Carnival/Carnivalesque

"Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators. In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act… The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it… or any other form of inequality among people" [Bakhtin 1984a: 122]

Bakhtin describes the ‘carnivalesque’ as those forces in society connected to popular forms of literature or life in language that work to disrupt the dominant paradigms, monological perspectives and hierarchical structures that are promoted by powerful social institutions. It is a literary text or social space that works to subvert and liberate dominant assumptions through humour and chaos. In ''Rabelais and his World, ''Bakhtin examines how traditions of carnival acted as a force promoting ‘unofficial’ dimensions of society and human life, particularly those corporeal facts typically abjected from dominant discourses, those barred images of the ‘human’ elided or made unintelligible by ‘official’ ideologies of religious and state institutions; images of debauchery, promiscuity, drunkenness, feaces -- for Bakhtin those images commonly censored from corporeal representation but central to bodily experience – he each considered as ‘carnivalesque’.

Carnival in the World
To better understand the carnivalesque it is helpful to consider four distinct categories Bakhtin identifies as carnival in the world. Firstly, Bakhtin denotes familiar and free interaction between people'' as ‘carnivalesque’. Carnival brings'' unlikely companions together and encourages their interaction and free expression in unity, expression uninterrupted or loosened from the usual restrictions of socially constituted hierarchic relations. Secondly Bakhtin marks eccentric behavior: Carnival welcomes eccentric behavior, expression unrestrained by the ‘noncarnival’; it is a space where behavior can be revealed without the consequences usually carried in the social world. The third dimension Bakhtin labels ‘carnivalistic misalliances’: those primary divisions that characterize the social world are allowed to reunite in carnival: heaven and hell, infants and the elderly, woman and man. Finally, his fourth sense is a carnivalesque sanctioning of sacrilege; the carnivalesque as a privileged space allowing for the occurrence of sacrilegious events without need for punishment, being registered and licensed instead as creative theatrical expressions of life experiences finding form in ritualised performances.

Related Terms
Dialogism, Double Voiced Discourse, Parody, Serious/Non-Serious Utterance, Citationality, Iterability