Hi All (including the spirits of Leather Beard and Ruby Nose),
This week's reading was really fun and extensive, so I'll try to point to one interesting particular commonality pervading both the Bakhtin and the drinking pamphlets: rituals of destruction (and, subsequently, renewal). That might seem vague and/or obvious, but such rituals also serve as a bridge between this week's reading and so much of our previous coursework. In other words, the notion will potentially allow us to explore all sorts of fascinating patterns and permutations throughout each of Bakhtin's chapters and the drinking pamphlets, and therefore the theme might serve well as a friend or foil to your posts/thoughts.
For example, as you know from last week, I am interested in the recursive discussion of people being "torn to pieces" (cf. Marlowe's Mephistophilis threatening Faustus, Dekker et al's Elizabeth both threatening and being threatened by Dog, Donne begging to be pierced/ravished/dissolved corporally into pious tears, etc.). And now, lo and behold, in Bakhtin, we see this again, and it is ritualized. For example, we see it in the grotesque "diablerie" of the burning and swallowing of dismembered (ie broken apart) bodies. More specifically, Bakhtin artiuclates this ritual (one of many such examples) as a consequence of Christian art meeting folk art, ie when the Acts of the Apostles meet Pantagruel. The result are "bodily tortures: the victims were to be burned, mutilated, TORN APART, and so forth. We have here grotesque dismemberment, an anatomization...a devouring of sinful souls" (346).
Taking the ritual of self-destruction one step further, perhaps an importance gortesque notion of being torn to pieces is the creation of space between. Such gaps are reiteratively stressed by Bakhtin as important allegorical spaces of a dialectical death/rebirth. This is as true of the corporal, as in the various organs indicating our grotesque incompletion, such as the "gaping jaw" (339), as it is of the verbal, as in the importance of language between friends, where "the usual speech patterns begin to break up" (421). So, in a sense, being torn to pieces might be the epitome of grotesque symbolism, ideology, and ontology.
A last example of self-destructive/regenerative ritual arises via a meta-critical materialist consideration of Bakhtin's seemingly purposeful use of repetitive syntax and argumentation. Perhaps this is merely a function of translation, but, assuming that the work is fairly accurate in its depiction of Bakhtin's intent and style, then one could argue that his form emulates his content; by intellectually and formally reiterating his argument through a series of gaps and effusions exemplifying excess and the importance of materiality, Bakhtin is indulging in language and self-permissions in methods seemingly parallel to the very spirit of carnival underpinning so much of Bakhtin's vast, disparate, playful, and deep analysis of folk art and Rabelais. (One final note: even the periodic inclusion of humor in "Official" and "great" literature waxes and wanes across history, thereby illustrating this materialist approach to Bakhtin's larger literary-historical analysis).
Ok. I have to run. As he does each Thursday afternoon, "the great Grape f@#%er" is hawking wine cheaply on the corner, and I always like to walk over to observe the ensuing mayhem.
In the communal spirit of freedom, carnival, and anti-structure, Stephan and I invite you to post your comments on Bakhtin and the drinking pamphlets--as you will. Our comments will be posted at 8 pm.
PS-I keep losing my drinking pamphlet link as I attempt to transfer my post to the blod on this public computer (I guess I shouldn't have teased the ghosts of Leather Beard and Ruby Nose!)
In any case, the crux of the link arises in Robert Harris's "The Drunkard's Cup", where drinking assumes a ritualistic, diabolical role. For example, Harris writes "There is (they say) an Art of drinking now, and in the world it is become a great profession; there are degrees and titles given under the name of Roring boyes, damned crew, &c. there are laws and ceremonies to be observed" (image 3).
Similarly, in the anonymous "A looking glasse for drunkards", one reads that "drunkenesse is a flattering Devill" (image 2) and, in true grotesque form, that "in a word the fearfull accidents that doe re[s]ound to the body in drunkenesse, bee strange and wonderfull" (image 4).
Also, if thinking of Bakhtin's understanding of the grotesque as possessing the power to invert/restructure rituals, heirarchies, forms, etc., one notes in this same anonymous drinking pamphlet that "a drunkard makes his belly god", and this parallels Bakhtin's fascination with the Indian bodies (half-human, half-animal) or the devilish relocation of organs and body parts (eg brains in derrieres), or even the transformation of transubstantiation (ie the change of blood into wine in Rabelais or Quixote).
I enjoyed Bakhtin and am having trouble printing the drinking pamphlets, but what I'm able to squint and look at, I also like. Also I am jealous that Seth is able to get in two very smart posts in the time it takes me to think about one.
I am interested in the themes of universality and individuality that run throughout Bakhtin's book. He talks about the universality of both humor and tragedy and how they intersect and, in some historically dark times, don't intersect. I think this is related to Seth's idea of being ripped apart. Is humor, as Bakhtin talks about, inherently tragic?
