me!" "May the
devil push their old man over the bridge."4 Here is another image
characteristic of the ambivalence of the grotesque: "Foma
Grigorivich's hand, instead of making an obscene gesture, reached
for a knish." The story is framed around a Latinized schoolboy
(compare the episode with Rabelais' Limousin student). And in
addition to these features, listing of foods, that is to say, of images
of the feast, comes toward the end of the introduction. 5
From Sorochinskaya Fair we cite an image of old people dancing
that is characteristically ambivalent-it is almost an image of
Dancing Death:

Everything danced. But one glance at the old women

with their withered cheeks, marked with the indifference
of the grave, who were jostling among the laughing,
lively young people, would have aroused an even
stronger and more enigmatic feeling. Oh the light
hearted ones! the aged ones, who-bereft of childish
happiness or the fiery spirit which comes from par

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40 Mikhail Bakhtin

ticipation in the dance-have been forced by in

toxication alone to perform like humans-just as
puppets, activated into life-like movement by a
magician, quietly sway their drunken heads. Paying no
attention at all to the young couple, the old women
imitate the dance of the happy crowd.

Aspects of grotesque realism make their appearance inMirgorod

and Taras Bulba. In the Ukraine (as well as in Belorussia) the
traditions of grotesque realism were extremely vital and powerful.
Their breeding grounds were, for the most part, the ecclesiastical
schools, seminaries and academies (Kiev had its own "Mount St.
Genevieve" with analogous traditions). Wandering schoolboys
(seminarians) and members of the lower clergy, "Mandrovanye
scribes," spread the oral light-literature of the facetiae, anecdotes,
minor verbal travesties, and parodies of grammar throughout the
entireUkraine.
School games, with their special disposition and license for
freedom, played an essential role in the evolution of Ukrainian
culture. Traditions of grotesque realism were still active in
Ukrainian educational institutions (not only ecclesiastical ones) in
Gogol's time and even later. They make up a large part of the
evening dinner conversation of the raznochintsy intelligentsia6
(who came primarily from the ecclesiastical spheres). Gogol could
not help but immediately recognize them in their living oral form.
He gained knowledge of them through written sources too. And
finally, he acquired the essentials of grotesque realism from
Narezhny, whose work was thoroughly imbued with it. THE
UNRESTRICTED-UNCEREMONIOUS LIGHT-LAUGHTER
OF THE SEMINARIAN WAS RELATED TO THE POPULAR
FESTIVE LAUGHTER that resounds in Evenings, and at the same
time, this Ukrainian seminarian laughter was a REMOTE
KIEVAN ECHO OF THE WESTERN "RISUS PASCHALIS"
(Easter laughter). Therefore, the elements of popular-festive
Ukrainian folklore and the elements of seminarian grotesque
realism are just as organically and harmoniously combined in Viy
and Taras Bulba as analogous elements were organically combined
in Rabelais' novel three centuries earlier. The figure of the
democratic, homeless seminarian, a certain Khoma Brut, himself a
combination of Latin wisdom, popular laughter, bogatyr7 strength,
measureless appetite and thirst, is very close to his western
colleague, Panurge, and especially to Friar John.
A careful analysis of Taras Bulba would reveal even more images
that are akin to Rabelais: the REVELRY OF THE BOGA TYR, the

