This is the first scholarly edition in English of Bakhtin’s global best seller on Rabelais, carnival bodies, and the cosmic virtues of laughter. He wrote it in the 1930s as a monograph, defended it in 1946 as a dissertation, and then revised it into a book publishable in the postwar Soviet Union. With his exquisite command of French and German of all periods, Bakhtin is a surprisingly good close reader of Rabelais. He is contentious, of course—in part because such was the Stalinist mandate: no more borrowing from the bourgeois West; Marxist-Leninist Russia is not a beggar nation; Soviet literary scholarship must now interpret Western classics better and more truly than their own home scholars can do. Bakhtin is indeed original, bold, granular in his readings, ambitious, and (although enterprising) not care-less. One senses his photographic memory for literary texts, his relishing of sounds in their original language (here, Sergeiy Sandler matches him word for word, preserving the reiterations, researching the sources, and drawing on the most appropriate translations). Russian academic prose is thick, however. Modeled on the erudite practice of the nineteenth-century German professoriate, this language is heavier and more abstract than the chatty norms of our Anglophone essay. Add to this the fact that Bakhtin’s own style can be ponderous, ecstatic, hyperbolic, and repetitious to the point of stupefaction. An honest translation must be true to this texture while also reflecting its patches of poetry, which can suddenly, unexpectedly raise us up—as do the rhythmic refrains of a liturgy or a chant.
This dual mandate—to shock and overstate with revolutionary verve and to document one’s work with all the reassuring pedantry of the continental scholarly tradition—helps explain a great deal in this curious book. But an odd tension obtains between form and content. We think of the carnival square in terms of its unbridled, trickster-filled, fun-loving improvisations; carnival is not a bookish bit of human culture. Among the charms of this study, therefore, is Bakhtin’s scrupulously academic treatment of Rabelais’s scabrous material, its irreverent use of numbers, breathtaking crudeness of epithet, and digressions on Gargantua’s arse-wipes as a top-to-bottom, cheeks-into-buttocks inversion that provide a defamiliarizing jolt. Such well-documented pedantry is itself hilarious—and Bakhtin, always more of a trickster than a moralist, was surely alert to a stylistic grotesque that mimics Rabelais’s own wickedly learned folly. Life, both what we hear and what we feel, is resurrected from the bottom-most organs first.
This foreword addresses two questions. First, surprisingly much in this book is “Party-minded,” obedient to the reigning ideological slogans of the Soviet state. One might even say that its most exuberant parts succeed ingrafting then-current communist catchwords on to the sixteenth-century French humanist François Rabelais. How does Bakhtin, an apolitical man, Christian personalist, and “strange kind of Kantian,” manage to carry off this task—and do so honorably, with a transformative edge that caught the imagination of the world? Second, the year 2025 is the semicentennial of Bakhtin’s death. Utopian projections have long been out of fashion; indeed, they are unsustainable. Can our twenty-first century tolerate a carnival worldview, one cast even remotely in Bakhtin’s spirit, in which Death doesn’t matter and nothing runs out?
To consider first the Party-mindedness. It helps to hear this book in its initial academic context. What rules did it need to follow? Bakhtin consistently presents Rabelais, a physician, scholar-poet, and diplomat educated in the sixteenth-century Franciscan Order, as an anticleric, an enemy of all dogmatism, piety, mysticism, and prayer, a radically democratizing and secularizing force. To be sure, Bakhtin assures the reader, Rabelais did not “overtly contest the immortality of the soul, taking it for granted.” Buthe claims that his subject cared more about “relative immortality”—about bodies giving birth to other bodies on the earthly plane. The Church every-where is oppressive, its personnel all lecherous parasites, and heaven itself is “decentralized”—that is, relocated from the vertical to the horizontal axis. Essential truth is “inwardly free, merry, and materialistic.” Rabelais’s books were indeed banned by the Sorbonne (whereas the Popes took Rabelais under their protection); he was a persecuted writer. But Bakhtin’s tone fits right in with the Soviet anti-God campaigns and purging of priests. Further, Bakhtin insists that the folk of folklore have no need of a transcendent. However devastating a famine or war, the common people celebrate “labor that triumphs in eating.” The working class swallows the world, makes it part of itself, flushes away waste products as its body grows at the world’s expense; “there can be no sad eating.” However, none of this is ordinary-life eating, defecating, copulating, or the sort of playful combat that contributes to personal enjoyment, potency, or the lusts of an egoistic individual. It is the communal triumph of an entire people. And “there is no room for fear” in the people immortal, because optimism is natural for the folk. Laughing, they “give birth as they die.” All this resonates with Stalin’s World War II rhetoric—or with the war drums of the militarized, mythologized Russia of the mid-2020s.
These parallels might pacify the censors, but Bakhtin, of course, is after bigger game. He would have us appreciate the vast multipurposedness of the carnival idea, its antiessentialism and amoral survival potential that celebrates the very fact of change. For Bakhtin had devised a dynamic that works both ways. Carnival laughter is powerful enough to be revolutionary (against obscurantist feudalism or a stingy bourgeoisie), but it is also ambivalent, unfinished, two-way, and ever in transit. Thus it requires that we forever suspend judgment and take the present reality as unserious. Laughter is progressive only inthe sense of breaking down constraints, not in building up class solidarity or setting an agenda. A two-way laugh both defeats fear and discredits the laws of cause and effect (when Rabelais praises the charlatan physicians and hawkers of fake cures on the public square, the lesson is that what heals us is not folk medicine but the miracle of laughter). And when Bakhtin insists that a “new seriousness, free and sober” is being born in the Renaissance, he has in mind an open seriousness, one not intimidated by monologic ideology or any allegories of predestination. Bakhtin’s hero is “merry time”; he emphasizes Rabelais’s “carnivalesque perception of the historical process as a game.” This is not, then, the purposeful forward motion preferred by dialectical material-ism but rather the spontaneous play of dialogic matter.
