The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [151]
In the condoned spirit of the holiday, carnival revelers chased their bosses and betters through the streets and whapped them with sticks. There was theater that might be pious or parody, but in a real sense there wasn’t an audience. Everyone was part of the show. Goethe wrote that carnival “is not really a festival given for the people but one the people give themselves.” Bakhtin wrote, “Carnival does not know footlights.”6 The crowd is its own spectacle. At carnival each year, a boy was elected Lord of Misrule. The laity provided an Abbey of Misrule; and among the printers’ journeymen there were Lords of Misprint. Men dressed as women, women as men. In the carnival plays put on by the Abbey of Misrule there were all sorts of women behaving badly. In France, characters included Mère Folle and Mère Sotte: Crazy Mom and Drunken Mom.7 Among French men there were appointed a Prince of Improvidence, Duke Kickass, Bishop Flat-Purse, and the Grand Patriarch of Syphilitics.8 Jesters were proclaimed kings, and serving girls were queens. Even churches directly under the pope’s jurisdiction chose a mock pope for the festival and let him satirize the pope without mercy. (Sometimes the popes did get angry.) Carnival meant inversion on every level. People wore their clothes inside out or wore blousy pants as shirts, pulled on over their heads.9 They paraded in crazy order. Parading was a big deal in the Middle Ages and into the early modern. Today we see our towns and countries through statistics and news media. How could they see who they were? The answer is that they regularly organized themselves into a procession. The clergy of the town led, then the government, then the major land-and-money folk, then every guild, group, or association.10 Everyone came out and had a good look at the town leaders, a good look at each other, and a few pints of ale. Processions are a recognition of official order. Carnival parade was the procession undone. It was a moving crowd, not a delineated hierarchy, and it evoked madness, fantasy, and inversion. People participated across significant economic differences, from noble to rich laborer to landless hired hands.11
Like the Greek festivals, carnival was about grief. In some ways it was the same old grief, but it was also new. Let us try to squint at the Christian story and see it in a new focus. Here is a family with two fathers: one is the father, father therefore of both the mother and the son; the other, Joseph, is the father of neither. Joseph doesn’t actually show up in the Bible very much; just a few tiny mentions in Matthew and Luke, and even there, he is never even referred to after Jesus is twelve years old. Jesus is a boy with two fathers, and both are not around. As fathers they are not biological and not legitimate. That is the grief of the boy. Consider now the mother. Mary’s coming up pregnant was a classic kind of being in trouble. In medieval Christendom, the most important images were the first and last moments of the life of Jesus. In both cases we experience the moment through Mary. In the first, a young woman is in labor in a barn. There was no room for her at the inn. People of earlier times did not need to work to remember the smells and the dirt in a barn, so it was a poignant tale. It would not be an easy birth for other reasons, too: not only was this her first child; the girl was a virgin. Her maidenhead was broken by her child, crowning. It is an image of an innocent and unprotected girl under extreme pressure. The last image of the life of Jesus was equally evocative. Here, the young mother is sitting on top of a hill where executions take place. Her son is already dead.