I'm also interested in talking about the marketplace being the place of the people-- the place for laughter and the grotesque. But it seems that nowadays the marketplace has become the system of power, and so the question arises (for me) as to where is the locus of universal and renewing laughter in the present. Does it even exist? But, as it's probably wise to stay withing the historical bounds of our texts, I'm also interested in talking about witches and their role in the marketplace. In particular, we might look back to Middleton's "The Witch" and think about Hecate and her minions. In light of what Bakhtin says they now seem more like comic grotesques than cautionary, or scary figures-- their obsession with the body, how they are the market.
And-- I'd like to talk about the social reality of Bakhtin's world. Is the laughter he talks about and celebrates truly universal? Or is it limited to the folk at the exclusion of the ruling class (as I've heard suggested)?
I could use a visit to the great Grape f*@%er myself, Seth.
In the meantime, I can’t help thinking of the affinities between Rabelais—at least Bakhtin’s Rabelais—and Luther. They lived and wrote almost concurrently, for one thing. And both were creating sensibilities that responded to prevailing hierarchies. As Bakhtin writes, with Rabelais in mind, “A boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture” (4). The kind of folk ritual that Bakhtin associates with Rabelais eliminated differences of class and station. As Bakhtin says it, “all were considered equal during carnival” (10).
I’d argue that Lutheranism provided a similar refuge from the “official feast” of Catholicism. Granted, Lutheranism was a serious business which probably didn’t sanction a lot of laughter, but no longer were congregants asked to genuflect before other men to receive sacrament, or to worship in a church whose intricate hierarchy extended to another country. Like Bakhtin’s carnival celebrants, Lutherans received a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” (10).
I’m wondering whether the meanings of Bakhtin’s/Rabelais’ folk rituals are indeed universal, or whether they’re bound to the 16th century’s history of radical social and religious change. As Brian notes, the marketplace of the 21st century doesn’t exactly have the folk charm of Leather Beard’s tavern…
Stephan and I took the ale house to be a common denominator in the pamphlets and the Bakhtin. Whereas Stephan will look at the connection between the ale house and the Bakhtinian grotesque body (all those fun and secret orifices which Bakthin identifies), I will explore the space and geography of the ale house. If we think about the ale house as a version of the Bakhtinian folk marketplace, how would we define that space? Is it domestic, transgressive, or communal? Also, how do we connect the discussion of space to larger socio-political issues we had been developing throughout our Witch-Unit, namely, economic and gender transgression, persecution and censorship?
According to Robert Harris (The Drunkard’s Cup), the ale house is a transgressive, sinful space. Whoring, brawling, rioting, murder, are commonplace to the ale house. Furthermore, the ale house is where men go to lose their money (18). Not only is the ale house a space outside of religious control, but it is also a space which disrupts proper economy of exchange (capitalism and industry). In these respects, Harris’s ale house seems to mirror Bakhtin’s marketplace, the space of carnival and the fair. The carnival space is characterized by several features: irreverent laughter, which subverts ecclesiastical authority, theatre, which represents alternative, inverted world-views, and familiar or marketplace language, which acts as an equalizing force to cancel out the division of hierarchy. High and low are mixed up: “Rabelais creates that special marketplace atmosphere in which the exalted and the lowly, the sacred and the profane are leveled and are all drawn into the same dance” (160).
Despite the passing similarities between the ale house and the carnival, the two spaces are actually structurally different. Harris’s ale house is a fixed space, enclosed by four walls. But Bakhtin’s space of carnival, the marketplace, is not so fixed. Instead of a definite location, the carnival is infinite; it is a structure of being—an entire “second world”—rather than a singular space. Does the spatial difference between the ale house and the carnival world suggest that the former can be potentially controlled and the latter cannot? What is so dangerous about the ale house? Is the ale house a genuinely “free” space, outside of everyday censorship, or is it a ghostly, corrupt, and inferior form of the Bakhtinian carnival?
I look forward to tomorrow’s discussion. Thanks for reading.
First, as one who is writing a comic novel, I feel compelled to say, “Big ups to Mikhail Bakhtin! Representing! Comedy!” Now if only we lived in a world where Bill Murray could have won Best Actor for Rushmore.
With that behind me, I’ll begin with the “Epistle Dedicatorie” of the Drunkard’s Cup, which has Master Harris, Pastor of Hanwell, telling the Right Honorable and Right Worshipful his Majesty’s Justice of the Peace, “I know not at what bench to commence a suit against Drunkards, if not at yours; you are as stakes in a hedge, that must keep all from reeling, the Captains of the Provinces that must give the victory” (A3).
It’s interesting to place this alongside p. 29 of Bakhtin’s introduction, where he writes: “The Renaissance saw the body in quite a different light than the Middle Ages … and (in) a different relation to the exterior nonbodily world … The body (in the Renaissance) was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies.”
