Carnivalesque
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The Carnivalesque is a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. It originated as "carnival" in
Mikhail Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (; rus, Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, , mʲɪxɐˈil mʲɪˈxajləvʲɪdʑ bɐxˈtʲin; – 7 March 1975) was a Russian people, Russian philosopher and literary critic who worked on the phi ...
's ''
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics ''Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics'' (, ''Problemy poètiki Dostoevskogo'') is a book by the 20th century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. It was originally published in 1929 in Leningrad under the title ''Problems of Dos ...
'' and was further developed in ''
Rabelais and His World ''Rabelais and His World'' (Russian: Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса, ''Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura srednevekov'ja i Renessa ...
''. For Bakhtin, "carnival" (the totality of popular festivities, rituals and other carnival forms) is deeply rooted in the human psyche on both the collective and individual levels. Though historically complex and varied, it has over time worked out "an entire language of symbolic concretely sensuous forms" which express a unified "carnival sense of the world, permeating all its forms". This language, Bakhtin argues, cannot be adequately verbalized or translated into abstract concepts, but it is amenable to transposition into an artistic language that resonates with its essential qualities: it can, in other words, be "transposed into the language of literature". Bakhtin calls this transposition the ''carnivalization'' of literature. Although he considers a number of literary forms and individual writers, it is
François Rabelais François Rabelais ( , ; ; born between 1483 and 1494; died 1553) was a French writer who has been called the first great French prose author. A Renaissance humanism, humanist of the French Renaissance and Greek scholars in the Renaissance, Gr ...
, the French Renaissance author of ''
Gargantua and Pantagruel ''The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel'' (), often shortened to ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' or the (''Five Books''), is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the advent ...
'', and the 19th-century Russian author
Fyodor Dostoevsky Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. () was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in both Russian and world literature, and many of his works are considered highly influent ...
, that he considers the primary exemplars of carnivalization in literature.


Carnival sense of the world

Bakhtin identifies four principal categories of the carnival sense of the world. *''Familiar and free interaction between people'': carnival often brought the unlikeliest of people together, those ordinarily separated by impenetrable socio-hierarchical barriers. The suspension of distance between people encouraged free interaction and free individual expression. *''Eccentricity'': with the dissolution of hierarchical relationships, ordinarily unacceptable behaviour becomes acceptable. Behaviour, gesture and discourse that are normally considered eccentric and inappropriate are encouraged, permitting "the latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves". *''Carnivalistic mésalliances'': the familiar and free format of carnival allows all dualistic separations of the hierarchical worldview to reunite in living relationship with one another — heaven and hell, the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, the great and the small, the clever and the stupid, etc. *''Profanation'': in the carnival, the strict rules of piety and respect for official notions of the 'sacred' are stripped of their power — blasphemy, obscenity, debasing, 'bringing down to earth', celebration rather than condemnation of the earthly and body-based. The primary act of carnival is the mock crowning and subsequent de-crowning of a carnival king. It is a "dualistic ambivalent ritual" that typifies the inside-out world of carnival and the "joyful relativity of all structure and order". The act sanctifies ambivalence toward that which is normally considered absolute, single, or monolithic. Carnivalistic symbols always include their opposite within themselves: "Birth is fraught with death, and death with new birth." The crowning implies the de-crowning, and the de-crowning implies a new crowning. It is thus the process of change itself that is celebrated, not that which is changed. The carnival sense of the world "is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order." This is not to say that liberation from all authority and sacred symbols was desirable as an ideology. Because participation in Carnival extracts all individuals from non-carnival life, nihilistic and individualistic ideologies are just as impotent and just as subject to the radical humour of carnival as any form of official seriousness. The spirit of carnival grows out of a "culture of laughter". Because it is based in the physiological realities of the lower bodily stratum (birth, death, renewal, sexuality, ingestion, evacuation etc.), it is inherently anti-elitist: its objects and functions are necessarily common to all humans—"identical, involuntary and non-negotiable". Bakhtin argues that we should not compare the "narrow theatrical pageantry" and "vulgar Bohemian understanding of carnival" characteristic of modern times with his Medieval Carnival. Carnival was a powerful creative event, not merely a spectacle. Bakhtin suggests that the separation of participants and spectators has been detrimental to the potency of Carnival. Its power lay in there being no "outside". Everyone participated, and everyone was subject to its lived transcendence of social and individual norms: "carnival travesties: it crowns and uncrowns, inverts rank, exchanges roles, makes sense from nonsense and nonsense of sense."


