Chapter 7 - Christian motifs in Bakhtin's carnival writings

Summary

In a recent article, Turbin reports that Bakhtin once remarked to him, ‘The gospel, too, is carnival’ (1990, 25). The aim of this chapter is, in brief, to examine that remark with reference to Bakhtin's carnival writings. In so doing I shall allow myself a certain licence to meditate on how the Christian motifs which, as I hope I have established in the foregoing chapters, permeate Bakhtin's work, knit with a certain reading of the New Testament. The validity of this approach, of course, stands or falls on the extent to which you, the reader, have been persuaded by the argument so far. Insofar as fall and incarnation, creativity and aesthetic love inform Bakhtin's discourse, my meditations will not be found to be entirely speculative. As to the purpose of such an exercise, I believe that a circumspect inclusion of the gospels in a ‘dialogue’ with Bakhtin can ultimately help us to take an investigation of the Christian dimension to his theories further in a fruitful, and, I trust, legitimate way. An examination of the anti-ecclesiastical bias of Bakhtin's The Work of François Rabelais and Popular Culture of the Middle Ages and its implications for such a project is followed by a discussion of certain central features of carnival with a view to gaining a picture of the kind of spirituality Bakhtin might have endorsed in his work under different political conditions. Rabelais is commonly held to be on one level a carefully constructed critique of the Stalinist regime.