When Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin's first book to be published in ...
Bakhtin's carnival, surely the most productive concept in this book, is not only not
Author(s): Renate Lachmann, Raoul Eshelman and Marc Davis
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 11 (Winter, 1988-1989), pp. 115-152
This essay will analyse the presence of Elements of the Carnival —such as the Grotesque, Church Criticism and Laughter— in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" through concepts of the Carnivalesque developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in "Rabelais and His World" and by Lillian Bisson in "Chaucer and the Late Medieval World".
Shanti Elliot
Images of reversal twist through many folklore traditions, celebrating the poor fool who becomes king and condemning the powerful to ruin. For Mikhail Bakhtin, such reversals express the creative energy of "a carnival sense of the world." In carnival, laughter and excess push aside the seriousness and the hierarchies of "official" life. Carnival shakes up the authoritative version of language and values, making room for a multiplicity of voices and meanings. Bakhtin's theories of language emerge from this space of multiplicity. By discerning between different modes of discourse,Bakhtin shows how "dialogic" language disrupts uniformity of thought.
The Grotesque and Carnivalesque
Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the original authors of the criticisms on the grotesque and the carnivalesque. According to him, “the grotesque starts when the exaggeration reaches fantastic dimensions” (1984:315), for example the features that protrude from the body are changed and exaggerated. Exaggerated body parts would hide any normal parts, “there are men with disproportionate phalli […] and others with unusually large teste” (1984:328). Noses, ears and head can be change into that of animals; the transformation of human to animal is a combination that is “one of the most ancient grotesque forms” (1984:316). The mouth also plays a big role in the grotesque, such as the ‘gaping mouth’, Bakhtin calls it a “wide-open bodily abyss” (1984:317), the hole can be viewed as an erotic image, as something to be filled, penetrated, even if it cannot be. The anus is like a ‘gaping mouth’. Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as being unfinished, that it is still in the process of ‘becoming’, of procreating and conception.
For the literary theorist and philosopher
Mikhail Bakhtin the carnival was not only liberating because
- for that short period - the church and state
had little or no control over the lives of the
revelers, although Terry Eagleton points out
this would probably be “licensed”
transgression at best. But, its true liberating
potential can be seen in the fact that set rules
and beliefs were not immune to ridicule or
reconception at carnival time; it “cleared the
ground” for new ideas to enter into public
discourse. Bakhtin goes so far as to suggest
that the European Renaissance itself was
made possible by the spirit of free thinking
and impiety that the carnivals engendered.
, the carnivalesque is both
the description of a historical phenomenon
and the name he gives to a certain literary
tendency. Historically speaking, Bakhtin
was interested in great carnivals of Medieval
Europe. He saw them as occasions in which
the political, legal and ideological authority
of both the church and state were inverted
— albeit temporarily — during the anarchic
and liberating period of the carnival.
Bakhtin recognizes that the tradition of
carnival dwindled in Europe following the
Renaissance and the eventual replacement of
feudalism with capitalism. As a result, he
says, the public spirit of the carnival
metamorphosed into the “carnivalesque”:
that is, the spirit of carnival rendered into
literary form. The person who, existing on
the cusp of this social upheaval, most fully
represented this spirit was François
Rabelais, and the book which holds the
greatest purchase on Bakhtin’s imagination
1 Russian linguist and literary critic, whose writings,
including Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929)
and The Dialogic Imagination (1975), were very
influential in 20th-century structuralism,
poststructuralism, social theory, and the theory of the
novel.
is Rabelais” Gargantua and Pantagruel. The
comic violence, bad language, exaggeration,
satire, and shape-shifting which fill this
book are, for Bakhtin, the greatest example
of carnivalesque literature. Ever concerned
with the liberation of the human spirit,
Bakhtin claimed that carnivalesque literature
— like the carnivals themselves — broke
apart oppressive and moldy forms of thought
and cleared the path for the imagination and
the never-ending project of emancipation.
Bakhtin suggests that carnivalesque
literature also became less common as the
increasingly privatized world of modern,
individualistic capitalism took hold.
