rabelais and his world
rabelais and his world (1984) by mikhail bakhtin
reading for museum of care reading group on mikhail bakhtin.. one of david graeber‘s fav books
via 508 pg pdf from monoskop:
[https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Bakhtin_Mikhail_Rabelais_and_His_World_1984.pdf]
notes/quotes:
[also adding a bunch of notes here: scott on bakhtin]
8 (vii)
forward
When Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin’s first book to be published in English, appeared in 1968, the author was totally unknown in the West. Moreover, his name, his biography, and his authorship were a mystery even in his native Russia. Today, Bakhtin (1895-1975) is internationally acclaimed in the world of letters and the humanities generally.
His roots in the intellectual life of the turn of the century, Bakhtin insisted that art is oriented toward communication..t “Form” in art, thus conceived, is particularly active in expressing and conveying a system of values, a function that follows from the very nature of communication as an exchange of meaningful messages.
especially self-talk as data – missing piece #1
ie: rheingold (mom) art law – ‘not so much about the art – but the conversation you have with yourself while you’re making/creating art‘ .. getting us that ongoing detox.. keeping us us..
Even more striking are Bakhtin’s ideas concerning the role of semiosis outside the domain of art, or, as he put it, in the organization of life itself. In opposition to interpretations of life as inert “chaos” that is transformed into organized “form” by art, Bakhtin claims that life itself (traditionally considered “content”) is organized by human acts of behavior and cognition (postupok i poznanie) and is therefore already charged with a system of values at the moment it enters into an artistic structure. Art only transforms this organized “material” into a new system whose distinction is to mark new values. Bakhtin’s semiotic orientation and his pioneering modernity of thought are grounded in his accounting for human behavior as communication and, eo ipso, his recognition of the goal-directedness of all human messages.
for this.. need imagine if we ness.. ie: listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us.. as global detox leap
because all human messages to date have been (and still are) whalespeak
As a philosopher and literary scholar, Bakhtin had a “language obsession” as Michael Holquist calls it, or, as we might also say, a perfect understanding of language as a system; he managed to use language comprehended as a model for his analysis of art, specifically the art of the novel. Besides his revolutionary book on Dostoevsky, his essay “Disco·urse in the Novel”3 (“Slovo v romane”), written in 1934-35, belongs among the fundamental works on verbal art today. In it Bakhtin argues first and foremost against the outdated yet persistent idea of the “randomness” in the organization of the novel in contrast to poetry. He proved this assertion by demonstrating in his works the particular transformations of language necessary to produce the genre labeled the “novel.” In contradistinction to poetry, Bakhtin defines the novel as a “multiplicity of styles” (mnozhestvo stilei) in their mutual echoing, or as the word constantly reinvolved in a dialogue (which he calls romannoe slovo-the “novelistic word”). Behind each reply in this dialogue stands a “speaking man,” and therefore the word in the novel is always socially charged and thus necessarily polemical (critical, hostile). There is no one-voiced novel, and, consequently, every novel by its very nature is polemical.
yet language as control/enclosure.. rumi words law.. et al
9
Another of Bakhtin’s outstanding ideas connecting him with modern semiotics is his discovery that quoted speech (chuzhaia rech’) permeates all our language activities in both practical and artistic communication. Bakhtin reveals the constant presence of this phenomenon in a vast number of examples from all areas of life: literature, ethics, politics, law, and inner speech. He points to the fact that we are actually dealing with someone else’s words more often than with our own. Either we remember and respond to someone else’s words (in the case of ethics); or we represent them in order to argue, disagree, or defend them (in the case of law); or, finally, we carryon an inner dialogue, responding to someone’s words (including our own). In each case someone else’s speech makes it possible to generate our own and thus becomes an indispensable factor in the creative power of language.
no.. rather.. keeps on making us not us.. other people’s opinions/thoughts.. et al
yeah to beyond the monastic self.. but need to listen to itch-in-the-soul first.. because maté trump law and brown belonging law et al
A further domain of Bakhtin’s interest, and the source of his methodology, is folk culture. Even more than language and semiotics.s his concern with folk culture derives from the Russian tradition of his youth. Just as the Montpellier school of Rabelais’s time promoted the importance and developed various theories of laughter, so Russian scholars in the early 1920S, including Zelenin, Trubetzkoy, J akobson, Bogatyrev, and Propp, emphasized the importance of the “lower” strata of culture as opposed to the uniform, official “high culture.” The prohibition of laughter and the comical in the epoch prior to the Renaissance parallels the rejection of “subcultures” in the years prior to the Second World War.
10
*Bakhtin’s ideas concerning folk culture, with carnival as its indispensable component, are integral to his theory of art. The inherent features of carnival that he underscores are its emphatic and purposeful “heterglossia” (raznogolosost’s and its multiplicity of styles (mnogostil’nost’). Thus, the carnival principle corresponds to and is indeed a part of the novelistic principle itself. One may say that just as dialogization is the sine qua non for the novel structure, so carnivalization is the condition for the ultimate “structure of life” that is formed by “behavior and cognition.” Since the novel represents the very essence of life, it includes the carnivalesque in its properly transformed shape. In his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin notes that **“In carnival … the new mode of man’s relation to man is elaborated.” One of the essential aspects of this relation is the “unmasking” and disclosing of the unvarnished truth under the veil of false claims and arbitrary ranks..t Now, the role of dialogue-both historically and functionally, in language as a system as well as in the novel as a structure-is exactly the same. ***Bakhtin repeatedly points to the Socratian dialogue as a prototype of the discursive mechanism for revealing the truth. Dialogue so conceived is opposed to the “authoritarian word” (avtoritarnoe slovo) in the same way as carnival is opposed to official culture..t The “authoritarian word” ****does not allow any other type of speech to approach and interfere with it. Devoid of any zones of cooperation with other types of words, the “authoritarian word” thus excludes dialogue..t Similarly, any official culture that considers itself the only respectable model dismisses all other cultural strata as invalid or harmful.
