(B.)
Bakhtin grasps so well the meaning of Rabelais’ readiness to mingle discourses because of the parallels between their two periods. [296] ¶ Bakhtin claims that after all these centuries of incomprehension his own book finally explains Rabelais’ book. Bakhtin feels justified in making this extravagant advertisement for the intertextuality of the two books because they are both born out of a similar uniqueness. [297] ¶ “[Rabelais] uses the popular festive system of images with its charter of freedom consecrated by many centuries [re: François Villon]; and he uses them to inflict severe punishment upon his foe, the Gothic age . . . In this setting of consecrated rights, Rabelais attacks the fundamental dogmas and sacraments, the holy of holies of medieval theology” (RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD, trans. Helen Iswolsky, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965, pg. 268).
This passage is one of the loopholes that Bakhtin always leaves open in his own work. In describing Rabelais’s strategy, he reveals his own. The relation of Rabelais to Villon mirrors the relation of Bakhtin himself to Rabelais. Bakhtin has written a book about another book that constantly plays with the categories and transgresses the limits set by the forces of official ideology . . . In treating the specific ways in which Rabelais sought to find gaps in the walls between what was punishable and what was unpunishable in the 1530s, Bakhtin is looking for similar loopholes at those borders in the 1930s. His examination of Rabelaisian license is a dialogic meditation on freedom. [298] ¶ . . . Bakhtin knows there is much left unsaid in his own text, and thus his major key for opening up Gargantua is to seek the unsaid in Rabelais’ text. This approach assumes that a text is recognizable as such, an entity with distinct borders, because it is the manifestation of a system [!].
A legal text is codified by the legal system, a literary text by the literary. The systems that texts manifest may also be thought of as ideologies [!]. Ideology in this sense is locatable in all that texts take for granted, the preconditions held to be so certain by their authors that they need not be stated. The pillars supporting a text’s assumptive world are thus invisible insofar as they need not be expressed. Ideology must be seen in a text’s holes, in what it has felt it could leave unuttered . . . Great effort is required even to see it, since so much of its function is to ensure that it never becomes an issue independent of the material it organizes . . . [Bakhtin] charts the parameters of the Renaissance social system which enabled a more balanced ratio of permitted versus unpermitted language than has since then obtained. Bakhtin treats the spheres of permitted and unpermitted language as texts in their own right, each with its own characteristic gaps and holes. He identifies two subtexts: carnival, which is a social institution, and grotesque realism, which is a literary mode [But, as it is explained above, this ‘social institution,’ an intentionally dubious identification of carnival, and this ‘literary mode’ are both systems within unacknowledged ideologies. In fact, just like in Heidegger, absorbs and includes acknowledged ideologies as Bakhtin will show below in his comparison of the acknowledged ideology of Stalinism with, of all things, Neo-platonism!]. Rabelais and His World is a study of how the social and the literary interact. In addition, it is a study of the semantics of the body, the different meanings of the body’s limbs, apertures, and functions [But this is the body as personal, or “psychic” as Sartre calls it, not the scientific physiological body, although Rabelais himself uses the horizontality of science to battle the vertical hierarchy of theological idealism.]. [298-299] ¶ . . . The importance of carnival . . . lay . . . in the unique sense of the world it embodied. First of all, carnival was one of the few areas that the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church did not reach. Carnivals are ritually devoid of mysticism and piety. They are without prayer and magic: “They do not command nor do they asked for anything . . . All these forms are systematically placed outside the church and religiosity. They belong to a completely different sphere. Not only do such forms fail to belong to official religiosity, but they also fail to follow the rules of official aesthetic forms: “The basic carnival nucleus of this structure is a purely artistic form . . . and does not, generally speaking, even belong to the sphere of art at all . . . In reality, it is life itself . . . shaped according to a certain pattern of play” (pg. 7). ¶ Unlike ritual, carnival is not organized by a separate caste of specialists who create it according to their exclusive dictates, whether religious or aesthetic. Everybody makes carnival, everybody is carnival: “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.” Carnival extends a kind of general hegemony not only over everyone but also everywhere: “While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws . . . the laws of its own freedom” (pg. 7). Carnival is a minimally ritualized anti-ritual, a festive celebration of the other, the gaps and holes in all the mappings of the world laid out in systematic theologies, legal codes, normative poetics, and class hierarchies. [300] ¶ Carnival must not be confused with mere holiday play. The ability to revel in the world’s variety, to celebrate its openness and its ever-renewed capacity to surprise, is a “special form of life (osobaja ~iznennaja forma) ,” a kind of existential heteroglossia (pg. 8). Carnival is a gap in the fabric of society. And since the dominant ideology seeks to author the social order as a unified text, fixed, complete, and forever, carnival is a threat. [300-301] ¶ . . . Such an emphasis on change and becoming is directly opposed to the official emphasis on the past, to a stasis so complete that it becomes eternity. Through carnival, the folk are “freed from the oppression of such gloomy categories as ‘eternal,’ ‘immovable,’ ‘absolute,’ ‘unchangeable,’ and instead are exposed to the gay and free laughing aspect of the world, with its unfinished and open character, with the joy of change and renewal” (pg. 81, 83). ¶ . . . [T]he feast is a carnivalesque form insofar as it is a “temporary transfer to the utopian world . . . It is rather a primary indestructible ingredient in human civilization; it may become sterile or even degenerate, but it cannot vanish,” because it is “a liberation from all that is utilitarian, practical” (pg. 276).
