A literary critic wanting “the truth”? What does literature have to do with such “ideology”? It becomes merely its style and adjunct to that which is its only reason to be in the first place. Rather, one might describe this as either defining “style” in philosophy as one of its fundamental techniques of presentation and approach, or the raising of “genre” from mere literary category to a logically valid mode of investigation through intuition and understanding based, exactly as it is in Kant’s CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, upon the fundamental category of imagination. It acknowledges passion as the ground of morality and action as in the CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON and even intuition and reason as Martin Heidegger so definitively defined it in KANT AND THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS. It becomes a matter of aesthetics, retaining that word’s root meaning as “sensation,” and the acknowledgment of a desire for purpose and design that is in the teleology that Kant describes in the CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT. Philosophy is the goal of literature. Philosophy as how to live is the only goal of literature, especially if it is ‘just’ to – laugh!

3. The first characteristic of all gendres of the serio-comical is their new relationship to reality: their subject, or – what is more important – their starting point for understanding, evaluating and shaping reality, is in the living present, often even the very day. For the first time in ancient literature the subject of serious (to be sure, at the same time comical) representation is presented without any epic or tragic distance, presented not in the absolute past of myth and legend but on the plane of the present day, in a zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries. In these gendres, the heroes of myth and the historical figure of the past are deliberately and emphatically contemporized; they act and speak in a zone of familiar contact with the open ended present. In the realm of the serio-comical, consequently, a radical change takes place in that time-and-value zone where the artistic image is constructed. (Ibid., pg. 108)

In RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD, Bakhtin talks about the “laughing principle” (“The ever-growing, inexhaustible, ever-laughing principle which uncrowns and renews is combined with its opposite: the petty, inert ‘material principle’ of class society.” trans. Iswolsky, M. I. T. Press, 1968, pg. 24) and:

3a. Let us stress the special philosophical and utopian character of festive laughter and its orientation toward the highest spheres. The most ancient rituals of mocking at the deity have here survived, acquiring a new essential meaning. All that was purely cultic and limited has faded away, but the all-human, universal, and utopian element has been retained. RABELAIS, pg. 12

To put the extremity of Bakhtin’s statements about “reality” and now the relativization of “time-and-value” where “the artistic image” becomes a, or the, crucial element, let us quote from the first volume of Heidegger’s NIETZSCHE:

4. Demonstration of will to power as the basic character of beings is suppose to expunge the lies in our experience of beings and in our interpretation of them. But not only that. It is also supposed to ground the principle, and establish the ground, from which the valuation is to spring and in which it must remain rooted. For “will to power” is already in itself an estimating and valuing. If beings are grasped as will to power, the “should” which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a “should” does not determine Being; Being determines a “should.” “When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values. . . . [Nietzsche]” (Nietzsche I, VIII, 89), THE WILL TO POWER AS ART, trans. Krell, Harper-Collins, 1991, pg. 32

And –

4a. What is decisive is not production in the sense of manufacturing but taking up and transforming, making something other than . . . , other in an essential way. For that reason the need to destroy belongs essentially to creation. In destruction, the contrary, the ugly, and the evil are posited; they are of necessity proper to creation, i. e., will to power, and thus to Being itself. To the essence of Being nullity belongs, not as sheer vacuous nothingness, but as the empowering “no.” (Ibid., pg. 61)

This relates to Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism” in RABELAIS –

4b. The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity . . . All the . . . forms of grotesque realism degrade, bring down to earth, turn their subject into flesh . . . Laughter degrades and materializes . . . Degradation means here coming down to earth,, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better . . . Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down into the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving . . . Bodies could not be considered for themselves; they represented a material bodily whole and therefore transgressed the limits of their isolation. The private and the universal were still blended in a contradictory unity . . . The grotesque image refers to a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one determining trait of the grotesque image. The other indispensable trait is ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis.

