Carnival/Carnivalesque

In his bookRabelais and His World(1984) and in parts ofProblems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, the Russian critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin develops the concept of “carnivalization” in order to explore the literary effect of François Rabelais's comedic vision. Rabelais was a sixteenth‐century French doctor, author, and humanist whose romanceGargantua and Pantagruelrelies on scatological and bodily imagery, caricature, and linguistic and rhetorical excesses of all kinds. For Bakhtin, the “carnivalesque” is an aspect of the medieval celebration known as “carnival,” the period of “licensed misrule” in which ordinary citizens could mock and defame the acknowledged authorities of church and state. A form of “theater without footlights” in which everyone participates through pageants, parades, and spectacles, the carnival undermines the concept of authoritative utterance and indulges in the rituals of crowning and de‐crowning of fools, mockery of all and sundry, foul language, the energetic utterance of nonsense, and the degrading of everything usually held as noble or sacred. One variant of the celebration in medieval times was known as the “Feast of Fools,” while our milder contemporary versions are usually associated with Mardi Gras, a period of revelry preceding Lent. Bakhtin values very highly this inversion of established values and regards carnival as the form of oppositional speech elicited by authoritative utterance, the natural expression of the powerless folk. Bakhtin particularly values the anarchic but life‐affirming laughter of carnival, which presents a rejuvenated version of the world in a mode for which James Joyce's term “jocoserious” seems appropriate.