Like other aspects of carnival, the feast is a victory over fear . . . The feast celebrates the destruction of what was formerly threatening. [301] . . . “It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way . . . it is outside all socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity” (pg. 255) . . . ¶ The kind of time peculiar to carnival is the release from time . . . But this freedom cannot be understood merely as playing hooky from the norms of noncarnivalized life at any particular point in history [302] . . . The festive crowd “. . . is conscious of its uninterrupted continuity in time, of its relative historic immortality . . . the people do not perceive a static image of their unity (eine Gestalt) but instead the uninterrupted continuity of their becoming and the ceaseless metamorphosis of death and renewal” (pg. 255-256). ¶ . . . “It is a pregnant death, a death that gives birth . . . Life is shown in its two fold contradictory process: it is the epitome of incompleteness” (pg. 25-26). ¶ If the body is to tell this distinctive kind of timeless time, it must be conceived as a special kind of clock . . . The grotesque body is flesh as the site of becoming . . . [I]t “outgrows itself its own self, transgresses its own limits . . . conceives a new, second body, the bowels and the phallus . . . Next to the bowels and the genital organs is the mouth through which entered the world to be swallowed up . . . the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences (sprouts, buds) and orifices, only that which leads beyond the body’s limited space or into the body’s depths” (pg. 317-318). [303] ¶ “. . . [T]he inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being” (pg. 32).
Just as carnival enacts the intertextuality of ideologies, official and unofficial, so the grotesque body foregrounds the intertextuality of nature . . . ¶ Carnival and the grotesque both have the effect of plunging certainty into ambivalence and uncertainty, as a result of their emphasis on contradictions and the relativity of all classificatory systems . . . The mask, which is “the most complex theme of folk culture . . . rejects conformity to one’s own self [!]. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries” (pg. 39-40) . . . [304] ¶ . . . This is the essence of Rabelais’ novel, and thus the reason that it was violently opposed by Calvin and contemporary churchmen, who related the atheistic and materialistic trends of the time directly to the banquet atmosphere which they characterized as “prandial [belonging to a meal] libertinism” (pg. 297). ¶ . . . When a work written in the Soviet Union in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s makes so much of freedom and the unofficial/official distinction, it cannot fail to be in part a comment on its times.