¶ The relation to time, its perception and experience, which is at the basis of these forms was bound to change during their development over thousands of years. At the early stage of the archaic grotesque, time is given as two parallel (actually simultaneous phases of development, the initial and the terminal, winter and spring, death and birth . . .

¶ . . . In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque concept of the body

¶ . . . It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world . . . The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other . . .

¶ . . . It is the dying and yet unfinished body that stands on the threshold of the grave and the crib . . . The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements. It is the incarnation of this world as the absolute lower stratum, as the swallowing up and generating principle, as the bodily grave and bosom, as a field which has been sown and in which new shoots are preparing to sprout.

¶ Such are the rough outlines of this concept of the body. In Rabelais’ novel this concept has been most fully and masterfully expressed . . . (pp. 19-27)

The last sentence cannot be emphasized too much. Bakhtin is making Rabelais’ novel as quite simply the greatest of all philosophical expressions. “The sixteenth century represents the summit in the history of laughter and the high point of this summit is Rabelais’ novel,” RABELAIS, pg. 101. Bakhtin quotes Rabelais himself stating his most ambitious purpose: “In the prologue to the first book of his novel, GARGANTUA, Rabelais points out the hidden meaning of his work: ‘Here you will find a novel savor, a most obstruse doctrine; here you will learn the deepest mysteries, the most agonizing problems of our religion, our body politic, our economic life,” RABELAIS, pg. 111. Even more, Bakhtin quotes on the same page the historian Jacues Auguste de Thou “the following opinion concerning Rabelais; ‘He wrote a remarkable book in which, with a quasi-Democritean freedom and with an almost clownish biting irony and under imaginary names he received as in a theatre all the conditions of human and political existence and exposed them to the laughter of the entire people’. The characteristics perceived in this commentary are indeed typical of Rabelais; the universal, popular, and festive nature of laughter, in the manner of Democritus, directed at all the conditions of human and political existence, the theatrical character of the images, and, finally real historical characters appearing under imaginary names. This is the opinion of a man who as early as the sixteenth century correctly grasped the essential traits of Rabelais’ novel.”

In accord with Bakhtin’s paragraph starting, “It is not a closed, completed unit,’ Heidegger says in ZOLLIKON SEMINARS: Protocols—Conversations—Letters, ed. Boss, trans. Mayr & Askay, Northwestern University Press, 2001:

4b1. The Da-sein of the human being is spatial in itself in the sense of Making room [in space] [Einraümen von Raum] and in the sense of the spatialialization of Da-sein in its bodily nature. Da-sein is not spatial because it is embodied. But its bodiliness is only possible because Da-sein is spatial in the sense of making room. (pg. 81/105 German)

The difference between the limits of the corporeal thing and the body, then, consists in the fact that the bodily limit is extended beyond the corporeal limit. Thus, the difference between the limits is a quantitative one. But if we look at the matter this way, we will misunderstand the very phenomenon of the body and of bodily limit. The bodily limit and the corporeal limit are not quantitatively but qualitatively different from each other. The corporeal thing, as corporeal, cannot have a limit which is similar to the body at all . . . The corporeal limit, by apparently coinciding with the bodily limit, cannot ever become a bodily limit itself. When pointing with my finger toward the crossbar of the window over there, I [as body] do not end at my fingertips. Where then is the limit of the body? “The body is in each case my body.” This belongs to the phenomenon of the body. The “my” refers to myself. By “my,” I refer to me. Is the body in the “I,” or is the “I” in the body? In any case, the body is not a thing, nor is it a corporeal thing, but each body, that is, the body as body, is in each case my body. The bodying forth [Leiben] of the body is determined by the way of my being. The bodying forth of the body, therefore, is a way of Da-sein’s being. But what kind of being? If the body as body is always my body, then this is my own way of being. Thus bodying forth is co-determined by my being human in the sense of the ecstatic sojourn amidst the beings in the clearing [gelichtet]. The limit of bodying forth (the body is only as it is bodying forth: “body”) is the horizon of being within which I sojourn [aufhalten]. Therefore, the limit of my bodying forth changes constantly through the change of the reach of my sojourn. (pg. 87/113)

