The Carnivalesque: Not Just for Catholics
August 04, 2004
Editor Caleb Stegall in a recent interview:“It’s true, our editorial board is quite ecumenical, but Protestants are the clear majority. I think that more than anything, tNP is consciously trying to re-evoke an important pre- and early-modern cultural space which has all but disappeared over the course of the last several centuries. Mikhail Bakhtin called this space the Carnivalesque … a space where, for a time at least, the disparate elements of culture and society are brought together and shorn of pretense. The King and the Peasant share the stage; they may trade places; for a while it may even be difficult to distinguish one from the other.
“It functions as a way to subvert ‘official’ culture and hold at arm’s length the worst abuses of society by fostering communal exposure to a shared and received tradition through which the commonwealth can recognize and reorient itself towards the spiritual order and transcendent ground which lies behind and above the mundane everyday orders of politics, power, religion, and money.
“I don’t think this evocation of the Carnivalesque is necessarily ‘Catholic,’ but I think I understand the transposition of the two because Protestants have never excelled at evoking the Carnivalesque. In one of the ironic twists of the Reformation, the Protestant desire to arrive at a ‘critical’ understanding and implementation of tradition ended up closing off the Carnivalesque spaces in society. Catholic culture on the other hand, with its ordering of life around the ritual of the mass, is better situated to foster such spaces. Interestingly, when the ritualistic spaces shrink and are closed off, the effect is a rise in the importance of the official culture of the ‘public’ square.
“The intramundane orders of life I mentioned earlier (all of which end up being embodied in the state) usurp the primacy of the spirit in the ordering of human life. This process is really the process of secularization in the West; a process now complete and total in all meaningful ways.”
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