Word Picture

Word Picture

Hi, I’m Chiam Robinsky, a Jew from Eastern Europe, who has snuck out of my shtetl for a day to dress-up like an abbot in order to participate in the city’s Carnival. It’s my one day in the year that I can express how I really feel with impunity about those ecclesiastical hypocrites. Life for Jew, even a Torah scholar such as me, is even lower on the social scale than a Christian peasant from the city. But on this day, we all unite in our rebelliousness in making fun of the church and the royalty. As you can see, I’m sticking my tongue out and making a weird face to show self-mockery and disdain for the aristocratic and ecclesiastical order in today’s society.

Analysis: Formalism

Mikhail M. Bakhtin (1895-1975), a literary theorist and dissident Russian during the Stalinist regime of repression and censorship, arguably contributed to the Formalism Literary Theory, which was a “Russian literary movement of the 1920’s and 1930s…emphasized theoretical considerations of FORM as they sought to develop a science of poetics of literature” (Frye 209). His writing on the “carnivalesque—an idea  first introduced in Rabelais and His World (written in the 1930s and 1940s, published 1965)—is Bakhtin’s term for those forms of unofficial culture (the early novel among them) that resist official culture, political oppression, and totalitarian order through laughter, parody, and ‘grotesque realism’”(Leitch 1073). Bakhtin’s  research and dissertation of Rabelias’s discourse on carnival intrigued him because he evidently related its lack of Rabelias’s carnivalesque laughter to his modern day Russia.

            Anatoly Lunacharsky, a Russian critic “who presided over the foundation of Soviet culture, the Commissar of Enlightenment … basic argument that carnival was a kind of safety valve for passions the common people might otherwise direct to revolution” coincided with Bakhtin’s premise, who was writing his dissertation at the time (Bakhtin Michail Prologue xviii). Bakhtin was keenly aware of the intolerance the Stalinist regime held for political satire and parody so he tried to do a balancing act when the censors questioned him. The Introduction of Rabelais and His World states that “all were considered equal during carnival” (10). Furthermore, it “is the laughter of all the people. Second, it is universal in Scope; it is directed at all and everyone, including the carnival’s participants. Third, this laughter is ambivalent: It is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding” (11, 12). Bakhtin’s interpretation of the carnival relates to Victor Shklovsky’s—another Russian formalist (1893-1984)—salient points in his discourse on “Art as Technique.”

            For example, the pantomime of the carnival correlates with the “defamiliarization” technique that Shklovsky describes as making “the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He [Leo Tolstoy] describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something, he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of the object” (Shklovsky Online 2). The dress, costume, and pantomime of these carnival participants conveyed hilarious satire and parody without declarative sentences, of their political, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical targets. On a typical carnival day, one would probably see heteroglassia—Bakhtin’s term for speaking differently to different people—at work, depending who the performer’s audience is at that specific instance. Thus Bakhtin tries to revitalize and infuse the carnivalesque freedom into intellectual formalist theory and Russian literary life, and furthermore, we see the incorporation of Shklovsky’s defamiliarization technique reflected in these carnivals during the Middle Ages/Early Renaissance periods in Europe as well.

Work Cited

Bakhtin, Mikail. Rabelias and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana      

University Press, 1984. Print

Frye, Northrop, et al. Ed. The Harper Handbook to Literature. New York: Longman, 1997. Print

Kuiper, Kathleen. Ed. Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. Springfield, Mass.: 

Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 1995. Print

Leitch, Vincent B. Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2^nd ed. New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, 2010. Print

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” Online: http://www.vahidnab.com/defam.html