Do zombie-figures, highlighting the materiality and the "gross" aspects of the body as they mob and crowd and swarm, rehearse what Bakhtin below calls the carnivalesque?
And is this resurgent carnivalesque moment, so often connected to the "lower orders," the poor and the laboring classes, one answer to the question:
Why do we laugh at zombies, laugh at images of our own mortality and materiality, when by rights we should be horrified?
Recent examples in our reading:
Grandpa, resistant to social norms, in "A Case."
And in "Bitter Herbs," the narrator bound for and to the carnival City, New Orleans; leaving his old self behind and at the story's close taking the hand of the little zombie girl and walking with her into the light, a bright "dawn."
The zombie-game with carnivalesque and the Grotesque:
Norms are inverted: the real living ones are the dead, and the dead are the living ones in their "dead" normal world.
This means the zombie can become an image of resistance, freedom, rebellion, a track that leads all the way to various utopian and posthuman zombie-figures.
Think Marilyn Manson?
"Celebrations of a carnival type represented a considerable part of the life of medieval
men, even in the time given over to them. Large medieval cities devoted an average of
three months a year to these festivities" (13).
"In grotesque realism... the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented not in a private, egoistic form, severed from other spheres of life, but as something universal,
representing all the people. As such it is opposed to severance from the material and
bodily roots of the world; it makes no pretense to renunciation of the earthy, or
independence of the earth and the body. We repeat: the body and bodily life have here
a cosmic and at the same time an all-people's character; this is not the body and its
physiology in the modern sense of these words, because it is not individualized. The
material bodily principle is contained not in the biological individual, not in the
bourgeois ego, but in the people, a people who are continually growing and
renewed.... This exaggeration has a positive, assertive character. The leading themes
of these images of bodily life are fertility, growth, and a brimming-over abundance.
Manifestations of this life refer not to the isolated biological individual, not to the
private, egotistic 'economic man,' but to the collective ancestral body of all the
people" (19).
"To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life
of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and
copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a
new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one....
Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is
always conceiving" (21).
"Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the
world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses
its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside
world, that is, the parts through the world enters the body or emerges from it, or
through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the
emphasis is on the apertures or convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots:
the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose.
The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only
in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or
defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of
genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where
they enter into each other. This especially strikes the eye in archaic grotesque" (26).
Such grotesque figures are found "in the frescoes and bas-reliefs which adorned the
cathedrals and even village churches of the 12th and 13th centuries....
.....
"It is quite obvious that from the point of view of these canons the body of grotesque
realism was hideous and formless. It did not fit the framework of the 'aesthetics of the
beautiful' as conceived by the Renaissance" (29; see Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier for a widely known renaissance expression of that official aesthetics, which
was essentially the neoplatonic aesthetics of renaissance humanism. Barrie).
"Even more important is the theme of the mask, the most complex theme of folk
culture. The mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay
relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects
conformity to oneself. The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation
of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames. It contains the playful
element of life; it is based on a peculiar interrelation of reality and image,
characteristic of the most ancient rituals and spectacles" (40).
"...in the parodical legends and the fabliaux the devil is the gay ambivalent figure
expressing the unofficial point of view, the material bodily stratum. There is nothing
terrifying or alien in him" (41).
"Fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is
defeated by laughter.... Complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless
world."
On laughter--note the lower or outside-the-official order aspect of laughter. Laughter comes from the lower, from the low-down lowdown, from the body. And it's about the body, in a certain way reclaims the body from the definitions set up by the authorities--religion and Church, the higher-orders and their politics.
It's earthy and it's unruly and it mocks the dominant social norms and images that pretend to "higher" things..
"The essence of the grotesque is precisely to present a contradictory and double-faced
fullness of life. Negation and destruction (death of the old) are included as an
essential phase, inseparable from affirmation, from the birth of something new and
better. The very material bodily lower stratum of the grotesque image (food, wine, the
genital force, the organs of the body) bears a deeply positive character. This principle
is victorious, for the final result is always abundance, increase" (62).
"Let us stress once more that for the Renaissance (as for the antique sources described
above) the characteristic trait of laughter was precisely the recognition of its positive,
regenerating, creative meaning. This clearly distinguishes it from the later theories of
the philosophy of laughter, including Bergson's conception, which bring out mostly its
negative functions" (71).
"In the Middle Ages folk humor existed and developed outside the official sphere of
high ideology and literature, but precisely because of its unofficial existence, it was
marked by exceptional radicalism, freedom, and ruthlessness. Having on the one hand
forbidden laughter in every official sphere of life and ideology, the Middle Ages on
the other hand betwowed exceptional priviledges of license and lawlessness outside
these spheres: in the marketplace, on feast days, in festive recreational literature. And
medieval laughter knew how to use these widely" (72).
No comments:
Post a Comment