Laughter In Dostoyevsky's The Idiot

Bakhtin considered Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot one of the vivid manifestations of carnivalisation in literature, where such elements of carnival culture as ambivalence of the situations and events, fantastic and bizarre mixture of people in one place, and the notion of carnival reduced laughter begin shaping literary work through its mode of narration, structure and characters. I would like to focus on the way laughter is incorporated into the narration of The Idiot and on what functionality it is aimed to serve. In his work on Rabelais and the history of laughter, Bakhtin presents a transition that laughter underwent in literary tradition from Renaissance period towards XVIII and XIX centuries. Notably, having occupied a significant part of the …show more content…
One of the most well-known philosophical work on the phenomenon of laughter belongs to Henri Bergson, the author of Laughter written in 1900. There Bergson examines laughter as a social activity caused by certain comic situations, which in their turn obtain particular patterns of mechanics or repetition. According to Bergson, laughter is an exclusively human phenomenon such that only human beings are able to laugh and also are the primary objects of laughter. In all other cases, nature or inanimate objects are laughable as long as they remind any human features (Bergson 11). Further, Bergson argues that laughter is also a social act, which can be performed in a group of people. This is an arguable statement, since following his logic as long as a person has an object to laugh at or a comic situation, he may not need other people for laughing. What I am interested in Bergson’s work is his view of laughter as a manifestation of indifference, meaning that a person should not feel neither sympathy nor hatred towards the object at the moment of laugh. This seems to be quite generalized approach towards laughter, which in The Idiot is not simply a thoughtless impulse, but a way to establish certain social borders. Furthermore, reversely laughter itself generates various types of emotional responses, that in case of Prince Myshkin vacillates between sympathy and disdain. Bergson also identifies automatism as significant contribution to laughter. Behaving automatically or in other words unconsciously brings the element of comic, this is how Don Quixote is an extremely comic due to his absentmindedness (Bergson 70). Similar absentmindedness is typical to Prince Myshkin’s behavior and certainly produces a comic effect. Nonetheless Bergson do