More on Bakhtin's Carnival

I was reading Eugene Slepov's recent essay on Confederacy (see below for citation). In general, I think it is a good essay and makes good points about nativity as being like ethnicity and about the importance to a character's identity of the time and place from which that character comes (or as the Beowulf poet would say, þæm dæge ond þysses lifes). He makes an important connection between place as a constituent of identity in Percy's Moviegoer as compared to Confederacy. I would have liked for him to have cited the work of Sara Dunne on the act of moviegoing with regard to place in Confederacy, The Moviegoer, and Catcher in the Rye, but that's me.

Slepov begins the essay contrasting his theory of carnival to Bakhtin's theory of carnival. He states that John Lowe, in his essay "Carnival Voices," relied on Bakhtin's theory, whereas Slepov instead sees Ignatius in the role of scapegoat. Here, I sat up and took notice, because I have several times commented on the contrast between Bakhtin's theory of carnival and the earlier tradition that culminated in Frazer's theory of carnival, which features a scapegoat figure.

I even went back and reread Lowe's essay, because I don't think of his essay as being anti-scapegoat. In fact, I think of it as an essay very much in the camp of pro-scapegoat, and one of the few that is pro-scapegoat, so I was surprised by the Slepov's discussion. My conclusion is that Lowe's position is more complex than Slepov suggested.

(Side note: When I had originally read Lowe, I was looking primarily for any comparisons he made between Confederacy and other texts. Rereading it, I see that Lowe articulates a theory of humor. I may study that theory of humor in a later blog entry. In my own writings, I may have borrowed some more ideas from Lowe than I have given him credit for.)

As for Bakhtin himself, Bakhtin seems studiously to ignore the role of the scapegoat in the history of carnival. In his book on Rabelais, he even cites Frazer, but doesn't mention this central feature of Frazer's theory. Why? I think Bakhtin's goal is to create a vision of a utopian "second life" in which all social status and dominance hierarchies are abolished in a revel of immersing ourselves into the regenerative and transgressive potential of the lower bodily stratum and a mythic folk laughter that is not singling any one person out for ridicule.

Bakhtin's supposed folk laughter is primarily ridiculing the "first life" of social orderliness controlled by political authorities. He overlooks the fact that humor is often directed by those of higher status against those of lower status even in a carnival setting. IMHO, Bakhtin's goal is part of a broader agenda of minimizing the fundamental nature of humans as social animals who naturally form interpersonal status hierarchies. I have criticized Bakhtin elsewhere for not having a fully general theory of humor.

It is, of course, impossible to transport oneself back to a previous era and conduct psychological tests to establish that the folk laughter of the medieval times was different than the laughter of, say, the Enlightenment, so many claims that Bakhtin states as obviously true cannot be disproven. His focus on Rabelais is brilliant, because carnival in Rabelais is not typical of carnival traditions generally, which often have a mock social hierarchy and feature a ritual purging of chaos as revelers get back to their lives. Bakhtin's utopian vision has been embraced by literary critics since the 1960s, perhaps in part because of its denial of social status hierarchies in the revolution of the people's laughter.

As for Lowe, he brings in the parts of Bakhtin that do relate to Confederacy, such as Ignatius's grotesque qualities, which wallow in the lower bodily stratum. But the center of Lowe's essay is comparing Confederacy to an ethnic melee, which is a comic drama that often features a scapegoat. So Lowe's approach to Confederacy is much closer to Slepov's than Slepov would lead one to believe. Confederacy features a scapegoat, Ignatius, and he is a figure that the reader is invited to laugh at, the agent of chaos to be celebrated but then expelled as the social order is reestablished, which is a situation very much unlike Bakhtin.

(More awkwardly, Lowe also lists nativity as a form of symbolic ethnicity (page 182), leaving Slepov very little room left to introduce novel points to the discussion. Lowe then goes further than Slepov into the study of ethnicity, making Lowe's essay the stronger of the two.)

Slepov, Eugene. "Singularities of Time and Place: A Study of Nativity as Ethnicity in A Confederacy of Dunces." Southern Quarterly. v. 56, no. 2, (Winter 2019), 8-21.