Carnivalesque is a term used in the English translations of works written by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. It originated as "carnival" in his "Dostoevsky's problem of Poetics" and was explicated as a concept in his "Rabelais and His World". It refers to a literary mode that subverts and liberates the assumptions of the dominant style or atmosphere through humor and chaos. Bakhtin traces the origins of the carnivalesque to the concept of carnival, itself related to the Feast of Fools. This was a medieval festival held originally by the sub-deacons of the cathedral, at about the time of the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January). The humbler cathedral officials performed burlesques of the sacred ceremonies, releasing "the natural lout beneath the cassock."
Also Bakhtin derives carnival and its influence in literature from the reign of the "Serio-comical," with the examples of Socratic dialogues and Menippean satire. Within the Socratic dialogue, carnival affects all people, attracting them to the behavior and rituals of carnival. Each individual is affected by carnival, meaning everyone is a constant participant in carnival. In the base of examples from the Menippean satire, the relativity of joy is that it subverts and creates a syncretic pageant: with humor and the grotesque, it weds and combines the sacred with the profane.
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The Feast of Fools
The Feast of Fools had its chief vogue in the French cathedrals, but it was also recorded a few times in England, notably in Lincoln Cathedral and Beverley Minster. Today in the United States, carnival is primarily associated with Mardi Gras, historically a time of Catholic revelry in Catholic societies that immediately precedes the Christian celebration of Lent. It has become a widespread event: during the modern Mardi Gras in several cities, ordinary life and its rules are suspended for parades and balls. The "riot" of Carnival is juxtaposed against the customary restrictions of the Lenten season. Even in the early 20th century, Bakhtin argues in Rabelais and His World that we should not compare modern Mardi Gras with his Medieval Carnival. He argues that the latter was a powerful creative event, whereas the former is only a spectacle. Bakhtin suggests that the separation of participants and spectators has been detrimental to the potency of Carnival. In some Latin American cultures, Mardi Gras carnivals are celebrated more by everyone.
In his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and His World (1965), Bakhtin likens the "carnivalesque" in literature to the character of activity typical of the carnivals of popular culture. In the carnival, social hierarchies of everyday life--their solemnities, pieties and etiquettes, as well as all ready-made truths--are profaned and overturned by normally suppressed voices and energies. Thus, fools become wise, kings become beggars; opposites are mingled (fact and fantasy, heaven and hell). He did not believe that liberation from all authority and sacred symbols was desirable as an ideology. Because Carnival extracts all individuals from non-carnival life, and because there are no hierarchical positions during carnival, ideologies which manifest the mind of individuals cannot exist.
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Bakhtin's Four Categories
Mikhail Bakhtin's four categories of the carnivalistic sense of the world:
- Familiar and free interaction between people: carnival often brought the unlikeliest of people together and encouraged the interaction and free expression of themselves in unity.
- Eccentric behaviour: unacceptable behaviour is welcomed and accepted in carnival, and one's natural behaviour can be revealed without the consequences.
- Carnivalistic misalliances: familiar and free format of carnival allows everything that may normally be separated to reunite -- Heaven and Hell, the young and the old, etc.
- Sacrilegious: Bakhtin believed that carnival allowed for Sacrilegious events to occur without the need for punishment. Bakhtin believed that these kinds of categories are creative theatrical expressions of manifested life experiences in the form of sensual ritualistic performances.
Through carnival and carnivalesque literature, a world upside-down is created, ideas and truths are endlessly tested and contested, and all demand equal dialogic status. The "jolly relativity" of all things is proclaimed by alternative voices within the carnivalized literary text that de-privileged the authoritative voice of the hegemony through their mingling of "high culture" with the profane. For Bakhtin it is within literary forms like the novel that one finds the site of resistance to authority and the place where cultural, and potentially political, change can take place.
For Bakhtin, carnivalization has a long and rich historical foundation in the genre of the ancient Menippean satire. In Menippean satire, the three planes of Heaven (Olympus), the Underworld (Hades), and Earth are all treated with the logic and activity of Carnival. For example, in the underworld, earthly inequalities are dissolved; emperors lose their crowns and meet on equal terms with beggars. This intentional ambiguity allows for the seeds of the "polyphonic" novel, in which narratologic and character voices are set free to speak subversively or shockingly, but without the writer of the text stepping between character and reader.
The carnivalesque was employed in the 1970 film Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest), directed by Satyajit Ray.
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