COMEDY

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 31pleasure to the redistribution of mental energy normally devoted tosocial conformity, so that ‘the energy normally occupied in maintaininginhibitions is freed for celebration’ (Barber, 1963:7). ‘Clarification’ iscomedy’s ability to reaffirm the positive relationship of humanity to itsenvironment, ‘a heightened relationship between man and “nature’”(Barber, 1963:8). Comedy thereby has the dual function of celebratinghuman relationships and merrymaking, while mocking what it considers‘unnatural’, baiting killjoys and miserly characters who fail to observethe feast or show some perverse aversion to happiness. From thisperspective, Barber reads a character like Shylock from The Merchant ofVenice as a representative of anti-festival, a usurer whose anxiety aboutmoney stands in joyless contrast to the Venetian Christians who usemoney ‘graciously to live together in a humanly knit group’ (Barber,1963:167). As the defeat of outsiders and the chastisement ofscapegoats is a significant aspect of the comic celebration of communalidentity and its life experience, the vilification and forcible conversionof Shylock reveal him as a representative of egregious heterogeneity thatmust be made to conform to ‘healthy’ community values. However,Barber’s insistence on holiday forms, while not absolute in hisdiscussion of The Merchant of Venice, has the effect of naturalizing folkpractices and eliding the politics of race that speak through them.CARNIVAL AND THE MARKETPLACE:BAKHTIN AND THE NEW HISTORICISMWith the re-emergence and dominance of forms of historicism inliterary studies in the 1980s and 1990s, the work of one commentator,Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), has been extremely influential. Bakhtin,a Russian formalist who first began working on a theory of the novelafter the Russian Revolution, made a major contribution to comedystudies with the monograph Rabelais and his World, written as adoctoral dissertation sometime in the later 1930s and unpublished inEnglish until 1968.Through an analysis of the early modern French comic novelistFrançois Rabelais (c. 1494–c. 1553), Bakhtin argues for the existence oftwo synchronous but contradictory world views during the medievalperiod. ‘Official’ culture, which he characterizes as ecclesiastical,sombre, excluding profanity, and suppressing the body, driven by thebureaucracy of the Church and the administration of Grace, iscontrasted with what he calls the culture of the marketplace, the popularand boisterous voice of the people. The marketplace is a totemic