For our Reading Diary this week, please read the following prompt, and post at least two comments in the discussion. To enable everyone to respond to one another’s comments, please post your first comment by Wednesday (2/19) at noon, and your second by Friday (2/21) at 5pm.
Before commenting, make sure you read all the previous comments – be a good citizen of the comments section! You can reply directly to this post if you’d like to take the conversation in a new direction, or to someone else’s comment below if you’d like to respond to them. Make sure your comment adds something to the discussion: you’re not evaluating each other’s contributions, you’re adding something that expands the discussion.
Remember that you’ll also start to see this week’s other students’ “Idea” and “Reflection” posts related to their Appetizer presentations. As you’re considering ways to contribute to the class, consider posting your comments on their posts as well! You can start with Hannah’s reflection post here. Future posts (once they are categorized correctly) will appear here.
Prompt: One of the ways we’ll be examining Aristophanes’ Peace this week is to consider how the play celebrates the joys of peacetime. In our own culture, we often think of “peace” as simply the absence of war; efforts to produce peace often focus rhetorically on the evils of war rather than the joys of peace. Let’s talk about “peace” while we’re reading Peace. How do you respond to Aristophanes’ efforts to portray peace in this play? Can you think of contemporary cultural products that celebrate peace as something distinct and positive, rather than simply as the absence of war? What role does the carnivalesque have in celebrating peacetime?
In thinking about how contemporary cultural products may celebrate peace, I would call to light the celebrations following the conclusion of World War II. I believe someone mentioned it today in class, but in NYC there were parties for 2 days straight. There was endless dancing and singing in the streets of Little Italy. There were ritualistic peace dragons parading through Chinatown. In Times Square there were reportedly 2 million people crammed into 10 blocks, filled with kissing, cheering, dancing, drinking etc. This video shows what it was like: https://www.history.com/news/v-j-day-end-of-wwii-japan
This celebration of peace was one big representation of the carnivalesque. However, it only lasted a short while. I was wondering if anyone could recall longer lasting products of peace as opposed to the initial and brief celebrations, and how those may represent the carnivalesque? (anything specific to WW2?)
I think I’ve adjusted my idea of peace since class, especially since we talked more about farming and having the TIME to do WORK. I think I was focusing on a carnivalesque party-all-the-time idea, rather than looking at how simple peace can be. To these farmers in Athens, peace means having the ability to work, eat, conquer the earth, and reap it’s benefits. I wanted peace to be an all-encompassing utopia, but I think that even with the excesses and indulgences in this play, they don’t go beyond simple freedoms and general abundance (not necessarily overflowing in rivers, but no one is eating onions.)
I think in the modern day most of us in America live in that peace already. We have the ability to work, earn money, fill our bellies, have sex, raise families, party, etc. My impression–and feel free to correct me–of the joy-filled peace in Peace is not that everything is always perfect and there are no problems (as we mentioned in class, the jurors will be kinder, but there are evidently still lawsuits and legal problems,) but that you simply have enough, and what you have is good.
I’m not sure if this is a carnivalesque enough idea, so maybe I’m being too tame with the abundance and freedom that people have. Hm.
I was also really interested in the idea that peacetime is a time for work, labor, and focus. In class, I started thinking about the last line of Voltaire’s Candide: “mais il faut cultiver notre jardin,” meaning, “but we must cultivate our garden.” These final words are said by Candide to Pangloss, who, throughout the book, he (Pangloss) continuously claims that they live in the best of all possible worlds (despite every bad thing the world sends their way throughout the book). In the end, Pangloss tells Candide that, had he not gone through all of the trials and tribulations of the previous pages, he would not be here now, eating “candied citron and pistachios.” Candide’s gardening response to this reminded me of something Trygaeus says on page 501 of Peace. He states, “I’m anxious to get back to the country myself, and at long last to start hoeing my own spot of earth.” Trygaeus then proceeds to list all of the good things that come from peacetime, like myrtle berries, and beds of violets. While I think Aristophanes meant for this part to be more of an indicator of the abundance of peacetime, I like to imagine that this quote is of the same sentiment as the end of Candide, in that you can only have control over, or have peace in, your own patch of earth, and therefore you must cultivate it. You can find peace in working your land and making something grow. However, I would also like to consider what Alice was saying, about how pastoral work is mostly done by those who do not get to reap the rewards of peace and abundance. I think that is where Voltaire succeeds and Aristophanes does not. Voltaire means to have Candide cultivate his own garden (with his friends though), performing the labor of growing food and flowers on his own. This labor is then meant to eliminate the “three evils” of life, namely: poverty, vices, and boredom.
