Pure Filth is an expansive study of early French farce with a great deal to offer anyone interested in the transition from medieval to early modern drama or, for that matter, in “the tensions, antagonisms, and instabilities that imbued popular devotion at the dawn of the Reformation” (110). Rather than downplaying the superficiality, obscenity, and kitsch that characterize farce, Noah Guynn shows how these qualities allow the genre as a whole to imagine “the possibility of a more ethical and just future precisely by disrupting a conventional language of virtue and vice and by demonstrating the scandalous lack of justice in the present moment” (71). His argument, which moves “from the openendedness of farce (its lack of aesthetic and moral closure) . . . toward its largely unrealized and unarticulated ethics and politics” (74), is all the more remarkable and worth reading because it troubles along the way any settled boundary between the Middle Ages and postmodernity, theology and theory, compliance and rebellion.Guynn sustains his most far-reaching claims by rooting them in the particular language of surviving playscripts while never losing sight of the “large-scale, infinitely complex social relations and practices” (65) from which that language arises but which we tend, of necessity, to oversimplify. Such a viewpoint requires relentless erudition—or what Guynn calls a “rather unbounded sense of intellectual terrain” (18)—together with constant self-reflection on our own embeddedness in historical matrices that cannot be safely consigned to the past or present. It requires a deep engagement with ambiguity, contradiction, and overdetermined meanings that threaten the coherence of any systematic order but must not be set aside lest we collaborate in the erasure of “attitudes, beliefs, and practices below the threshold of social and historical visibility” (65). Guynn shows in exquisitely researched, philologically rich detail how early French farce provides a record of otherwise hidden experiences: that of the marginalized, the subordinate, the exploited, the excommunicated, the censored—in a word, the subaltern.Guynn’s central point is that the disruptions and indeterminacies of farce are capable of serious “ethicoreligious, ethicopolitical” (70) work on behalf of these groups. Farce is not (as some have argued) a hegemonic form illustrating through the absurdity of human foolishness the need for officially sanctioned morals; nor is it an amoral celebration of absurdity for its own sake (as some others have claimed). Pure Filth threads the needle between these two positions: any given farce may well seek “to demonstrate that human sign systems, including its own, are predicated upon a regression of artifice in which stable reality, rational truth, and original or final meaning are fundamentally lacking” (75). And yet such demonstrations cannot help but inspire us to ask “whether and how a theory of ethics and justice could arise in so destabilized a setting.” Is it possible, Guynn wants to know, for the mock-moralizations of farce to indicate an ethical domain beyond easily ridiculed notions of good and evil?“Nothing does us as much good as a fool’s cap,” writes Nietzsche in a passage akin to Guynn’s thinking: We need it in relation to ourselves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose the freedom above things that our ideal demands of us. . . . We should be able also to stand above morality—and not only to stand with the anxious stiffness of a man who is afraid of slipping and falling at any moment, but also to float above it and play. How then could we possibly dispense with art—and the fool? (Nietzsche 164, §107)Nietzsche is not one of Gyunn’s explicit touchstones, but I think Pure Filth locates in early farce something close to what Nietzsche calls la gaya scienza (a Provençal phrase derived, not incidentally, from medieval troubadours). Guynn’s regular affirmation of the consonance between pre- and postmodern ways of thinking makes a major contribution to the ongoing reevaluation of the “the hidebound traditionalism that is so often associated with the Middle Ages” (224; compare Holsinger). He puts to fascinating use, for example, Carol Symes’s claim that a public sphere (whose penchant for secular reasoning allegedly displaces the church as an arena for ethical debate) already existed in the Middle Ages, thanks to the stage, and “was likely to have been ‘larger and more buoyant’ than its modern counterpart” (11), if for no other reason than that the Middle Ages lacked the disciplinary, therapeutic regimes that have subsequently emerged to instill in us proper mental hygiene. “If modern consumers,” Guynn writes—quoting Michel de Certeau—“are able to ‘manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them’ (xiv), surely late medieval and early modern subjects would have had even greater room for maneuver, given that opposition was far easier to conceal and far more difficult to control” (27). This was above all the case, Guynn argues, when performers were masked, cross-dressed, and speaking lines they could attribute to someone else. Farce could afford to be searingly critical of the accepted wisdom because its flippant ironies, vulgarity, and claptrap lent actors a further, even more plausible deniability—that of being utterly superficial and therefore devoid of meaning.Guynn drives this point home in a tour de force reading of Maistre Pierre Pathelin (ca. 1456–60), “the unquestioned masterpiece of the genre” (71). At one point Pierre—who is acting as a lawyer but hopes in fact to defraud his client, a stealer of sheep—advises the thief