How Useful is Bakhtin’s Concept of Carnival?

Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich (1895-1975) was Russian philosophist, literary critic and the theorist of art. He is a representative of Russian Structuralism and his historical and theoretical researches on expansive and brisk literature be important for understanding of the cultural development. Mikhail Bakhtin was peerless of the offset theorists who investigated the polyphonic form of the novel (Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics, 1929) and folk laughing market-gardening of the Medieval Ages (Rabelais and his knowledge base, 1965).He is withal an author of the essays The issues of literature and esthetics (1975) and On the philosophical system of the act (1986). He was the first who work the suppositions of dialogism (The Dialogic Imagination) and heteroglossia, the genus Circusesque and chro nonope in the literary critique. Bakhtins plans are in truth useful for explanation of the nature of the genre of the novel. The dialogism and heteroglossia posit a special multivo iced use of language. The belief of the novelistic chrono tope describes historical verbalisms of literary sources it uses specified and differentiated time and space for the plot.The present essay is addicted to the concept of the fairesque. Bakhtin considers that novels hind end be described as inspired by a laughing truth, indebted to parodic genres and to the spirit of carnival. Bakhtin was interesting in Rabelaisian study since 1930s. His first work about this Renaissance author was Francois Rabelais in the history of the realism (1940). This work appeared in the time when Soviet political orientation admitted concepts of the realism and the national character. Bakhtin adopted these categories and proposed the concept of carnivalesque.He suggested that low irritability civilisation of Medieval Ages and Renaissance was a power folk opposer to the authorised values and government. The characteristic of folk low humor, the bread and providedter of the swell up was ac cepted as the main source of Rabelais halt and became a discovery in the critique on gothic literature and, particularly, Rabelais creative work. It was the first overtation about the philosophy of laugh. The theory of carnivalesque was infixed non simply for the explanation of local historical fact further as a universal phenomenon of the demesne culture.Bakhtins idea about carnivalization of literature was developed in other works, but the first record of this theory appeared in the second edition of the monograph on Dostoyevsky. After the Second World War, in 1946 Bakhtin tried to defend theses in the Institute of World Literature (Moscow). The flying field of his theses was the creative work of Rabelais. But in Stalin epoch his utterance was spurned (Bakhtin received the item of candidate of science (the lowest scientific degree in Russia) only in 1952) and they prohibited publishing the text of the dissertation about Rabelais.Mikhail Bakhtin published the book Tvor chestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kultura srednevekovia i Renessansa (The creative work of Francois Rabelais and the popular culture of the Medieval Ages and the Renaissance more known as Rabelais and his World) only in 1965. In the next couple years this book was trans deeplyd in foreign languages (English translation by Helene Iswolsky was published in Cambridge, MA M. I. T. Press, in 1968) and it opened the epoch of Bakhtins influence on the Russian and world humanistic thought.The exchange esthetic idea of Rabelais and his World is fantastic realism. Rabelais created images of the imaginative luggage compartment he emphasized the features of lower corporal strata. The grotesque body is opened to the world, his physiology is not hidden, and this body degrades and regenerates actively. In grotesque realism the somatic element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egoistic form, severed from other spheres of animateness, but as something universal, representi ng in all the people.As such(prenominal) it is opposed to severance from the material and bodily grow of the world it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or independence of the earth and the body. We repeat the body and bodily life have here a cosmic and at the same time an all-peoples character this is not the body and its physiology in the juvenile sense of these words, because it is not item-by-itemized. The material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed.This exaggeration has a positive, assertive character. The leading themes of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance. Manifestations of this life refer not to the isolated biological individual, not to the private, egotistic scotch man, but to the collective ancestral body of all the people (Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, p. 19). Bakhtin put the Renai ssance was a period of the benign balance between negative and regenerative features of grotesque realism. He wroteThe essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced