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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 101

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

in Rabelais (Bakhtin, 1981; Bakhtin, 1965). According to
Bakhtin, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel had used ‘the
popular-festive system of images’ to attack ‘the fundamental
dogmas and sacraments, the holy of holies of medieval
ideology’ (p. 268). In Rabelais, as in medieval reality, the ‘carn-
ivalesque crowd’, he wrote, ‘is the people as a whole,...
organized in their own way,... outside of and contrary to
all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political
organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity
. . . The people become aware of their sensual, material bodily
unity and community’ (p. 255). The carnival is also a world of
language mixing, of the parodic speech forms of folk humour,
of debunking and ‘decrowning’ the official Latin of the
priest caste, of the free play of words in a context of collapsed
hierarchies: ‘The hard, official dividing lines between
objects, phenomena, and values begin to fade. There is an
awakening of the ancient ambivalence of all words and ex-
pression...revived in a free and gay form’ (p. 420).
Bakhtin remains an enduring influence on contemporary
cultural theory, if only as a brake on more conventionally Form-
alist conceptions of structure as asocial, ahistorical and immanent.
The concepts of dialogism and heteroglossia suggest a levelling
of ideological viewpoints, which in reality, as distinct from fiction,
occurs only very rarely outside the carnival. And even the concept
of the carnivalesque seems problematic once extracted from the
social context of the medieval marketplace. As Stallybrass and
White have observed, its displacement from the marketplace to
the bourgeois home, through the novel form, hardly disrupts the
dominant norms (Stallybrass & White, 1986). Hirschkop has
asked how might the carnivalesque be ‘translated into the very
different kinds of popular culture one finds in modern capitalist
societies?’ (Hirschkop, 1989, p. 3). The answer is that in most cases
it can’t. Indeed, the subversive potential of the carnivalesque
might only still exist in the so-called Third World, where capitalist
modernity has not yet fully dissolved pre-modern ways of life.
Perhaps the true value of the notion lies neither with the novel
nor with any other contemporary literary form, but with its
capacity to remind us of our common bodily ties in ‘an age

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