[In the following essay, using Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais as context, Butler argues that Pratchett's novels mix a carnival atmosphere with the concept of the bildungsroman to accomplish change in both the characters and the world they inhabit.]

It would be extremely interesting to write the history of humour. We would have to pay special attention to time: adventure time, carnival time, fairy-tale time, and of course, comic timing. And as time is relative to space, then we need to pay attention to space as well. Think of the strategies of comedy: reversal, juxtaposition, imitation, exaggeration. All of these have a spatial element. But here and now, I wish to write of only one time and one space of humour: that occupied by Terry Pratchett from the mid-1980s to the present day. In order to explore this comic space I will make use of the ideas of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.

Bakhtin's theorising of humour and laughter is yoked to his analysis of folk culture throughout the centuries, and in particular to his analysis of the writings of Rabelais.¹ With Pratchett's status as a best-selling author, shelved in bookshops, station bookstalls, newsagents and supermarkets, with his appearance on top-ten lists of sales, he is perhaps the nearest we have to Bakhtin's written folk humour.² Certainly both are considered “non-literary writers”.³ As Bakhtin writes: “[His] images have a certain undestroyable non-official nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can exist with [these] images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook” (Rabelais, p. 3). Here Bakhtin is writing about Rabelais, but he could have easily have been describing Pratchett's impact.

According to Bakhtin, medieval and Renaissance humour was a counter-cultural move. Festivals and spectacles mimicked and coincided with official events, with fools crowned as kings and clowns playing officials. Scholars, monks and clerics, infected by the carnival spirit, would parody Latin texts, prayers, sermons, treatises, debates and poke fun at the original. Between individuals, between friends, carnival relations became the exchanging of insults, and blasphemy and indecency become acceptable. All of these elements can be located in Pratchett's fiction, as I will go on to demonstrate with Mort.⁴

But before it is time to turn to these elements of the carnivalesque, I wish to use another text written by Bakhtin to situate Pratchett. Many of Pratchett's Discworld novels feature a young protagonist, often a foolish one, who comes to maturity and wisdom during the course of the novel. This is itself a genre of novel, the Bildungsroman, and Bakhtin produced a manuscript entitled: “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)”.⁵ Unfortunately the manuscript is incomplete, for in the Second World War he used it to make rolling papers for his cigarettes.

Bakhtin begins what is left of the manuscript with an anatomy of the novel and its different types: the travel novel, the novel of ordeal, the biography and the Bildungsroman. Each of these are described in terms of the position of their hero in time and space. In the travel novel the hero remains the same, existing in adventure time: moments, sequences and days and nights. The hero of the novel of ordeal is continually tested, and has to remain the same. Again, this exists in adventure time, with the threading together of individual tasks and ordeals, but there is also the elastic fairy-tale time, as the princess sleeps for a hundred years or the hero counts the grains of sand in a single night. This is to be contrasted with the realism of the biological time which features in the biographical novel. Again the hero remains the same within himself, although his position or fate will alter.

The single genre, described by Bakhtin, in which the hero alters, is the Bildungsroman:

The hero himself, his character, becomes a variable in the formula of this type of novel. Changes in the hero himself acquire plot significance, and thus the entire plot is reinterpreted and reconstructed. Time is introduced into man, enters into his very image, changing in a fundamental way the significance of all aspects of his destiny and life. This type of novel can be designated in the most general sense as the novel of human emergence.

(“Bildungsroman”, p. 21)

In turn, Bakhtin divides the Bildungsroman genre into five distinct subgenres. The first subgenre features cyclical time: the changes an individual undergoes as he or she grows up, and which could occur to anyone in any lifetime.⁶ Next there is a subgenre marked by the shift from youthful idealism and innocence to aged scepticism and experience, which again is cyclical, and could happen to anyone, in any lifetime. Then there is the biography or autobiography, where the hero passes through distinctive stages of development, which Bakhtin labels as linear biographical time. Again unfolding in linear time, the fourth subgenre is based on the depiction of the education of the hero at a pedagogical level. Finally there is a version of the Bildungsroman where the hero's emergence is intimately connected with that of the world, in historical time: “He emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, as the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being” (“Bildungsroman”, p. 23). It is this sort of novel, in comic form, that is written by Pratchett.

As I have already suggested, I have chosen to discuss Mort in order to demonstrate Bakhtinian comedy. Mort is the fourth novel in the Discworld sequence and was published in 1987. The story begins with Mort, the youngest son of a farming family, although:

[he] had about the same talent for horticulture that you would find in a dead starfish. It wasn't that he was unhelpful, but he had the kind of vague, cheerful helpfulness that serious men soon learn to dread … He was tall, red-haired and freckled, with the sort of body that seems to be only marginally under its owner's control; it appeared to have been built out of knees.

