It is at this point that, through costume and mask, an individual exchanges bodies and is renewed. At carnival time, the unique sense of time and space causes the individual to feel he is a part of the collectivity, at which point he ceases to be himself. Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age” (Bakhtin 10). According to Bakhtin, “ll were considered equal during carnival.
Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body (Clark and Holquist 297-299).īakhtin explains that carnival, in Rabelais' work and age, is associated with the collectivity for those attending a carnival do not merely constitute a crowd rather the people are seen as a whole, organized in a way that defies socioeconomic and political organization (Clark and Holquist 302). By means of this analysis, Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts in Rabelais' work: the first is carnival which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism, which is defined as a literary mode. Throughout Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin attempts two things: first, to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either ignored or suppressed and, second, to conduct an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to discover the balance between language that was permitted and language which was not. Bakhtin declares that, for centuries, Rabelais' book had been misunderstood. Mikhail Bakhtin's book Rabelais and His World explores Gargantua and Pantagruel and is considered a classic of Renaissance studies (Clark and Holquist 295).
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