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 Mikhail Bakhtin 41

Rabelaisian HYPERBOLE OF BLOODY BATTLES AND

FEASTS. Finally the very representation of the specific structure
and way of life of the FREE SECHI would bring to light the
profound aspects of the popular-festive utopia as its own
Ukrainian brand of saturnalia. There are many carnival features in
Taras Bulba; take, for example, the very beginning of the tale that
shows the arrival of the seminarians and the fist fight between
OSTAP AND HIS FATHER (this could be seen as the "utopian
cuffing or boxing" of the saturnalia).
In the Petersburg tales, in all Gogol's successive work, we find
other elements of the culture of popular laughter, especially IN
THE VERY STYLE ITSELF. No doubt Punch and Judy shows
and the speech of the market square have a direct influence on
Gogol's work. Not that this excludes the influence of Sterne and
Sternian literature, especially in the images and style of The Nose,
for example-such images were common during Gogol's time.
Gogol discovered, however, at the same time the theme of the nose
was gaining prominence in world literature, that it also played a
role in the Punch and Judy shows of the Russian Pulchlinella and
Petrushka. The Punch and Judy shows provided Gogol with a style
that, in the course of the narrative action, mixed the voices of all
the HAWKERS IN THE FAIR BOOTHS, as they acclaimed and
praised their goods in ironic tones, alogical language and deliberate
absurdities (elements of the coqalane). In all of these phenomena
Gogolian style and Sternian imagery (and consequently the indirect
influence of Rabelais) are combined with the direct influence of
popular comedy.
The separate nonsense units of the coqalane as well as more
evolved verbal absurdities are widespread in Gogol. They are
especially frequent in portrayals of litigations, bureaucratic red
tape, rumored scandal and gossip. There are, for example, the
officials' suppositions concerning Chichikov, Nozdrev's ex
patiation on this subject, the women's chat, Chichikov's con
versation with the landowner about the purchase of dead souls, and
the like. These elements are linked to the forms of popular comedy
and grotesque realism.
Finally we have come to one last feature. A careful analysis of
Dead Souls would reveal that the work is based on and shaped by
the light-hearted journey to the underworld, the land of the dead.
Dead Souls offers a most interesting parallel to Rabelais' fourth
book, to Pantagruel's journey. It is not without reason that this
underworld exists in the very design and title of the Gogolian novel
(Dead Souls). The world of Dead Souls is the domain of the light

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42 Mikhail Bakhtin

hearted underworld. In externals it more closely resembles

Quevedo's9 nether-world, but internally and essentially it is closer
to the world of Rabelais' fourth book. It includes both the rabble
and trash of the carnivalistic "hell" as well as an entire string of
images representing the realization of abusivemetaphors. A careful
analysis would show many traditional elements of the carnivalistic
underworld, of the lower parts of both the earth and the body.
Note that the type itself, a "journey" (travel), '? is a chronotopical''
type of movement. It stands to reason that this profound
traditional basis of Dead Souls ismade richer and more complex by
a wealth of material from another order and tradition. 12
We can locate nearly all of the elements of the popular-festive
culture in Gogol's work. The carnivalistic world view, though
romantically tinged in the majority of cases, was second nature for
Gogol. He gave it various forms of expression. Here we will recall
only the well-known image of the whirlwind ride and the Russian
character, an image that is purely carnivalistic: "And what Russian
does not love a whirlwind ride? Is it not in the very nature of his
soul to abandon himself, to let it all go to Hell and say from time to
time, 'the devil take it all', isn't this in the very make-up of his
soul?" Notice a little further on: "the entire road flies off God
knows where into the retreating distance, and there is something
frightening in this rapid flashing by, where you can't make out the
outlines of the vanishing object. . ." Note the destruction of all the
statistical boundaries between phenomenon. In addition, the
Gogolian sense of "the road," a favorite image, has a purely
carnivalistic quality.
The grotesque conception of the body was not alien to Gogol.
Here is characteristic sketch for the first volume of Dead Souls:

There are all kinds of faces in this world. But

whatever kind of mug it is, you can be sure it isn't like
any other. Take a look at one guy; the nose commands
his whole face, while the lips do it for someone else.
Sometimes it's the cheeks that go spreading their in
fluence even at the expense of the eyes, the ears, and the
very nose itself, which in comparison, seems no larger
than a vest button. And then there's the fellow whose
chin is so long that he has to keep his handkerchief over
it constantly to keep from spitting all over it. And then
there are all those who aren't even the least bit human.
Look at that one over there-nothing more than a dog
in coat and tie. Doesn't it amaze you that he can carry a
cane in his hand? The first person to come along will no
doubt snatch it away from him. . .

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 Mikhail Bakhtin 43

Gogol consistently transforms proper names into nicknames.