"Nietzsche's Influence on Bakhtin's Aesthetics of Grotesque Realism"
In her article "Nietzsche's Influence on Bakhtin's Aesthetics of Grotesque Realism" Yelena Mazour-Matusevich discusses Bakhtin's concept of grotesque realism in the light of Nietzsche's influence, particularly his notion of chaos and its expression of the Dionysian blended with and perceived through Russian religious thought and mythological consciousness. Mazour-Matusevich postulates that Nietzsche's influence on Bakhtin is most obvious in the latter's seminal work, Rabelais and His World.
In order to demonstrate Nietzsche's influence on Bakhtin, Mazour-Matusevich provides an overview of Nietzsche's reception in Russia during Bakhtin's formative years as well as of the current state of research concerning the correlation between the ideas of Nietzsche and Bakhtin. Unlike previous scholarship, Mazour-Matusevich explores the "Nietzschean connection" beyond Thus Spoke Zarathustra by including Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, The Will to Power, The Antichrist, and Twilight of the Idols.
Galin Tihanov
Professor at Queen Mary, London University, London, London, United Kingdom; g.tihanov@qmul.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
I propose to take the grotesque, both as a discursive genre and a cultural attitude and practice, as a point of departure that allows us to comment more widely on Bakhtin's Rabelais book and its significance for current debates on subjectivity. In carnival, the epic reverberates in humanity's boundless memory "of cosmic perturbations in the distant past," while the novelistic lives in the grotesque fluctuation and removal of distance, and in the irreverent and joyful celebration of resilience through laughter. Like the epic, carnival is about the maintaining of traditional practices, but in an open and charitably insecure, "novelistic" way. The book on Rabelais seems to be the point where, on reconciling and synthesizing culture and life in the acts of the human body, reworking and redrawing the boundaries of cultural taboos, and championing a symbiosis between the epic and the novelistic, Bakhtin sponsors a new sense of tradition inscribed in the irreverent life of folk (community) culture. This celebration of the people re-opens the vexing question about the political implications of Bakhtin's pronouncements on the epic and the novelistic, on communitarian and individual culture, and on their desired synthesis. But it also enables us to locate Bakhtin's style of thinking and his specific brand of decentred, indeed dislocated, humanism.
Keywords: Grotesque; Body; Cultural value; Subjectivity; Humanism; Bakhtin
CULTURAL & SOCIAL THEORY, LITERARY THEORY, MARXISM, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN
On Bakhtin’s "Carnival" and "Grotesque"
Mikhail Bakhtin begins his work, Rabelais and His World with an introductory essay. For him, Rabelais is the most difficult classical author of world literature and it is impossible to understand him with ongoing artistic and ideological conceptions. He intends to reconstruct a new method in order to evaluate his writings accordingly and therefore begins to define important characteristics of folk culture. He divides this main heading in three categories; ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, various genres of billingsgate, and tries to interpret the human behaviors in carnival activities. He states that the form of carnivals was distinct from the official ceremonies. Additionally there was a distinction between the two concepts; carnivals and theatrical performances. Carnivals were standing between art and life. Moreover, there was no distinction between spectators and actors. There were no footlights; everyone was participating. Carnivals, unlike official, feudal, political ceremonies, were offering a kind of nonofficial type of worldly experience. Thus there was a two world condition. According to him, the two world condition is crucial in the way that it enables us to fully understand Renaissance and Medieval cultural consciousness. Carnivals had a universal spirit. It was referring all humanity and the extra humane and earthly subjects such as planets as well. In the line between art and life, carnival people were experiencing both real and the ideal, and that was the reason why carnivals were second-life of people. The festivity had a practical content, also had spiritual and ideological ones, which evolves it into a position in which particular philosophical content occurs. One of the important aspects of the carnival activity is about hierarchy. In carnivals, ranks of people were no longer valid; every participant was equal, thus the true human experience was lived. Bakhtin describes this situation of lack of hierarchy as a temporary suspension. On the other hand, Bakhtin emphasizes the activity of laughter; it was freed from religious dogmatism, mysticism and piety, and from magic as well. Laughter turns its subjects into flesh, besides it degrades and materializes. First of all, laughter was not individual; people were laughing all together. Secondly, it was universal; entire world was seen by the participants and laughter was directed to everyone. Thirdly, it was ambivalent; on one hand it was gay, triumphant, but mocking and deriding on the other.
