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Carnivalized Desire and the Cult of the Flesh: the Erotic Ethos of Grotesque Realism

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Carnivalized Desire and the Cult of the Flesh: the Erotic Ethos of Grotesque Realism CARNIVALIZED DESIRE AND THE CULT OF THE FLESH: THE EROTIC ETHOS OF GROTESQUE REALISM A thesis submitted to the faculty of A6 San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of 3G the requirements for MS the Degree UJ L I T Master of Arts In Comparative Literature by Jon-David Wesley Settell San Francisco, California Fall 2015 Copyright by Jon-David Wesley Settell 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Carnivalized Desire and the Cult o f the Flesh: the Erotic Ethos o f Grotesque Realism by Jon-David Wesley Settell, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University. Assistant Professor CARNIVALIZED DESIRE AND THE CULT OF THE FLESH: THE EROTIC ETHOS OF GROTESQUE REALISM Jon-David Wesley Settell San Francisco, California 2015 Engaging with Mikhail Bakhtin’s dual literary tropes of the carnival and the grotesque body, each a part of what he calls grotesque realism, this project traces the carnival’s revalorization of Eros, a kind of carnivalization of desire, and its ethical implications. Carnivalized desire, through its dialogization of poetic discourse, invokes becoming for the authoritative lyrical voices in Walt Whitman’s “This Compost” and Pablo Neruda’s “Caballero solo” [“Single Gentleman”]. In novelistic discourse, carnivalized desire enacts these becomings through a masochistic and highly eroticized cult of the flesh in Virgilio Pinera’s La came de Rene [Rene’s Flesh], and through the similarly cult-like and sexually charged world of John Rechy’s City o f Night. In each text, desiring bodies invoke and enact the grotesque body’s acts of becoming, in turn postulating an ethical vision of selfhood that is exuberantly incomplete, constituted by difference, and multiplicitously loving. •ect representation of the content of this thesis. Date TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction.............. *..................................................................................................................... 1 The Human Body in and as Discourse...........................................................................6 Matrices of Becoming.................................................................................................... 10 Chapter One: Whitman and Neruda’s Desiring Bodies in Discourse.................................. 22 Chapter Two: Eating, Hurting, and Loving the Grotesque Body.........................................47 Eating the Grotesque Body...........................................................................................50 Wounding and Wanting the Grotesque Body.............................................................60 Love in a Time of Becoming.................................................................... 77 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 93 End Notes............... 103 Works Cited................................................................................................................................105 v 1 Introduction “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” - Friedrich Nietzsche. In writing, the human body takes on a discursive dimension shaped by the form of its representation. Mikhail Bakhtin, in Rabelais and his World, makes a distinction between two of these forms in European art and literature, the classical and the grotesque body. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque image of the body in literature uses laughter and parody to subvert hegemonic systems of meaning-making embodied in the “entirely finished, completed, strictly limited” classical image of the body (320). The grotesque in literature draws deeply on High Middle Age carnival traditions, where the exuberant chaos of the carnival temporarily suspends social hierarchies and class with its joyful mockery and frank treatment of the functions of the body. An ethos of change and renewal pervades the laughter and festivities of the carnival, creating a “world inside out” that asserted the “gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities” (Bakhtin 11). Eating, copulating, suffering, defecating, and giving birth, the grotesque body is the site of a downward movement in the body of degradation and renewal, a perpetual exchange between the flesh and the earth; it is a body in “the act of becoming” (317). In the gay relativity of the carnival, the grotesque body gives birth to a corporeal semiotics that is fleshy, porous, and subject to a perpetual cycle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. 2 The origins of the carnival can be traced to the Roman Saturnalias (Bakhtin 7), riotous ritual festivities in honor of Saturn, god of fertility, regeneration, and liberation. These traces linger in the carnival time of the High Middle Ages, when feasting and pleasuring, self-parody, bisexuality and cross-dressing, obscene language and gestures, and the masking and shifting of identities created a material cosmology centered on the regenerative forces of life and the unbounded creativity of working people (Stam 93). The space and time of carnival draws on its Saturnalian roots to invert the religious cosmology of the Church and its idealization of “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract,” grounding itself in a material cosmos of flesh and earth in chaotic and perpetual exchange. Bakhtin describes the material lower bodily stratum, “that is, images of the human body with its food, drink, defecation, and sexual life” (18), as central to this carnival cosmology. Oaths and billingsgate, obscene jokes about the functions of the body, and self-parody all form part of a culture of folk humor in literature that he calls “grotesque realism,” based on the degradation of “all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract.” In grotesque realism, Bakthin traces a carnival spirit and folk heritage that he identifies as carnivalesque, contained “not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed” (19). Through the exuberant chaos of carnival and a cosmology grounded in degradation and the material functions of the body, grotesque realism in Bakhtin’s formulation voices the creative, regenerative force of ordinary working people. 3 Desire and pleasure are at the heart of this carnival cosmology, part of the revalorization of Eros central to the camivalesque (Stam 94). Bakhtin coins the term camivalization to describe the “defeat through laughter” of the “official conceptions of hell and purgatory,” punishment for verboten desires and pleasures. He argues that the camivalesque marshals humor, parody, and the image of the grotesque body to overcome the fear and “mystic terror” engendered by the “official Christian point of view” (395). I adapt his term to describe a similar process in the grotesque imagination of desire, what I will call the camivalization of desire. As a term, carnivalized desire is intended to bridge Bakhtin’s dual tropes of carnival and the grotesque body, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s re-conceptualization of desire as positive and productive. I use the term in an attempt to describe the creative, regenerative force that propels the grotesque body’s “act of becoming” in its discursive deployment in literature. In this investigation, I will argue that carnivalized desire overwhelms the repressive force of what Bakhtin calls the “correct” word, or authoritative discourse, through the erotic congress of grotesque bodies in the literary imagination. In subsuming authoritative discourse, carnivalized desire invokes the grotesque body’s “act of becoming,” a move with considerable ethical and political implications. As a first step toward exploring these implications, I situate my concept in relation to Bakhtin’s camivalesque and Rosi Braidotti’s ethics of nomadic subjectivity, before briefly moving to position it within contemporary discourse on desire. Throughout this work, carnivalized desire’s invocations and enactments will be examined in diverse literary 4 texts linked by grotesque realism, with an eye toward an answer to the age-old question of the uses of literature. In the first chapter, I take up Bakhtin’s invitation to explore the revival of grotesque realism in early modernity with a comparative analysis of camivalized desire and its transformative effect on an authoritative lyrical voice in two poems about grotesque bodies by Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda. In the second chapter, I turn my focus to the study of two strikingly different cults of the flesh, each a modern Saturnalia linked by the grotesque body. Carnivalized desire for the material lower bodily strata of young male protagonists lies at the center of each cult’s material cosmology, carnivalesque inversions of the religious cosmology of the Church. We will see this in Cuban writer Virgilio Pinera’s absurdly anthropophagic 1953 novel, La came de Rene [Rene’s Flesh] and in US writer John Rechy’s sexually revolutionary 1963 novel, City o f Night. Taken together, these texts form part of a revival of grotesque
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