The Drunkard’s Cup shows how early 17th C England has moved on from the carnivalesque spirit of The Middle Ages, when “all were considered equal during carnival” (p. 10). Now we have no escape from the hierarchy of society (the “captains” of the world – your justices of the peace, at the urging of the clergy – must support the public like a “stake (does) a hedge,” must direct the public’s growth to ensure it is moving in the right direction). Now we have the body "alone, fenced off," a social composition that will soon find a mirror in the world of atoms, with oxygen discovered in 1777 and the world moving on from there in a greater and greater number of fragments.
Now let’s move on to the last page of the Epistle, where the pastor writes, “You often complain of bastardies, sheep-stealers, hedge-breakers, quarrelers, and the like: will you be eased of these diseases? Believe it, these gather into the Alehouse, as the humors do into the stomach against an Ague-fit; take them there, drive them thence with some strong Physicke, and you heal our Towns and Corporations of infinite distempers all in one.”
This shows a world with clear divisions, which is in stark opposition to the grotesque realism of Rabelais: “The bodily element is deeply positive (in groteseque realism),” Bakhtin writes. “It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life [Stephan: as are the drunkards of the alehouse in Harris’ pamphlet], but as something universal, representing all people” (19).
Grotesque realism mixed the profane and the sacred; Harris’ pamphlet shows that England is increasingly a world described by divisions. There are the social division (the drunkards and the clergy/justices of the peace) and geographic ones (with the proliferating alehouses seen as undesirable). There is no longer a cyclical view, with such dualities as life/death and high/low and good/bad; now there are things to be driven out (I refuse to say "Others").
Some less integrated thoughts follow. I hope we can follow these up in class.
“The material bodily principle,” Bakhtin goes on, “is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed” (19).
As I began above with my atomised comments, this “people,” once intermingling in a cohesive whole of earth, fire, water, air, begins to disappear post-Reformation, when, inversely, people in society gain a greater sense of “selfhood.” Is selfhood achieved only at the cost of the public body? Who benefits from selfhood? Or, put another way, was life better when you really weren’t all that special?
Another thing, perhaps suitable for the Rabelias and His World For Dummies publication: Could Carnival only have existed pre-Reformation, when there was not a vernacular religion, something that, like the Protestantism to come, could provide a sort of explanation to life that could be shared by the people? Before the Reformation, even the monks, clerics and “learned theologians” could perceive “the world in its laughing aspect” or lose a sense of “self” in the carnival-like atmosphere of the marketplace. There was a mingling of high and low, sacred and profane, believer and drunkard. Was this only possible because – and I’ll oversimplify for the sake of space and time – most people weren’t suffocated by an ideology from above? After all, how suffocated can you be when you don’t understand the Latinate catechisms that fill the cathedral hall? Hoist your cup, slap the banker on the shoulder; we're all the same. Wasn't that Carnival?
By the way, I didn't have space to do what Penny expected me to do. We'll have to save the lower stratum of the body for discussion. Isn't that something you've always wanted to say?
I haven’t yet finished all the reading for tomorrow, but thus far my reading of Bakhin inspires comparison between the carnival and Artaud’s theater of cruelty. The theater of cruelty is, most simply, that which happens when god is “expulsed from the stage,” or in another way, that which happens on-stage once both the actors and the production themselves are liberated from the authorial dictatorship of the writer and director. The theater of cruelty is best understood as life itself, as the closest that art can come to enveloping the whole of life . Although this is at best a cursory attempt to enter into a very dense nexus of texts (Artaud’s work on the theater, e.g. The Theater and Its Double, and Derrida’s reading of Artaud, to name just a few), I think it nevertheless opens up quite a few questions at the heart of both Bakhtin and Rabelais’ shared concerns. What happens to formal art when the traditional authoritarian structures are bucked? What sort of art happens when the disruption of these structures is written into the nature of social and political revolution itself? To what extent can any event or any text tear itself from the social normativity that formed the context for its generation? Moreover, doesn’t this notion of a “cruel theater,” with the removal of god and author, cut to the core of the tensions between free will and subservience that we’ve seen in all the literature we’ve read so far? I know these questions as yet lack as specific a thrust as they will have by class tomorrow . . . See you then!
I am fascinated with Seth’s unequivocally meticulous reading of this week’s materials. I like his desire to examine obliteration in relation to the superstructure to our class, as well as this microstructure of our new unit. After the Bakhtin reading as well as the Drinking Pamphlets, I have a few points of interest.