(Mort, p. 9)

His father takes Mort to the market, in order to find him a more suitable job, but no one is interested in apprenticing him. However, at midnight, Death arrives and offers Mort a job. Thus the stage is set for a typical Bildungsroman: the foolish apprentice making mistakes as he learns the job, and having to correct them through his own resourcefulness. The situation is made worse, as is often the case, by the continual absence of his master, who has decided to discover what it is like to be human. Mort's change is clearly flagged in the text:

It might be worth taking another look at Mort, because he's changed a lot in the last few chapters. For example, while he still has plenty of knees and elbows about his person, they seem to have migrated to their normal places and he no longer moves as though his joints were loosely fastened together with elastic bands. He used to look as if he knew nothing at all; now he looks as though he knows too much.

(Mort, p. 132)

Mort demonstrates a number of different sorts of time as discussed by Bakhtin. For example, Mort and his family experience idyllic-labour time, which unites the cyclical time of the developing youth with the cyclical time of the rotation of the seasons and the growing of crops. In fact this cyclical agricultural time is emphasised by the nature of the crops grown by Mort's family: they include reannual plants, which are harvested a year before their seeds are sown. This is a typical example of comic reversal.

Fairy-tale time also occurs when Mort is attempting to collect the souls of dying people on schedule. At one point he has to collect two souls at opposite sides of the Discworld and return to the town of Sto Lat. He notes that: “‘That's a ten thousand mile round trip however you look at it. It can't be done’” (Mort, p. 212). Mort is able to collect both souls within the allotted time, but is prevented from returning to Sto Lat by the spell cast by the wizards of the Unseen University. It seems that time is flexible enough to fit the duration of the story.

Another element of the Bildungsroman which I noted is the maturation of the hero coinciding with the dawning of a new epoch for society. Mort fits into this category, as the result of a mistake he makes whilst he is an apprentice. Rather than taking the Princess Keli's soul at her death, he kills her assassin and saves her life. Unfortunately as a result of her not dying, the predestined unification of the cities of Sto Lat and Sto Helit will not happen, and a new reality has been created: “history is flapping around loose” (Mort, p. 124). The Princess Keli has a hard time proving to other people that she is still alive, as the true reality tries to carry on as if nothing untoward had happened. At the end of the novel, having completed his apprenticeship, Mort elects to give up working for death and returns to the new reality, where he will attempt to unify the cities after all:

“YOU AREN'T FREE YET. YOU MUST SEE TO IT THAT HISTORY TAKES PLACE” [said Death].

“I know,” said Mort. “Uniting the kingdoms and everything.”

(Mort, p. 269)

If Mort succeeds in this, then a new era will dawn, and a hundred years of peace and plenty.

I have demonstrated the status of Mort as Bildungsroman, and now I wish to return to its comic status in terms of carnivalesque reversal, parody and the exchanging of insults. At the outset it has to be noted that other texts by Pratchett are richer in parody—Shakespeare and silent comedy in Wyrd Sisters⁷ and rock music in Soul Music⁸—but its relative thinness will perhaps enable the material not to become overwhelming. It is perhaps also worth noting that this early in the sequence—the fourth book—the parodies were still more about fantasy and sf texts rather than the wider cultural references which Pratchett has since alluded to.

According to Bakhtin, the carnivalesque were the social festivities which were unofficial, or which mocked the solemn. The most obvious manifestation of this is in the feast of fools, where a fool was elected as king for a day. But the feast is not a spectacle, it is not a play put on to amuse an audience: it is an event which all partake in. As Bakhtin suggests: “[The people] live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it … it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal” (Rabelais, p. 7; my italics). The Discworld, a flat world balanced on the back of elephants standing on the top of a tortoise, is a carnival space, operating always within the carnival time of the collapse or reversal of hierarchies.

In the person of Mort there is a fool, who first becomes Death's apprentice, then almost becomes Death himself and then by marriage becomes the Duke of Sto Helit, charged with uniting the kingdoms. Death himself is a figure of comedy, confused by the affairs of humans, and yet dealing with them every day. Any religious laws of a Christian afterlife where sinners are punished and the blessed rewarded, are suspended. As Mort as Death says: “THERE'S NO JUSTICE … JUST US” (Mort, p. 232). It may be that there is an afterlife, but Death does not know the fate of each person after their death.

Parody is usually an attempt to mimic the style of another writer, film-maker or musician for comic effect. The medieval and Renaissance carnivalesque parody took the words of a sacred text and twisted them to more earthy ends. Bakhtin gives the example of the words of Friar John from Rabelais: “by the shape of my nose you will know (how) I lift up” (Rabelais, p. 86), where the phrase “I will lift up” is the opening of Psalm 121. But here the phrase “I will lift up” refers to an erection, and the then common belief that nose size relates to penis size. The models in Mort are mostly from fantasy or fairy tales, rather than biblical sources, but some of them have a similar scatological element. In a conversation between Mort and Death's cook Albert, the age-old fairy story of the Princess and the Pea is subverted:

“… the princesses were beautiful as the day is long and so noble they, they could pee through a dozen mattresses—”

“What?”

