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RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD BY MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

A very insightful study of Rabelais’s work in the medieval period and the Renaissance is presented by literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and his World.  The volume consists of a Foreword by Krystyna Pomorska; a substantial introduction; and seven long chapters in which the author discusses several topics like the role played by Rabelais in the History of Laughter, Rabelais’s use of the language of the marketplace, the relations between the popular-festive forms and images in Rabelais’s writing, the process of imagery, the grotesque projection of the body and its sources, as well as Rabelais’s own images and his time.

According to Bakhtin, Rabelais is the most difficult classical author of world literature (3). A reconstruction of artistic and ideological perceptions, along with the renunciation of rooted demands of literary texts, has to be taken into consideration when approaching Rabelais’s work, for his images escape from dogmas, authoritarianism and concepts that attempt to provide “finished and polished” accounts of reality. In the introductory words, Bakhtin offers a description of the culture of folk humor in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that helps us to have a clear idea of the importance of the carnival festivities, comic spectacles and other related rituals in the lives of the people. “Carnivals,” says Bakhtin, “belonged to the borderline between art and life, and they were organized on the basis of laughter.” Filled with changing, playful and undefined forms, the carnival was life itself, shaped according to a certain pattern of play.

The concepts of the body and the mask constitute other important themes exposed by Bakhtin. The author argues that people from each of the studied periods established different cannons of appreciation of the human body. The body of grotesque realism was represented as hideous and formless, in contrast to the framework of the cannon of beauty developed in the Renaissance. With regards to the mask, Bakhtin considers it as the most complex theme of folk culture as it was connected to the joy of change and reincarnation, metamorphosis, and violation of natural boundaries (39-40).

Other topics are explored in depth in the following chapters. For instance, the Renaissance’s conception of laughter appears fully described as “one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole,” history and man included (66). The notion of the marketplace spectacles impregnated by popular and unofficial elements becomes a key element to understand how the theme of oaths and curses organically emerges out of the Rabelaisian images (193). The popular-festive images were a powerful tool of capturing the real world and served as a point of departure for an authentic development of realism in the literature by Rabelais. The banquet images play an important part in Rabelais’s first book Pantagruel that refers to the process of swallowing, which is considered by Bakhtin on the borderline between body and food images (279).

Exaggeration, hyperbolism and excessiveness are also attributes of the grotesque style as the body appears usually depicted in “the act of becoming.” As Bakhtin states, the body is “never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created and builds and creates another body” (317).  Rabelais’s familiar and colloquial forms of language may be one of the main sources of presenting the grotesque body. His knowledge of the world of objects and the world of language is seen in correspondence to the progress of navigation, architecture, industry, commerce, and art, among other subjects that flourished in the Renaissance, which allowed him to explore new (and archaic) forms of linguistic expressions.