ABSTRACT

The carnivalesque play which one can find emerging from his informants' practices simply give rise to a Turnerian critique, a ritual of inversion, or a stronger Bakhtinian notion of creation, a ritual of subversion. It bisects the strategies of inversion and subversion, forming a periphery within the very centre, a constitutive outside that refuses to reinforce that which it opposes. Turner understands of the carnival dynamic, 'the creative anti-structure of mechanized modernity' as he termed it, held considerable space in his examination of contemporary ritual as a whole. The social (dis)order of communitas would thus inexorably return to the pre-existing structural order, the reaggregation coming to form an inevitable part of the whole. The extravagant and licentious texts Rabelais produced however conjoined the two modes. It was a modality that literally transgressed its concrete media that materially transgressed space that instrumentally transgressed time.