Preparatory materiasl from Isabel Jacobs:
François Rabelais, in the 16th century, used Thélème as the name of a fictional abbey in “Gargantua and Pantagruel.” The only rule of this Abbey was “fay çe que vouldras” (“Fais ce que tu veux,” or “Do what you will”). This concept influenced thinkers like Bakhtin and Crowley. The Greek word θέλημα (thelēma) translates to desire, pleasure, or divine will. Or as Rabelais describes the Thelemites, the men and women in the abbey:
“All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat,
drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; …”
Rabelais introduces here the theme of freedom; if we turn to Bakhtin’s text, he is also interested in this freedom of the spirit assocaited with carnival life (in contrast to everyday life), noting how the boundaries between the two become blurry. On page 97, Bakhtin states, “The culture of laughter begins to break through the narrow walls of festivities and to enter into all spheres of ideological life. Official seriousness and fear could be abandoned even in everyday life.” This suggests a new and free way of life.
On page 100, he notes, “for men, as we have seen, were suspicious of seriousness and were accustomed to relate sincere and free truth to laughter.” However, he continues, this link between carnival and truth, freedom, and laughter was eventually broken.
In the other excerpt we read, Bakhtin then explores the image of the belly and the lower parts of the human body. What is the politics of the body or, so to say, this spirit of the belly? How is it related to other Bakhtinian themes, such as laughter, excess and freedom – and also carnival and the carnal, that is, a material, bodily experience of reality? Also, Bakhtin asks whether we laugh the same way in the 21st century as in the 20th or 16th, suggesting that laughter is historical and changes over time.
Laughter in Rabelais, Bakhtin writes, has an “element of knowledge” linked to truth: “Laughter purifies the consciousness of men from false seriousness, from dogmatism; from all confusing emotions” (p. 141). It can have multiple meanings, it is not always clear what is comical or what we exactly laugh about. It can even be relative or contradictory, laughter is alive.