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The Comic and the Serious in Religious Literature of the Middle Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Aron I. Gourevitch

Extract

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A history of the comic has not yet been written. According to historians, the comic had very different, and sometimes even opposite causes, in relation to different ages and cultures. What provoked laughter in one civilization could be taken quite seriously in another. The comic has always had a particular function and its nature, its internal composition, has not been immutable. It could be kept within the limits of a single sphere that was assigned to it in particular (the comic, as opposed to the tragic), but it could also be elevated to a conceptual vision of the world, and in this case, it embraced much more universal domains of human history. Nevertheless, nothing has been written on the history of the comic throughout all ages and encompassing all peoples. Serious studies concerning the place it occupies in the history of civilizations are, however, of great interest.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 23 , Issue 90 , March 1975 , pp. 56 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Cf. Lucien Febvre's remarks on this subject in Combats pour l'Histoire, Paris, 1953, p. 236.

2 This study was first published almost a half century later, in Troudy po znakovym sistemam, VI ("Study on systems of symbols," VI), Tartu, 1973, p. 490-497.

3 So as not to go beyond the framework of the European Middle Ages, we shall limit ourselves to citing some observations on the link between the comic and the demonic in Scandinavian "sagas" Cf. E. Mélétinsky: The "Edda" and the Original Forms of the Epic, Moscow, 1968, p. 202 and ff.

4 L. Pinski, Realism during the Renaissance, Moscow, 1961, p. 120.

5 F. Curtius, Europaïsche Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, 8th edition, Bern and Munich, 1973, p. 422. Curtius brings to our attention the mixture between serious and comic and the fragility of their boundaries, as one of literature's characteristic traits from the end of Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Humorous elements can be found, often quite unexpectedly, in scenes from the lives of saints, even in those farthest from the comical. One must then deduce that the audience of the time expected authors to introduce comic elements into these descriptions. Curtius quotes numerous convincing examples of the method consisting in "telling the truth while laughing" in Medieval literature, and he emphasizes the point that this question has received little attention and that it merits further study. Curtius limits himself mainly to noting the fact that joking and seriousness are mixed, without searching deeper into the nature of the phenomenon. He certainly feels that this stylistic norm in Medieval literature can be sufficiently explained by the succession of Greek and Roman traditions, contrary to classical canons of ancient aesthetics, that made a strict distinction between the elevated and the vulgar style.

6 Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter, 2nd edition, Stuttgart, 1963.

7 We must remember that the role of the grotesque in European art after ancient times was described in a clear and pertinent way by Victor Hugo. In particular, we feel that his comments on the universal influence of the grotesque, that penetrated into all spheres of Medieval life, including the customs, are very incisive. (Cf. Victor Hugo, preface to Cromwell).

8 Vitae patrum, XIII, 3; Historie Francorum, I, 48.

9 M. Bakhtine, op. cit., p. 48.

10 This is the proposal the devil makes to the bell-ringer whom he threatened, in case of refusal, to abandon forever on top of the tower on which he had thrown him. (Césaire de Heisterbach. Dialogus Miraculorum, V, 56).

11 We can call to mind the miraculous gift of knowledge of the history of the Bible given to the illiterate Caedmon (Bedae Hist. Ecc., IV, 24). The Latin preface to the Saxon translation of the story of Christ's passion describes the case of an ignorant Saxon who received from heaven the gift of composing verses: "qui prius agricola, mox et fuit ille poeta," Heliand, Tübingen, 1965, p. 3).

12 L. Karsavine, op. cit., p. 39.

13 Bakhtine imagines a Medieval world oscillating between two uni verses : parallel to official serious culture that incarnates "terrifying and ter rified thought," there is, "on the other hand," popular, carnivalesque culture, making up "a second universe and a second life," in which men in the Middle Ages participated.

14 The question of ulterior transformation of the didactic genre in Medieval Latin literature surpasses the limits of our study. As Huizinga demonstrates, the relationship and even the mixture between the sacred and the ordinary were even more intense during the low Middle Ages. Nevertheless this evolu tion no longer resulted in a spiritualization of life, but in the elimination of traditional forms from the religious context. Thus, the disappearance of the distance between the serious and the comic brought about the profanation of the former, the "constant degradation of the infinite in the finite," and the substitution of faith by superstition (J. Huizinga, Herbst des Mittelalters, 10th edition, Stuttgart, 1969, p. 214 and ff.).