| Chapter : | Introduction |
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so that it could be refashioned in the mouths and bodies of the people. Carnival pitted the “unofficial” folk culture of the populous against the “official” culture of the dominant social hierarchy, and created space and time in which folk culture could play with dominant ideals. In this sense, the sociological institution of carnival corresponds to Bakhtin's linguistic idea of heteroglossia—the collision of different discourses within one text or national language, including the persistence of linguistic meaning from earlier texts that disrupt a speaker or writer's ability to produce uncomplicated individual rhetoric. The carnival's tradition of grotesque parody highlights the intertextuality of ideology by demonstrating the power of the collective to appropriate, mock, and interrogate expressions of the ideal in official culture. Bakhtin sees carnival as an important part of the process of social change in that it challenged dominant values in pre- and early-modern culture: “This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things” (34). Though he does not mechanize how carnival's challenges to linguistic and ideological meaning ultimately produce real social change in the material world, the ideological revision and renewal offered by the carnival spirit and the grotesque are, for Bakhtin, the wellspring of their value.
Bakhtin specifically attends to the importance of bodily imagery, particularly odd bodies, in negotiating ideology. Grotesque bodies are essential to carnival. Bakhtin describes the grotesque body in terms of change, openness, and collectivity:
Images of the grotesque body—characterized by extremes of size, contradiction, and emphasis on bodily orifices—encourage a fluid exchange between normative ideals in a culture and the varied, often non-ideal human beings who test such expectations against their own