With an almost theoretical precision these nicknames reveal the
essence of ambivalence; the Gogolian names of towns in the second
volume of Dead Souls illustrate their quality of praise and abuse:
Tfuslavl, for example.'3 Similar unceremonious combinations of
praise and abuse take the form of enraptured, blessed curses: "The
devil take you steppes, you are so ravishing."
Gogol was profoundly aware of the universal nature of his
laughter's ideology; all the same he couldn't find a suitable plan,
theoretical basis or illumination for such laughter within the terms
of "serious" eighteenth-century culture. When he described his
laughter at various times, he clearly didn't dare to expose fully its
basis in the all-embracing popular culture of laughter. Frequently
he justified his laughter within the narrow morality of the time.
When Gogol tried to defend his notion of laughter, he involuntarily
descended to the level of what his audience could understand. He
tried to translate into the language of official culture the enormous
transforming power of laughter that burst to the surface of his
works. But thismerely limited his concept of laughter.
The initial, external, and "derisive" negative effect that upset
the habitual mode of perception did not allow the ingenious ob
server to glimpse the positive essence of this power. "Why then has
my heart become so sorrowful?" Gogol asked in At the Theater
(1842), and answered, "No one noticed the honest actor in my
play." After revealing that "this honest noble actor was laughter,"
Gogol explained that "it was noble because it chose to perform, in
spite of the low opinion awarded it by the public."
According to Gogol, it is precisely its POPULAR, LOWER,
FOLK meaning that gives laughter its noble visage; he could well
have added "its godly visage," since it echoes the laughter of the
gods in the ancient popular comedies. This laughter, and the very
fact that it could be interpreted as an actor, did not fit into the
explanations that were possible at the time. Gogol wrote:

No, laughter ismore significant and profound than they

think. Not the kind of laughter that comes from a
passing annoyance, a jaundiced and diseased tem
perament, nor the kind that serves as a festive
distraction and entertainment; but the kind which arises
from the radiant nature of humanity and does so
precisely because it is fed by an ever-flowing spring. No,
those who claim that laughter causes mere indignation
alone are unjust. Only the gloomy and sullen cause
indignation, whereas laughter illumines. Much, when

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44 Mikhail Bakhtin

presented in its raw and naked state, can cause in

dignation, but when lit up by the power of laughter, this
indignation already begins to carry reconciliation to the
soul. . But
. they don't hear the powerful might of such
laughter: the world decrees that what is comic is low;
only that which is uttered in a severe and drawn voice
can be given the title of high.

Gogol's "positive," "radiant," and "exalted" laughter,

developed on the soil of popular culture, was not understood (and
to a large extent is still misunderstood). This laughter, IN
COMPATIBLE WITH THE SATIRIST'S,14 shapes the major
elements in Gogol's work. One might say, perhaps, that his inner
nature caused him to laugh "like the gods," but that he, on the
other hand, considered it necessary to justify his laughter within the
limitations imposed by the human morality of the time.
It is in GOGOL'S POETICS, IN THE VERY STRUCTURE OF
THE LANGUAGE, that his laughter is fully brought to light. The
non-literary verbal life of the common people (their non-literary
strata) enters the language. Gogol draws from unpublishable verbal
spheres. His notebooks are literally jammed with little used and
enigmatic words, ambivalent both semantically and acoustically.
He even intended to publish an Explanatory Dictionary of the
Russian Language that he had written. In the introduction he
affirmed, "Such a dictionary seems all the more pressing con
sidering our society's estranged life, a life so little suited to the
spirit of the land and the people that the direct and true meaning of
the roots of Russian words is perverted; to one meaning another is
ascribed, while others are entirely forgotten." Gogol acutely sensed
the need for a battle between the popular verbal elements and the
DEAD EXTERNALIZING STRATA OF LANGUAGE. The
absence of a single authoritarian indisputable language, charac
teristic of the Renaissance, is answered in his work by the
organization of a thoroughgoing and detailed interaction of verbal
spheres. In Gogolian discourse we can observe a continual
liberationof forgotten and forbiddenmeanings.
Lost in the past, forgotten meanings begin to communicate with
each other, to come out of their shells, to find use and application
for something else. Under the conditions, semantic connections,
existing only in the context of certain utterances, within the limits
of certain verbal spheres-formed in an irretrievable connection
with the situations which gave them birth-gain the chance to join
in a renewed life. Otherwise they would remain invisible and in
some way cease to exist; as a rule they are neither preserved nor