Albert hesitated. “Something like that, anyway.”

(Mort, p. 99)

The carnivalesque parody brings the low, the bodily, into the realm of what has previously been thought to be divine.

Another example. Ysabell says: “It is unwise to meddle in the affairs of wizards because a refusal often offends, I read somewhere” (Mort, p. 183). This is obviously an echo of Gildor's advice to Frodo in that almost sacred, classic fantasy text The Lord of the Rings: “But it is said: Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”⁹ That which was previously a useful piece of advice from and within the context of The Lord of the Rings, becomes foolish in its translation to the Discworld and Mort.

The carnivalesque profanity within comradeship can be seen in one exchange between Mort and Ysabell:

“At least I don't look like I've been eating doughnuts in a wardrobe for years,” he said …

“At least I walk as if my legs only had one knee each,” she said.

“My eyes aren't two juugly poached eggs.”

(Mort, p. 121)

This exchange comes just as the two of them are making friends with each other, and deciding not to marry. It is a wooing in reverse, which prepares the ground for their eventual marriage at the end of the book.

It should now be clear that Mort contains the three elements of the Bakhtinian carnivalesque: the ritual of inversion, the scatological parody and the insulting friendship. In the space-time of the Discworld there is a carnival location. The Discworld's reversibility, its subjection to no laws but those of carnival and laughter, is most clearly seen in the epigraph to the next novel, Sourcery: “This book does not contain a map. Feel free to draw your own.”¹⁰ This not only satirises the pretentions of much fantasy to realism or to a sense of groundedness by opening with a map, but also emphasises the always already provisionality of the Discworld.

This carnival element is mixed with the Bakhtinian conception of the Bildungsroman. The growth and emergence of the comic hero is here intimately linked to a future change in the world. Of course this change, which we are assured is for the better, occurs after the end of the novel, and so it is not certain whether such a change will in fact occur. The ending leaves a space open for a sequel of the conventional kind: Mort offers to take over from Death if he ever wants a holiday: “MANY THANKS FOR THE OFFER,” said Death graciously. “I SHALL THINK ABOUT IT MOST SERIOUSLY” (Mort, p. 272). Death's parting words are not “GOODBYE”, but “AU REVOIR”. This event has not yet happened, although in Reaper Man Death is not so much given a holiday as made redundant.¹¹

At the end of the novel, the novel becomes identical with what Bakhtin calls fairy-tale time, as well as biographical time. Death keeps a book of each person's life, which is written as it happens. Mort is given his own book to read, and paradoxically ends the novel by reading the words which describe the events which happen after he has stopped reading the book. Time spirals into itself.

Through a comic Bildungsroman, the world changes. Comedy has become fragile in recent years: it seems so difficult to write a history of it or an account of it, that keeps the comedy funny, and is more than a simple listing of “the funny bits”. According to Bakhtin, the Rabelaisian laughter was “a universal philosophical principle that heals and regenerates” (Rabelais, p. 70). In the medieval period, as perhaps now, laughter was kept apart from the official. In the figure of Rabelais—a figure already seen as not quite being part of the cannon—the laughter became: “the expression of a new free and critical historical consciousness” (Rabelais, p. 73). Rabelais takes the elements of medieval carnival, and makes them into art, albeit an art which resists being classed as art. In the same way, four hundred years later, Pratchett takes the same elements and makes them almost into an art. The interesting history of humour is a circle.

I would like to thank Robert Edgar, who accompanied me to a conference on Bakhtin and who looked at an early draft of this article.

Notes

1. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), hereafter Rabelais.

2. This qualification “written” skirts around the issue of other forms of popular humour: newspaper cartoons, comic strips, films and television. I wish to avoid the word “literary”, for fear of contradiction in the next sentence.

3. Witness Tom Paulin's opinion, from BBC2's Late Review. “A complete amateur … doesn't even write in chapters … hasn't a clue”: quoted in Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times (London: Corgi [paperback], 1995), p. 3.

4. Terry Pratchett, Mort (London: Gollancz, 1987): hereafter Mort, cited from the Corgi edition (London, 1988).

5. M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel)” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986). Hereafter: “Bildungsroman”.

6. John Clute has suggested that Pratchett's protagonists are all the same child, returned to reenact the story. See John Clute, “The Big Sellers 3: Terry Pratchett”, Interzone 33 (January/February 1990), p. 27.

7. Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters (London: Gollancz, 1988).

8. Terry Pratchett, Soul Music (London: Gollancz, 1994).

9. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of the Lord of the Rings (London: Unwin, 1981), p. 120.

10. Terry Pratchett, Sourcery (London: Gollancz, 1988), cited from the Corgi edition, (London: 1989), p. 5.

11. Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man (London: Gollancz, 1991).