Let’s go to the chapter on RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD in MIKHAIL BAKHTIN by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Harvard University Press, 1984. Comments and jokes between [ . . . ] are mine.

EXCERPTS:

A.

Although the confrontation between the French novelist and his Russian critic might easily be dismissed as the attraction of opposites, even more significant are the similarities between the two. [295]

[Even that puts them too far apart. The carnivalism of Rabelais which Bakhtin identifies specifically and literally is an ideology and philosophy that he finds already in place in the satyr plays the Classical Greek tragedians necessarily composed to go with the ‘tragic’ trilogies they are now famous for but also in Menippean satire (Menippus of Gadara) as primarily represented by Lucian.

1.

Precise and stable boundaries within the bounds of the serio-comical are almost impossible for us to distinguish. But the ancients themselves distinctly sensed its fundamental uniqueness and counterposed it to the serious gendres – the epic, the tragedy, the history, classical rhetoric, and the like. And in fact the differences between this realm and the rest of the literature of classical antiquity are very substantial. ¶ What are the distinguishing characteristics of the gendres of the serio-comical? ¶ For all their motley external diversity, they are united by their deep bond with carnivalistic folklore. They are all – to a greater or lesser degree – saturated with a specific carnival sense of the world, and several of them are direct literary variants of oral carnival-folkloric gendres. The carnival sense of the world, permeating these gendres from top to bottom, determines their basic features and places image and word in them in a special relation to reality. In all gendres of the serio-comical, to be sure, there is a strong rhetorical element, but in the atmosphere of joyful relativity characteristic of a carnival sense of the world this element is fundamentally changed: there is a weakening of its one-sided rhetorical seriousness, its rationality its singular meaning, its dogmatism. ¶ This carnival sense of the world possesses a mighty life-creating and transforming power, an indestructible vitality. Thus even in our own time these gendres that have a connection, however remote, with the traditions of the serio-comical preserve in themselves the carnivalistic leaven (ferment), and this sharply distinguishes them from the medium of other gendres. These gendres always bear a special stamp by which we can recognize them. The sensitive ear will always catch even the most distant echoes of a carnival sense of the world. (Bakhtin, PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS, ed. & trans. Emerson, U. of Minnesota P., 1984, pg. 107)

This essentially summarizes Bakhtin’s ‘concept’ of carnivalism but does so, not from his RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD but from his Dostoyevsky book. The point of that is, carnavalism was fundamental in his thinking from the beginning to the end of his (hysterical laughter intrudes) ‘career’. At his doctoral dissertation defense in 1946, which he ‘failed,’ the relevance of menippean satire and carnivalism in relation to Dostoyevsky specifically was brought into question. But Bakhtin states in his Dostoyevsky book,

2.

Essentially all of the defining features of the menippea (with, of course, the appropriate modifications and complications) we will find also in Dostoevsky. This is in fact one and the same generic world, although present in the menippea at the beginning of its development, in Dostoevsky at its very peak. But we know that the beginning, that is the archaic stage of a gendre, is preserved in renewed form at the highest stages of the genre’s development. Moreover, the higher a genre develops and the more complex its form, the better and more fully it remembers its past. ¶ Does this mean that Dostoyevsky proceeded directly and consciously from the ancient minippea? Of course not. In no way was he a stylizer of ancient gendres . . . Speaking somewhat paradoxically, one could say that it was not Dostoyevsky’s subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked, that preserved the peculiar features of the ancient menippea. ¶ The generic characteristics of the minippea were not simply reborn, but also renewed, in Dostoyevsky’s work . . . In its posing of philosophical and social problems, in its artistic qualities, the ancient menippea seems in comparison with Dostoyevsky primitive and pale. Ibid., pg. 121

Does this not call immediately to mind Heidegger’s project of asking the grounding question of being from out of the history of philosophy? The form ‘the question of being” takes is completely determined by the history of philosophy one is within, whose language one must at least start with and, hopefully, become objectively conscious of. The external forms of language one inherits determines how one thinks. It is only by turning oneself inside out that one that one can see things differently. And that is not “THE TRUTH” either! That also one loses a ‘grasp’ on and it slides away! The sentence in quotation 1., “The carnival sense of the world, permeating these gendres from top to bottom, determines their basic features and places image and word in them in a special relation to reality,” is the most important key to understanding what Bakhtin is really at. Not just baldly describing ‘reality’ like a news reporter but making a sliding philosophical statement about reality is his real goal, hidden under the politically forced trivialities of ‘literary criticism.’

Also, this is the only approach to Dostoyevsky’s thinking that makes sense, for how else could one possibly rationally combine his public born-again fundamentalist Christianity with the thorough convincingness of the thought and aliveness of such atheists and truly de Sadean villains as Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, Peter Verkhovensky, Rogozhin, Ivan Karamazov, and Smerdyakov? The ‘Christian’ characters are even subversive of public Christian morality:

2a.

Wherever Prince Myshkin appears, hierarchical barriers between people suddenly become penetrable, an inner contact is formed between them, a carnival frankness is born. His personality possesses the peculiar capacity to relativize everything that disunifies people and imparts a false seriousness to life. (Ibid., pg. 174)

Even Aloysha Karamazov and Father Zosima enter into dialogue with others in this fashion. (But, even so, his ‘believers’ pale beside his atheist monsters. Remember what Nietzsche said about Prince Myshkin: “Dostoyevsky wanted to portray a perfect Christian. And he portrayed him as – an idiot!”) But how utterly unwelcome this direct and open frankness is - open even to someone like de Sade or Rabelais, priest, monk, physician, father, author of obscene books – to ultimate questions. Can you see Jerry Falwell or Jimmy Swaggert or Oral Roberts or John-Paul II or the Imam Khomeini or the chief rabbi Lubavitcher (“The Jews that died in the Holocaust deserved to die because they broke the dietary laws.”) conversing this way? But Dostoyevsky was a born-again fundamentalist Christian, a loyal supporter of Czar and Russian nationalism. Bakhtin, in his Dostoyevsky book, in listing the basic characteristics of minippean satire, states at the fifth characteristic:

2b.