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 Mikhail Bakhtin 45

strengthened in abstract semantic contexts established in standard

written and printed speech. It is as if they disappear forever, having
been just barely formed to express a single living unrepeatable
event. In an abstract normative language they have absolutely no
right to enter a system of ideology, because they are not a system of
conceptual formulations, but the speaking life itself. They usually
appear as expressions of situations outside the literary, business, or
serious world (outside where people laugh, drink, swear, celebrate
or feast); they generally fall outside the established parameters.
They cannot, therefore, pretend to be a representation in a serious
official language. These situations and verbal phrases do not die,
however, even though literature might forget or even avoid them.
A return to the living popular speech is vital, therefore, and this
is tangibly accomplished by artists such as Gogol who are genuises
in expressing the popular consciousness. We reject the primitive
notion, usually formed in normative circles, of a certain linear
progression. Actually, it turns out that each essential step forward
is accompanied by a return to the beginning ("primordial state")
or, more precisely, to the renewal of the beginning. Only memory
and not oblivion can move forward. Memory returns to the
beginning and renews it. Of course, seen in this way, the terms
"backward" and "forward" themselves lose their closed ab
soluteness. Instead, their interaction opens up the living
paradoxical nature of movement, studied and interpreted dif
ferently by philosophy from the Eleatic school to Bergson. When
applied to language, such a return signifies its restoration of the
active accumulating memory in its full semantic capacity. The
popular culture of laughter, so vividly expressed by Gogol, serves
as one means of the reconstruction-renewal.
Gogol organizes the discourse of laughter so that its primary aim
is not merely the indication of separate negative phenomenon, but
rather the REVELATION OF THE UNIQUE ASPECT OF THE
WORLD AS A WHOLE.
In this sense, Gogol's ZONE OF LAUGHTER becomes the
ZONE OF CONTACT. There the contradictory and incompatible
join and come to life as CONNECTION. The words carry in their
wake a total impression of contacts, of verbal genres almost always
far removed from literature. Simple chatter (women) in this context
expresses a verbal problem, a significance showing through the
verbal debris that had, or so it seemed, no meaning.
Such language carries on a continual rupturing of the literary
norms of an epoch and creates its correlations with other realities,
exploding the official, straight, and "decent" surface of discourse.

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 46 Mikhail Bakhtin

The process of eating and various phenomenon of the material

bodily life in general (a certain unusual form of a nose or a lump,
etc.) demand a language to signify them, certain new twists and
bends, coordinations, a struggle with the need for accurate ex
pression that would not harm the canon. At the same time, it's
obvious that they can't help but harm the canon. A splintering
occurs and thought jumps from one extreme to another. The at
tempt tomaintain balance and simultaneously to disrupt produces
a comic travestying of discourse, revealing its bountiful nature and
the paths for its renewal.
Licentious dance, animal traits perceptible in humans, etc. serve
this goal. Gogol paid special attention to a whole stock of gestures
and abuses and examined all the detailed color of the popular
speech of laughter. Life outside uniform and rank attracted him
powerfully, even though he dreamed of them in his youth.
Laughter's violation of rights found in him its defender and
illustrator, even though he dreamed of a serious, tragic, and moral
literatureall his life.
We see, then, the clash and interaction of two worlds: one that is
completely official and established, legalized by ranks and
uniforms so colorfully sketched in the dream of the exciting "life in
the capital"; and one where ALL IS HUMOROUS AND NON
SERIOUS, WHERE LAUGHTER IS THE ONLY SERIOUS
ELEMENT. The nonsense and absurdities introduced by thisworld
turn out to be their exact opposites-the true connecting internal
geneses of the other, the external. This is the light-hearted absurd
of the popular sources whose many verbal correspondences were
accurately cited byGogol.
Consequently, the Gogolian world is always located in the zone
of contact (just as every portrayal of laughter is). In this zone all
once more becomes tangible. The verbal representation of food can
arouse an appetite, and it is also possible to portray discrete
movements analytically without destroying their wholeness.
Everything becomes real, contemporary, existing in actuality.
It is characteristic that whenever Gogol expresses anything real,
it is never in the zone of recollection. For example, Chichikov's
past is given in a REMOTE ZONE AND IN ANOTHER VERBAL
PLANE than his search for Dead Souls, and it lacks laughter.
Whenever character is genuinely revealed, laughter is constantly
active, joining, colliding, and contrasting with everything around
it.
It is important that this world of laughter always be open to new
interaction. We must revise and deepen the usual and traditional

