Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin

Bakhtin evokes carnival as a special, creative life form, with its own space and time. For both, carnival, with its emphasis on the earthly and the grotesque, signified the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. The work of both Rabelais and Bakhtin springs from an age of revolution, and each reflects a particularly open sense of the literary text. In Bakhtin's view, the spirit of laughter and irreverence prevailing at carnival time is the dominant quality of Rabelais's art. Blurb from the Indiana University Press edition This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially the world of carnival, as depicted in the novels of François Rabelais. This entire book is a golden bough.' -Bakhtin quoting French historian Jules Michelet in Histoire de France, vol. Under each tiny leaf of this forest of dreams, the fruit which the future will harvest lies hidden. If he does not discover, he foresees, he promises, he directs.

But refracted by this foolery, the genius of the age and its prophetic power are revealed in all their majesty. 'Rabelais collected wisdom from the popular elemental forces of the ancient Provencal idioms, sayings, proverbs, school farces, from the mouth of fools and clowns. 'This image of the body acquired a considerable and substantial development in the popular, festive, and spectacle forms of the Middle Ages: in the feast of the fool, in charivari and carnival, in the popular side show of Corpus Christi, in the diableries of the mystery plays, the soties, and farces.'- Rabelais and His World (1965) by Mikhail Bakhtin, (p.27 tr. Gargantua eating six pilgrims from Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, as illustrated by Gustave Doré

Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin