course material

1. Bakhtin’ s account of the grotesque body
Bakhtin’ s account of the grotesque bodyMikhail Bakhtin is a Russian literary critic who
studied Francois Rabeilas’ work and came up with the concept of the grotesque body. He
divides his work into two main categories which are the carnival and the grotesque realism.
He describes the carnival as a social institution and the grotesque realism as a literary
mode. In his work, Bakhtin studies the interaction between the literary and social in an
attempt to explain the meaning of the human body. Rabelais uses the human anatomy as a
figure that depicts social and unruly biological exchange as he relates political conflicts to
the human anatomy. Bakhtin uses the grotesque body to explain how it is a figure that
depicts the celebration of the cycle of life as being a comic figure with profound
ambivalence. The positive side of the grotesque body being related to birth and renewal
while the negative part of it being related to death and decay. In Rabelais work, he uses
dung and urine to ridicule the king and clergy. According to Bakhtin, this was not just to
mock but also to unleash the people’ s power with an aim of renewing and regenerating the
entire social system. The people’ s festive carnival was used as a means of turning the
official spectacle upside down and inside out to make an impression, long enough, on the
participating official stratum.There exists an image of reversal in many folklore traditions
that celebrate the poor fool who eventually becomes king while in the process condemning
the powerful to ruin. Mikhail Bakhtin uses such reversals in creating energy that he refers to
as “ a carnival sense of the world.” The hierarchies and seriousness of the official life are
pushed aside by the laughter and abundance found in carnival. Carnival performs the
function of shaking up the authoritative version brought about by values and languages and
replacing it with the multiplicity of voices and meanings. From this space of multiplicity,
Bakhtin creates theories of language. He shows how dialogic language is used to disrupt
uniformity of thought as he discerns through the different modes of discourse. Bakhtin
symbolizes intellectual ideal of rethinking when he uses the image of reversal in his work.
He finds multiple levels of meanings in tones, images, and words. (Shanti, 1999, pg 130).The
ability to rethink is required as one tries to explain the contradictory and outrageous
images that are the basis of carnival ambivalence. Folklorists are able to discern the
multiple semantic levels in philosophical and social interactions by understanding the
theories of discourse and carnival. Many traditions have song, ritual, and narrative that
create a realm of meaning which a transformative potential in the society. As soon as
Bakhtin’ s philosophy of carnival became known in the West, it was embraced by a number
of folklorists who found it useful in their quest to understand the power relations and the

2. structure of carnival in many traditions.Bakhtin writes on how the spirit of carnival defies
systematic explanation. In the philosophy of carnival, he uses his key terms with even and
unexpected shifting with intertwining meanings. There is a dynamic movement that lies in
unofficial language when you look at the laughter, subversion, becoming, and ambivalence
that are most commonly found in unofficial language (Bakhtin, 1994, pg 280). Rabelais
novel Gargantua and Pantagruel describes elaborately the aesthetics of medieval culture
practiced by peasants. Bakhtin argues that this argument can only be understood by the
popular festive forms of late medieval-early renaissance using phrases like “ the folk” , “ the
people” , “ the unofficial world” , “ the second world” and “ the popular festive culture” to
try to explain the culture practiced by the peasants. Bakhtin compares the unofficial world
with the official world of religious and civil authority insisting that as a reader, you can only
understand Rabelais work by using the eyes of the 16th century which in those times were
finely tuned to the aesthetics of the grotesque. Grotesque images of lower bodily stratum
and feasting violence cannot in any way be understood using the limited scope of
convention. The grotesque images represent a reversal of logical expectations and morals.