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 MikhailBakhtin 47

understanding of THE WHOLE AND THE ELEMENT of the

whole that receives its meaning only in terms of the whole. Ac
tually, any given element can simultaneously represent any other
whole (of popular culture, for example) from which it receives its
primary meaning. Interpreted this way, the whole of the Gogolian
world is, in principle, neither closed nor independent.
It is due to the popular culture alone that Gogol's contemporary
world has joined "major time."
The popular culture adds depth and connection to the carnival
images of the collectives: to Nevsky Prospect, the officials, and the
department (the beginning of The Overcoat abuses "the depart
ment of baseness and absurdity"). Only in terms of the popular
culture can we understand the notion of LIGHT-HEARTED
DYING and Gogol's light-hearted deaths-Bulba's light-hearted
heroism after the loss of his pipe, the dying Akaky Akakyevich's
transformation (the death bed delirium accompanied by swearing
and rebellion) and his wandering beyond the grave. Popular
laughter essentially removes carnivalized collectives from the
"real," "serious," and "decent" life. There is no point of view of
seriousness that is contrasted to the laughter. Laughter is the "only
positive hero."
Consequently, Gogol's grotesque is not simply a destruction of
norms, but a negation of all abstract and immovable norms that
pretend to be absolute and eternal. He denies the obvious and "a
world understood on its own" in favor of the unexpectedness and
unforseeableness of truth. It is as if he claims that good should be
expected not from the stable and ordinary, but from "a miracle."
This is the basis of the renewing and life affirming ideas of popular
culture.
In this sense the buying up of dead souls and the varous reactions
to Chichikov's proposal can be seen as belonging to the popular
conception of the link between life and death and to their car
nivalistic derision. There is also an element of carnivalistic play
with death and with the boundaries between life and death (for
example, Sobakevich's ruminations about what little sense living
souls have, Korobochka's fear of the dead, and the proverb "a
corpse is so stiff that you can prop up a fence with it"). The play
with the clash of the insignificant with the serious and the
frightening is also carnivalistic; so is the play with concepts of
infinity and eternity (interminable litigations, absurdities, and the
like).
From this perspective we can more accurately see the
correspondence to the real images and subject matter of serfdom

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48 Mikhail Bakhtin

(the buying and selling of people). These images and subject matter
come to an end with the end of serfdom; but Gogol's images,
subject matter, and situations are eternal; they are all in "major
time." A phenomenon belonging to "minor time"might be purely
negative and arouse only hatred. In "major time" it is ambivalent;
it is always pleasurable because it is an attribute of being. From the
plane where they can only be destroyed, hated or accepted, where
they actually cease to be, all these Plyushkini, Sobakevichi, and
other characters from Dead Souls cross over to the plane where
they remain eternally, where their attributes (of eternally
becoming, but never dying to being) are shown.
The laughing satirist is not light-hearted. He is sullen and gloomy
to the extreme. For Gogol, laughter vanquishes all. He creates his
own brand of catharsis which is a release from self-satisfied
complacency (poshlost). I5
The problem of grotesque laughter can be properly raised and
resolved only on the basis of studying the popular culture of
laughter.

translated by Patricia Sollner

Notes

'M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World. This article is a part of the Rabelais
dissertation that is not contained in that book.-M. B.

2Popular culture believes in the ever renewing cycles of life, in life without ab
solutes, final statements or ultimate truths-not even death. It evolves a system of
imagery that illustrates a "bountiful" and "unrestricted" conception of life.
Trans.

3We stress that in the story Lost Charter the image of playing the fool in the
underworld is of a purely carnivalistic nature.-M. B.

4The "Latinized schoolboy" of this passage has returned to his native village after
some time at school. He has been annoying everyone around by calling common
objects by their Latin names. During his musings on what the Latin form for "rake"
was, the very rake he was contemplating obeyed the stimulus of being stepped on
and struck him in the forehead. In response, the hero hurled this curse at the rake.
The home-spun curse is an antidote to the high flown false language of Latin. Its
specific reference to the underworld emphasizes that such abstractionsmust literally
go to the devil to regain their vitality.-Trans.

