''Rabelais and His World'' (Russian: Творчество Франсуа Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса, ''Tvorčestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura srednevekov'ja i Renessansa''; 1965) is a scholarly work by the 20th century Russian philosopher and literary critic

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 ...

. It is considered to be a classic of Renaissance studies, and an important work in literary studies and cultural interpretation. The book explores the cultural ethos of the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

and

Renaissance The Renaissance ( , ) is a Periodization, period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and was characterized by an effort to revive and sur ...

as depicted by the

French Renaissance The French Renaissance was the cultural and artistic movement in France between the 15th and early 17th centuries. The period is associated with the pan-European Renaissance, a word first used by the French historian Jules Michelet to define ...

writer

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 ...

, particularly in his novel ''

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 ...

''. Bakhtin argues that for centuries Rabelais's work has been misunderstood. He attempts to redress this and clarify Rabelais's intentions through recovery of sections of ''Gargantua and Pantagruel'' that were previously either ignored or suppressed, and analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. Bakhtin identifies two important subtexts: ''

carnival Carnival (known as Shrovetide in certain localities) is a festive season that occurs at the close of the Christian pre-Lenten period, consisting of Quinquagesima or Shrove Sunday, Shrove Monday, and Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras. Carnival typi ...

'', which he describes as a social institution, and '' grotesque realism'', which he defines as a literary mode. ''Rabelais and His World'' examines the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body.

History of the text

Bakhtin completed his book on Rabelais (titled ''Rabelais in the History of Realism'') in 1940. After several attempts to get the book published fell through, it was submitted as a dissertation for the

Candidate of Sciences A Candidate of Sciences is a Doctor of Philosophy, PhD-equivalent academic research degree in all the post-Soviet countries with the exception of Ukraine, and until the 1990s it was also awarded in Central and Eastern European countries. It is ...

degree at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow. At the dissertation's defense in 1946, all three official opponents were in favor of awarding Bakhtin a higher doctoral degree, the

Doctor of Sciences A Doctor of Sciences, abbreviated д-р наук or д. н.; ; ; ; is a higher doctoral degree in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and many Commonwealth of Independent States countries. One of the prerequisites of receiving a Doctor of Sciences ...

, and their motion was accepted with a narrow majority vote. However, following an assault on the institute published in the press at the time, and after six years of repeated revisions and deliberations, USSR's VAK decided Bakhtin would only receive the

degree (roughly equivalent to a

research doctorate A doctorate (from Latin ''doctor'', meaning "teacher") or doctoral degree is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities and some other educational institutions, derived from the ancient formalism '' licentia docendi'' ("licence to teach ...

). The book was eventually published in Russian in 1965, under the title ''Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance''. Its 1968 English translation by Hélène Iswolsky was given the title, ''Rabelais and His World''.

Carnival

For Bakhtin, ''carnival'' is associated with the collectivity. Those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd; rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization.Clark and Holquist 302 According to Bakhtin, " l were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age." The carnival atmosphere holds the lower strata of life most important, as opposed to higher functions (thought, speech, soul) which were usually held dear in the signifying order. At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes individuals to feel they are a part of the collectivity, at which point they cease to be themselves. It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one's sensual, material, bodily unity and

community A community is a social unit (a group of people) with a shared socially-significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given g ...

Grotesque

In the grotesque body, emphasis is placed on the open, the penetrative, and the "lower stratum." The open (the mouth, the anus, the vagina, etc.) and the penetrative (the nose, the penis, etc.) allow exchange between the body and the world (mostly through sex, eating, and drinking), but also to produce degrading material (curses, urine, feces, etc.). The lower stratum (belly, womb, etc.) is the place where renewal happens, where new life is forged, thus connecting degradation to renewal. The grotesque body is one of unashamed excess, anathema to authority and pious austerity. Bakhtin's notion of ''carnival'' is connected with that of the ''grotesque''. In the carnival, usual social hierarchies and proprieties are upended; emphasis is placed on the body in its open dimension, in its connection to the life of the community. This emphasis on the material dimension which links humans, rather than on the differences and separations between them, allows for the consciousness of the continuity of human life as a whole: for every death, there is a birth, a renewal of the human spirit. This process allows for progress. Due to its inscription in time and its emphasis on bodily changes (through

eating Eating (also known as consuming) is the ingestion of food. In biology, this is typically done to provide a heterotrophic organism with energy and nutrients and to allow for growth. Animals and other heterotrophs must eat in order to survive – ...

, evacuation, and sex), the ''grotesque'' has been interpreted by some critics as a dimension of the body that allows perception of the historicity of man: in this reading it is used as a measuring device.

History of laughter

Bakhtin opens this work with a quotation from

Alexander Herzen Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (; ) was a Russian writer and thinker known as the precursor of Russian socialism and one of the main precursors of agrarian populism (being an ideological ancestor of the Narodniki, Socialist-Revolutionaries, Trudo ...

: "It would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter".chap.1, p. 59 One of the primary expressions of the

ancient world Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history through late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the development of Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient h ...

's conceptions of laughter is the text that survives in the form of apocryphal letters of

Hippocrates Hippocrates of Kos (; ; ), also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician and philosopher of the Classical Greece, classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is traditionally referr ...

about

Democritus Democritus (, ; , ''Dēmókritos'', meaning "chosen of the people"; – ) was an Ancient Greece, Ancient Greek Pre-Socratic philosophy, pre-Socratic philosopher from Abdera, Thrace, Abdera, primarily remembered today for his formulation of an ...

(

Hippocratic Corpus The Hippocratic Corpus (Latin: ''Corpus Hippocraticum''), or Hippocratic Collection, is a collection of around 60 early Ancient Greek medical works strongly associated with the physician Hippocrates and his teachings. The Hippocratic Corpus cov ...

, ''Epistles'' 10–21).p.66-67 The laughter of Democritus had a philosophical character, being directed at the life of man and at all the vain fears and hopes related to the gods and to life after death. Democritus here made of his laughter a complete conception of the world, a certain spiritual premise of the man who has attained maturity and has awakened. Hippocrates finally perfectly agreed with him.

References

External links