Carnivalesque

In the Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary & Cultural Criticism, Carnivalesque is literary vehicle that “subverts and liberates the assumptions of the traditional literary CANON through humor and chaos” (1995:38-39). Carnivals are used to overturn traditional hierarchies and mix the high authorities/culture with those of the lower, profane; which “allow[s] for alternative voices” (38-39) that could change culture and politics.

Two fools (1642)

The exaggeration of the body to be grotesque is also related to the carnivalesque. There are comic figures/performers, such as clowns, that contribute to the grotesque image. An example of such characters grouping together in one place is the circus, as well as ‘freak shows’ which contained people with naturally exaggerated/deformed bodies.

The role of the clown, at carnivals and festivals, is to mock authority using satire and parody, to lower the things that are considered high, such as high authority becoming equal to those who are lower, “social distinctions are erased” (Sobchak 1996). It allows the liberation from conventional roles and values. This is called the “material body principle” (Guzlowski 1998:170), meaning that everything high is brought down to the level of the earth. There is subversions of binary oppositions, like ‘high’ and ‘low’, there is heaven/hell, life/death and self/other. Bakhtin uses the term “gay relativity”, which means to degrade and mock authority figures, showing them “to be as flawed as the carnival figures who want to unseat them” (1998:173). According to Lancaster and di Leonardo,

carnivalesque imagery destroys conventional assumptions, offering women as well as men, the [people] as well as the bourgeoisie, the opportunity to manipulate the webs of meaning and systems of power.

                                                                                                               (1997:376)

(after) Marco Marcola

The clowns and fools use parody and humour to stress the body and its functions, “eating, drinking, defecating and fornicating” (1998:168). Carnival is also a time and place for dancing and banqueting, where people can feast and celebrate, which draws upon the body to do what it naturally does. The clowns and dances threaten the ‘established order’ (1998:170), according to Guzlowski these factors are important to the carnivalesque, the dances “physicality and its mixing of the sexes” (1998:170) brings together the mixing of opposites, leading towards the prospective of rebirth. Rebirth being one of the main focuses of Bakhtin.

Mary Russo

According to Mary Russo, Bakhtin has:

Three forms of carnival folk culture: ritual spectacles (which include feasts, pageants, and marketplace festivals of all kinds); comic verbal compositions, including parodies both oral and written; and various genres of billingsgate (curses, oaths, profanities, marketplace speak.

                                                                                  (1994:61)

Russo also goes on to describe the carnivalesque body, and it seems to cross with the elements of the grotesque body:

It is as if the carnivalesque body politic hand ingested the entire corpse of high culture and, in its bloated and irrepressible state, released it in fits and starts in all manner of recombination, inversion, mockery and degradation.                                                         
                                                                                                                     (1994:61)

Gabriele Schwab

The ‘bloated’ state of the body is an element of the grotesque body, bloated is something that represents excess. Gabriele Schwab states that the carnivalesque in literature allows the grotesque body to be viewed and presented from an outside perspective (1996:138).

A main device used for the carnivalesque is a mask, it can be used as a fashion accessory, to disguise, to collect or for fetish purposes; it is used as part of the masquerade. G. Schwab says that “behind the carnivalesque masks of socially coded bodies it grasps the grotesque bodies and souls in their “abject nakedness”” (1996:141). Using masks allows people to cut down the boundaries; people are not recognised as they cover up their identities, therefore creating equality. According to Gamble, the carnival also “foregrounds the body and its excretive and sexual aspects” (2001:207), the carnival also emphasises the grotesque body.