In chapter 10, “Laughter and the Carnivalesque,” of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Morson and Emerson turn to discuss the chronological development of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque in novels. The idea of the carnivalesque in novels contains two main elements, parody and the carnival spirit, that the authors explore further through Bakhtin’s writings, such as “From the Pre-history of Novelistic Discourse,” “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” Rabelais and His World (Rabelais), and Bakhtin’s study on Dostoevsky (not summarized in this paper). Morson and Emerson further explore contradictions and problems in Bakhtin’s arguments.

The first appearance of this idea of the “liberating potential of laughter” (433) occurs in Bakhtin’s “From the Pre-history of Novelistic Discourse” (1930) essay in which he criticizes the use of parody in modern literature, including epic texts, prayers, grammars, and liturgies, as being “narrow and unproductive” (434) due to its one-way interaction between readers and the text—readers “laugh” at what is being parodied in and even at language itself. However, the original purpose of parody is allowing the “laughter” to be multi-directional and the “serious word,” or language, in texts is “complemented and supplemented” (434). Thus, this “parodic double” is not used to subvert the original word or idea, but a method to create other possibilities of interpretation and perspectives. Furthermore, the laughter is used to emphasize the “potential and outsideness” (434) to any words in order to criticize the idea of authority, of timelessness and absoluteness, in texts.

In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” Bakhtin combines the novel with the idea of the carnivalesque by focusing on the concepts of “embodiment and potential,” which serve as two contradictory ideas. Chronotope is “a unit of analysis for studying language according to the ratio and characteristics of the temporal and spatial categories represented in that language” (quoted in “Chronotope”). Embodiment is conveyed through “folkloric identity, in which a hero equals his physicality” (436); thus, the “folklore chronotope” is where good and bad ideas are “embodied spatially and temporally” (436) so that the good idea receives a larger space and develops more, along with its value, than the bad ideas. This process then suggests that this kind of chronotope is functioning in a “mimetic” way and not in a symbolic way with the focus on the body and its size (436).

The idea of potential is expressed through the marginalized characters of the rogue, the clown, and the fool who can “exploit” various roles but only in appearance. Bakhtin sees these characters as representing “the world’s primordial laughters” (436) in which they act as externalizing factors that allows them to disregard the restrictions of internal and external factors, such as class, status, profession, or environment (436). The rogue, the clown, and the fool are thus given the “chronotope of the entr’acte” in which at any given time and space, these bodies only represent certain parts of their personalities, so that future development does not lead to a certain end. Potential does not make the body appear as the entire entity but emphasizes instead that appearance can be deceiving.

        Bakhtin then joins the two concepts, embodiment and potential, through the chronotope of the “realistic fantastic,” adapted from folklore, to analyze the work of Rabelais. In this analysis, Bakhtin discusses the idea of a “responsible carnival” in which the carnival is still linked to “concrete personalities in a recognizably real space and time” (436). The main mission of Rabelais is to create a new chronotope for “a new, whole and harmonious man, and for new forms of human communication” after breaking from the restrictive and destructive influence of the “medieval worldview”—its “ideologically negative things” (437)—that divides the repellent body from human speech. The way Rabelais does this is through the grotesque, which disrupts language and ideological structures to allow free association among words and images; this then results in a “realistic folklore fantasy” paradox (437). In Bakhtin’s analysis of Rabelais, the grotesque and laughter are temporary methods used to re-infuse creativity back into time and space (437). Even more, the novel leads to the creation of the “grotesque-word” (438) in order to link abstract language to something more materialistic, such as obscenities in relation to the human body, and to break the “hierarchical word system” (438).

A contradiction found in Bakhtin’s exploration of Rabelais is the problematic relationship between language, meaning and the body. Since the carnivalesque body is emphasized as a force against the established hierarchies and as the transitional step between the medieval body and the humanist body, the narrative power of words is reduced at the same time and the focus lies on the body of the human race as a whole (439). Therefore, the main problem is whether language and meaning can be returned to a body that is removed from individual experience (439). Bakhtin’s ultimately sees the Renaissance humanist body as the ideal answer in which the body “engages in dialogue” (439), but in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” Bakhtin focuses on the in-between body, which is “exuberant and ambivalent” and “reveling in excess” (440).

In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” Bakhtin illustrates how Rabelais sees carnival as affirmation through destruction and that the ultimate goals are “humanism and moderation” (440). Furthermore, laughter is seen as being both “serious and historically active” and at the same time grotesque in relation to the idea of the “laughing death,” in which death does not lead to an absolute end in the broad scope of the “collective and historical world of human life” (440). This contrasts with the medieval overemphasis on death and afterlife.

Bakhtin, in “Epic and Novel” (1940), switches from the focus on human body in texts to suggest that the novel itself is a kind of carnival body that can be “touched, groped, entered” (441). This “laughing novel” has no special task, no responsibility, and contitutes an “antiforce” (441), which ultimately denies any fixed meaning or truth—an “unfinalizability.” The genre of novel is “dialogized” and its goal is to undermine other monologic genres through “laughter, irony, humor, and elements of self-parody” (qtd. in Morson and Emerson 442). Bakhtin disrupts any boundaries within the genre of the novel through laughter as the “eternal loophole” (442). Bakhtin sees genres as becoming limiting; thus, he contends, to “novelize a genre” by transforming materials through the “realms of familiarization and laughter” (442) is to eradicate the restriction. Laughter in this sense is seen as allowing freedom from “fear and piety” and has no memory. Previous Bakhtinian concepts of prosaics and dialogue, which are linked to the consciousness of the past that creates a distance, are being replaced by laughter, and the carnivalistic body is hence created in which pain, memory, and death play no part.

