ABSTRACT
The profane, crude, and fleshy caught the attention of Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin who wrote Rabelais and His World, a treatise that developed the concept of the "carnivalesque" as expressed by medieval common folk culture. Bakhtin discusses the carnivalesque in the context of François Rabelais' multivolume work Gargantua and Pantagruel and French medieval culture. Carnivalesque and grotesque realism share a transgressive desire to transform the ordinary: "The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming". The carnivalesque and grotesque realism are always oppositional, for they are, by definition, "unofficial culture". Bakhtin describes the carnivalesque as a way to respond to official culture, prevailing values, and hierarchies, and he explains how grotesque realism is one of the ways that scholars encounter the carnivalesque in language and imagery. Bakhtin insists that degradation destroys, but also regenerates: "Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth".