Although these concepts were previously invoked by Bakhtin, in RABELAIS they are given their most powerful airing. The book thus marks a distinct shift in Bakhtin’s writing. It is more passionately argued, more visionary, and more obviously ideological [This makes it a work of philosophy hiding as literary theory.]. Although on the surface it is less Russocentric than his earlier writings, it represents Bakhtin’s most comprehensive critique to date of Stalinist culture, that singular system which had just reached its height in the purges of 1936-1938. ¶ RABELAIS must be seen in the context of its times. In the original dissertation on which RABELAIS is based Bakhtin, who peppered his earlier texts with references to Russian writers such as Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, makes little mention of Russia or Russian writers. But this near absence of Russia in the texts makes it all the more present as a referent. . . [305] ¶ . . . [One of the references to things Russian], slipped into the middle of the book, commends Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible [“Terrible,” grozny also means “awesome.” The first part of Eisenstein’s film IVAN THE TERRIBLE pleased Stalin tremendously with its implicit comparison of him with Ivan (1944). The second part put the KGB in an unfavorable light and was banned (1946). The third part, which had started its filming before the second part’s release, was closed down unfinished.] as czars who “carnivalized Russia,” although Peter’s effort was the lesser of the two because he introduced Western rather than native rituals (pp. 270-271). This reference seems to be a gesture towards official thinking, since both Peter and Ivan were used in 1930’s rhetoric as symbols for the model ruler whom Stalin was purported to represent, and by the time Bakhtin began his dissertation, Ivan had superseded Peter as the chief model. Yet the reference is also ambiguous . . . the very names of these czars are synonymous with autocratic rule and repression. [306] ¶ . . . RABELAIS presents, inter alia, a critique of contemporary Soviet ideology. It offers a counter ideology to the values and practices that dominated public life in the 1930’s.
The counter-ideology itself is a particular and somewhat singular articulation of ideas commonly found among the intelligentsia of the 1920’s, primarily among the avant-garde and Bakhtin’s friends. Bakhtin presents his counter ideology not through a frontal attack on Stalinism but rather through a dialogue with it. [307] ¶ . . . Stalinist epistemology was a crude form of Neo-Platonism in which only the elect, specifically the leaders, had access to the higher order of reality. ¶ Bakhtin’s response to Stalinism is organized around the dichotomy common to all of his earlier writings, the distinction between official culture and the culture of the folk [Heidegger, CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY: From Enknowing***] . . . The function of folk culture is not just to debunk authority figures and received notions, as a healthy antidote to the dullness and dryness of official culture. Folk humor amounts to considerably more than mere playful irreverence, for the folk assume willy-nilly the role of a bulwark against repression. The peculiarity of carnival laughter is its “indissoluble and essential relation to freedom. The serious element in class culture and the “monolithic seriousness of the Christian cult and world view” go hand in hand with fear and repression, while “power, repression and authority never speak in the language of laughter” (pg. 265, 89, 84, 46, 107, 515, 94). ¶ . . . Bakhtin’s critique of Stalinism does not stop at its repressiveness but tackles its fundamental epistemological principle, the vertical ordering of all reality . . . [T]he carnival ethos undermined this epistemological megalomania. It undermined or debunked absolute ideas and introduced instead a spirit of “joyful relativity,” a phrase found in all Bakhtin’s work of this period. ¶ . . . Bakhtin . . . postulates the carnival spirit and carnival world as models for a superior world order that is organized horizontally rather than vertically (pg. 380-396) . . . [The carnival’s] essential qualities are incompleteness, becoming, and ambiguity. ¶ The question raised by Bakhtin’s carnival . . . is whether such a horizontally organized world can be maintained for any length of time . . . There is . . . a strong element of idealization, even utopian visionariness, in Bakhtin’s analysis of carnival.
