COMEDY

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 33As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnivalcelebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and fromthe established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchicalrank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the truefeast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It washostile to all that was immortalized and completed.(Bakhtin, 1984:10)The inversions and suspensions permitted and legitimized by carnivalrepresent substantive challenges to authority, therefore offering thepossibility that comedy, invested with the spirit of festive and carnivaltraditions, may also be an expression of popular discontent. Some criticshave seen in Bakhtin’s work an almost utopian view of medieval culturethat is more akin to wish fulfilment than historical research. AaronGurevich, for example, questions whether or not Bakhtin had not‘transposed some aspects of contemporary life in Stalinist Russia intothe epoch’ he was dealing with (Gurevich, 1997:58).Recent historicist and some poststructuralist critics have foundBakhtin’s theory of opposing cultures particularly productive. Suchcriticism is drawn to comedy via its thematization of misrule and thevisibility of characters from the lower social ranks. Perhaps the mostinfluential critical position of this kind is new historicism, amethodology that came to prominence in the 1980s, and whose practiceis best summed up by Steven Mullaney, who writes that, ‘literarycriticism is conceived not as an end in itself, but as a vehicle, a meansof gaining access to tensions and contradictions less clearly articulatedin other social forums but all the more powerful for their partialocclusion’ (Mullaney, 1988: x). With this in mind, new historicism readscomedy as a potential site of social disruption, using the comic as amedium for the message of dissent. However, according to newhistoricist formulations of the configuration of state power, it is amedium that is simultaneously monitored and controlled by theauthorities that it seeks to subvert. As Stephen Greenblatt writes ofShakespearean drama in his essay ‘Invisible Bullets’: during the processof transgression and inversion, ‘authority is subjected to open, sustainedand radical questioning before it is reaffirmed, with ironic reservations,at the close’ (Greenblatt, 1985:29). Power absorbs the potential forchange, permitting itself to be questioned for the tactical and pragmaticpurposes of seeming to appear open, before finally reasserting itselfonce more: ‘Within this theatrical setting, there is a remarkableinsistence upon the paradoxes, ambiguities, and tensions of authority,