By Dr Adrian Stevens Bakhtin's Theory of Carnival As It Is Developed

CARNIVAL AND COMEDY: ON BAKHTIN’S that ‘what is suspended first of all is hierarchical MISREADING OF BOCCACCIO structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety and etiquette connected with it — that is, everything — resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people (including By Dr Adrian Stevens age)’.5 It is the suspension of social and behavioural codes that generates ‘the atmosphere of joyful — relativity characteristic of a carnival sense of the world’ (p. 107) by allowing ‘free and familiar contact among people’ who in the normal course of things are divided Bakhtin’s theory of carnival as it is developed in the by ‘impenetrable hierarchical barriers’ (p. 123). two seminal studies Rabelais and his World1 and Problems Carnival as a celebration of freedom enables a ‘new of Dostoevsky’s Poetics2 has impacted on a variety of mode of interrelationship between individuals, disciplines. Although essentially literary in conception, counterpoised to the all-powerful socio-hierarchical it claims a historical underpinning. Bakhtin’s relationships of noncarnival life’. In keeping with his fundamental premise is that carnival, understood as theory that carnival enacts a process of liberation from the ‘sum total of all diverse festivities, rituals and oppressive norms, Bakhtin speaks of the ‘behaviour, 3 gesture, and discourse’ of people being freed from ‘the forms of a carnival type’, was a historical and cultural authority of all hierarchical positions (social estate, phenomenon of incalculable importance for the rank, age, property)’ which define them in noncarnival development of European comic narrative from life, and notes that from the perspective of classical antiquity onwards. He speaks of the noncarnival life they appear ‘eccentric and ‘determining influence of carnival’ on literature (p. inappropriate’. On this view, eccentricity represents ‘a 122), and uses the term ‘carnival’ to describe particular special category of the carnival sense of the world’ features that the literary ‘genres of the serio-comical’ because it permits ‘the latent sides of human nature to and actual festival forms have in common; as he sees reveal and express themselves’; and it is through the it, the various kinds of comic writing which translate eccentric capacity to overturn repressions and break and continue the carnival tradition are ‘saturated with with taboos that the grotesque comedy of mismatches a specific carnival sense of the world’ (p. 107). For or ‘carnivalistic mésalliances’ is generated. All things Bakhtin, carnival is a manifestation of ‘folk laughter’ which are, in Bakhtin’s words, ‘self-enclosed, and ‘folk humour’; it embodies a popular, folk based disunified, distanced from one another’ by the culture which is defined by its irreverent antipathy to normative (and characteristically decent and decorous) the official and hierarchical structures of everyday, hierarchical worldview pertaining outside carnival get noncarnival life. Bakhtin claims that in the Middle ‘drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations’. Ages and the Renaissance a ‘boundless world of In its celebration of mismatches and misrule carnival humorous forms and manifestations opposed the ‘brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the feudal culture’;4 he characterizes carnival as ‘the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid’; it people’s second life, organized on the basis of dramatizes the ‘sense of the gay relativity of prevailing laughter’ (p. 8), insisting that the laughter which gave truths and authorities’; and the comedy it generates in form to carnival rituals freed them ‘completely from the process of destabilizing norms is the anarchic, all religious and ecclesiastical dogmatism’ (p. 7). transgressive, topsy-turvy comedy of a world turned Carnival laughter is for Bakhtin above all an assertion upside down and stood on its head. of freedom; its function is to bring about a ‘temporary One of the chief problems with this theory liberation from the prevailing truth and from the is that Bakhtin’s tendency to absolutize the liberating established order’ (p. 10). Bakhtin argues that the potential of carnival and to insist that the reversal of ‘laws, prohibitions and restrictions that determine the social, ethical and behavioural norms is necessarily structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, comic results in a view of carnival that is too life are suspended during carnival’; and he contends idealized, and a definition of the comic that is too undifferentiated, to be acceptable. Although 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène reversals of the kind which Bakhtin links with Iswolsky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana carnival can be comic, they can equally well be University Press, 1984). experienced as horrifying or tragic. I shall illustrate 2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and my reservations by referring to the lengthy trans. by Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron which Bakhtin University Press, 1984). 