This is particularly apparent in his characterization of the folk. At this very time, the official platform, both literary and political, was assigning the folk a major role in its own scheme of things . . . ¶ Bakhtin decries the narrow conception of the folk prevailing at this time, which excludes the culture of laughter and the marketplace with all its subversiveness, blasphemy, and blatant physically. The result of this exclusion is a prettified, emasculated version of the folk, with no bite. But while opposing one idealized conception of the folk, Bakhtin’s own counter image is no less idealized, dripping with urine and feces though it be . . . ¶ Bakhtin attacks yet another unacknowledged idealism that had crept into Stalinism, the underlying assumption of all official rhetoric that there is a higher order of reality to which ordinary citizens do not have access. This assumption is expressed, for instance, in the main slogan of the decade, “Higher! (Vyae!)”. . . ¶ . . . Bakhtin’s reaction against the Soviet emphasis on transcending the physical body is consistent with his former rejection of Pauline ideas about the need to cast off physicality as expressed by theologians such as Florensky or the followers of Saint Seraphim of Sarov. ¶ Bakhtin’s stress on the body is far from his only affront to socialist realism in RABELAIS. He goes far beyond his previous attacks by positing a countervailing ideal, which he calls “grotesque realism.” To Bakhtin, the grotesque is the expression in literature of the carnival spirit. It incorporates for him what are the primary values: incompleteness, becoming, ambiguity, indefinability, non-canonicalism – indeed, all that jolts us out of our normal expectations and epistemological complacency. ¶ . . . According to Bakhtin, the novel is that genre which executes its own intention by binding the discourses the discourses of other ideologies. RABELAIS is a scholarly variant on this appropriation of other discourses for one’s own purposes. ¶ . . . The . . . major villain is the Roman Catholic Church, which Bakhtin argues is the enemy of all that Rabelais espoused . . . [H]e uses the church, the self-proclaimed “sole-possessor” of truth, to stand for the party in his attacks against all claims to the possession of an absolute truth and against all forms of monologism. Finally, he expresses a view of the Roman Catholic Church that has long been popular among the Russian intelligentsia . . . In the circles that Bakhtin once moved, both the Roman Church and the Orthodox Church were felt by many to represent a travesty of true spirituality because of their dogmatism, obtuseness, and power mongering. For instance, Blok distinguished between a “true clergy’ and that “caste of morally obtuse people who claim the title priest.” Thus, Bakhtin’s anticlerical remarks should not be regarded entirely as Aesopean language but should be taken in part at face value. ¶ . . . Bakhtin remarks in MARXISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, “Languages are philosophies - not abstract but concrete social philosophies, penetrated by a system of values inseparable from living practice and class struggle” (“V. N. Voloainov,” MARXISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE, trans. Matejka & Titunik, Seminar Press, 1973, pg. 471[I cannot find this in the Harvard edition]). ¶ . . .
Rabelais’ importance lies not in his own particular ideology but in his awareness of the limits, the incompleteness, of any ideology. No matter how serious Rabelais appears to be at any point in a text, he makes sure to leave a gap, to provide what Bakhtin calls a “merry loophole – a loophole that opens onto the distant future and that lends an aspect of ridicule to the present or the immediate future. Rabelais never exhausts his resources in direct statements” (pg. 454). ¶ Rabelais is important not only because he lets Bakhtin speak about language evolution and the interrelation between the literary language and the vernacular, but also because he permits Bakhtin to return once again to the major topic of his career, the dialogic nature of language and its relation to the dialogic nature of the world . . . “There is an awakening of the ancient ambivalence of all words and expressions, combining the wish of life and death, of sowing and rebirth. The unofficial aspect of the world of becoming and of the grotesque body is disclosed” (pg. 420).
COMMENTARY?:
Let us stop and catch our breath. Clark and Holquist ably grasp the main themes, but do not emphasize the mass exterminations going on around Bakhtin as he sits and writes his so-called ‘literary criticism.’ Of course, because he only is a nervous and timid professor that only delves into harmless literary figures of the past, this is precisely why he survived the ‘Yezhovchina,’ that phony name Stalin invented to palm off blame for the Great Purge that murdered 20,000,000 people in four years. The same was going on all around Rabelais. One of the people he worked with everyday, when he served Cardinal Jean du Bllay, the Cardinal’s secretary Jean Bribart was burned at the stake. Only because he had written an ‘obscene’ and ‘comic’ book kept the good priest and monk Rabelais with his ‘wife’ and three children (two legitimized by the Pope) kept him from also suffering for his sympathies with Martin Luther 9who also had a love for filthy, peasant metaphors), though never completely out of trouble.
