In 1268, Venice passed its first documented law banning masked people from certain games — not because masks were rare, but because they were already so common they were disrupting public order. That's the paradox at the heart of the Venetian Carnival tradition: a society so stratified by class that it invented an annual ritual to temporarily erase those distinctions entirely. Masks, Peter, weren't just costumes. They were a legal and social technology. Sumptuary laws that normally enforced visible class difference were suspended during Carnival, and for a few weeks, a nobleman and a laborer could stand in the same square, indistinguishable. While Lecture 4 explored Pitol's view of books and journeys as transformative, here we shift to how masks serve as cultural and social commentary in his work, critiquing societal norms and authority. Pitol spent significant time in Venice, and the Carnival's architecture of disguise gave him a living model for what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called the carnivalesque — a mode where hierarchy is inverted, authority is mocked, and the eccentric is celebrated over the conventional. The Bauta, Venice's primary Carnival mask, was engineered to allow speech and eating while concealing identity; Venetian noblemen wore it paired with a tricorn hat, zendale hood, and tabarro cloak, deliberately dressing down to move anonymously through the city. That deliberate erasure of rank is precisely the gesture Pitol performs in his prose. The Plague Doctor mask — long-beaked, originating from 17th-century French physician Charles de Lorme — adds a darker register. It was designed to hold flowers or herbs in its beak, a defense against miasma theory, the belief that disease traveled through foul air. Carnival revelers later adopted it as a decorated memento mori: a reminder of death worn as festive costume. That collision of dread and celebration, Peter, is exactly the grotesque register Pitol imports into his fiction. Humor and horror share the same sentence. Masks in Pitol's narrative frame societal critique as spectacle. Drawing from Commedia dell'Arte, characters like Arlecchino embody social commentary, challenging norms and authority through wit and transgression. Originally, mask-wearing during Carnival was reserved exclusively for men until the 17th century, which means the tradition was already coded as a performance of identity rather than a revelation of it. In the Caribbean Carnival tradition, masks like the Jab Jab used black paint and molasses to represent enslaved laborers — a parallel act of reclamation through disguise, where the mask became a vehicle for historical memory rather than its erasure. Pitol's humor, akin to the Bauta mask's anonymity, critiques societal norms by disarming the audience. His comedic elements are not mere diversions but integral to his critique of authority and convention. Bakhtin argued that carnival laughter is fundamentally ambivalent: it degrades and regenerates simultaneously. Pitol understood this. His grotesque characters — the pompous, the deluded, the accidentally absurd — aren't targets of contempt. They are mirrors, held at a carnivalesque angle. The key takeaway here, Peter, is this: Pitol's use of the carnivalesque is not stylistic decoration. It is a deliberate subversion of narrative authority. By adopting the mask — through humor, through the grotesque, through hybrid form — he refuses to let any single voice, including his own, claim final interpretive power. The eccentric is not the exception in his work. It is the method. The mask, worn long enough, stops being a disguise and becomes the most honest face in the room.