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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
I came across a rather interesting comparison of Mikhail Bakhtin with Walter Benjamin and was particularly struck by this section:"Traditionally carnival is the last blowout before Lent: a time of excess, when the prohibitions on carnal satisfaction are abolished and popular creative energy is given full expression in the form of costumes, masks, songs, dances, puppet shows, etc. Society is, in normal circumstances, ruled by the "head" (in medieval Europe, the court and the church). During carnival, hierarchy is not only suspended but inverted: The village idiot becomes king, sinners in priestly vestments preach nonsensical or blasphemous sermons...
The revelry of medieval carnival often included violence -- the slaughter of animals (and, when things got out of hand, people). The radically democratic essence of carnival is a cliche of academic discourse on Bakhtin, at least in the United States. But an essay by Boris Groys, "Between Stalin and Dionysus" (1989), suggests that things are not so simple: "One should not even speak of democracy here: no one is given the democratic right to shirk carnival, to not take part, to remain on the sidelines. On the contrary, precisely those who try to do so are the first to be subject to well-deserved `cheerful vilifications and beatings.' According to Bakhtin, this nightmare is transformed into carnival thanks to the laughter that accompanies it."
There is another difficulty with the concept of carnival not mentioned here; carnival is a form of release that serves to perpetuate the social hierarchy, not something that subverts it. Carnival is a means to dissolve and release tensions so that they can subsequently be resumed. While it is true that carnival in literature and art can demosntrate the radically democratic character assigned to it here, it is also true that such depictions tend to contain this character quite thoroughly (as with the fate of Falstaff, for example). There is still a debate to be had on how complete such a containment can ever be but treating the subject as if it were inherently subversive is quite wide of the mark.
posted by Richard 7:36 pm