Like Seth, I am also interested in this recurring theme of obliteration. Our previous encounters with this notion have been limited to the body being ravished in either divine grace, or as punishment for succumbing to the numinous, the demonic or the antithetical-to-Christian doctrine. Met with the corpus of society, Bakhtin focus upon the carnivalesque which, citing the introduction, should not be regarded “as party but a force preexisting priests and kings…On the contrary, all were considered equal on carnival…[A] Utopian ideal…People were…reborn for new, purely human relations.” As such, we see some reoccurring themes both from Rabelais and in Renaissance Theatre: Masquerade, privileging of laughter as spiritually and orally “free” expression unlimited to all beings regardless of distinctions of class, sex, race etc., role reversals in hierarchy (The transmutation of King as Clown and Clown as King), emphasis on the body—specifically those parts of the body , where “stress is laid” or where “the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. The open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose.” Different from our previous units, we are no longer examining the (non) surrender of the self to an external force, but perhaps this binary is now inverted. We are focusing on the surrender of the world to the body and pinpointing those areas on the body that must remain concealed, unmentioned, and are apt to make those privy persons blush, laugh, or cry. I am reminded of visual impressions in painting as well as literary and critical works often concerned with morphing orifice body parts (Munch’s The Scream) or phallic parts (Slavoj Zizek, in particular, who problematizes the existence of the dual-phallus, manifested, often, in the nose in sculpture and in painting). I’m sure there are other examples than these. Furthermore, I am reminded by Bruegle’s “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”—a painting that has captivated and eluded me to such a degree that I have suffered writing a good poem about it (Seth knows first-hand how ridiculous my poem is in light of this great painting). I am looking at the painting as I write this, and I am trying to see the revel through the lens après-Bakhtin: The man and woman engaged in collective hoop-racing, the unified corpus made from many individual bodies, a man riding upon the back of another as if he were a pack-mule or horse, men atop a sack-barrel as if it were a beast, men who enjoy hanging upside down on a wooden horse or through the execution of handstands, people in masquerade and costume, how light is only aimed at the center of the painting, and on the ground, as well as the many faces pointed away from the viewer, the participants, the sky, but also on to the ground. What I admire about this week’s work is the opportunities for spiritual, political, and existential transcendence manifested in privileging the body. Furthermore, I found the Drinking Pamphlets an interesting contrast to the above ideas in Bakhtin. Routine comparisons to excessive drinking as Swinneness, and Harris’s loathsome reference to the Tavern Dwellers who praise the King in the name of their God (Drink) seemed, for me, to represent the counterpoint to Rabelais’s world. On one hand, alcohol consumption was grounded in the locus of an individual’s worship of the stomach, as opposed to the soul, heart or the head. On the other, to commiserate in drunkenesse was, according to these pamphlets, to regress into a bestial phase. I am reminded of Harris’s allusion to the witch, Circe, which seems to be formative to his argument—he appeals to the mythopoeia of alcoholic revelry, and how the moly, or spiritual antidote against drinking is manifested in the preservation of the body for the reward of grace.
I’ll Hush here. See you all tomorrow. Here is a little ditty from Joyce’s Ulysses, Chapter 15:
(Chattering and Squabbling.) The Gentlemen…ten shillings…paying for three…allow me a moment…this gentleman pays separate…who’s touching it?...ow…mind who you’re pinching…are you staying the night or a short time? ...who did? …you’re a liar, excuse me…the gentleman paid down like a gentlemen…drink…it’s long after eleven.
Reading Bakhtin, I found myself reconsidering some of the texts we've already read in light of the grotesque body, the nature of medieval and Renaissance humor, divine mockery, social inversion, and depictions of the devil and noting that in many cases the witchcraft plays contain within them elements that might be viewed as carnivalesque or perhaps merely the residue of a carnival heritage.
Perhaps in some respects the witchcraft play might be considered a Renaissance location where the ideas of medieval carnival are simultaneously enacted and distorted/destroyed. For example, under the guise of the play carnival humor is evoked as characters perform divine mockery (invisible Faustus taunting the Pope and beating the monks), profanities and oaths are uttered, and sexuality is exaggerated and publicized (the Porter's speech in "Macbeth", lust and adultery in "The Witch"). However, counter to the spirit of carnival, all this happens on the stage, a separated space which removes the audience from complicit involvement with the action. Furthermore, the stage is a limited space as well as an artificially constructed space.
Bakhin's description of the grotesque body also intrigued me. At one point in the introduction he states that "It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits." Elsewhere he expands this to the following:
"The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements."
So if we see in the witchcraft plays something of an extension and transformation of some of the ideas of carnival, where might the grotesque body be? While the witch's body immediately comes to mind, I also can't help but see the cauldron itself as the grotesque body. After all, it's the cauldron which remains an open body, which ends up taking in all the elements of the material world, and ultimately gives birth to a new body, a new thing.
In any case, I'm excited to discuss the rest of Bakhtin and the drinking pamphlets.