Carnivalization of literature

Bakhtin's term ''the carnivalization of literature'' (which Morson and Emerson point out could also be called "the literization of carnival") refers to the transposition of the essential qualities of the carnival sense of the world into a literary language and a literary ''genre''.


Seriocomic genres

The ancient seriocomic genres initiated the "carnivalistic line" in Western literature. Of these, the most significant were
Socratic dialogue Socratic dialogue () is a genre of literary prose developed in Greece at the turn of the fourth century BC. The earliest ones are preserved in the works of Plato and Xenophon and all involve Socrates as the protagonist. These dialogues, and subse ...
and
Menippean satire The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, that is characterized by attacking mental attitudes rather than specific individuals or entities. It has been broadly described as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, an ...
. According to Bakhtin, the seriocomic genres always began with "the living ''present''". Everything took place "in a zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries." Unlike the "serious" genres (tragedy, epic, high rhetoric, lyric poetry), the seriocomic genres did not rely on ''legend'' or long-held tribal belief and custom for their legitimacy. Instead, they consciously relied on ''experience'' and ''free invention'', often manifesting a critical and even cynical attitude toward conventional subjects and forms. They eschewed the single-voiced, single-styled nature of the serious genres, and intentionally cultivated heterogeneity of voice and style. Characteristic of these genres are "multi-toned narration, the mixing of high and low, serious and comic; the use of inserted genres – letters, found manuscripts, retold dialogues, parodies on the high genres... a mixing of prosaic and poetic speech, living dialects and jargons..." Thus in the ancient seriocomic genres, language was not merely that which represents, but itself became an object of representation.


Socratic dialogue

Originally a kind of memoir genre consisting of recollections of actual conversations conducted by Socrates, the Socratic dialogue became, in the hands of
Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born  BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
,
Xenophon Xenophon of Athens (; ; 355/354 BC) was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian. At the age of 30, he was elected as one of the leaders of the retreating Ancient Greek mercenaries, Greek mercenaries, the Ten Thousand, who had been ...
and others, a freely creative form bound only by the Socratic method of dialogically revealing the truth. Bakhtin lists five aspects of the genre that link it to carnivalization: *The Socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth and human thought, posited in opposition to "official monologism, which pretends to ''possess a ready-made truth''" (Bakhtin notes that this is a ''formal'' quality only, and that in the hands of a dogmatic school or religious doctrine, the dialogue can be transformed into merely another method for expounding a ready-made truth); *''Syncrisis'', the juxtaposition of differing perspectives on an object, and ''anacrisis'', the elicitation or provocation of a full verbal expression of the interlocutor's opinion and its underlying assumptions; *The protagonist is always an ''ideologist'' and the interlocutors are ''made into'' ideologists, thus provoking the event of the ''testing'' of truth; *A tendency to create the ''extraordinary situation'' (e.g. Socrates on the threshold of an impending death sentence in ''The Apology''), which forces a deeper exposition through the loosening of the bonds of convention and habit; *It introduces, in embryonic form, the concept of the ''image of an idea'' (which will later attain full expression in Dostoevsky): "the idea is organically combined with the image of a person... The dialogic testing of the idea is simultaneously also the testing of the person who represents it".


Menippean satire

The tradition known as Menippean satire began in ancient Greece with
Antisthenes Antisthenes (; , ; 446 366 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and a pupil of Socrates. Antisthenes first learned rhetoric under Gorgias before becoming an ardent disciple of Socrates. He adopted and developed the ethical side of Socrates' teachings, ...
, an author of Socratic dialogues, and the Cynic satirist
Menippus Menippus of Gadara (; ''Menippos ho Gadareus''; fl. 3rd century BC) was a Cynic satirist. The Menippean satire genre is named after him. His works, all of which are lost, were an important influence on Varro and Lucian, who ranks Menippus wi ...
, although it first became recognized as a genre through the first century B.C.E. Roman scholar
Varro Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE) was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome" (after Virgil and Cicero). He is sometimes call ...
. According to Bakhtin, the roots of the genre "reach ''directly'' back into carnivalized folklore, whose decisive influence is here even more significant than it is in the Socratic dialogue." Its characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes, inappropriate behaviour, abnormal or psychopathological mental states, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, and a sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues. Despite the apparent heterogeneity of these elements, Bakhtin emphasizes the internal integrity of the genre and its thorough grounding in a carnival sense of the world. He notes its unparalleled capacity for reflecting the social and philosophical ethos of its historical setting – principally the epoch of the decline of national legend, which brought with it the gradual dissolution of long-established ethical norms and a concomitant rise in free interaction and argumentation over all manner of "ultimate questions". The internal dialogical freedom of the genre is coupled with an equally free external capacity for the absorption of other genres, for example, the
diatribe A diatribe (from the Greek ''διατριβή''), also known less formally as rant, is a lengthy oration, though often reduced to writing, made in criticism of someone or something, often employing humor, sarcasm, and appeals to emotion. Hist ...
, the
soliloquy A soliloquy (, from Latin 'alone' and 'to speak', ) is a speech in drama in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud, typically while alone on stage. It serves to reveal the character's inner feelings, motivations, or plans directly to ...
and the
symposium In Ancient Greece, the symposium (, ''sympósion'', from συμπίνειν, ''sympínein'', 'to drink together') was the part of a banquet that took place after the meal, when drinking for pleasure was accompanied by music, dancing, recitals, o ...
.


