Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin

Though he can't avoid taking a few pointless swipes at Saussure and Postmodernism, Eagleton has an interesting review in the LRB and Bakhtin is always an interesting subject.

In Rabelais and His World, this orgy of signification takes to the street in the form of a carnival. In the Russian tradition of the holy fool, the ancient art of the people debunks all transcendental signifiers and submits all official values to satiric parody. Like the novel, it celebrates flux and mutability, the dynamic and unstable. All absolute values are ridiculed and relativised. Against the high-mindedness of official doctrine is pitted the lethal power of laughter. Travesty, disfigurement and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane, man/woman, high culture/low culture) rampage for a euphoric moment through the byways and marketplaces. Rigid oppositions are scabrously dismantled. Birth and death, destruction and renewal, body and spirit, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are sent packing with their tails in each other’s mouths. Orifices are seen as the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into each other. Everything about the practice is ambiguous, Janus-faced, too slippery to be pinned down. Carnival deflates the sublime and portentous; and behind this desublimation lies the bathos of the Christian gospel, for which salvation comes down to the gift of a cup of water. As the first movement in history to consecrate the common life, Christianity stands at the source of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday, just as it lurks distantly behind the current fascination with popular culture.

This a wonderfully descriptive paragraph with all sorts of amazing ideas to unpack. Debunking transcendental signifiers. Ridiculing and relativising absolute values. Travesty, disfigurement, and inversion. Dismantling rigid oppositions. This all sounds very postmodern to me and its a shame that Eagleton can't get past his bias and distaste. Perhaps it is the insistence that Eagleton reads through Bakhtin that there must be something behind the Carnival, a source for his preoccupation with the everyday. Some find Christianity, others would try to replace it with Marxism. For a postmodernist, there is nothing behind the desublimation. It is hyperreal, it is simulated, it is self-referential. The everyday and the fascination with popular culture is the life we have, nothing more. Travesties and monsters are there to remind us that language and art are themselves the forces that "make for human misery and oppression [and the forces that] can also make for emancipation and wellbeing".