First of all, Rabelais understood Luther’s true theological intent recently and finally brought out by Richard Marius in his book MARTIN LUTHER: The Christian Between God and Death, Belknap-Harvard, 1999. The conflict in Luther’s mind is precisely “between God and death,” and Hell is only a cursing metaphor one throws at one’s enemies. People forget that some of the same humanist teachers that taught François Rabelais also taught John Calvin! And what were these humanists teaching? The Greek and Roman classics. And what did the Greek and Roman classics teach? That death was forever and the gods unreliable if not downright malevolent. At the same time amongst the Jewish Kabbalists like Issac Luria God was not only receding farther and farther away from humanity in every possible aspect, but the problem of the existence of evil was becoming greater and greater until Sabatai Sevi and Nathan of Gaza ‘solved’ it by taking it in as a necessary part of the Messiah’s becoming truly related to that receding God and bringing Him back to common, sinful humanity. The problem of evil for both Issac Luria and Martin Luther was not the supposed state of eternal damnation, but that after death there was nothing. The problem that the Greek and Roman classics presented was the same, except, of course, no one took them seriously. Bullshit. You know that could not be true during late Medieval times and the Renaissance, that all the teachers of the classics between then and now essentially lied either by commission or omission, and that that is the only problem that really concerns most people now. Because the logical corollary of Ivan Karamazov’s, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted” is “If death is forever, then everything is permitted.” If the worst you can suffer is nothing, then you can do anything. “Why do anything, anything at all?” become problematic for Rabelais, Bakhtin and especially Dostoyevsky and Heidegger. One became a “born again” Christian,” the most dangerous type, loosed from all moral responsibility because he is now and forever unchangeably “saved.” The other, through the methodical, philosophical mysticism of Meister Eckhart, discovered the beginning point of the authentic mind where, as Shestov said often, “All things are possible!” and nothing, nothing at all is necessary. True freedom can only mean there is no motivation or that you are free to give into whimsy. This is one of those common ideas talked about constantly by common people and intellectuals pay no attention to. ‘If there is no God, you can do anything,’ ‘If you are an atheist, you have no ethics,’ ‘If there is no God, there is nothing to live for,’ “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die.” Now, intellectuals know better, that everyone is under constraints, and like Jesus they take these meaningless restraints and change them into the eatable bread of morality that ‘somehow’ by divine intervention, even for atheists, is shown as a light into all souls equally, but that some nasty and evil people like Heidegger deliberately turn away from the light and love the darkness. Bullshit. The common people are right, and the carnival people amongst the common people love the darkness – as well as the light – fun is anywhere you can get it – if it feels good do it. Now intellectuals know these unthinking souls do not know any better and wish to teach them the wonderful benefits of social responsibility. Fuck you. At least that way the world will die with a bang instead of a whimper as it is now slowly and drearily doing. For people like Bush or Putin or Osama bin Ladin or Yasser Arafat or Sharon there is always a “somewhere over the rainbow,” that if we work hard enough and are real good people, we will eventually get there. Now, strangely enough, put in these terms, this is a basic part of human character and demonstrates perfectly the fundamental priority of the future in the human scheme of time as amply demonstrated by Heidegger in BEING AND TIME. A “fundamental priority,” yes, but this disciple of Eckhart knew that the Augenblick, the Moment, was much more important, the point of absolute nothingness, where everything is possible and absolutely nothing, including death, is important.
That is what Bakhtin’s carnival is all about, a very earthy, even filthy Augenblick where death and shit are the same and end up in the same place. The chief Lubbavitcher was right. The holocaust victims died because they did not observe the dietary laws, but in Rabelais’ sense, not Moses. And it is not that they died – Zyclon gas was the result of a demented, mechanical, therefore inevitable logic: 1) Hitler was getting too many Jews from his Russian conquests; 2) the einsatzgruppen, used as punishment duty for regular soldiers, was demoralizing the army, becoming too expensive, did not kill enough Jews, and left too many hostile witnesses. Menachim Begin was much closer to Rabelais when he said, “I fight, therefore I am!” Fighting, killing, and dying are a strong part of the ideology and feast of carnival. If you are going to die anyway, and your wife and your parents and your children, why hold back? At all? There is certainly nothing to save from death. The hustler on the street understands this, why can’t intellectuals? Death, despite all efforts, is not something you can get around. And total, complete, authentic anarchism must include joyful acceptance of one’s killing others, but, equally so, one’s being killed oneself. Death abounds in Rabelais’ GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL just like it did in Rabelais’ and Bakhtin’s and Heidegger’s lives. So why do we assume they did not take it seriously? That those deaths were cartoon or movie type deaths? Because they did not say they were ‘serious’? Because they did not say they were ‘sincere’?
It is because ya’ll take those words ‘seriously’ that this is still an age of naïve and unexamined faith and certainly not skepticism. Not only do you have to examine your premises, as Ayn Rand always insisted, but you have to examine your premises for examining your premises, and then examine your premises for examining your premises for examining your premises till you end up with just bare words and just bare experience and reason and judgment become words to be examined just like any others and no word or experience occupies a privileged place, i. e., you are right back with Heidegger’s authentic dasein of the Augenblick where you have infinite possibilities, but where any motivation to act, by the eye of reason, can only be called whimsical or nothing at all.
Now to examine the quotation.
Fritz Heidegger
Michael Foucault’s supplice |
