COMEDY

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 35Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics ofTransgression (1986) offers an alternative view. This is a radicalmaterialist reading of Bakhtin that can be said to have rescued some ofhis ideas from the romanticization of the marketplace and reformulatedthem as a more credible political force in which the marginal isunderstood to be genuinely creative and disruptive. Stallybrass andWhite see carnival and comic forms addressing ‘the social classificationsof values, distinction and judgements which underpin practical reason’,where carnival ‘systematically inverts the relations of subject andobject, agent and instrument, husband and wife, old and young, animaland human, master and slave’ (Stallybrass and White, 1986:56). Theseupheavals reformulate, for a temporary period at least, sociallysanctioned power relationships, bringing the margin to the centre,making it visible and giving it voice. This is not to say that carnival issuddenly a politically progressive force, however, as, ‘although it reordersthe terms of the binary pair, it cannot alter the terms themselves’,as inversion of the terms of normal social operation is not the same asredefining them (Stallybrass and White, 1986:56). The carnivalesque isnot then equipped to topple the dominant order, but neither is thedominant order able to silence the carnivalesque; Stallybrass and Whiteimagine both terms engaged in a mutually dependent but antagonisticrelationship, in which each contains an element of its other that it usesto define itself. ‘A recurrent pattern emerges’, they write,the ‘top’ attempts to reject and eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasonsof prestige and status, only to discover, not only that it is in someway frequently dependent upon that low-Other…but also that thetop includes that low symbolically, as a primarily eroticisedconstituent of its own fantasy life.(Stallybrass and White, 1986:7)Comic inversion not only makes visible those excluded from thehierarchy, therefore, but also symbolically foregrounds the tensions anddesires that are elided parts of the identity of power itself, revealingpower not to be the coherent and all-pervasive monolith of newhistoricism, but constituted of contradictions and unacknowledgeddependencies.A further challenge to the critical tendency to reduce dissent tocollusion in support of the absolutist tactics of the state appears inMichael Bristol’s Carnival and Theater (1985). Bristol takes issue withthe new historicism’s conception of power as ‘always singular, a unity