I am not entirely sure where the carnivalesque comes in here, beyond Candide giving up a life of eccentricity (and his constant crownings and uncrownings) for that of a farmer (and I suppose the same could be said about Tyrgaeus to some extent – at least on page 501), however, I do think there is something of the grotesque when it comes to digging your hands into the earth and working the soil. It is a very literal take on Bakhtin’s idea of being brought down to earth and turning into flesh.
I also meant to add that it has been a WHILE since I last read Candide so I might have gotten some things wrong!
This may be skirting around the initial question a bit, but my first thoughts both in class today and reading this week’s reading diary is that peace is an incredibly difficult word to define. As Hannah brought up in class today, just because our country is out of conflict with another one does not mean that someone would define America as at peace because of all of the internal and social conflict that remains ongoing. As pessimistic as it sounds, I think that one could argue that America has never truly seen peace because of inequities experienced by citizens.
As we talked about Greek slavery today, I thought of how peace in Athens would probably bring in more PoW slaves: while normalcy may return to farmers and to the normal male citizen, many people within the city-state would be foreign and newly enslaved. Aristophanes’ peace is pastoral, yet it also neglects the people who are most often doing the pastoral work for wealthy citizens. Peace inherently acts as a foil to war, and it is during peace that the realities of war still live on but are written off by the productivity of post-war economy and social life.
Although I know it’s not at all contemporary, I kept thinking back to Vergil’s Georgics where the simplicity of the pastoral lifestyle is praised: Vergil just wants to hang out with his bees. Vergil as a writer is incredibly prolific in the times after the civil wars, and it is this pastoral life that he immediately turns to after it. In this same way, the booms of literature, culture, and people that come from the end of wars are incredibly carnivalesque. By looking at these results as increased fertility and a coming together of people to make change after war, peace in-and-of-itself is a carnival. Peace mocks the toils of war with frivolity of time and resources; it contrasts the lack thereof in war where shortages of resources and the short lives of soldiers are the reality. Not to be too meta or pessimistic, but peace is almost like the carnival of life, the fun, positive group moments before the harsh moments of war.
Despite all of this, I do think that life itself can be viewed as a carnival: culture is constantly mocking itself, and it is through this mocking and excess of culture that we know that we’re in peace. If anyone else has any ideas about this, I’d be interested to read them!
I really love how you brought up the Georgics as an example, and wanted to talk a bit about the Eclogues. The Eclogues are the first of Vergil’s major works and were composed between 44 and 38 BCE, a time of major instability in Rome. While on the surface the poem does convey a carnivalesque sense of abundance and praise the pastoral lifestyle, the Eclogues create a nuanced vision of peace and the effects of civil war.
The first eclogue, for example, is a conversation between two shepherds, Tityrus and Meliboeus. This eclogue references Augustus’s redistribution of land following the civil war that forced a lot of people off of their land. Meliboeus has lost his land and livelihood, while Tityrus gets to keep his land. It’s really interesting to think about the poem in the context of our discussions about peace and to see how Vergil explores how the ramifications of war extend even into peacetime and that peace means different things for everyone.
I also think it’s interesting to think about the pastoral landscape that Vergil describes as a critique of utopia. The pastoral lifestyle is portrayed as an escape from the political instability of Rome, but even the shepherds in the Eclogues can’t escape from political issues like Augustus’s land distribution. The shepherds spend their days laying under trees and singing about love and being a shepherd, but they are never seen doing any work. Vergil presents a romanticized version of rural life that does not include struggle and labor and hardship. Even when Vergil was out in the countryside, he never would have had to work his own land- slaves would have. This pastoral world does not reflect reality, but I find it interesting how real life political instability creeps its way into Vergil’s world of the Eclogues, and this serves as a critique of utopia and reveals that peacetime is not a carnivalesque perfect world.
This was briefly discussed in class, but I think that one of the main reasons why contemporary images of peace may not be so distinct is that in modern America, many people are not impacted directly by war, especially people with power or wealth. For many, life is generally the same in times of peace as in times of war, whereas in Athens, every family was directly impacted, as almost all citizen men had to fight. In America, those who are impoverished are more likely to be negatively impacted by war due to the cost of war, while those who are wealthy are able to avoid the draft (when there was a draft). Because there is so much variance in lifestyle and privilege in contemporary America, there is equal variance in how people experience war and peace, so there are not so many universal images of peace as there are in Aristophanes’ play. That being said, this variance does also apply to Aristophanes’ Peace to some extent, because it is implied that the common people and the farmers are celebrating peace the most because they do the most work in war. However, I think that contemporary America has so much diversity of lifestyle and privilege that one image would not adequately convey peace for all Americans, though a collection of all of the images that we discussed in class may speak to most. Especially the more carnivalesque and temporary celebrations (like peace parades) would have the most universal effect because they are public and occur on such a large scale if only for a short time.