3 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 122. 4 Rabelais and his World, p. 4. 5 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, pp. 122-123. 1 inserts into Rabelais and his World in order to define According to Bakhtin, the ‘primary the connection between carnival and comic carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and narrative.6 Bakhtin cites the Decameron as a subsequent decrowning of the carnival king’; this paradigmatic example of the narrative adaptation of ceremony is a ‘dualistic ambivalent ritual’ which the ‘popular-festive forms’ of carnival.7 According to symbolizes ‘the joyful relativity of all structure and Bakhtin, Boccaccio deployed carnival forms because order, of all authority and all (hierarchical) position’; he was engaged in a search ‘for a new reality beyond the carnival king is the antithesis of a real king; he is the horizon of official philosophy’. Alluding to the ‘a slave or a jester’ whose brief reign ‘opens and way in which the stories collected in the Decameron sanctifies the inside-out world of carnival’.9 Yet are told in order to divert the narrators and their while mock crownings and uncrownings may be listeners from the grim noncarnival reality of plague comic, they are not necessarily so; the effect of such in Florence, Bakhtin claims that the plague created acts is context-dependent, a matter of the ‘new conditions for frank, unofficial words and circumstances in which they are performed. There is images’, and enabled Boccaccio to adopt ‘another a sense in which the uncrowned Lear in approach to life and to the world’ by transforming Shakespeare’s play is a carnival king, and his Fool the conventions of carnival into the narrative base of certainly pokes fun at him; yet the Lear who is the Decameron. In the Decameron as Bakhtin describes liberated from the trappings of kingship is anything it, ‘all conventions’ are ‘dropped’, and ‘all laws’, but comic. Crownings and uncrownings play a key whether ‘human or divine’, are silenced; life is ‘lifted part in the Griselda story; but as Boccaccio presents out of its routine’; the ‘web of conventions’ is ‘torn’, them they, no less than Lear’s, contradict Bakhtin’s and ‘all the official hierarchic limits’ that shaped sweeping assumption that carnivalesque reversals Boccaccio’s Italy are ‘swept away’.8 But the claim and inversions of the norm are inherently and that in the Decameron the conventions, laws, limits unconditionally comic. Griselda, the young woman and hierarchies that defined the society of Boccaccio chosen by Gualtieri, the marquis of Saluzzo, to be and his readers are dropped or swept away on a his wife, is the daughter of a shepherd. Their carnivalesque tide of unofficial comic frankness is marriage, judged by the norms of feudal society, is a surely too sweeping. The Decameron, like Chaucer’s mésalliance in the literal sense that it is a social Canterbury Tales, is a work which combines genres mismatch. The conventional judgment, which and mixes comedy and tragedy, often within the Boccaccio’s narrative pointedly contradicts, is that in same story; it moves in a highly conscious and marrying a woman whose social status is so far calculated way between high and low narrative beneath his, Gualtieri is marrying somebody who forms, shifting between the registers of language, cannot be fit to be his wife; but the Griselda story is character, and behaviour which in medieval narrative constructed in a way designed to question the kind act as generic markers. The story of Griselda, with of class prejudice that informed the received social which the Decameron famously ends, is a case in thinking of Boccaccio’s time. When Gualtieri takes point. It certainly contains elements which on a Griselda to be his wife, he dresses her in the style Bakhtinian reading could be classified as necessary to the new and elevated social status which carnivalesque, but it does not simply transpose becomes hers by virtue of her marriage. He gives her carnival into narrative in a way designed to create the ‘fine, rich robes’, the ‘rings and ornamental belts’ comic effects, nor does it endorse any notion of a which symbolize the wealth and power of nobility, comfortable division between an ‘official’ ordered along with a ‘precious and beautiful crown’ (pp. 785- noncarnival world and carnival as a subversive but 6).10 Clothing functions here

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