fullness of life. Negation and destruction (death of the old) are included as an essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image (food, wine, the genital twitch, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive character. This principle is victorious, for the final result is always abundance, append (Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, chapter 1, p. 62).Mikhail Bakhtin emphasized an opposition between the low popular culture and the official culture of the later middle Ages and early Renaissance. The official culture use static stratified model of the world. Unofficial culture is a culture of circus. The etymology of the word Carnival is enough sophisticated. The word is derivated f rom Italian carnevale, alteration of ahead carnelevare, literally, removal of meat, from carne flesh (from Latin carn-, caro) + levare (from Latin to remove, to raise). another(prenominal) explanation finds roots of the Carnival in Ancient mysteries.They derivate word Carnival from carrus-navalis (the chariot-ship) of Roman apparitional ceremonies. Carnival concentrates the contrasts of folk culture and shows the chaotic and imperfect nature of the world. An individual of the middle Ages lived two lives one that was the official life (church, social duties etc), other was the carnival life filled in with burlesque and low humor. The novel of Rabelais shows how the popular culture liberated the society and how the conventionalities were destroyed in the match with the reality of the modern era.Bakhtin sees Rabelais not only as a novelist but his work embodies a whole new philosophy of history, in which the world is viewed in the process of becoming (Bakhtins cycle, 2004). In the Prologue to Rabelais and His World Michael Holquist wrote Bakhtins carnival, sure enough the most productive concept in this book, is not only not an impediment to revolutionary change, it is revolution itself. Carnival must not be confused with mere holiday or, least of all, with self-serving festivals fostered by governments, layperson or theocratic.The sanction for carnival derives ultimately not from a calendar prescribed by church or state, but from a force that preexists priests and kings and to whose superior power they are existently deferring when they appear to be licensing carnival. (Michael Holquist, Prologue, Rabelais and His World) The carnival of the adventures of Pantagruel is not similar to the modern carnival. The Renaissance cultures understand the carnival as the temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men and of the prohibitions of usual life.(Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World p. 15). The Renaissance Carnival is unusual world wh ere festive pleasure and philosophy exists contemporarily. It is topsyturvy world, the world of the primary chaos. Bakhtin proposed the semiotic theory of the carnival, the theory of the carnivalizing of quotidian life. The central idea of the concept of carnivalizing or carnivalesque is an inversion of binary contraposition replacing official values with low folk culture. When people came to the carnival square than all terrestrial ideas and their oppositions of Christianity change each(prenominal) other.The King of Carnival is a pauper or fool (trickster). Everybody does honor to him. There is a Carnival bishop and Christianic sanctuaries could be desecrated. The top became the bottom, the head the genitals (low body). Females and males switch their places. Billingsgate and devout phrases change each other. Everything was subject of top big money imposition. Why? Bakhtin found roots of the carnival in the agrarian cults of pre-Christianic culture. Carnivalizing makes it possi ble to extend the narrow sense of life (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World p. 177).The aspiration of carnival is to uncover, undermine even destroy, the hegemony of any ideology that seeks to have the final word about the world, and also to renew, to shed softly upon life, the meanings it harbours, to elucidate potentials projecting, as it does an alternate conceptualisation of reality. Dialogism is a fundamental aspect of the carnival a plurality of fully valid consciousnesses (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 9), Baktin used the concept of the dialogism as a necessary condition of the understanding Two voices is the borderline for life, the minimum for existence (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 252).The carnival papered over the differences between the social strata. Carnival is the place for working out a new mode of interrelatedness between individuals . . . People who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar contact on the carnival square (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 123). Today the elements of carnivalesque are inherent for some cultural groups, e. g. Bantu tribe. Traditions of European carnival culture flourish in Latin America, in particular in Brazil. (Its interesting, that so popular in the Brazilian carnivals samba came