12 comments:
Hi All (including the spirits of Leather Beard and Ruby Nose),
This week's reading was really fun and extensive, so I'll try to point to one interesting particular commonality pervading both the Bakhtin and the drinking pamphlets: rituals of destruction (and, subsequently, renewal). That might seem vague and/or obvious, but such rituals also serve as a bridge between this week's reading and so much of our previous coursework. In other words, the notion will potentially allow us to explore all sorts of fascinating patterns and permutations throughout each of Bakhtin's chapters and the drinking pamphlets, and therefore the theme might serve well as a friend or foil to your posts/thoughts.
For example, as you know from last week, I am interested in the recursive discussion of people being "torn to pieces" (cf. Marlowe's Mephistophilis threatening Faustus, Dekker et al's Elizabeth both threatening and being threatened by Dog, Donne begging to be pierced/ravished/dissolved corporally into pious tears, etc.). And now, lo and behold, in Bakhtin, we see this again, and it is ritualized. For example, we see it in the grotesque "diablerie" of the burning and swallowing of dismembered (ie broken apart) bodies. More specifically, Bakhtin artiuclates this ritual (one of many such examples) as a consequence of Christian art meeting folk art, ie when the Acts of the Apostles meet Pantagruel. The result are "bodily tortures: the victims were to be burned, mutilated, TORN APART, and so forth. We have here grotesque dismemberment, an anatomization...a devouring of sinful souls" (346).
Taking the ritual of self-destruction one step further, perhaps an importance gortesque notion of being torn to pieces is the creation of space between. Such gaps are reiteratively stressed by Bakhtin as important allegorical spaces of a dialectical death/rebirth. This is as true of the corporal, as in the various organs indicating our grotesque incompletion, such as the "gaping jaw" (339), as it is of the verbal, as in the importance of language between friends, where "the usual speech patterns begin to break up" (421). So, in a sense, being torn to pieces might be the epitome of grotesque symbolism, ideology, and ontology.
A last example of self-destructive/regenerative ritual arises via a meta-critical materialist consideration of Bakhtin's seemingly purposeful use of repetitive syntax and argumentation. Perhaps this is merely a function of translation, but, assuming that the work is fairly accurate in its depiction of Bakhtin's intent and style, then one could argue that his form emulates his content; by intellectually and formally reiterating his argument through a series of gaps and effusions exemplifying excess and the importance of materiality, Bakhtin is indulging in language and self-permissions in methods seemingly parallel to the very spirit of carnival underpinning so much of Bakhtin's vast, disparate, playful, and deep analysis of folk art and Rabelais. (One final note: even the periodic inclusion of humor in "Official" and "great" literature waxes and wanes across history, thereby illustrating this materialist approach to Bakhtin's larger literary-historical analysis).
Ok. I have to run. As he does each Thursday afternoon, "the great Grape f@#%er" is hawking wine cheaply on the corner, and I always like to walk over to observe the ensuing mayhem.
S
Hi everyone,
In the communal spirit of freedom, carnival, and anti-structure, Stephan and I invite you to post your comments on Bakhtin and the drinking pamphlets--as you will. Our comments will be posted at 8 pm.
PS-I keep losing my drinking pamphlet link as I attempt to transfer my post to the blod on this public computer (I guess I shouldn't have teased the ghosts of Leather Beard and Ruby Nose!)
In any case, the crux of the link arises in Robert Harris's "The Drunkard's Cup", where drinking assumes a ritualistic, diabolical role. For example, Harris writes "There is (they say) an Art of drinking now, and in the world it is become a great profession; there are degrees and titles given under the name of Roring boyes, damned crew, &c. there are laws and ceremonies to be observed" (image 3).
Similarly, in the anonymous "A looking glasse for drunkards", one reads that "drunkenesse is a flattering Devill" (image 2) and, in true grotesque form, that "in a word the fearfull accidents that doe re[s]ound to the body in drunkenesse, bee strange and wonderfull" (image 4).
Also, if thinking of Bakhtin's understanding of the grotesque as possessing the power to invert/restructure rituals, heirarchies, forms, etc., one notes in this same anonymous drinking pamphlet that "a drunkard makes his belly god", and this parallels Bakhtin's fascination with the Indian bodies (half-human, half-animal) or the devilish relocation of organs and body parts (eg brains in derrieres), or even the transformation of transubstantiation (ie the change of blood into wine in Rabelais or Quixote).
I enjoyed Bakhtin and am having trouble printing the drinking pamphlets, but what I'm able to squint and look at, I also like. Also I am jealous that Seth is able to get in two very smart posts in the time it takes me to think about one.
I am interested in the themes of universality and individuality that run throughout Bakhtin's book. He talks about the universality of both humor and tragedy and how they intersect and, in some historically dark times, don't intersect. I think this is related to Seth's idea of being ripped apart. Is humor, as Bakhtin talks about, inherently tragic?