This is exactly what I was thinking. It seems that in ancient Athens, war was a (if not the) primary facet of politics, and whether the nation was in a time of war or peace determined whether or not someone could live as they please. In modern American politics, war is debatably not even one of the major themes discussed. We see the impacts of immigration law, healthcare, human rights movements, etc as being far more impactful to the way individuals can live their lives than in the case of ancient Greece.
Given this reality, it seems to follow that a modern interpretation of peace (in America specifically) should comprise mostly these issues, and not war; peacetime could signify the impossible end to political strife over topics such as healthcare or tax redistribution. Therefore, in the modern interpretation, I think a unifying concept of peace is unattainable.
After today’s class I am thinking about peace on the macro and micro level. On one hand you have peace as the absence of war, but on the personal level you can have peace between individuals. For example, two friends whose relationship is at peace after a “war-like” fight. Although I hope that this view is not reductive of the severity of war, I think it was important for me to visualize peace as not just something that is associated with full-scale war. On that note, I’m thinking about recent contemporary policies such as the New Green Deal and Free College Tuition as a carnivalesque form of peace. The idea of reaching an agreement so that all are equal is, in many aspects, carnivalesque. The ability for everyone to breathe clean air and get the education that they want reminds me of the “physical freedom” that Aristophanes alludes to in Peace. The passage on page 471 reminds me of this, when Trygaeus says that after peace is attained they will have the ability to do what they want. So, I’m left thinking about if peace is able to exist if structural inequality is still pervasive in society, and that there are some mundane policies that implicate a sense of the carnivalesque.
Trygaeus’ comment on 471 got me thinking that it was an interesting way to define peace. If peace meant that everyone could do whatever they wanted, I don’t think that it would be a goal everyone would want to achieve. Sure, for a short period of time it would be nice to have absolute freedom, however I would imagine it turning into something like the purge. Governments and regulations are in place in order to maintain safety and equilibrium, and the absence of government doesn’t allow for peace. Therefore when discussing how peace is carnivalesque we have to remember that if peacetime was a huge carnival, it wouldn’t be peace at all. Eventually there would be conflict, crime etc. because there would be no regulations.
That’s a great perspective on the role of the carnivalesque and how it may intersect or diverge from peace. Originally, I had not considered these factors, and I think that the comments below that allude to the purge support how carnival has an unflattering and dark side to it. Thinking about carnival as a “release valve”, it really is a period of government sanctioned freedom. The “freedom” or chaos that is unleashed during this period does showcase class separations which the reading mentioned, and how in this period of unfettered celebration, women, minorities, and other oppressed groups were still oppressed. The crowning of a King carnival still enforced the idea of hierarchy even if it was in a mocking way. Therefore, I agree with your comment that peacetime is not a huge carnival, and that during times of carnival violence, conflict, and crime were definitely present.
After our discussion today, I was most struck by the idea of an abundance of time to do work, which, for Baktin, seems to conquer and triumph over the earth through labor. Perhaps one of the reasons that it’s difficult to think about peace in an Aristophanic way nowadays is that we don’t conquer the earth through our labor, nor do we communally feast on our triumphs. Baktin’s discussion was very illuminating for me: “Human labor’s encounter with the world and the struggle against it ended in food, in the swallowing of that which had been wrested from the world… It must be stressed that both labor and food were collective; the whole of society took part in them” (281). I think this commonality is a crucial part of the equation, though my deep loyalty to the commonality of ancient Athenian celebration may be obscuring clear thought; we don’t feast anymore. I don’t think we’ve feasted for a hundred of not hundreds of years (roughly tracing American culture back through Britain, though I don’t pretend to know about British cultural habits). Our celebrations, except in exceptional moments (as Liam pointed out above), are delineated by private associations and organizations and not so much by civic community, which seems to skirt the true nature celebratory nature Aristophanes associates with peace (if we believe Bakhtin on feasting and that Bakhtin’s feasting and Aristophanes’ peace are related).
All of this is to say that our work, even if we are wresting resources from the earth, no longer serves the function that Athenian farmers’ work served them and that Bakhtin believes served Rabelais’ contemporaries, so we do not celebrate it in the ways that Athenian farmers did and Bakhtin says Rabelais’ contemporaries did (i.e. in a universal, consumption/production aspect). For these reasons, an abundance of time to do work just doesn’t mean the same thing (i.e. time to labor and celebrate the fruits of that labor). I don’t want more time to answer emails, which is what my labor entails. I want more time to truly engage with being alive (recalling, surprise surprise, Marx’ “species being”); I think having time to engage with being alive may be a standard for a more positive conception of peace like Hannah C. mentioned in class. It is also a very high threshold to meet! But maybe that’s why it’s so delicious.