from the Bantu word semba).In the modern culture the carnivalesque is actual as never before but it is another carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtins carnivalesque has quartette main themes the tumultuous crowd, the world turned upside- dump, the comic masks and the grotesque body. Bakhtin also categorizes the carnivalesque into three basic forms ritual spectacles (such as fairs, feasts, wakes, processions, mummery, dancing and surface amusements with costumes, masks, giants, dwarfs etc), comic verbal compositions and various genres of billingsgate or abusive language. we are especially interested in the language which mocks and insults the deity and which was part of the o ld-fashioned comic cults (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 16). But some authors found limitations in the theory of the carnivalesque. Richard Berrong wrote that Bakhtins theory had some weaknesses. Bakhtin emphasized the role of laughter culture but do not take in the account the historical linguistic context of Rabelaiss changing attitude (R. M. Berrong, Rabelais and Bakhtin , . 15, 19-51).The concept of the carnivalesque helps us to identify an atmosphere of festivities, arrogance of authority and material anti-intellectualism in literature. It could be applicable to certain genres carousals in Flemish painting and to the social criticism of postmodern art. Bakhtins concept of carnivalesque could be useful way for the analysis processes connecting the comic and the serious issues of routine life. Medieval carnival players went to the passageways in masks and costumes, their ritual spectacles (e. g. the Feast of Fools or the Feast of the Innocents) were full with the topsytur vy.The citizens were admitted to occupy the cathedral and turn it upside down and inside out. They could tell everything and do everything. They were equal and close in this moment. They were very much like Americans today. Where is American carnivalesque? You could find in the streets of New siege of Orleans during Mardi Gras or in the New York during Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. If can find it in the bad blocks and slums. Mikhail Bakhtins concept of the carnivalesque can be applied to ethnical studies of African American or Latin American culture.Today we can use the concept of the carnivalesque when we analyze issues of satire and parody in the festival performance of the globalization. We can see the elements of carnivalizing in the pubs, in political actions, advertising and media, in the street theater etc. We see grotesque body of the modern elaboration and the modern art. For example if we apply Bakhtins idea of the carnivalesque to the comedies and romantic movies w e can comfortably find accordance to Bakhtins description of the world turned upside down in the interests of liberating laughter.In Bakhtins view, comedy relocates the spiritual from the top (a head and the face) to the bottom (the belly, the bowels and the genitals) The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 19). Another modern arena of the contemporary carnivalesque is advertising. Carnivalesque PR stunts are used to quarter attention of the potential customer. Otherwise, traditions of the carnival could constitute a strategy of apology to the abusing advertising.I found very interesting material about rave medicinal drug and use of Bakhtins concept of carnivalesque. spirt is out of the mainstream. Like medieval carnival the rave has capacity to disrupt and remake official public norms, both they lead people into the symbolic sphere of utopian grantin g immunity. Rave realizes its carnivalesque features in several ways. There are no exclusions to enroll in the medieval carnival or rave party and thither is no hierarchy between people in the time of celebration or the party. There are oppositions between official and non-official life etc (Rave as Carnival, 2004).But I think that Mikhail Bakhtin never think we will use his concepts to plead our non-trivial ideas about music, movies, public relations about everything. He was a literary critic and proposed the concept of the carnivalesque to explain dynamics of social changes in the late Medieval Ages and early Renaissance. He uses Rabelais work because he was the most classifiable writer for this period and the elements of carnival grotesque were shown in Gargantua and Pantagruel very clearly. Mikhail Bakhtin died in 1975. He made an important contribution to science. But his concept is not universal.Nothing is perfect.References 1. Bakhtin and Medieval Voices. (1995) Universi ty Press of Florida. Gainesville.2. Carnival, History And Popular Culture Rabelais, Goethe And Dostoevskii As Philosophers (2004) The lucre encyclopedia of philosophy http//www. iep. utm. edu/b/bakhtin. htm.3. Rabelais and Bakhtin Popular Culture in Gargantua and Pantagruel by Richard M. Berrong (1986) University of Nebraska Press, 180 p..4. Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) Indiana University Press 510 p..5. Rave as a carnival (2004) http//www. odevarsivi. com/12/50972. htm.