I'm also interested in talking about the marketplace being the place of the people-- the place for laughter and the grotesque. But it seems that nowadays the marketplace has become the system of power, and so the question arises (for me) as to where is the locus of universal and renewing laughter in the present. Does it even exist? But, as it's probably wise to stay withing the historical bounds of our texts, I'm also interested in talking about witches and their role in the marketplace. In particular, we might look back to Middleton's "The Witch" and think about Hecate and her minions. In light of what Bakhtin says they now seem more like comic grotesques than cautionary, or scary figures-- their obsession with the body, how they are the market.
And-- I'd like to talk about the social reality of Bakhtin's world. Is the laughter he talks about and celebrates truly universal? Or is it limited to the folk at the exclusion of the ruling class (as I've heard suggested)?
I could use a visit to the great Grape f*@%er myself, Seth.
In the meantime, I can’t help thinking of the affinities between Rabelais—at least Bakhtin’s Rabelais—and Luther. They lived and wrote almost concurrently, for one thing. And both were creating sensibilities that responded to prevailing hierarchies. As Bakhtin writes, with Rabelais in mind, “A boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture” (4). The kind of folk ritual that Bakhtin associates with Rabelais eliminated differences of class and station. As Bakhtin says it, “all were considered equal during carnival” (10).
I’d argue that Lutheranism provided a similar refuge from the “official feast” of Catholicism. Granted, Lutheranism was a serious business which probably didn’t sanction a lot of laughter, but no longer were congregants asked to genuflect before other men to receive sacrament, or to worship in a church whose intricate hierarchy extended to another country. Like Bakhtin’s carnival celebrants, Lutherans received a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” (10).
I’m wondering whether the meanings of Bakhtin’s/Rabelais’ folk rituals are indeed universal, or whether they’re bound to the 16th century’s history of radical social and religious change. As Brian notes, the marketplace of the 21st century doesn’t exactly have the folk charm of Leather Beard’s tavern…
Stephan and I took the ale house to be a common denominator in the pamphlets and the Bakhtin. Whereas Stephan will look at the connection between the ale house and the Bakhtinian grotesque body (all those fun and secret orifices which Bakthin identifies), I will explore the space and geography of the ale house. If we think about the ale house as a version of the Bakhtinian folk marketplace, how would we define that space? Is it domestic, transgressive, or communal? Also, how do we connect the discussion of space to larger socio-political issues we had been developing throughout our Witch-Unit, namely, economic and gender transgression, persecution and censorship?
According to Robert Harris (The Drunkard’s Cup), the ale house is a transgressive, sinful space. Whoring, brawling, rioting, murder, are commonplace to the ale house. Furthermore, the ale house is where men go to lose their money (18). Not only is the ale house a space outside of religious control, but it is also a space which disrupts proper economy of exchange (capitalism and industry). In these respects, Harris’s ale house seems to mirror Bakhtin’s marketplace, the space of carnival and the fair. The carnival space is characterized by several features: irreverent laughter, which subverts ecclesiastical authority, theatre, which represents alternative, inverted world-views, and familiar or marketplace language, which acts as an equalizing force to cancel out the division of hierarchy. High and low are mixed up: “Rabelais creates that special marketplace atmosphere in which the exalted and the lowly, the sacred and the profane are leveled and are all drawn into the same dance” (160).
Despite the passing similarities between the ale house and the carnival, the two spaces are actually structurally different. Harris’s ale house is a fixed space, enclosed by four walls. But Bakhtin’s space of carnival, the marketplace, is not so fixed. Instead of a definite location, the carnival is infinite; it is a structure of being—an entire “second world”—rather than a singular space. Does the spatial difference between the ale house and the carnival world suggest that the former can be potentially controlled and the latter cannot? What is so dangerous about the ale house? Is the ale house a genuinely “free” space, outside of everyday censorship, or is it a ghostly, corrupt, and inferior form of the Bakhtinian carnival?
I look forward to tomorrow’s discussion. Thanks for reading.
First, as one who is writing a comic novel, I feel compelled to say, “Big ups to Mikhail Bakhtin! Representing! Comedy!” Now if only we lived in a world where Bill Murray could have won Best Actor for Rushmore.
With that behind me, I’ll begin with the “Epistle Dedicatorie” of the Drunkard’s Cup, which has Master Harris, Pastor of Hanwell, telling the Right Honorable and Right Worshipful his Majesty’s Justice of the Peace, “I know not at what bench to commence a suit against Drunkards, if not at yours; you are as stakes in a hedge, that must keep all from reeling, the Captains of the Provinces that must give the victory” (A3).
It’s interesting to place this alongside p. 29 of Bakhtin’s introduction, where he writes: “The Renaissance saw the body in quite a different light than the Middle Ages … and (in) a different relation to the exterior nonbodily world … The body (in the Renaissance) was first of all a strictly completed, finished product. Furthermore, it was isolated, alone, fenced off from all other bodies.”