Dostoevsky and polyphony

The tradition of Menippean satire reached its summit in the nineteenth century, according to Bakhtin, in the work of Dostoevsky. Menippean satire was the fertile ground on which Dostoevsky was able to grow his entirely new carnivalized genre—the polyphonic novel. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was familiar with works by
Lucian Lucian of Samosata (Λουκιανὸς ὁ Σαμοσατεύς, 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer who is best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridi ...
(such as ''
Dialogues of the Dead Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange. As a philosophical or didactic device, it is ch ...
'' and ''Menippus, or The Descent Into Hades''), Seneca (''
Apocolocyntosis The ''Apocolocyntosis (divi) Claudii'', literally ''The Pumpkinification of ''(''the Divine'')'' Claudius'', is a satire on the Roman emperor Claudius, which, according to Cassius Dio, was written by Seneca the Younger. A partly extant Menippean ...
''),
Petronius Gaius Petronius Arbiter"Gaius Petronius Arbiter"
Britannica.com.
(; ; ; s ...
(''
The Satyricon The ''Satyricon'', ''Satyricon'' ''liber'' (''The Book of Satyrlike Adventures''), or ''Satyrica'', is a Latin work of fiction believed to have been written by Gaius Petronius in the late 1st century AD, though the manuscript tradition identifie ...
''),
Apuleius Apuleius ( ), also called Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (c. 124 – after 170), was a Numidians, Numidian Latin-language prose writer, Platonist philosopher and rhetorician. He was born in the Roman Empire, Roman Numidia (Roman province), province ...
(''
The Golden Ass The ''Metamorphoses'' of Apuleius, which Augustine of Hippo referred to as ''The Golden Ass'' (Latin: ''Asinus aureus''), is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety. The protagonist of the novel is Lucius. At the end of ...
''), and possibly also the satires of Varro. He was also probably influenced by modern European manifestations of the genre in authors such as
Goethe Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on Western literature, literary, Polit ...
, Fénelon,
Diderot Denis Diderot (; ; 5 October 171331 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during t ...
, and
Voltaire François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778), known by his ''Pen name, nom de plume'' Voltaire (, ; ), was a French Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment writer, philosopher (''philosophe''), satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit ...
. Bakhtin observes that although Dostoevsky may not have consciously recognized his place as the heir of the tradition, he undoubtedly instinctively adopted many of its carnivalistic forms, as well as its liberated approach to the use of those forms, and adapted them to his own artistic purposes. The dialogic sense of truth, the device of the ''extraordinary situation'', the unencumbered frankness of speech, the clash of extreme positions and embodied ideas over ultimate questions, the technique of ''anacrisis'', "threshold" dialogues in extreme or fantastic situations: present in Menippean satire, these qualities are given a new and more profound life in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel. In this "carnival space and time", a reality beyond the quotidian fog of convention and habit comes to life, allowing a special type of "purely human" dialogue to occur. In polyphony, character voices are liberated from the finalizing and monologizing influence of authorial control, much as the participants in the carnival revel in the temporary dissolution of authoritarian social definitions and "ready-made" truths, and a new ''dialogical'' truth emerges in the play of difference: a "''plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world'', combine but are not merged in the unity of the event."Bakhtin (1984). pp. 6–7


See also

* Grotesque body *
Dialogue (Bakhtin) The twentieth century Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively on the concept of dialogue. Although Bakhtin's work took many different directions over the course of his life, dialogue always remained the "master k ...
* Culture of popular laughter


Notes


Bibliography

* * * {{Authority control Literary genres Literary concepts Comedy genres Carnivals