Rabelais and His World  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Gargantua eating six pilgrims from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, as illustrated by Gustave Doré

Pantagruel by Gustave Doré (prologue)

Friar John and Panurge give the Blason and contreblason du couillon by Rabelais

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Rabelais and His World (1965) is a book by Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. A classic of Renaissance historiography, the study explores Gargantua and Pantagruel of the French Renaissance writer François Rabelais.

Bakhtin attempts two things: he seeks to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed, and he conducts an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival (carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, transgression, and the meaning of the body.

History of the text

Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on Rabelais in 1940 to receive his Candidate of Sciences degree. Some members of the committee, including Boris Tomashevsky were favor of awarding Bakhtin a higher degree, Doctor of Sciences. However, because the tumults of World War II, the thesis defense took place after the war between 1946 and 1949, and since the controversial ideas discussed within the work caused disagreement, VAK decided Bakhtin receives (only) Candidate of Sciences degree. Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was published in a rewritten form in 1965, at which time it was given the title, Rabelais and His World.

Carnival

Carnivalesque

For Bakhtin, carnival is associated with the collectivity. Those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd; rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization. According to Bakhtin, “[A]ll were considered equal during carnival. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age”. The carnival atmosphere holds the lower strata of life most important, as opposed to higher functions (thought, speech, soul) which were usually held dear in the signifying order. At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes individuals to feel they are a part of the collectivity, at which point they cease to be themselves. It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At the same time there arises a heightened awareness of one’s sensual, material, bodily unity and community.

Grotesque

Grotesque body

At the beginning of the chapter, Bakhtin criticizes previous definitions of the grotesque, most notably that offered in Geschichte der grotesken Satire by Heinrich Schneegans.

He then offers his own definition:

"Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is on the apertures or convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other. This especially strikes the eye in archaic grotesque". (tr. Helene Iswolsky)

History of laughter

Bakhtin opens this work with a quotation from Alexander Herzen: "It would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter".

One of the primary expressions of the ancient world's conceptions of laughter are the apocryphal letters of Hippocrates about Democritus. The laughter of Democritus had a philosophical character, being directed at the life of man and at all the vain fears and hopes related to the gods and to life after death. Democritus here made of his laughter a complete conception of the world, a certain spiritual premise of the man who has attained maturity and has awakened. Hippocrates finally perfectly agreed with him.

Lucian

"Lucian's work "Menippus, or the Descent into Hades" had an essential influence on Rabelais, more precisely on the episode of Epistemon's journey to hell in Pantagruel. Another important influence was Lucian's "Dialogues." Here are a few characteristic excerpts from the "Dialogues": "Menippus, Diogenes advises you, if mortal subjects for laughter begin to pall, come down below, and find much ..."

Editions

The Indiana University Press English translation by Helene Iswolsky has The Fat Kitchen by Pieter Bruegel on its cover.

Blurb from the Indiana University Press edition

This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895—1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially the world of carnival, as depicted in the novels of François Rabelais. In Bakhtin's view, the spirit of laughter and irreverence prevailing at carnival time is the dominant quality of Rabelais's art. The work of both Rabelais and Bakhtin springs from an age of revolution, and each reflects a particularly open sense of the literary text. For both, carnival, with its emphasis on the earthly and the grotesque, signified the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. Bakhtin evokes carnival as a special, creative life form, with its own space and time.

Written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s at the height of the Stalin era but published there for the first time only in 1965, Bakhtin's book is both a major contribution to the poetics of the novel and a subtle condemnation of the degeneration of the Russian revolution into Stalinist orthodoxy. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.

See also

• Grotesque
• Grotesque body
• Laughter
• List of works in critical theory
• Menippean satire
• Physical comedy
• Piers Plowman tradition
• Profanity
• Scatology
• Tactical frivolity
• Sacred–profane dichotomy
• Safety-valve institution
• Structural functionalism