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The notion of ambivalence is also very important in Bakhtin’s interpretation of the grotesque. According to him, grotesque image is something which represents an unfinished metamorphosis of death and birth, of growth and becoming. It is frightening and humorous at the same time. It is between the real and the imaginary. It is incomplete, and this aspect challenges Renaissance perception of body. Principal of human body in Renaissance realism regards body as one complete object. It is atomized, and designed mathematically as complete material body like Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”. Bakhtin’s one of the main arguments is that grotesque is highly related with carnival spirit and it remained till today, marginalized, turned and interpreted into other forms such like romantic or modernist grotesque, but it survived. Bakhtin also refers to Wolfgang Kayser’s ideas, in which he stresses the element of alienation in grotesque imagery. For him there is something alien, hostile in that imagery; the actual world becomes alien because in carnival spirit there is the possibility to experience an ideal, utopian world. People return into themselves and the world is destroyed. Kayser also introduces the concept of id in grotesque interpretation. It is not in Freudian sense; it is an “alien, inhuman power, governing the world, men, their life and behavior”. He talks about “puppets” and “madness”. For him, there is something alien in madmen, on the contrary in grotesque, madmen exists to escape the existing world, presenting different perceptions.
_
In grotesque image, death was associated with life. Bakhtin states that Renaissance saw the body as a complete whole, and a deathless one. I suggest that today, the carnival spirit is deeply hidden, because of the tendency of enlightenment to keep death hidden. Adorno and Horkheimer suggested the notion of “mimicking death”; that humans turned themselves into “things” because they were afraid of death. Bakhtin underlines that people in carnivals were not “things”; they were experiencing the two worlds all together. Besides, Adorno suggests the concept of “authentic art” which brings the element of knowledge and element of magic together. I think grotesque image is partially related with this concept; it is neither fully “knowable” nor fully “magical” but includes perceptions of both. It is fantastic in Tzvetan Todorov’s understanding. Adorno and Horkheimer in “Dialectic of Enlightenement” were suggesting that enlightenment was seeing in the animate what’s inanimate. It brings life into non-living mechanisms, by ultimate demythologization and disenchantment. There were no universal spirits and gods, everything were explainable with numbers and positivist knowledge, which later constituted the myth of enlightenment. Grotesque imagery at this sense seems something resisting against enlightenment. It is revolutionary and distorting; it seems to me like that while enlightenment tries to demythologize concepts, grotesque brings up new concepts that are between life and death, actuality and art. It is “demythologisable” to a certain degree, but not totally ever, or it is something as an escape route from demythologizing of enlightenment. Modern Grotesque is practiced in art today and maybe popular culture (or pop culture) can be said to include a kind of carnival spirit in itself.
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Lastly, Bakhtin’s ideas on carnival spirit may be related with Karl Marx’s thoughts; in the way which proposes that it is in human’s nature to be social. In carnivals, human socialize, without any hierarchies. For Marx, being social is a fundamental human need, which approves Bakhtin’s understanding of the carnival spirit. Furthermore, Marx emphasizes labor, suggests that humans connect themselves to other people, and creates something which gives joy to other people. In other words; humans define themselves in relation to others. Bakhtin’s understanding of carnival may also be interpreted in Marxist methodology; in carnivals, people join together, regardless of their social ranks, they are both actors and spectators, they form some kind of labor relationship, create humor, speak in abusive tones with intimacy and give joy to each other. Alienation for Marx occurs because capitalism sets distance between laborer and the product s/he produces, thus the laborer cannot connect him/herself with other people. Carnival spirit, with its utopian realization and escapement from the official, seems to be actualizing a kind of model for human relations which Marx desires. For Bakhtin, carnival spirit includes “true human” experiences in its essence. But Bakhtin is not determinist like Marx, because he thinks that the carnival spirit only introduces temporary suspension of the official and hierarchical.
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Thus, carnival spirit will never truly be fulfilled.
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