Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Tran. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: M. I. T.
Press, 1965.

Bakhtin's book traces, through Rabelais's writings, the history of the carnival from medieval times to the Renaissance. Bakhtin declares that Rabelais focused his art on the folk culture found in the common market place and interprets Rabelais's laughter motif, often expressed in images of bodily functions such as eating and defecation, as a reaction against abstract or transcend ent ideas. The book originated as Bakhtin's dissertation and explores how festival or carnival improves the world by weakening certain kinds of hierarchies and allowing new connections. The process is often a story of death and rebirth, where the required death becomes an elaborate production.
In ancient Roman festivals, the king may have already been executed while the Renaissance carnivals only pretend the killing of the king. In the "carnival-like" world of novels, Bakhtin emphasizes that the characters do not always die. Bakhtin was writing in a Russia ruled by Stalin, so he tried to make his carnival mockery at authority unthreatening in an attempt to allow readers to see a tolerant period.
Contrasts are seen with the custom of the common people and the high culture of church and authority. In the period of Rabelais, the elite shared in popular culture. Bakhtin makes three major comparisons in his study. The first view is praise of the poor and reproach of the rich which is similar to the Marxist theory and which allowed Bakhtin’s dissertation to be passed by a communist university. The second view of ridiculing of authority criticized Stalinism indirectly. Thirdly, for Bakhtin "carnival" becomes a reinterpretation of the Christian Passion and Resurrection.
The book uses descriptions of distorted or mutilated bodies. Renaissance carnivals ended the idea of using flesh as enjoyment through deprivation and a parade of bodies too deformed for conventional desire. Bakhtin sees the "regenerative potential" of carnival, as its ability to "combat terror." Carnival atmosphere allows pleasures in mass living and also the possibility of subversion of authority.
Bakhtin, in Rabelais and His World, investigates and compares verbal, pictorial, and gestural sign systems. His goal is to try to find a common link between the medieval and Renaissance cultures represented by the work of Rabelais and the treatment of them as systems of multiform signs. Since laughter in the forms of folk rites and festivities seem to be the connector, Rabelais' signs are directed toward the folk culture of the marketplace of the MiddleAges and Renaissance. Bakhtin goes beyond the culture to use the results for sociological studies.
However, since Bakhtin was writing of a Soviet Union ruled by Stalin, he was not free to say or write exactly what tie wanted. Critics warn the reader to be aware of information that may be left out and may be distorted because of the political reality in the Soviet Union. (Booker 105). Some of Bakhtin's points try to avoid controversy, and he includes many subversive points on Stalinism. Critics believe Bakhtin's description of the rigid, humorless, and authoritarian practices of the medieval Catholic Church are veiled comments on Stalinism. Critics also believe that Bakhtin's commentary on the "intrinsic multiplicity and ideological diversity of language and on the evolutionary nature of history" can be read as responses to Stalinist totalitarian utopianism. (Booker 105)
Bakhtin's carnival is a celebration where normal social boundaries and backgrounds are nonexistent and are totally contradictory to the official world of medieval Catholicism. He emphasizes that Rabelais' use of treatment of the aspects of human life such as sex and excrement give humans the status of physical creatures living in a physical world. According to Bakhtin, this transfer of material from the body's interior to the outside world makes human beings a part of that world. He also emphasizes that placing the functions of the higher part of the body over the lower is similar to systems that classify both bodily functions and literary works. This trend displays the view of social domination of opposed groups by ruling ones.
In the book, Bakhtin depicts the carnival as a suspension from the normal flow of events, a disruption in the ordinary flow of affairs. He suggests that the removal from history provides a perspective from which history can be understood. Bakhtin's view of a characteristic of society is the way it thinks about time and space, and this characteristic is reflected in the literature of that society. He feels that the use of the carnival of Rabelais represents a correspondence to an intense sense of cultural crisis in the early Renaissance cultural context in which Rabelais lived.
In his introduction, Bakhtin explains the division of folk culture into 3 forms: (1) carnival pageants and comic shows of the marketplace (2) oral and written parodies in Latin and in. the vernacular (3) curses, oaths, and popular displays. He describes each, but focuses on the work of Rabelais as "an encyclopedia of folk culture" (58) and also the history of laughter. According to Bakhtin, looking at Rabelais in relation to folk culture reveals the life of the Middle Ages of which. Rabelais was a major part. Looking at the language of laughter of the renaissance also allows a view of the folk humor of other ages.