Boldness of invention and the fantastic element are combined in the menippea with an extraordinary philosophical universalism and a capacity to contemplate the world on the broadest possible scale. The menippea is a genre of “ultimate questions.” In it ultimate philosophical positions are put to the test. The menippea strives to provide, as it were, the ultimate and decisive words and acts of a person, each of which contains the whole man, the whole of his life in its entirety . . . Under menippean conditions the very nature and process of posing philosophical problems, as compared with the Socratic dialogue, had to change abruptly: all problems that were in the least “academic” (gnoseological and aesthetic) fell by the wayside, complex and extensive modes of argumentation also fell away, and there remained essentially only naked “ultimate questions” with an ethical and practical bias . . . Everywhere one meets the stripped-down pro et contra of life’s ultimate questions. (Ibid., pg. 116)

You must remember that this originates from within bursting outward, trying to break and cross boundaries, boundaries that when so stretched expand and keep ‘expanding’, exploding outward ‘forever’ or until . . .  A very similar image of the philosophical person is to be found in quotation 8. by Henry Corbin below:

*The Image in question is not one an Image that precedes all perception, an a priori expressing the deepest being of the person, what depth psychology calls an Imago. Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world, his Imago mundi, and projects it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out. He may not be conscious of it, and to that extent he will experience as imposed on himself and on others this world that in fact he himself or others impose on themselves.

What Bakhtin describes here is no longer “literary” genre but “philosophical” genre. He is describing a way of life that is explicated by ways of literature because 1) that is literature’s only justification, and 2) it is safe. For one thing, though menippean satire rejects Socratic dialogue, Bakhtin himself is fully involved with it:

2c.

In shaping that variety in the development of the novel, and in shaping that artistic prose which we will provisionally call “dialogic” and which, as we have said, leads to Dostoyevsky, two gendres from the realm of the serio-comical have definitive significance the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire . . . ¶ . . . The Socratic dialogue is not a rhetorical genre. It grows out of a folk-carnivalistic base and is thoroughly saturated with a carnival sense of the world, especially, of course, in the oral Socratic stage of its development . . . ¶ . . . But very soon a freely creative attitude toward the material liberated the genre almost completely from the limitations of history and memoir, and retained in it only the Socratic method of dialogically revealing the truth and the external form of a dialogue written down and framed by a story . . . ¶ . . . At the base of the genre lies the Socratic notion of the dialogic nature of truth, and the dialogic nature of human thinking about truth. The dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth, and it is also counterposed to the naïve self-confidence of those people who think that they know something, that is, who think they possess certain truths. Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction. Socrates called himself a “pander”: he brought people together and made them collide in a quarrel, and as a result truth was born; with respect to this emerging truth Socrates called himself a “midwife,” since he assisted at the birth. But Socrates never called himself the exclusive possessor of a ready-made truth. We emphasize that Socratic notions of the dialogic nature of truth lay at the folk-carnivalistic base of the genre of Socratic dialogue, determining its form, but they did not by any means always find expression in the actual content of the individual dialogues . . . [T]he dialogue of [the] early periods has not yet been transformed into a simple means of expounding ready-made ideas (for pedagogical purposes) and Socrates has not yet been transformed into a “teacher” . . . ¶ The two basic devices of the Socratic dialogue were the syncrisis (?_?"?'?'?) and the anacrisis (????"?'?'?). Syncrisis was understood as the juxtaposition of various points of view on a specific object . . . Anacrisis was understood as a means for eliciting and provoking the words of one’s interlocutor, forcing him to express his opinion and express it thoroughly. Socrates was a great master of the anacrisis: he knew how to force people to speak, to clothe in discourse their dim but stubbornly preconceived opinions, to illuminate them by the word and in this way to expose their falseness or incompleteness; he knew how to drag the going truths out into the light of day. Anacrisis is the provocation of the word by the word (and not by means of plot situation . . . ). Syncrisis and anacrisis dialogize thought, they carry it into the open, turn it into a rejoinder, attach it to a dialogic intercourse among people. Both of these devices have their origin in the notion of the dialogic nature of truth, which lies at the base of the Socratic dialogue. On the territory of this carnivalized genre, syncrisis and anacrisis lose their narrow, abstractly rhetorical character. ¶ The heroes of the Socratic dialogue are ideologists. The prime ideologist is Socrates himself, but everyone he converses with is an ideologist as well – his pupils, the Sophists, the simple people whom he draws into dialogue and makes ideologists against their will. And the very event that is accomplished in a Socratic dialogue . . . is the purely ideological event of seeking and testing truth . . . The Socratic dialogue was thus the first to introduce into the history of European literature the hero-ideologist. ¶ . . . In Plato’s Apology the situation of the trial and expected death sentence determines the special character of Socrates’ mode of speaking; it is the summing up and confession of a man on the threshold . . . [T]here is a tendency to create the extraordinary situation, one which would cleanse the word of all of life’s automatism and object-ness, which would force a person to reveal the deepest layers of his personality and thought . . . [W]e can already speak of the birth, even on this soil, of a special type of “dialogue on the threshold” (Schwellendialog) . . . (PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS, pp. 109-111)