The Drunkard’s Cup shows how early 17th C England has moved on from the carnivalesque spirit of The Middle Ages, when “all were considered equal during carnival” (p. 10). Now we have no escape from the hierarchy of society (the “captains” of the world – your justices of the peace, at the urging of the clergy – must support the public like a “stake (does) a hedge,” must direct the public’s growth to ensure it is moving in the right direction). Now we have the body "alone, fenced off," a social composition that will soon find a mirror in the world of atoms, with oxygen discovered in 1777 and the world moving on from there in a greater and greater number of fragments.
Now let’s move on to the last page of the Epistle, where the pastor writes, “You often complain of bastardies, sheep-stealers, hedge-breakers, quarrelers, and the like: will you be eased of these diseases? Believe it, these gather into the Alehouse, as the humors do into the stomach against an Ague-fit; take them there, drive them thence with some strong Physicke, and you heal our Towns and Corporations of infinite distempers all in one.”
This shows a world with clear divisions, which is in stark opposition to the grotesque realism of Rabelais: “The bodily element is deeply positive (in groteseque realism),” Bakhtin writes. “It is presented not in a private, egotistic form, severed from the other spheres of life [Stephan: as are the drunkards of the alehouse in Harris’ pamphlet], but as something universal, representing all people” (19).
Grotesque realism mixed the profane and the sacred; Harris’ pamphlet shows that England is increasingly a world described by divisions. There are the social division (the drunkards and the clergy/justices of the peace) and geographic ones (with the proliferating alehouses seen as undesirable). There is no longer a cyclical view, with such dualities as life/death and high/low and good/bad; now there are things to be driven out (I refuse to say "Others").
Some less integrated thoughts follow. I hope we can follow these up in class.
“The material bodily principle,” Bakhtin goes on, “is contained not in the biological individual, not in the bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and renewed” (19).
As I began above with my atomised comments, this “people,” once intermingling in a cohesive whole of earth, fire, water, air, begins to disappear post-Reformation, when, inversely, people in society gain a greater sense of “selfhood.” Is selfhood achieved only at the cost of the public body? Who benefits from selfhood? Or, put another way, was life better when you really weren’t all that special?
Another thing, perhaps suitable for the Rabelias and His World For Dummies publication: Could Carnival only have existed pre-Reformation, when there was not a vernacular religion, something that, like the Protestantism to come, could provide a sort of explanation to life that could be shared by the people? Before the Reformation, even the monks, clerics and “learned theologians” could perceive “the world in its laughing aspect” or lose a sense of “self” in the carnival-like atmosphere of the marketplace. There was a mingling of high and low, sacred and profane, believer and drunkard. Was this only possible because – and I’ll oversimplify for the sake of space and time – most people weren’t suffocated by an ideology from above? After all, how suffocated can you be when you don’t understand the Latinate catechisms that fill the cathedral hall? Hoist your cup, slap the banker on the shoulder; we're all the same. Wasn't that Carnival?
By the way, I didn't have space to do what Penny expected me to do. We'll have to save the lower stratum of the body for discussion. Isn't that something you've always wanted to say?
I haven’t yet finished all the reading for tomorrow, but thus far my reading of Bakhin inspires comparison between the carnival and Artaud’s theater of cruelty. The theater of cruelty is, most simply, that which happens when god is “expulsed from the stage,” or in another way, that which happens on-stage once both the actors and the production themselves are liberated from the authorial dictatorship of the writer and director. The theater of cruelty is best understood as life itself, as the closest that art can come to enveloping the whole of life . Although this is at best a cursory attempt to enter into a very dense nexus of texts (Artaud’s work on the theater, e.g. The Theater and Its Double, and Derrida’s reading of Artaud, to name just a few), I think it nevertheless opens up quite a few questions at the heart of both Bakhtin and Rabelais’ shared concerns. What happens to formal art when the traditional authoritarian structures are bucked? What sort of art happens when the disruption of these structures is written into the nature of social and political revolution itself? To what extent can any event or any text tear itself from the social normativity that formed the context for its generation? Moreover, doesn’t this notion of a “cruel theater,” with the removal of god and author, cut to the core of the tensions between free will and subservience that we’ve seen in all the literature we’ve read so far?
I know these questions as yet lack as specific a thrust as they will have by class tomorrow . . . See you then!
I am fascinated with Seth’s unequivocally meticulous reading of this week’s materials.
I like his desire to examine obliteration in relation to the superstructure to our class, as well as this microstructure of our new unit. After the Bakhtin reading as well as the Drinking Pamphlets, I have a few points of interest.
Like Seth, I am also interested in this recurring theme of obliteration. Our previous encounters with this notion have been limited to the body being ravished in either divine grace, or as punishment for succumbing to the numinous, the demonic or the antithetical-to-Christian doctrine. Met with the corpus of society, Bakhtin focus upon the carnivalesque which, citing the introduction, should not be regarded “as party but a force preexisting priests and kings…On the contrary, all were considered equal on carnival…[A] Utopian ideal…People were…reborn for new, purely human relations.”
