Prophetic Riddles

Poor mortals who good fortune do desire,

Receive the bounties of the earth or deracinate before they grow?

World knows neither good nor evil, yet knows it dire

When for their own delight poor mortals have no limit to how far they’ll go.

The first line of this (my) riddle is borrowed from François Rabelais’ La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel (The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel)—which is the epitomic exemplar of the carnivalesque, as laid out by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World.

Why the riddle? A few reasons. First, it is obvious that our world is presently wrought with a number of “riddles” that need to be solved, from environmental (BP oil spill) to man-made (BP oil spill….as well as heightened conflict in Gaza, a stand-off between the two Koreas, an anachronistic law within these our twenty-first century United States, among others). Second, it harks back to Bakhtin’s understanding of the “prophetic riddle,” in which “historic events are represented with the help of” games, prophecies, parodies, festivals, etc. presented in a carnivalesque aspect. That is, “[i]nstead of being gloomy and terrifying, the world’s mystery and the future…appear as something gay and carefree.” More on this in a moment, but third, it speaks to a recent article in issue 46-21 of The Onion. The article is entitled, "White House Jester Beheaded For Making Fun Of Soaring National Debt," and in its own carnivalesque way speaks directly to the limits of denuding the ideologies of our time. (Note it's own riddle contained within: "A pocket-hold that grew so large, / A giant couldn't eat it. / A cache of gold that never was, / but nonetheless depleted").

Dating back centuries, and certainly to the time of Rabelais as well as the English Royal Courts (15^th/16^th centuries), the jester has played an important role in what Bakhtin calls “popular-festive” occasions. On such occasions (and on order of the monarch), the jester was given license to play the fool: to mock, satirize, jibe and deride the politics and political figures of the time. Far from being idle amusement however, the jester’s performances were often laced with subtle critiques of those in power. Moreover, they were anything but merely playful, but rather loaded with high seriousness despite their low presentation. As Bakhtin notes, such a “comic performance” is “gay and free play, but it is also full of deep meaning. Its hero and author is time itself, which uncrowns, covers with ridicule, kills the old world (the authority and truth), and at the same time gives birth to the new. In this game, there is a laughing chorus. The protagonist is the representative of a world which is aging, yet pregnant and generating. He is beaten and mocked, but the blows are gay, melodious, and festive.”

Simply put, the jester is meant to abuse and even be abused himself, but he is not meant to be killed. What this article points to is the glaring fact that, even today, those in power tend to dictate the parameters of even the most festive of occasions. If one is not convinced, one need only consider the difference between Stephen Colbert’s roast on George W. Bush at the Annual White House Correspondent’s dinner in 2006 and Obama’s roast of himself and his administration at the 2010 dinner (Jay Leno's performance is, I am sorry to say, a poor example of carnivalesque jest). In the former, Colbert's "punishment" of the Bush administration and its press corps was "transformed into festive laughter"; in the latter, Obama "killed" with laughter (for sure), but reminded us all that his and the government's power to literally kill is more serious than the carnival play could ever hope to be. Said Obama:

“Jonas Brothers are here, they're out there somewhere. Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking? I’m serious.”

What was killed in Obama’s speech was the power of the carnivalesque (which is unfortunated because much of it was actually really funny); what was reborn was the power of the United States government, and it is certainly reason to give us pause as to that which we find funny and why. After all, the comic “blows” should be “broadened, symbolic, ambivalent.” They should “at once kill and regenerate,” not by putting bookends on a narrow spectrum of the norm but by “put[ting] an end to the old life and [a] start [to] the new.”