Literary Theorists: Mijail Bajtin

Carnival and carnivalesque: the vision of Mijail Bajtin

For the Russian theorist Mijail Bajtin, the carnival could be read like a book. It  creates an alternative social space, characterized by freedom, equality and abundance. During carnival, rank (otherwise pervasive in medieval society) is abolished and everyone is equal. People were reborn into truly human relations, which were not simply imagined but experienced. The body is here figured not as the individual or ‘bourgeois ego’ but as a growing, constantly renewed collective which is exaggerated and immeasurable. Life manifests itself not as isolated individuals but as a collective ancestral body. This is not, however, a collective order, since it is also continually in change and renewal. The self is also transgressed through practices such as masking.

Carnival is a kind of syncretic and ritualised pageantry which displays a particular perspective. It is a brief moment in which life escapes its official furrows and enacts utopian freedom. It is a form of life at once real and ideal, universal and without remainder. Its defining feature is festivity – life lived as festive. It is also sanctioned by the highest ideal aims of human existence, not by the world of practical conditions.
Reading this in a contemporary way, we might say that carnival is expressive rather than instrumental. It involves the expression of latent aspects of humanity, direct contact among people (as opposed to alienation), and an eccentric refusal of social roles. It brings together groups and categories which are usually exclusive. Time and space are rearranged in ways which show their contingency and indissolubility. All of this is done in a mood of celebration and laughter.

Bajtin suggests that it took the social changed of the Renaissance era (the 15th-16th centuries) for carnival to expand into the whole of social life. The awareness of contingency and natural cycles expanded into a historical view of time. This occurred because social changes undermined established hierarchies and put contingency on display. Medieval folk culture prepared the way for this Cultural Revolution.
Bajtin almost portrays this as a recuperation of carnivalesque: it was separated from folk culture, formalized, and made available for other uses. Yet Bajtin portrays this as a positive, creative process which continues to carry the creative spirit. Bajtin suggests that carnival and folk culture have been in decline since the eighteenth century.

Carnivals have turned into state-controlled parades or privatized holidays, humour and swearing have become merely negative, and the people’s ‘second life’ has almost ceased. However, Bajtin believes that the carnival principle is indestructible. It continues to reappear as the inspiration for areas of life and culture. Carnival contains a utopian promise for human emancipation through the free expression of thought and creativity. Rabelais stands out here for a style which is irreducibly unofficial and unserious, and irrecoverable by authoritarianism.

                                                                                                    Arly Fuentes