What I am trying to show, now, is this is what Bakhtin believes, that both his AND Rabelais’ endeavours are philosophical and neither ‘literary’ nor ‘literary criticism in their trivial senses. Writing about Lucien Febvre’s Le Problème de Incroyance au XVIème siècle: la religion de Rabelais (1942), Bakhtin says,

4c. Rabelais’ artistic thought fits neither rationalist atheism nor a religious faith, no matter whether Catholic, Protestant, or the “religion of Christ” of Erasmus. Rabelais’ religion is wider and deeper rooted. It ignores all intolerant seriousness, all dogmatism. His view of the world is neither pure negation nor pure affirmation. Both [Abel] Lefranc and Febvre fail to make us understand Rabelais’ philosophy. They also fail to make us understand correctly the entire sixteenth century.

¶ . . . [Febvre] hears Rabelais’ laughter with the ears of the twentieth century, rather than those of the sixteenth . . . He misses the main point of Rabelais’ laughter, its universal and philosophic character. He does not understand that a philosophy of laughter, a universal comic aspect of the world are possible. He looks for Rabelais’ philosophy when he is not laughing, or more correctly, whenever Rabelais seems to him to be entirely serious. When Rabelais laughs, he is merely joking in Febvre’s eyes, and these jokes seem to him innocent enough. Like all jokes, they say nothing about philosophy, which can only be serious . . .

¶Here we see clearly Febvre’s attitude toward Rabelais’ jokes; they merely make him laugh. On rit. But it is precisely this on rit which needs to be analyzed. Do we of the twentieth century laugh as did Rabelais and his contemporaries? And what of these “old clerical jokes”? If they do not hide the serious, abstract atheist tendencies as seen by Lefranc, they may contain something else, something far more meaningful, profound, artistically concrete – the comic aspect of the world . . .

¶Febvre ignores the comic aspect of the world, evolved during hundreds and thousands of years in the infinitely varied culture of folk humor, and first of all, in comic rites and pageants . . . He does not see that these [“clerical”] jokes are particles of an immense whole, of the popular carnival spirit, of the world that laughs. In order to grasp this whole, it would be necessary to discover the historical meaning of these century-old phenomena – the parodia sacra, the risus paschalis, and the immense medieval comic literature.

¶ . . . Irony, [Febvre] says, is often heard where it does not exist.¶ We find such a statement radically wrong. Only relative seriousness is possible in Rabelais’ world. Even the lines in which a different context or taken separately would be completely serious (Thélème, Gargantua’s letter to Pantagruel, the chapter about the hero’s death) acquire in their context an overtone of laughter; the reflexes of surrounding comic images react on them. The aspect of laughter is universal and embraces everything. But it is precisely this universalism, the peculiar truth of laughter that Febvre does not see. In his mind, truth can only speak in solemn tones. Neither does he perceive ambivalence. RABELAIS, pp. 132-5

This is, in part, why I am interspersing Heidegger’s texts. Heidegger’s recreation of Nietzsche and Bakhtin’s recreation of Rabelais share a mutual incomprehension in academia because they are only interpreted within academic seriousness. BEING SERIOUS – “Merely amusing, meaningless, and harmless laughter was also tolerated, but the serious had to remain serious, that is, dull and monotonous,” Bakhtin, RABELAIS, pg. 51 – And, interpreting Zarathustra, Heidegger says, “He knows that the greatest and smallest cohere and recur, so that even the greatest teaching, the ring of rings, itself must become a ditty for barrel organs, the later always accompanying its true proclamation,” Heidegger, NIETZSCHE II, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. Krell, Harper Collins, 1984, pg. 60. Seriousness distorts and wrecks what both philosophers are trying to say.