Tuesday
One of my favorite essayists, New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, has once more hit it out of the park with a piece applying the ideas of literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to understand the effectiveness of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Gopnik focuses on the fact that, before president, Zelensky was
not merely an actor—à la Reagan and some others—he was a comic, a clown. He came to office, it seems, on a platform of little else except his clowning, particularly his role in a comedy series about the elevation of an ordinary bumbler to the Ukrainian Presidency. If he had a platform, we were assured when he ran for President, in 2019, it lay in mockery—particularly of his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, who conveyed a hard-edged appearance of authority. Once, when called a clown, Zelensky did not argue, but posted a video on Instagram of his own face with a big red nose upon it. The refusal to act like a grownup infuriated Zelensky’s opponents as much as Groucho Marx infuriated his political opponents in Fredonia, in Duck Soup, with his unseriousness.
To understand Zelensky’s prowess as an effective communicator and as probably the right person to be leading Ukraine at this moment, Gopnik looks to the Russian theorist who “made his special study the intricate relation of ‘carnival’ (i.e., clowning) with power.”
Bakhtin seems even more appropriate in that he too was victimized by the Russian state: Stalin imprisoned him in the Gulag and he barely survived. In fact, we almost lost one of his critical masterpieces, which he wrote in Siberia, because he was using the pages for cigarette paper.
It is to Bakhtin that we owe the concept of literary carnival, which I invoke when I teach Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale” (told in response to the elevated and oh-so-proper “Knight’s Tale”), Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie. Gopnik explains that
a “carnival” is not only a European peasant festival but an event that gave birth to a whole new way of looking at the world, a world turned upside down. The ugly and ridiculous things that bodies do—copulate, defecate, get drunk, fart—are the special realm of healthy vulgar comedy, of “carnival,” and this comedy reminds us of the limits of power to explain and dominate existence. The Church and the courts can give orders, but they can’t make an order more enduring and permanent than the gloriously sordid order of the body
A key work for Bakhtin is Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, which revels in the anarchy of body. Here’s a sample, chosen at random, about Gargantua as a child:
Gargantua, from three years upwards unto five, was brought up and instructed in all convenient discipline by the commandment of his father; and spent that time like the other little children of the country, that is, in drinking, eating, and sleeping: in eating, sleeping, and drinking: and in sleeping, drinking, and eating. Still he wallowed and rolled up and down himself in the mire and dirt—he blurred and sullied his nose with filth—he blotted and smutched his face with any kind of scurvy stuff—he trod down his shoes in the heel—at the flies he did oftentimes yawn, and ran very heartily after the butterflies, the empire whereof belonged to his father. He pissed in his shoes, shit in his shirt, and wiped his nose on his sleeve—he did let his snot and snivel fall in his pottage, and dabbled, paddled, and slobbered everywhere—he would drink in his slipper, and ordinarily rub his belly against a pannier. He sharpened his teeth with a top, washed his hands with his broth, and combed his head with a bowl.
Gopnik notes that Bakhtin counterposed the world of carnival with the world of officialdom:
There were, Bakhtin wrote, two lives available in Rabelais’s time: “One that was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter.” It was the genius of Rabelais to break apart this world order by raising it to literature, not only to make us laugh but to make us aware that the highest philosophy could be produced by the lowest comedy. Comedy is the peasant’s revenge on the king; laughter is man’s revenge on God.
Gopnik points out that, for Bakhtin, carnival challenged
the cult of personality and the bureaucratic, grinding evil of Stalinism. What he admired in Rabelais and labelled “grotesque realism” is the opposite of social realism, the enforced manner of civic virtue of the Stalin period.
Such comedy is not merely anarchic but actually restorative. Just as, in Shakespeare’s comedies, stultified society gives way to a new and generative new order, so Bakhtin saw Rabelaisian comedy working its magic in the author’s own world. And here’s where Gopnik makes the link to Zelenskyy:
[For Bakhtin,] clowns degrade order in order to make us imagine another world. The softness, absurdity, and the giggling help us see past brutal authority toward a freer life. Bakhtin shows us what fires the world’s admiration of Zelensky: that dignity is available to those who smile at degradation, and that courage and comedy have a transitive relationship. The one willing to degrade oneself knowingly, as a clown does, is the one afterward most able to act with dignity.
And then Gopnik tells a story about Zelensky reflecting upon Putin:
In interviews with the French philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy in 2019, Zelensky made it clear that he was quite aware of the interconnection between his place as a clown and his role as a leader. When Lévy asked him if he could make even Vladimir Putin laugh “just as he had made all Russians laugh,” Zelensky insisted that he could.
To this Zelenskyy added a caveat, however:
“This man does not see; he has eyes, but does not see; or, if he does look, it’s with an icy stare, devoid of all expression.”
To which Gopnik observes,
They are eerie words, since one of Bakhtin’s other great themes was, so to speak, the politics of gazing, how we emancipate ourselves from our own solipsism by trying to see life through the eyes of another—a thing no dictator or tyrant can achieve. “Laughter is a weapon that is fatal to men of marble,” Zelensky told Lévy, aphoristically.
I would add one other Bakhtin concept, which is that he loved the chaos of novels, especially those of an author such as Dickens. As Bakhtin saw it, the interplay of many voices that one finds in the genre captures the wonderful variety of the world.
Fascists are not fans of such variety, wanting a single theme (say, the Russian empire) that they can control. They love marble statues but not a society teaming with life and diversity. Gopnik concludes,
Comedy and democratic courage are the same thing seen at different moments, and what they have in common is the will to defy authority in the cause of humanity—to assert the desire of people, ridiculous and animal and imperfect as we are, to live as we choose.
Seen this way, Ukraine could not have done better for itself that elect a comic as president.