to adopt in court “a defense strategy that amounts to a single, monosyllabic, and nonsensical word: to every question, no matter who poses it, even if it is Pierre himself, he is to cry out like a lamb: ‘Dy-be[e]’ (‘Say baa’; 1198)” (80; line numbers are keyed to Smith). In Guynn’s reading, this comical gibberish, which the thief will ultimately offer to Pierre in place of payment, serves as a placeholder for all that is lacking in discourse, be it coins or sheep, reality or justice. It offers a warning that a language vitiated by lack will betray those who believe too readily in their ability to control its meaning or grasp its truth. It reminds the audience of humanity’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity to perpetrate acts of fraud and crime. And finally, it serves to flatten seemingly inflexible social and class distinctions: not only does it enable a shabby shyster [Pierre] to defeat a well-heeled merchant [the sheep owner] on behalf of his plebeian client [the sheep stealer]; it also compels the self-proclaimed ‘maitre / Des trompeurs d’ici et d’ailleurs’ (‘master of tricksters from hither and yon’; 1611–12) to admit that a mere ‘berger des champs’ (‘shepherd of the fields’; 1616) has surpassed him. (81–82)That is a lot to extract from a single, repetitive gag, but ultimately it is the flatness of the gimmick that allows the word to signify so capaciously. Farce at its most extreme has to risk nonsense, in Guynn’s reading, to open the possibility that there might be better ways to make sense of things.And yet, under what moral, linguistic regime would it be possible to speak of humanity’s capacity for fraud and crime as seemingly inexhaustible rather than inexhaustible in fact? Guynn finds one answer in the peculiar Christian symbolism according to which Christ is at once lamb, shepherd, and lord of a Kingdom that will come like a thief in the night. Pure Filth carefully delineates, in other words, everything that a “premodern, messianic ethics” shares with “the postmodern, deconstructive one” (92) espoused by Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, Geoffery Harpham, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin. The basic idea here is that any ethics worthy of the name requires a comprehensive critique of moralism. It requires “an incessant deconstruction of moral and legal discourses that aims at social transformation but excludes all forms of foundationalism, rationalism, or universalism” (92). Ethics has to be a self-examining, eschatological mindset, one that anticipates “the unanticipatable: an arrival that can be grasped only after it has arrived, a justice that will be made known only after humanity has already been judged” (91). Audiences can thus learn from the farcical critique of existing moral codes to “strive to earn a forgiveness that is simultaneously lodged in and betrayed by language itself, that is always impending but never present, and that is therefore a source of unending struggle but also hope” (106)—or in any event, the hope-against-hope conveyed by laughter. I found this reading enormously suggestive and thought it might also apply to the so-called nihilism sometimes attributed to the modern Theater of the Absurd, which can display a tragicomic eschatology similar to what Guynn sees in medieval comedy—as, for example, in En attendant Godot or Fin de partie. Perhaps early and late instances of French farce are equally committed to rescuing art from “the administrators of authentic messages” (Adorno 128; see also Vattimo).Nowhere is Guynn’s subtlety as a theorist and scholar of critical resistance more astute than in his exploration of strategic compliance as a valid strategy in any age of great crisis. What if, Guynn asks (channeling Jack Halberstam), we were less strident in presuming “‘the form that agency must take?’ (127)” (185). Might it not operate even through attributes associated with agency’s absence: passivity, silence, masochism? Was it not possible in the Middle Ages, as now, to top from the bottom? Gyunn’s deployment of Halberstam, together with “Paul’s theory of marital debt as mutual enslavement, Deleuze’s theory of masochism as brokered submission, Butler’s theory of subjection as the ground of agency” (215), maps a great deal of common ground between the premodern world and contemporary queer-feminist criticism. It helped me better understand the relationship between the male players who “even under the strictest controls . . . still manage to signal the existence of hidden transcripts in their plays . . . [sometimes] by loudly proclaiming their adherence to the censor’s decrees” (58) and the farce wives these men impersonated so as to interrogate the nature of all subordination: “the feisty but loyal” one who “defies her obtuse, pigheaded husband in order to protect his claims in her chastity;” “the irascible but diligent” one whoOne of Guynn’s key points is that such figures cannot be subjected to any ethicopolitical standard without subjecting that standard in turn to reevaluation. Indeed, their feminine ability to capitalize on and deploy such standards to their own ends charts a devious route to freedom. Not unlike the cunning slave in ancient Roman comedy, the farce wife is at once a stereotype and a transcript for the subaltern resistance that usually operates “below the threshold of social and historical visibility,” except when punished or given a public platform in complex forms of transvestism. I think Guynn’s bravura last chapter shows in granular detail the power that the medieval wife could wield not only over her husband but over the male players who wanted