There is a closure to the view of constant possibility and principles of stability when the
carnival reversal is taken into account (Rabelais and Screech, 2006, pg 15).Dialogism in
itself contains a model of the world that puts emphasis on relationality, inter-
connectedness, continual interaction and the permeability of physical and symbolic
boundaries that if explored divulge insights into our cognitive, ethical and practical
treatment of the non-human world (Fingesten, 1984, pg 430). Bakhtin explicitly indulges us
in human-nature relations as he makes key comments about nature and human who have
over time been developed by feminists, critical theorists, and ecologists (Gardner, 1993, pg
801). Francois Rabelais epitomizes Renaissance spirit and this is brought out in his
medieval style of writing. Bakhtin has used the figure of Rabelais to explain the collapse of
medievalism to pave way for the emergence of a more humanistic secularized society. The
archaic rituals depicted in the cultures of the peasants who lived in the 16th century are
well explained by Bakhtin as he looks at the various carnal excesses that largely constituted
an alternative abundance, social space, and equality giving a utopian promise of redemption
and plenitude.Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and His World examines the concept of the
grotesque realism. He stresses on the special character of laughter that is philosophical and
the utopian in relation to the highest spheres. Ancient rituals of mocking at kings and
clergies have survived in the modern times and acquired a new important meaning. The
cultic concept has faded away in the modern times while utopian, universal, all-human
element has been retained. The basic character of will and power is demonstrated and is
supposed to remove the lies in our experience with beings and in their interpretation. It
also grounds the principle from which the valuation springs and remains rooted. Will to
power is in itself a valuing and estimating principle. The will to power is already in itself a
valuing and estimating principle. If beings are grasped as will to power, the ‘ should’
supposed to hang above them becomes superfluous. This is the ‘ should’ against which
beings are measured. If life is taken to be the will to power, then it becomes the ground
principium of valuation. This implies that a “ should” does not determine a being but the
being determines the ‘ should.’ Life demands us to create values as it also values through

3. us whenever we post values (Heidegger and Krell, 1991, pg 89).There is the need to destroy
that lies in creation. In this destruction, the evil, ugly and the contrary are posited. These are
of proper necessity to creation that is to the will to power and the Being itself. Nullity
belongs to the being not as vacuous nothingness but purely as the empowering ‘ NO’ . This
is clearly depicted in Bakhtin’ s grotesque realism in his work Rabelais and His World. The
important principle of grotesque realism illustrates the act of lowering all that is spiritual,
high, and ideal in the end causing degradation. This transfer is viewed as one to the material
level, the body in its indissoluble unity and the sphere of the earth. The various grotesque
realism types degrade, lower to earth, and turn their subject into flesh. Laughter in itself
materializes and degrades. To degrade is the simultaneous killing, sowing and burying with
an aim of bringing forth something better. The earth depicts an element that swallows and
later gives birth (Harpham, 1976, pg 6). These two elements combined give the view that
degradation digs up a bodily grave that later brings forth a new birth. This shows that it not
only possesses a negative, destructive effect but also a regenerating one. Degrading an
object means hurling it down into the reproductive system in the lower stratum, the same
place where the acts of conception and also new birth take place.Grotesque realism
recognizes no other lower level: it represents the womb and also the fruitful earth with the
idea that it is always conceiving (Ellison, 2009, Pr 3). Bodies were not considered for
themselves but represented a materially bodily whole and hence transgressed their
isolation. The universal and private were all blended in a contradictory unity. The grotesque
body referred to a phenomenon in transformation that viewed it as metamorphosis of birth
together with death, becoming, and growth which is yet to be finished. The character trait of
the grotesque body is determined in relation with time. The other trait that is indispensable
is the ambivalence. Both poles of transformation are found in this image. Also the grotesque
image provides old as well as the new, the start and end, the procreation and the death of
the metamorphosis. These forms were bound to change as they developed thousands of
years later in relation to time, experience, and perception. During the early stages of the
archaic grotesque body, time is viewed as two parallel phases in development, the final, and