In Rabelais and His World (Rabelais), Bakhtin feels that Rabelais has only been interpreted through a modern perspective, which reduces the importance of laughter. Bakhtin brings forth two ideas: “debasement” and “casting-down.” Traditionally, debasement has a negative connotation in which the action suggests “humiliation and loss of power” (443); but if taken in a carnivalistic sense, casting-down is seen as “a bringing-down-to-earth and thus a renewal and refertilization” (443). The focus moves from the bodily images of a “closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface” (444) to its orifices; defecating, ingesting, and laughing are the reflexes of the carnival, grotesque body. The body does not “necessarily hold dialogues with the world”—“the grotesque body [itself] is cosmic and universal” (444) and part of the collective whole with “no other life outside it” while it occurs (qtd. in Morson and Emerson 444).

Morson and Emerson, however, point out the contradictions in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his earlier works. The idea of either-or is heightened in Rabelais, and this contradicts with his earlier analysis on Rabelais in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope,” in which the emphasis is on the lack of dualism. The multiplicity of language in Bakhtin’s earlier works, such as “Author and Hero” and “Discourse in the Novel” are also pared down to two dichotomies: “the authoritative language of state or church power, and the shouted, unprintable word” (446). The latter he calls the “language of the marketplace” or the “public-square word,” such as hawking, in which the carnival word lacks the ability to communicate and acts only as a mediator, similar to the idea that excrement mediates between the body and the earth (447).

The authors of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics go on to explore the idea of “double-voicing” in Bakhtin’s works. One example is Bakhtin’s study of Ivan the Terrible’s reign through a carnivalistic perspective, which Morson and Emerson suggests can also be seen as Bakhtin commenting on Stalin’s rule since Stalin identifies with Ivan. Morson and Emerson further point out that parallels exist between the development of Bakhtin’s concept of carnival and that of Futurism in the early 1920s, which is “an era of sanctioned radicalism and free experimentation” (448). To futurists, the word is allowed to be “transrational and absurd” (448). In Bakhtin’s 1920s writings, he argued against the futurist idea of the word, but in the 1940s, Bakhtin adapted the futurist idea into his concept of the carnivalized speech—free from the “shackles of sense” and “shackles of history” (448)—which is another example of the use of double-voice by Bakhtin.

From dualism in language, Morson and Emerson move on to discuss Bakhtin’s idea of dualism of the body in Rabelais. The first type is the “bourgeois ego,” which is possessive and selfish, and the second is the “collective ancestral body,” which is generous and selfless (448-49). The two binaries for language and body could be seen as Bakhtin trying to probe further into the issue of unfinalizability. The antiauthoritarian “public-square word” and the “ancestral body” combine and lead to the “grotesque image” of openness—“interfaced,” forever active and reevaluating—in which the collective body is forever immortal (449). The grotesque image also merges the ideas of “the interdependence of bodies and the messiness of life,” leading to the reconsideration of humanism as the harmonious ideal (449). Instead, Bakhtin suggests an “idealized female principle” in Rabelais where women are “perceived as the source of all flow and change (451). Furthermore, Bakhtin turns to the concept of “ideal-real” or “utopian-realist” in which the focus is on people’s “purely human relations” after carnivalistic experiences though in earlier works Bakhtin disapproves of the idea of “purity” (451). Through a carnival perspective, the dichotomy of being completely stabilized or continuously changing is highlighted by Bakhtin in Rabelais.

Morson and Emerson then look at the idea of laughter more closely. Laughter is generally seen as a therapeutic response that “comforts and advises” (452) and at the same time presents a form of truth. Bakhtin calls this a “laughing truth” and its importance is in the fact that “it never worships, commands or begs” and thus can “banish fear, mystic terror and guilt” (qtd. in Morson and Emerson 453). Laughter has no real, concrete effects on real conditions, but it is a method to free a person from their “interior censor” caused by history in order to reach “an internal form of truth” and change the “sense of existence” (453). In Rabelais, Bakhtin points out that the idea of parody and the carnival spirit are not used to undermine all types of seriousness. Seriousness that portrays a sense of fearlessness is similar to what Bakhtin sees as one of the aims of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, and all have the same awareness of “an uncompleted whole” (545).

        When “folk humor complex,” or carnival laughter, was adopted by later generations to combine with literature during the Renaissance, the original form changed into satire, in which the interaction is one-way: laughter to target (454). Carnival laughter was then used for specific political and moral agendas to “inspire disgust or fear” instead of a liberating act. For example, in later modern analysis of Rabelais, a new “system of interpretation” (455) was established, which limited the meaning that could be gleaned from the text. During the Enlightenment period, Rabelais’s work was even less appreciated because of its ambiguous nature, but during the nineteenth century, there was an increase in the interest of Rabelais.

        The idea of “reduced laughter” coincides with the decrease of importance of carnival in people’s daily life. Bakhtin indicates that as “laughter [becomes] invisible to the world” (qtd. in Morson and Emerson 463), the meaning of laughter can be lost or found. Previously, laughter was seen as a “form-shaping ideology or genre-shaping power” that helped show “a carnival sense of the world and of change” (464). Although reduced laughter still may contain the power to shape genres, its ability to “provoke outright laughter” is either erased or diminished; sometimes, laughter is used as an ironic method.

        Morson and Emerson feel that Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque is “benevolent and unrealistic” especially with aspects such as catastrophes and terror (470). They believe that it is the symbol of carnival that interests Bakhtin the most—having “the potential for extending, transcending, and rendering immortal the collective body” (470).

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