Bakhtin, one of the leading thinkers and literary critics of the twentieth
century, always defended the important role of laughter in the novel.
For the comic mode nothing is eternal or stable, everything can and
must be renewed. The notion of an absolute and indisputable truth is
rejected. This explains why one of the main functions of laughter is to
mock institutional mystiques and orthodoxies. The aim of this essay is
to show that Pym’s novels are not trivial works of art, but irreverent and
open-ended texts that destroy the mystique that surrounds the academic
world in particular and other professions in general.
