Excerpts from: Bakhtin, Mikhail Problems of Dostoyevskys Poetics 1984

Humphrey, Chris The Politics of Carnival 1988

Mullini, Roberta European Medieval Drama 1996
The Role of Carnival in Medieval Society
Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators.
In carnival everyone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Because
carnivalistic life is drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent life turned inside out, the
reverse side of the world. The term carnival is often used as a catch-all term to describe any
festival occasion that pushes at the boundaries of what is considered to be safe, normal and
acceptable, in order to surprise, exhilarate and shock audiences and performers alike.
The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that
is non-carnival life, are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first of all is hierarchical
structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it that is,
everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among
people (including age).
All things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a
noncarnivalistic hierarchical worldview are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations.
Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with
the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.
Carnivalistic blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth,
carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body. Ultimately,
there is an interrelatedness of all things or the unity of opposites.
The idea is that carnival acts as a safety-valve: the metaphor of a controlled release of pent-
up steam is used to suggest that by temporarily inverting norms, it enabled the frustrations of
socially subordinate goups to be dissipated, and thereby helped to maintain the status quo.
Festive occasions on which the boundaries of everyday behavior were overstepped can therefore
be seen ironically, as a means through which unequal relations of power and opportunity
patriarchy, lordship, oligarchy were perpetuated in the cultures where misrule (carnival) occurs.
(Humphrey)
The primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival
king. This ritual is encountered in one form or another in all festivities of the carnival type: in the
most elaborately worked out forms the saturnalia, the European carnival and festival of fools (in
the latter, mock priests, bishops or popes, depending on the rank of the church, were chosen in
place of a king); in a less elaborated form, all other festivities of this type, right down to festival
banquets with their election of short-lived kings and queens of the festival. Rather than seeking
death or banishment of the authority figure, it attempts to shame or humiliate the figure into
changing his or her worldview and thus creating a social balance.
All the images of carnival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and
crisis: birth and death (the image of pregnant death), blessing and curse (benedictory carnival
curses which call simultaneously for death and rebirth); praise and abuse, youth and old age, top
and bottom, face and backside, stupidity and wisdom. Very characteristic for carnival thinking is
paired images, chosen for their contrast (high/low, fat/thin, etc.) or for their similarity
(doubles/twins). Also characteristic is the utilization of things in reverse.
Parodying is the creation of a decrowning double; it is the same world turned inside out.
[It is well known that popular culture, but also the learned tradition, makes use of parody to
disrupt authority, to mock the most ambitious forms of power, and to win the fear of the
terrifying. All the symbols of the carnival idiom are filled with the pathos of change and renewal,
with the sense of the gay relativity of prevailing truths and authorities. We find here a
characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the inside out of numerous parodies and travesties.
(Mullini)]
In the realm of carnivalistic folk culture there was no break in tradition between antiquity and
the Middle Ages. Essentially, every church holiday in the Middle Ages had its carnivalistic side,
the side facing the public square (especially those holidays like Corpus Christi). Many national
festivities, such as the bullfight for example, were of a clearly expressed carnivalistic character.
It could be said (with certain reservations, of course) that a person of the Middle Ages lived, as
it were, two lives: one was the official life, monolithically serious and gloomy, subjugated to a
strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence, and piety; the other was the life of
the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation
of everything sacred, full of debasing and obscenities, familiar contact with everyone and
everything. Both these lives were legitimate, but separated by strict temporal boundaries.

Discussion Questions:
1 What is carnival and what does it entail?
2 How do the ideas that surround carnival behavior connect with early Christian philosophy,
particularly the idea of duality?
3 What is the role of carnival/comedy/humor is opposing authority? Particularly the role of the
carnival king and/or court jester
4 What is parody? How was it used in the Medieval Period?
5 What role does carnival serve is altering the social balance?