MDMD6: The carnivalesque (1)

[Paul Nightingale]

Pam Morris ed, The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev,
Voloshinov, London: Edward Arnold, 1994.
EP Thompson, Customs in Common, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.

Bakhtin's take on carnival (in Rabalais and His World) is that it represents
a popular counternarrative, "sharply distinct from the serious official,
ecclesiastical, feudal and political cult forms and ceremonials" (p197). He
deals with the medieval and early-modern renaissance period in Europe; that
is to say, the transition from feudalism to early capitalist modes of
production. I'm thinking also of the territory covered by EP Thompson in
"Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism" (first published in 1967).
Thompson describes popular resistance to regularised labour: "The work
pattern was one of alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness,
wherever men were in control of their own working lives ... There are few
trades which are not described as honouring Saint Monday" (p373). Thompson
notes that Saint Monday, the practice of extending the weekend, survived
into the C20th, particularly in coal-mining (which, as I've already
suggested, has been granted a central role in the writing of labour history
and working-class culture generally).

Given the importance of food in M&D, it's worth considering Bakhtin's view
on feasting within the carnivalesque: "As opposed to the official feast, one
might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing
truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all
hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true
feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to
all that was immortalised and completed" (p199).

>From Thompson: "This irregular working rhythm is commonly associated with
heavy week-end drinking: Saint Monday is a target for many Victorian
temperance tracts" (p377).

Elsewhere, Bakhtin argues that laughter is subversive: "The serious aspects
of class culture are official and authoritarian; they are combined with
violence, prohibitions, limitations, and always contain an element of fear
and of intimidation ... Laughter, on the contrary, overcomes fear, for it
knows no inhibitions, no limitations. Its idiom is never used by violence
and authority" (p209).

One of the points made by Thompson is that the imposition of "clock time"
was violent, an attempted incursion into the private and personal spheres of
daily life; it was one of the ways in which capitalism was able to separate
labour power from wage labour (ie work done that is 'stolen' and then
'rewarded' by payment): "The irregular work rhythms ... help us to
understand the severity of mercantilist doctrines as to the necessity of
holding down wages as a preventative against idleness" (p383).

>From Bakhtin: "[Food] concluded work and struggle and was their crown of
glory. Work triumphed in food. Human labour's encounter with the world and
the struggle against it ended in food, in the swallowing of that which had
been wrested from the world ... It must be stressed that both labour and
food were collective; the whole of society took part in them" (pp228-9).