'Images of food and feasting play a major role in popular culture. All the aspects
of carnival are present at the feast. It is the collective (and not individual) feast of all
humanity. The feast reflects the process of death and renewal of the body that

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 Mikhail Bakhtin 49

"swallows, devours, rends the world apart, is enriched and grows at the world's
expense. " See Bakhtin's chapter on Banquet Imagery in Rabelais and His World, p.
281. Notice also the ambivalence between food and obscene gestures (that signify the
"lower bodily stratum" and hence regeneration through reproduction)when Foma
Grigorivich reaches for a knish.
Like the language of carnival, the language of the feast
is liberated; people are
more familiar. The atmosphere of the light-hearted philosophical discussions in the
symposia that Bakhtin describes is similar to the atmosphere of these stories-food
is being prepared, people are eating, chatting, and listening to the storyteller.
Trans.
6Raznochintsy refers to the non-noble intelligentsia that came primarily from the
clergy but also from the merchants and the military.-Trans.

7Bogatyr was a warrior hero of the Russian epics and folk tales. He had unlimited
strength and was able to perform impossible feats. Such an image reflects the joyous
abundance and wealth of popular culture's world-view; it symbolizes the
measurelessness of the world.-Trans.

8Sech is a Cossack band or community that, recognizing no law other than its
own, lived in the geographically and politically unstable area between Russia,
Poland, and the Tartars of the Crimea. The name for this area (Ukraine) literally
means "on the border." See Hugh Seton Watson, The Russian Empire 1800-1917
(Great Britain, 1967), p. 7.-Trans.

9See Quevedo, Visions (written between 1607 and 1613, published in 1627).
Representatives of different classes and professions, individual vices, and human
weaknesses traverse this Hell. The satire is nearly devoid of profound and genuine
ambivalence.-M. B.

'?Travel (Khozhdenie) indicates a metaphysical as well as a physical journey. The

apocryphal "Descent [Khozhdenie] of the Virgin into Hell" was popular in
Medieval Russia, because of the compassion the Virgin showed both in making the
trip to the underworld and interceding for tormented souls.-Trans.

"Chronotope refers to a method of studying the structure and cultural traditions

of space and time in literary text. Bakhtin developed this method in his essay Forms
of Time and Chronotope in the Novel. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), pp. 84
159.-Trans.

'2It was Bakhtin's belief that just as popular culture informs the work of a given
age or author, the age and author themselves add to and transform popular
culture.-Trans.

3Tfuslavl is an absurd hybrid that combines tfu, an abusive term pronounced

with a spit, and slavl, a term denoting glory and praiseworthiness and used when
speaking of venerable Russian heroes such as Prince Yaroslav the Wise. However,
the term slavl does not exist, even if it is made into a suffix form as it is here (it is
slav, not slavl). Also, neither Tfu or slavl have anything to do with names of
towns.-Trans.

4The concept of satire is used here in the explicit sense of the word which the

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50 Mikhail Bakhtin

author established in his book Rabelais and His World.-M. B. [According to

Bakhtin the satirist has no sense of the universal and regenerative nature of the
world. His laughter is never ambivalent, because it never uplifts as it degrades; satire
ispure derision.-Trans.]

'5Poshlost is a term that is notoriously impossible to translate, but D. S. Mirsky's

rendition is very fitting here: "self-satisfied inferiority, moral and spiritual."
Bakhtin's notion of grotesque realism is completely opposed to such self-contained
satisfaction. See D. S. Mirsky, A History of Russian Literature From Its Beginnings
to 1900 (New York, 1962), p. 158.
Nabokov points out another crucial aspect of poshlost-that it is the mistaking of
something hollow and artificial for something valuable. Chichikov's quest is for
dead souls; Akaky Akakyevich gives a lover's devotion and caresses to an overcoat.
Laughter explodes the official backing of these false goods in the contemporary
world. It is just exactly the qualities of grotesque realism and of laughter that are
needed to degrade the lofty object. It is also important that laughter lie outside the
official and lofty system for, as Nabokov indicates, "poshlost. . .is especially
vigorous when the sham is not obvious, and when the values it mimics are con
sidered, rightly or wrongly, to belong to the very highest level of art, thought or
emotion," Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York, 1944), p. 68.-Trans.

- --?-:- ? . ?!?

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