The two-wayness of carnival is a tricky beast. It guarantees one of Bakhtin’s key virtues, ambivalence, an attitude grounded not in uncertainty, indifference, relativism, or any principled tolerance of otherness but in a peculiar creative type of negation, as well as in the potent and (to us moderns) “illogical” doctrine of antinomy. Negation does not deny a thing, but turns it inside-out or upside-down. The recurring exemplary antinomy for Bakhtin is the fused pairkhvala/bran’, praise/invective, in words, actions, attitudes, intentions, and reception. Is this satire—that is, when required to praise Stalin, should others hear us as cursing him out? Bakhtin is careful here. Politicized thinking is always reductive and usually one-way. The “laughing whole” of public-square speech must be understood in terms of genre, not power. Laughter, and genres of laughing speech, do not pass judgment. What they do is provide energy, possible ways out of something different, and improve the mood.
Holy Writ is parodied. So are clericals, kings, and magistrates, who are shown feasting, drinking, and brawling endlessly. This hypocritical, stable official hierarchy of eaters, drinkers, and bullies is mercilessly satirized, but the images of food, drink, and punching a person out are not. Of asceticism or pacifism, there is none. “Wine and bread have their own logic, their own truth, always positive,” Bakhtin writes. Such a logic holds that matter is nourishing—and that every material image is always becoming something else, invariably implicated in other images that share a border with it. Ambivalent “two-bodied wholes” of praise/invective are not neutral, cannot be “objective,” and can never endorse “the non-participating position of a third. ”There is no place for such a [detached] third party in a becoming world.”
This brings us to a final fact about ambivalence, a potentially counter-revolutionary quality that Bakhtin costumes as politically correct. Ambivalence is expressed not in arguments but in images. An image is present to us all at once, as a field. It’s an intuition, an orientation, not a linear narrative that moves from “problem” to “solution.” Readers of this translation will note the omnipresence, in Bakhtin’s writing, of the word “image”(obraz)—not “feast” but “image of a feast”; not “language” but “image of a language.” In every instance Sandler retains the word, even though it clogs the English text. There is a reason for this. Image-based thinking (obraznoemyshlenie) is overall a more accurate carrier for carnival truths than is word-based thinking (which is sequential, discursive, and logical and ends up eliminating contradictions in order to make a point or deliver a moral).Rationalistic thinking, of the Renaissance and later, tended to make our images “thin and flat,” Bakhtin laments. Although the material world is deeply positive, modernization moves the center of gravity to the “moral”(or the abstract) content of the image. Thus carnival hyperbole is reduced to exaggeration and negative satire. The folkloric image, however, has no fixed moral content. This is what ambivalence means.
Consider the case of pain and violence, so merrily indulged in throughout Rabelais and so seemingly anaesthetized. There are three interrelated ways to look at it. First, there is violence as metaphor. Its ugly reality is not a simple negative, just as verbal abuse is not. Beating up the kings, cops, bailiffs, and members of a wedding feast, and then proceeding to dismember their bodies, is not morose or masochistic. We’re not meant to focus on the pain. In the “folk-festive system of images,” the beaten-up body becomes a ploughed field, a “bodily harvest.” Laughter and slaughter are fertilizing acts. Bakhtin is eloquent about the overlap of battle, kitchen, and butcher shop.
Since none of this seems to hurt, as a second option, we might consider violence as configured in utopia. Cuffing and aggressive physical contact in Rabelais is radically egalitarian. But egalitarian does not mean “equal rights.” It means equal treatment: no one is exempt, no one can opt out, and no one has the right to complain. Since there are no footlights, none of the protected zones of a stage performance exist; there is no audience; no one is allowed to simply watch. From the Enlightenment on—and folk-festive culture is not on easy terms with what we call “enlightenment”—European culture has had trouble ignoring individual human rights and, especially in the Romantic era, ignoring individual pain. If the folk-festive economy is respected, however, bodies never run out. Food never runs out.
Finally, image-based thinking permits us to experience, at a single glance, what Bakhtin calls “becoming.” At the end of chapter 6 we find a lengthy discourse on recurrent sorts of violence and pain in the natural world—with special focus on the kinship between death throes and birth spasms. “The image of death,” Bakhtin writes, “while picking out the given (individual)dying body, at the same time also picks up a small bit of another body, one that is being born.” The image of birth is likewise ambivalent: “it picks out the body that is being born, but also picks up a bit of the dying one.” All that exists now is in the process of becoming something else—and is therefore laughable, Bakhtin writes, “since all that becomes is laughable” (mockingly and joyfully). It is not uncommon to find instances in Rabelais of straight-up death from laughter, “merry death,” death from “an excess [izbytok] of joy.” Such scenarios are possible, how-ever, only when I keep the whole picture in view, when I do not feel reality solely from within the “I.” The individual parts of any whole are mobile and cannot be mechanically isolated.
Do we laugh or cry at this news? Much here makes the modern reader uncomfortable. There is no private laughter, no individual joy or grief, no solitude.
Excerpted from Rabelais and His Word by Mikhail Bakhtin. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2025.