to inhabit her stereotype, to subordinate themselves to her formula, so as to win for themselves a limited but genuine ability to speak truth to power.Or at any rate, to speak gargantuan, blasphemous obscenities. I always thought that I had some understanding of the French farcical tradition from reading Rabelais in translation—he “is said to have committed Pathelin to memory” (102)—but now realize to my embarrassment how chaste my understanding of depravity has been. In French, I learn, one can mock the sacrament of penance through puns on confesser, which “contains con (‘cunt’), fesse (‘buttock’), and fesser (‘to fuck’)” (111). Or take, for another example, the scene of death-bed delirium in Pathelin’s sequel, Le testament Pathelin, when he “mangles his penitential prayers, scandalizing the priest by misconstruing ‘Dominus’ for ‘nulz’ (‘nothing’; 330–31) and rhyming ‘sainctz’ (‘saints’) with ‘sains’ (‘breasts’)” before bestowing, in his last will, “sexual pleasure on monks, nuns and beguines . . . and his wife’s ass cheeks on the priest, because ‘cela est honneste’ (‘that’s the decent thing to do’; 485)” (106–7; line numbers are keyed to Tissier 8:125–208). Or consider the farce inserted into the Mystère de saint Martin in which a miller, suffering from “an agonizing and apparently lethal case of indigestion” (116) is taunted by his faithless wife, who tells him to hang his ass over the bedside—“‘Par là s’en peult vostre ame aller’ (‘Your soul can take its leave that way’; 443)” (116; line numbers are keyed to Tissier 4:167–243). As his soul leaves his body, an expectant devil hiding under the bed receives it in the form of “‘bran moullé’ (s.d. 239), which can be translated either as ‘molded shit’ or as ‘milled bran,’ the latter perhaps being the substance used to make a fake turd look real to the audience” (117). When the devil triumphantly delivers this tribute to Hell, Satan must open the gates—not because Christ has arrived to harrow the damned but because there is no other way to ventilate the fumes. Last but not least, consider Martinville de Rouen, a mid-sixteenth-century farceur, who “performed the role of a sexually curious adolescent girl while sporting a full, black beard . . . a sign of the actor’s abiding virility (as in the colloquial phrase avoir de la barbe, ‘to have a full beard’), of the character’s budding sexual maturity (avoir le con barbu, ‘to have a bearded cunt’), and of the transferability and ambiguity of gendered attributes” (154).I list these examples not just to linger over a choice handful of the book’s belles choses but to illustrate the challenge Guynn had before him of liberating farce from the pious overreactions that would dismiss it as “the most vulgar, primitive, and formulaic of theatrical genres” (5). Farce may well be that, but precisely on account of its vulgar, formulaic primitivism, it is also a genre devoted to a radical critique of decorum—which is to say, to the critique of social norms and categories, in particular those that regulate class, gender, and sexuality. “The spirit of cynicism that scholars have mistakenly associated with farce for centuries” is in Guynn’s reading an ethos of using “laughter and ridicule to spur ethical reflection and spiritual renewal” (108) wherever inherited behavioral codes are most stifling. The ethics of farce lies, that is, in the spirit of carnival, in the celebration of antistructure, in attacks on the dangerous idea (to borrow from Charles Taylor) “that a code need leave no space for the principle that contradicts it, that there need be no limit to its enforcement, which is the spirit of totalitarianism” (Taylor 50–51). I found it deeply refreshing to be reminded that even propaganda theater at the time—“plays that aimed to reinforce, or urge acceptance of, prevailing norms, regimes and beliefs”—were shot through with “irresolvable ambivalence” (40–41) simply by virtue of having to stage the conflict between any regulative principle and the people it would regulate. Equally refreshing is the reminder that outside the theater, these conflicts were real, ongoing and not invariably settled in favor of the powerful: “peasants, laborers and artisans frequently rose up against economic and political oppression,” writes Guynn, “and in the process won significant concessions from the institutions and groups that ruled over them” (30).Medieval culture in general, as demonstrated again and again by Guynn’s finely detailed analysis, was a debate between unevenly matched antagonists; farceurs both learned from and lent to disadvantaged parties the explosive critical maneuver of exposing every moral code as an exploitable form of role-play. “What, the play [Pathelin] seems to ask, can ethics be, or what could it become, if morality were understood as a kind of performance or masquerade, if social relations were understood as fundamentally inauthentic, and if knowledge were subject to constant destabilization?” (91). If a Catholic drama of the fifteenth century can ask that question—and Guynn leaves me with little doubt that it can—then early farce provides us with especially resplendent evidence for the striking affinity between the pre- and postmodern conditions. In it we catch a glimpse of the protest shared across many centuries by those whose experience has been most subject to regulation and therefore, also, to the most grievous, moralizing erasures, but who for that very reason have also been well positioned to envision a better justice. If Guynn is right—and, again, I think he is—then we should learn to see in farce an ongoing movement toward a more liberating and fair ethical stance.