You can hear the nostalgic ache in her voice contrasted with the decay in her language. The colored dance of lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.” Olympia Binewski. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. “A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. The happiness that Oly has in it is the happiness she has in her family, in her love. To them, the sacred occasion of carnivalesque, the light poetic humor that serves as a beacon from the unbearable weight of drab everyday existence, is itself profane and barren, just like everything else. They work hard to be festive, to create gaiety and illusions of hope. The Binewski’s live behind the glitz, behind the flashing lights. Ideally, it is vividly felt as an escape from the usual official way of life.īut what if the carnival is your official way of life? It has a universal sprit it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part.” Bakhtin. During carnival time, life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. While the carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. ![]() “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people they live it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all people. Opposites comingle, everyone is included. This subversion and liberation has its roots in the carnival, where social hierarchies are overturned, where the fool is wise, and a king is no better than a beggar. Bakhtin thinks that in order to understand Rabelais, one must reconstruct their aesthetic and ideological perceptions by entering and elevating the bawdy, chaotic world of folk humor, in other words, toilet humor. Mikhail Bakhtin developed his theory in his study of Rabelais. And this whole is gay and gracious.” Bakhtin. ![]() The comic, social, and bodily elements are given here as an indivisible whole. “The material bodily principle in grotesque realism is offered in its all-popular festive and utopian aspect. Grotesque realism is all about this kind of materialist introspection, it’s about degradation, “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of the earth and body in their indissoluble unity.” (Bakhtin) Powerful images of the humans–often larger or deformed in some way, though not necessarily so–eating, drinking, fucking, menstruating, micturating, and defecating. No one is as isolated as they think, nor are they as connected as they want. “This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.” Prospero, The Tempest 5.1.275-6, the epigraph to Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.Įveryone has secret desires, lusts, revulsions, curiosities. Geek Love is so brilliant, so wonderful, that I almost urge you, if you have not read it, not to read on. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy.
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