Rabelais and His World

Rabelais and His World (1984 [1968])
By Mikhail Bakhtin

Synopsis: This book is an examination of the raw, folk-culture, laughter-infused aspects of Rabelais's work, mostly centering on the carnivalesque. It focuses on 1) ritual spectacles, 2) comic verbal compositions, and 3) "billingsgate" (curses, oaths, etc.). Both Bakhtin (post-Russian Revolution) and Rabelais (Renaissance), were writing during a time of revolution and renewal. Bakhtin looks at laughter, the language of the marketplace, festive images, banquet imagery, the grotesque body,. "material bodily lower stratum," and Rabelais' image in his own time. Bakhtin argues that carnival is all about "the feast of becoming, change, and renewal" - the suspension of all hierarchies. Much of Rabelais' imagery is about the lower regions - guts, ass, stomach, etc - and bodily functions and secretions - piss, spit, shit, etc. This can be called grotesque realism, and depicts humanity as a collective body. Whereas today we have privatized and individualized bodily functions, in Rabelais' time such functions were seen as connected to society and to the cosmos; universality and a body's interaction with the outer world. Laughter was seen as essentially human, and Rabelais saw moments of festival gaiety as utopian. Essentially, these scenes are all about bodily sensation and about material sensual bodily unity (but infused with some individual distinctions).

Interesting Specifics:

Bakhtin is a philosopher and literary scholar; a theorist of the novel.

Laughter is central to Rabelais, and during the Renaissance, laughter had a positive, regenerating, creative meaning (71).

"...in the atmosphere of Mardi Gras, reveling, dancing, music were all closely combined with slaughter, dismemberment, bowels, excrement, and other images of the material bodily lower stratum" (224).

In Rabelais' day, "excrement was conceived as an essential element in the life of the body and of the earth in the struggle against death. It was part of man's vivid awareness of his materiality, of his bodily nature, closely related to the life of the earth" (224).

"The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or on the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity" (255).

"Death from laughter is one of the forms of gay death" (408).

Interacts With:

I love the idea of a "collective body," and bodily fluids and the lower regions as expression of connectivity and union with the cosmos - cool man!
Connects with books that stress the importance of historical context.
Connects with any books that deal with the carnivalesque and inversion of "natural" order.
In Place/Out of Place