*carnival et al
**part of global detox leap
***need 1st/most: means to undo our hierarchical listening to self/others/nature as global detox/re\set.. so we can org around legit needs
****language as control/enclosure.. need 2 conversations as infra.. in the city.. as the day
11
Long before he published his book on Rabelais, Bakhtin had defined in the most exact terms the principle and the presence of the carnivalesque in his native literary heritage.” However, the presence of carnival in Russian literature had been noted before Bakhtin, and a number of earlier critics and scholars had tried to approach and grasp this phenomenon. The nineteenth-century critic Vissarion Belinsky’s renowned characterization of Gogol’s universe as “laughter through tears” was probably the first observation of this kind. The particular place and character of humor in Russian literature has been a subject of discussion ever since. Some scholars have claimed that humor, in the western sense, is precluded from Russian literature, with the exception of works by authors of non-Russian, especially southern, origin, such as Gogol, Mayakovsky, or Bulgakov. Some critics, notably Chizhevsky and, especially, Trubetzkoy, discussed the specific character of Dostoevsky’s humor,” and came close to perceiving its essence; yet they did not attain Bakhtin’s depth and exactitude.The official prohibition of certain kinds of laughter, irony, and satire was imposed upon the writers of Russia after the revolution. It is eloquent that in the 1930S Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment, himself wrote on the subject and organized a special government commission to study satiric genres. The The fate of Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and Zoshchenko–the prominent continuers of the Gogolian and Dostoevskian tradition-testifies to the Soviet state’s rejection of free satire and concern with national self-irony, a situation similar to that prevailing during the Reformation. In defiance of this prohibition, both Rabelais and Bakhtin cultivated laughter, aware that laughter, like language, is uniquely characteristic of the human species.
Krystyna Pomorska15 (xiii)
prologue
intro thru pdf p 64 (40 of actual book) on page: m of care – oct 31 24
81 (57) – still intro
humanism and renaissance are not the product of knowledge. they do not arise because scholars discover the lost monuments of antique lit and art, and strive to bring them back to life.. humanism and the renaissance were born from the passionate and boundless expectation and striving of an aging epoch; its soul, shattered to its very depths was thirsting for a new youth
the striving toward renewal and a new birth, ‘the thirst for a new youth’ pervaded the carnival spirit of the middle ages and found a multiform expression in concrete sensual elements of folk culture, both in ritual and spectacle.. this was the second, festive life of the middle ages
francis of assisi called himself and his companions ‘god’s jugglers’.. his ‘spiritual joy’.. liberating and renewing principle of laughter
82
so our problem is posed.. however, the immediate object of our study is not the culture of folk humor but the work of rabelais.. his work is an encyclopedia of folk culture.. only that part of his work was read which was the least important for him.. the least essential.. rabelais’ exceptional charm, which we all feel, remains unexplained to date.. to explain it, it is first of all necessary to understand his peculiar language, that is, the language of the culture of folk humor
83 (59)
ch 1 – rabelais in the history of laughter
84
the fact that rabelais was understood and loved by the men of his time is proved most clearly by the numerous and deep marks of his influence and by the number of imitation inspired by his work
(63 of pdf)
The images of Romantic grotesque usually express fear of the world and seek to inspire their reader with this fear. On the contrary, the images of folk culture are absolutely fearless and communicate this fearlessness to all. This is also true of Renaissance literature. The high point of this spirit is reached in Rabelais’ novel; here fear is destroyed at its very origin and everything is turned into gaiety. It is the most fearless book in world literature.
(64)
In its Romantic form the mask is torn away from the oneness of the folk carnival concept. It is stripped of its original richness and acquires other meanings alien to its primitive nature; now the mask hides something, keeps a secret, deceives..an inexhaustible and many-colored life can always be descried behind the mask of folk grotesque.
masks and measures ness et al
notes/quotes from on Rabelais: pp. 59-61; on laughter: pp. 66-73; on the ‘feast of fools’: pp. 74-75; pp. 78-82; on parody: pp. 87-95 on page: m of care – nov 28 24 – session 2
notes/quotes from on chapter One: Rabelais in the History of Laughter: on mediaeval humour: pp. 96-103; on obscenity: pp.109-110; Rabelais and revolution: p. 119; on seriousness: pp. 122-124; on the belly: pp. 126-127; on the historicity of jokes: pp. 134-136; Rabelais’s laughter: pp. 140-144 on page: m of care – dec 26 24 – session 3
notes/quotes from ch two: The Language of the Marketplace in Rabelais – pp 169-195 – on page: m of care – jan 30 25 – session 4
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expanding the rabelais m of cares starting here:
dgi – benjamin palof – 11 14 25
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be you. 