Hi all,

I’d like to contribute some ideas I’ve been toying with since Tuesday about our Bakhtinesque reading of Money: A Suicide Note. I’m pretty familiar with Bakhtin’s theories of the grotesque and the carnivalesque, and I’m likely reading into this too literally but hey, at least it might provide some more context about these ideas.

I’ve been thinking in particular about the conflicted gendering of John’s body given the introduction of the grotesque and carnivalesque in Begley’s “Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism” and our conversations in class. Bakhtin’s notions of the carnivalesque and the grotesque bodies are largely indebted to Renaissance French writer François Rabelais and his work Gargantua and Pantagruel, which, as Dr. Dick mentioned on Tuesday, is about giants. Begley points to “Self’s hedonistic cycle of accumulation, consumption, and gratification [which] exists as a grotesque celebration of a proliferating commodity culture” in Money (86), the ‘grotesque celebration’ of which is derived from the motif of surplus in Gargantua and Pantagruel, whose physical sizes, actions, and consumption of food is nothing short of excessive.

However, the idea of the grotesque complicates this reading. In his book on Rabelais, Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin introduces the concept of the grotesque body. The grotesque body is the abject body; it is open, incomplete and leaks internal fluids into the outside world. Due to the extra genital orifice and activities such as childbirth and breast-feeding, the grotesque body is characterized as feminine. While the women in Rabelais inhabit the grotesque, they are often barred in various ways from accessing surplus; they are either punished for participating in festivals (or what Bakhtin would call “positive hyperbolism” (Rabelais and His World 278)), or they die in childbirth.

As John partakes in both of these activities, he could be read as both Bakhtin’s grotesque body or the complete body (masculine, with closed off boundaries to the external world). Begley states that: “Self’s carnival involves neither a suspension of, nor liberation from, hierarchy”, but is more: “a desperate cycle of accumulation and gratification” (91-92). He further suggests that John’s concern with decay is in opposition to this surplus. If we consider Rabelais, John’s abundant consumption aligns with that of the masculine giants, while his abjection (vomit, semen, tears at the royal wedding) sees him “embodying the degradation and ‘material bodily principle’ of grotesque realism” or the feminine body (Begley 91).

I know this might sound super far-fetched, but let me know what you guys think! I’m also trying to work out some ideas about the connection between the grotesque and the potlatch, so any thoughts about that would also be great.

Also: the idea of the abject is from Julia Kristeva’s book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.