the initial, spring and winter seasons, being born and dying. There are figurines contained
in the famous Kerch terracotta collection of senile pregnant hags. In addition, these hags are
laughing. This is very strongly and typically expressed as grotesque showing that it is
ambivalent. It represents pregnant death, a death that also gives birth. The bodies of these
hags do posses nothing calm, stable, or completed. Flesh that is decaying, senile, and
deformed was combined with the flesh of new life which has been conceived but is yet to be
formed. The two contradictory forms of life are shown here to signify the epitome of
incompleteness. And as such that can be termed as the grotesque nature of the body, it is
unfinished, transgresses itself and outgrows its own limits with more emphasizing on those
body parts which are open to the outside world. These are the body parts having the world
emerging from or entering into or those that the body uses to go out and meet the
world.The body exceeds its own limit and discloses the essence of the principle of growth in
pregnancy, copulation, childbirth, and death, drinking, food consumption and defecation
throes (Steig, 1970, pg 256). This brings out the body as the ever-creating, ever unfinished
and yet the dying that illustrates the connection between the crib and the grave. This can be

4. used in studying the contemporary body as the open and unfinished body which signifies
bringing forth, being born and dying as not having clearly defined boundaries separating it
from the world. On the contrary it is blended with the objects in the world and the world
itself. The ever unfinished body is the incarnation of this world as the lower stratum, as the
generating principle and also the swallowing principle, as the grave of the body and bosom
(Bakhtin, 1984, pg 10).This concept is very useful in analyzing the contemporary body as it
is clear that thorough analysis of the grotesque body is done from conception to death. This
can help us understand the contemporary body in detail including its functions. The
grotesque image brings out the concepts of conception, pregnancy, childbirth, life,
defecation, drinking, eating, and also death (Stoddart, 2007, pg 133). All this function are
found in the contemporary human body and as such the comparison between the two will
only bring us closer to understanding the contemporary body even more. The actions
performed by the contemporary body such as laughter and seriousness are also brought out
in the grotesque body and from this we learn about the various limits that are experienced
by the human body from time to time.In conclusion, the works of Bakhtin clearly bring out
the relation of the grotesque body to the political environment of the modern times. They
show a great resemblance between the grotesque bodies only this time going deeper in an
archaic way in our quest to study the contemporary body. He takes back in time making us
see with the eyes of medieval peasants who lived in the 16th century the nature of the
contemporary body when compared to the grotesque image of the body that is depicted by
these peasants as they mock the clergies and the Kings who ruled them.The dark nature of
the image created by the grotesque image is imprinted in our minds helping us understand
clearly what was happening in the medieval times. The writer brings the events closer to us
as if they are happening at present. This still happens in the modern civilized world as
people still mock their rulers but in a more civilized way than it used to happen back then.
The contemporary body is also studied in a more reserved way than it used to be. The
grotesque body was turned inside out and upside down back then and this could really be
useful in understanding the contemporary body in detail.Reference ListBakhtin, M. M. 1984.
Rabelais and his world. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Elisson, G. 2009. Grotesque
Physicality: Female Excess in Angela Carter’ s “ Nights at the Circus.” Retrieved November
20, 2011 from: http://hdl.handle.net/1946/3529Fingesten, P. 1984. “ Delimitating the
Concept of the Grotesque” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art History, Vol. 42, No. 4: 419-
426.Gardiner, M. 1993. “ Ecology and Carnival: Traces of a ‘ Green’ Social Theory In the
Writings of M. Bakhtin.” Theory and Society. 22, 765-812.Harpham, G. 1976. “ The
Grotesque: First Principles” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No.
4Heidegger, M. and Krell, D. F. 1991. Nietzsche: Vols. 3 and 4 (Vol. 3: The Will to Power as
Knowledge and as Metaphysics; Vol. 4: Nihilism). San Francisco: HarperOne.Screech, M. A.
and Rabelais F. (2006). Gargantua and Pantagruel. London: Penguin classics.Shanti, E.
(1999). “ Carnival and Dialogue in Bakhtin’ s Poetics of Folklore.” Folklore Forum
30(1/2):129-139.Steig, M. (1970). “ Defining the Grotesque: An Attempt at Synthesis” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 29, No. 2: 253-260.Stoddart H. (2007). Angela
Carter’ s Nights at the circus. London: Routeledge.