In the previous chapter, we briefly raised the problem of polyphony in the representation of the cultural past, and we also mentioned Bakhtin's heteroglossia. He also wrote a dissertation on Rabelais, the Renaissance writer we already encountered in our discussion of Febvre and his take on the problem of unbelief and outillage mental. While Russian and French intellectuals have always heavily inspired each other, Bakhtin approached the French writer Rabelais in a very different way than Febvre. History sometimes progresses in a bitter manner: Bakhtin's dissertation almost did not see the light of day because the contents were considered controversial and even unscientific at the time, while the book is now considered one of the most important works from his oeuvre. What was so controversial about it? In his dissertation on Rabelais and the folk culture of the Middle Ages, renamed in a 1965 translation as Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin stated that Rabelais’ salacious novel The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel had for centuries been misinterpreted. Whole passages from this novel were simply ignored due to their alleged obscenity or blasphemy. Bakhtin began to ponder the status of ‘openness’ within the culture that had produced this novel — and in this, he comes close to Febvre's attempt to reconstruct the outillage mental of Rabelais’ time; only for Bakhtin, it was not about an intellectual ‘conceptual framework,’ but about two other things.

First, he wanted a number of passages to be restored from The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (a collection of comic stories) that had been completely ignored or suppressed. Next, he incorporated the social system of the Renaissance in his analysis, considering what kind of language was allowed and what was not. By pointing out two types of subtexts (‘authorised’ language and ‘forbidden’ language), he arrives at a carnivalesque description of sixteenth-century social reality on the one hand and grotesque realism as a literary style on the other. By emphasising an underlying layer within the text — a second voice, as it were — Bakhtin was able to establish that there was an interaction between social conventions and literary freedom.

Bakhtin also stressed the importance of humour as part of cultural studies in locating power within a culture. He posited that laughing was therapeutic and liberating. And by resisting hypocrisy, the smiling truth exposes the gravity of power.