As such, we see some reoccurring themes both from Rabelais and in Renaissance Theatre: Masquerade, privileging of laughter as spiritually and orally “free” expression unlimited to all beings regardless of distinctions of class, sex, race etc., role reversals in hierarchy (The transmutation of King as Clown and Clown as King), emphasis on the body—specifically those parts of the body , where “stress is laid” or where “the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. The open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose.”
Different from our previous units, we are no longer examining the (non) surrender of the self to an external force, but perhaps this binary is now inverted. We are focusing on the surrender of the world to the body and pinpointing those areas on the body that must remain concealed, unmentioned, and are apt to make those privy persons blush, laugh, or cry. I am reminded of visual impressions in painting as well as literary and critical works often concerned with morphing orifice body parts (Munch’s The Scream) or phallic parts (Slavoj Zizek, in particular, who problematizes the existence of the dual-phallus, manifested, often, in the nose in sculpture and in painting). I’m sure there are other examples than these.
Furthermore, I am reminded by Bruegle’s “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent”—a painting that has captivated and eluded me to such a degree that I have suffered writing a good poem about it (Seth knows first-hand how ridiculous my poem is in light of this great painting). I am looking at the painting as I write this, and I am trying to see the revel through the lens après-Bakhtin: The man and woman engaged in collective hoop-racing, the unified corpus made from many individual bodies, a man riding upon the back of another as if he were a pack-mule or horse, men atop a sack-barrel as if it were a beast, men who enjoy hanging upside down on a wooden horse or through the execution of handstands, people in masquerade and costume, how light is only aimed at the center of the painting, and on the ground, as well as the many faces pointed away from the viewer, the participants, the sky, but also on to the ground.
What I admire about this week’s work is the opportunities for spiritual, political, and existential transcendence manifested in privileging the body. Furthermore, I found the Drinking Pamphlets an interesting contrast to the above ideas in Bakhtin. Routine comparisons to excessive drinking as Swinneness, and Harris’s loathsome reference to the Tavern Dwellers who praise the King in the name of their God (Drink) seemed, for me, to represent the counterpoint to Rabelais’s world. On one hand, alcohol consumption was grounded in the locus of an individual’s worship of the stomach, as opposed to the soul, heart or the head. On the other, to commiserate in drunkenesse was, according to these pamphlets, to regress into a bestial phase. I am reminded of Harris’s allusion to the witch, Circe, which seems to be formative to his argument—he appeals to the mythopoeia of alcoholic revelry, and how the moly, or spiritual antidote against drinking is manifested in the preservation of the body for the reward of grace.
I’ll Hush here. See you all tomorrow. Here is a little ditty from Joyce’s Ulysses, Chapter 15:
BELLA, ZOE KITTY, LYNCH BLOOM (SIMULTANEOUS SPEECH):
(Chattering and Squabbling.) The Gentlemen…ten shillings…paying for three…allow me a moment…this gentleman pays separate…who’s touching it?...ow…mind who you’re pinching…are you staying the night or a short time? ...who did? …you’re a liar, excuse me…the gentleman paid down like a gentlemen…drink…it’s long after eleven.
-Cody
Reading Bakhtin, I found myself reconsidering some of the texts we've already read in light of the grotesque body, the nature of medieval and Renaissance humor, divine mockery, social inversion, and depictions of the devil and noting that in many cases the witchcraft plays contain within them elements that might be viewed as carnivalesque or perhaps merely the residue of a carnival heritage.
Perhaps in some respects the witchcraft play might be considered a Renaissance location where the ideas of medieval carnival are simultaneously enacted and distorted/destroyed. For example, under the guise of the play carnival humor is evoked as characters perform divine mockery (invisible Faustus taunting the Pope and beating the monks), profanities and oaths are uttered, and sexuality is exaggerated and publicized (the Porter's speech in "Macbeth", lust and adultery in "The Witch"). However, counter to the spirit of carnival, all this happens on the stage, a separated space which removes the audience from complicit involvement with the action. Furthermore, the stage is a limited space as well as an artificially constructed space.
Bakhin's description of the grotesque body also intrigued me. At one point in the introduction he states that "It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits." Elsewhere he expands this to the following:
"The unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth and being born) is not separated from the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements."
So if we see in the witchcraft plays something of an extension and transformation of some of the ideas of carnival, where might the grotesque body be? While the witch's body immediately comes to mind, I also can't help but see the cauldron itself as the grotesque body. After all, it's the cauldron which remains an open body, which ends up taking in all the elements of the material world, and ultimately gives birth to a new body, a new thing.
In any case, I'm excited to discuss the rest of Bakhtin and the drinking pamphlets.
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