Carnivalesque
The carnival sense of the world "is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order.
Because it is based in the physiological realities of the lower bodily stratum (birth, death, renewal, sexuality, ingestion, evacuation etc.
Instead, they consciously relied on experience and free invention, often manifesting a critical and even cynical attitude toward conventional subjects and forms.
According to Bakhtin, the roots of the genre "reach directly back into carnivalized folklore, whose decisive influence is here even more significant than it is in the Socratic dialogue.
"[16] Its characteristics include intensified comicality, freedom from established constraints, bold use of fantastic situations for the testing of truth, abrupt changes, inappropriate behaviour, abnormal or psychopathological mental states, inserted genres and multi-tonality, parodies, oxymorons, scandal scenes, and a sharp satirical focus on contemporary ideas and issues.
He notes its unparalleled capacity for reflecting the social and philosophical ethos of its historical setting – principally the epoch of the decline of national legend, which brought with it the gradual dissolution of long-established ethical norms and a concomitant rise in free interaction and argumentation over all manner of "ultimate questions".
According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was familiar with works by Lucian (such as Dialogues of the Dead and Menippus, or The Descent Into Hades), Seneca (Apocolocyntosis), Petronius (The Satyricon), Apuleius (The Golden Ass), and possibly also the satires of Varro.
The dialogic sense of truth, the device of the extraordinary situation, the unencumbered frankness of speech, the clash of extreme positions and embodied ideas over ultimate questions, the technique of anacrisis, "threshold" dialogues in extreme or fantastic situations: present in Menippean satire, these qualities are given a new and more profound life in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel.
[21] In this "carnival space and time", a reality beyond the quotidian fog of convention and habit comes to life, allowing a special type of "purely human" dialogue to occur.
In polyphony, character voices are liberated from the finalizing and monologizing influence of authorial control, much as the participants in the carnival revel in the temporary dissolution of authoritarian social definitions and "ready-made" truths, and a new dialogical truth emerges in the play of difference: a "plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.
