Notes on Carnivalesque imagery:

- The Carnivalesque is a notion described by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) in his book Rabelais and His World (1968). In this book Bakhtin writes about the French novelist Francois Rabelais (1532-1564) who’s most famous work is the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, the comic and satiric story of the giant Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.

Bakhtin opens the book with the line: “Of all great writers of world literature, Rabelais is the least popular, the least understood and appreciated.”

- Rabelais’s writing is comical, grotesque, full of exaggerated bodily images, and is, Bakhtin writes, a celebration of folk culture. His writing is a “boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed to the official and serious tone of medieval feudal culture.”

- Rabelais’s writing embodies the qualities of the Carnival in medieval culture. The Carnival was the one time of the year in which revelry was allowed and sanctioned, under the premise that celebration must occasionally be allowed if peasants were to work the rest of the time. “Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air,” writes a letter from a school of theology in 1444 which Bakhtin cites.

- The Carnival is sanctioned, permitted revelry in which the rigid order of the world during the rest of the year is thrown off. Inverted power relationships are temporarily celebrated. Carnivalesque imagery partakes in the traditions and the spirit of this celebratory nature of the Carnival, and in turn wrestles with the capacity of such imagery to truly upset power.

The Carnival, and Carnivalesque imagery, have the following qualities:

· Role Play / Role Reversal – Peasants could dress as King and the King played at being a peasant

· Dressing up – One could temporarily be something that one was not the rest of the year

· Laughter – typically open public mocking laughter directed towards authority

· A Mockery of What is Official, including an opposition between:

· The filthy language of the masses (versus) the official language of the king or church

· Playfulness (versus) Seriousness

· Dialogic voices (versus) the Single monologic voice of the King

· Things that are dirty or gross (versus) things that are clean

· This was because, overall, there was an Emphasis on the Body, on bodily functions – as opposed to the deep spirit or reason of official power, the Carnival emphasized the material reality of the body that defacated, smelled, drank, and died. This emphasized the levelness that we are humans and we all share these characteristics. The body is a positive, not a negative.

· Particularly, an emphasis on the lower half of the body - The Upper half of the body was associated with reason, and what was official. The Lower half of the body, characterized by gross bodily functions, and rejected by what was official, was the realm of the peasant.

· The opened body versus the closed body – The upper half was similarly characterized as being closed off, never open. The lower half was always opened up, free. “The stress,” writes Bakhtin, “is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it.” There is an emphasis on what is typically hidden and repressed.

· This is because the Carnival was characterized by the spirit of possibilities, of renewal, of the tearing down of old forms and creations of new ones. The Carnival is opposed to “all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook.” It is a world of constant reinvention and renewal. The Carnival does not reproduce the power of the old order, but seeks to invent new ones.

· Thus, one of the key qualities of the Carnival is degradation, the degrading of what is official and revered, mocking it and transferring it to the realm of the unofficial. But, Bakhtin is careful to note, this degradation is always in the interest of making something new. “To degrade is to bury,” he writes, “to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring for something more and better. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth: it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.”

· An emphasis on dirt or reproductive organs is an association not only with what is repressed by authority, but these are the place where new things are grown.

To sum up then: Carnivalesque imagery draws on the mischievous and playful spirit of the Carnvial which mocks authority, subverts power relationships, and, by emphasizing the body, laughter, and role play, tries to create a new world.

The question of course, is that sometimes the Carnival is mischief that is allowed because it is something we get out of our system. It is has a conservative function – by allowing us a bit of mockery, the usual system runs better the rest of the time. Truly Carnivalesque imagery upsets power without reproducing that old power in any way.