Again here, we have exactly the same situation of the very zenith of the grotesque in precisely the place where the text is claiming to represent the classical. The theme of the Saint's body which does not rot after death is a topos of classical hagiography.
16
But, the grotesqueness of its handling in this text, and particularly the grotesque denouement with the worm coming out of the Rabbi's ear, suggest not a hagiography but a satire or parody on hagiographies. Although the text reduces the force of the image by moralizing it, its power "to upset" does not really disappear. If a worm is seen coming out of the ear of a corpse, the suggestion is certain that the cavity is, in fact, full of worms. In order to better understand this moment, we have to remember that until the modern period, the corpse was understood to produce the very worms that devoured it. The corpse is said "to beget" the worms, that is to give birth to them. A more powerful icon, then, of death in life and life in death, of the imbrication of death in the production of life, is hard to imagine.
17
This talmudic grotesque can hardly be said to represent the "last best word of the cosmos."
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I have my doubts about Rabelais as well. Certainly the image of an infant so gigantic that he suffocates his mother in being born no more supports these rhapsodic remarks about "triumphant life" than does a corpse being consumed by the worms that it has "begotten." Indeed, where Bakhtin talks about "birth-giving death" (392), I think often we must think of "death-bringing birth."
18
Indeed, I would suggest that it is the very question of reproduction as providing the kind of "triumphant life of the people,'' the conquering of death that Bakhtin conjures, that is the source of the inner tension of our discourse. For Bakhtin's Rabelais, it is clear that his children will not only repeat the father [
sic
] and render
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 | | 16. For the association of hagiography and the classical, see Brown 1983. Recently it was reported in the Israeli press that a group of French Jews buried in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century were reinterred in a mass grave in Jerusalem because their remains had been disturbed. One was found to have had his corpse preserved intact, and was given, therefore, a separate grave since this "miraculous" preservation proved his holiness. A more relevant comparison, perhaps, to a satiric reflection of this topos is of course the story of Father Zosima in
The Brothers Karamazov
. Another possible cultural source for this theme is a motif of Hellenistic romances regarding the preservation of a dead lover, which would make it a sort of early "A Rose for Emily." See Hadas (1953, 151).
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| | 17. Compare the birth of Pantagruel, as discussed in Bakhtin (1984, 328).
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| | 18. These images fit more with Paglia's conception of fecundity as being terrifying, of liquid, female nature gone wild (Paglia 1990). Where I part company with her is at two crucial and related points; one, her assumption that such images are somehow natural and not cultural in origin, and two, her enthusiastic acceptance of the values implied by the imagery of classical male and grotesque female.
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