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This article examines images of the body and laughter in Alain Mabanckou's novel Verre Cassé (2005). Using Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, this discussion highlights how carnivalesque humor operates in the novel through scatological imagery and informal diction. The novel's eponymous writer-protagonist documents tragic tales of his compatriots in a bar that Verre Cassé himself frequents. Through this alcoholic writer wallowing in his own excrement, Mabanckou suspends conventions of literary and social propriety. Images of excretion and copulation, and familiar speech of the "marketplace" punctuate the novel, as Mabanckou draws laughter from the fate of the novel's suffering heroes. I argue that this carnivalesque idiom makes possible an ambivalently utopic world—the black Other who rejects social decorum exists free from but also outside conventional society. As the bar's patrons consume their lives away in alcohol, they forego social decorum, living as social pariahs in the margins of society. By portraying the suffering that afflicts the black African body in resolutely ludic terms, Mabanckou transgresses the grim image of African literature. This ambivalent gesture carnivalizes the dreary realities of postcolonial Congo wrought by both colonization and internal conflict, all-the-while injecting levity where there seems to be no place for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scatological is often relegated to the realm of humor and the juvenile, the transgressive and disturbing nature of the fecal neutralized through its demotion to the basest stratum of humor, where it serves as humor's lowest common denominator, the kind of subject that children delight in. Rather than concede to this narrative, which would make of scatological humor a temporary, Bakhtinian carnivalesque inversion of social norms and order, this article explores what it would mean to take the scatological seriously. To reject the laughter associated with the carnivalesque and decline to take the scatological as comic relief is to claim fecality as the site of a more durable emancipation than the carnivalesque affords, by exploiting fecality's capacity to enable the assimilation of the inassimilable fact of mortality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]