Carnavalesque

In a direction running, the carnavalesque adjective indicates what milked with the Carnaval: " a procession carnavalesque". In its work François Rabelais and the popular culture with the Middle Ages and under the Rebirth , the literary critic Mikhaïl Bakhtine gave him a broader and major direction: the carnavalesque one indicates in this test a temporary inversion of the hierarchies and values whose carnival provides an example particularly striking.

According to Bakhtine, the carnival with the Middle Ages, far from being only one folk demonstration, was one of the strongest expressions of the popular culture, in particular in its subsversive dimension. It was the occasion for the people to reverse, in way symbolic system and for one limited period, all the hierarchies instituted between the capacity and dominated, the noble one and the commonplace one, the top and bottom, refined and the coarse one, between crowned and the layman… This general inversion of the values culminated in the election of a king of the symbolically replacing carnival and temporarily the authority places from there (Victor Hugo preserved of it the trace in its novel Notre-Dame de Paris where uneven deformed the Quasimodo is elected in a grotesque way pope of insane) ).

Thus, written Bakhtine, “ that authorizes us to use “the carnavalesque” adjective in a widened meaning indicating not only the forms of the carnival to the narrow and precise direction of the term, but still all the rich and varied life popular holiday during the centuries and under the Rebirth, through its specific characters represented by the carnival for the following centuries, whereas the majority of the other forms either had disappeared, or degenerated ”. And further: “ the principle of the laughter and the carnavalesque feeling of the world which are at the base of grotesque destroy the serious unilateral one and all the claims with a significance and a inconditionnality located out of time ”.

The concept of carnavalesque thus makes it possible Bakhtine to describe the analogy which it perceives between the popular culture of the time and the work of François Rabelais; but it does not clarify the mechanism of this analogy. Indeed, François Rabelais did not address to a popular public (at the time mainly illiterate) but to cultivated readers for whom the Sorbonne for example represented an eminent theological and intellectual authority, against which could then be exerted the satire of Rabelais. It is thus difficult to decide if the work of François Rabelais must be included/understood like a " expression" or a " reflet" popular culture, or if the writer is used himself for clean ends of certain forms of the " culture populaire" to attack for example the " sorbonnards". The ideas of Bakhtine, which are today a great success in the French-speaking literary studies, would undoubtedly deserve a critical re-examination.

Reference

Mikhaïl Bakhtine, François Rabelais and popular culture with the Middle Ages and under the Rebirth . Paris, Gallimard, 1982. ISBN 2070234045 (the work was written in 1940 and was published for the first time in Soviet Union in 1965).

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