Malbrough theme  

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The "Malbrough theme" "(тема Мальбрука) is the term Mikhail Bakhtin uses to denote those instances in literature or folklore where the moment of death coincides with the act of defecation (испражнение) or breaking wind (испускание ветров)."[1]

In Rabelais and His World:

"In world literature and especially in anonymous oral tradition we find many examples of the interweaving of death throes and the act of defecation."

Alistair Ian Blyth notes:

"As an important variant of the theme Bakhtin also mentions involuntary defecation provoked by terror, by the throes of fear. (Творчестсво Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековая и Ренессанса. Khudozhestvennaja literatura: Moscow, 1965; 2nd edition, 1990, p. 167-8.)[2].
Bakhtin, like Ravisius, omits to mention what was probably the most famous instance of the "Malbrough theme" in the ancient and mediaeval world after that of the Emperor Claudius, namely the death of Arius, the originator of the heresy that the Son of God was a created being subordinate to the Father, condemned by the Ecumenical Council at Nicea in the year 325. Indeed, "the strange and horrid circumstances of [Arius's] death", as Edward Gibbon puts it in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (cap. 21), were decisive in the defeat of Arianism, and seen as divine intervention. The sceptical Gibbon concludes that "those who press the literal narrative of the death of Arius (his bowels suddenly burst out in a privy) must make their option between poison and miracle." [3]

According to Alistair Ian Blyth[4], "the origin of the term "Malbrough theme” is the song “Malbrough s’en va-t-en guerre”. "A Russian translation of the French song was published in an almanack in 1792, but such was the popularity of the tune that the carnivalesque popular imagination – the voice of the lower material bodily stratum, as it were – inevitably created its own rude version of the original words (cf. in this respect Hitler Has Only Got One Ball). In the Russian scatological version of the song, quoted in the aforementioned article, Marlborough eats sour cabbage soup and shits himself to death:

Мальбрук в поход собрался
Наелся кислых щей…
Он к вечеру обклался
И умер в тот же день.
Четыре генерала
Портки его несли,
И тридцать три капрала
Г…о из них трясли.

English: (Malbrough left for the war / He ate sour cabbage soup… / That evening he paid the toll / And died the very same day. / Four generals / It took to carry his trousers / And thirty-three corporals / To get the shit out of them.) (N.B. “Г…о” is the polite way of rendering “govno” (shit) in print.)

Alistair Ian Blyth concluses that "therefore, Bakhtin must be alluding to this familiar (to Russians) example of death during the act of defection found in oral folk culture."






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