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The old authority
This quotation from Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (previously written about) seems timely and topical. I’ve copied it here, without commentary, for your reflection.
The old authority and truth pretend to be absolute, to have an extratemporal importance. Therefore, their representatives (the agelasts) are gloomily serious. They cannot and do not wish to laugh; they strut majestically, consider their foes the enemies of eternal truth, and threaten them with eternal punishment. They do not see themselves in the mirror of time, do not perceive their own origin, limitations and end. They do not recognize their own ridiculous faces or the comic nature of their pretensions to eternity and immutability. And thus these personages have come to the end of their role still serious, although their spectators have been laughing for a long time. They continue to talk with the majestic tone of kings and heralds announcing eternal truths, unaware that time has turned their speeches into ridicule. Time has transformed old truth and authority into a Mardi Gras dummy, a comic monster that the laugh crowd rends to pieces in the marketplace.
Rabelais and His World1
Footnotes
- Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. ↩