Since our discussion in class, I have been thinking about the things that qualify as “peaceful” in modern-day living; is it possible to separate our idea of peace from that of luxury, comfort, and abundance? We tend to associate peacetime with an absence of rationing and hardship––like I said earlier a period in which there is time for leisurely activities. As I thought more about this topic, one of the eras that came to mind was the post-WWII era. I know many people have posted or talked about the celebrations immediately after the war itself ended, but I wanted to focus on the 50s and 60s and the retreat into domesticity and emphasis on homeliness and perfection that is associated with these decades.
The idea of the housewife and nuclear family erupted from the fear of broken families and reversed gender roles that were commonplace during the war. The US wanted to project an image of peace and contentment to its powerful counterparts and did so in a way that I would say borders on carnivalesque. The postwar era created the infamous baby boomer generation and was a time in which the extremes of domesticity were encouraged and strictly enforced in the social sense. The roles that housewives had to fulfill were almost like manufactured personas: masks and characters that they wore to avoid social ridicule.
I think this is a really important point, that we assume peace means no hardship/rationing, and abundance! But I think you could have hardship during peace in Peace (those spear-makers etc. were not happy at all and were definitely going to struggle financially!) I get the sense–from the readings, but also everyone’s impressions here–that peace for Aristophanes is not as abundant/carnivalesque, and much more subdued. They just talk about freedom, youth, kindness, release, more time (as we listed in class) and a little bit of feasting.
The only part that strikes me as being really strongly carnivalesque is the wedding feast at the end, where they all bring gifts and food and dance together; I think on stage it would probably strike me as more party-like than in the text too.
I wanted to offer a particular detail to tie together a couple of threads that have arisen in this conversation and our discussions in class, alongside Collin’s presentation in particular: quite a few of you have raised the idea that in both Athenian and American celebrations of “peace,” the benefits of peace are often distributed along pre-existing lines of inequality (despite Bakhtin’s insistence that the carnival should abolish social distinctions). Athenian farmers get to enjoy peace, but their slaves continue to be enslaved; wealthy Americans reap the benefits of the post-war economy, but it’s primarily poorer Americans and Americans of color who both fight the wars and pay their costs. All that is to say, I was struck by this article in the New York Times this morning: After Fighting Nazis, Black G.I.’s Faced Racism in U.S. Military (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/magazine/blacks-wwii-racism-germany.html). If you’re interested in pursuing the American parallels further, this piece might be a useful jumping off point.
Doing the reading for Tuesday got me thinking about what peace means, depending on the context of where and when you’re living. I’ve taken classes on ancient Rome in the past, and we’ve talked about how the Roman idea of pax is different from our modern perception of peace. Peace was something that Rome imposed on cities that they conquered, and those cities would have to pay taxes and tribute to Rome. Even though the war was over, they were not free. Can you be at peace if you’re not free?
In Peace, Hermes mentions the “cities subject to [Athenian] rule” (505), and I wonder what peace would have looked like for them. It definitely would have contrasted with the grotesque image of peace characterized by abundance that Aristophanes creates. I feel like Aristophanes’s vision of peace in some ways mirrors the peace that we get to enjoy today, where we are not subject to invasion or rule from another country. Similar to what happens in the first half of the play, with peace we are able to work and have what we need and live freely.
This is why it’s difficult to come up with an example of modern day peace. After the reading for Tuesday and class discussion I still found it difficult to imagine peace today without viewing it as the absence of war. My first thought were holidays some which are carnivalesque and grotesque in nature. But with this example peace is viewed as the absence of everyday life like work and responsibility and its an intended time for leisure. Then like carnival you go back to your regular life the next day. Another example that shot to my mind were parades. For example, the macys thanksgiving parade but this “peace ‘ and celebration is only temporary. Which leads me to believe that there’s no collective modern idea of peace because unlike back then during Aristophanes time we are more divided as a nation and also globally. Many peoples peace may be less responsibility like school and work while others may just want time. Time to do things like the farmers in Peace. Everyone was excited to have time to farm and enjoys the fruits of the labor that they aren’t able to during war.
Regarding Aristophanes’ Peace, I think one of the most interesting topics is the necessity of carnivalesque elements for peace. Through the whole play, the Athenians’ insistence and desire for gathering are reiterated, not only considering people, but also plants and food. From the beginning, Trygaeus tells the spectators: “As for all of you, for whose sake I’m performing these labors …”(445) and promises his daughters the later reunion; Trygaeus makes it clear that peace has to be shared by the crowd. Afterwards, Trygaeus and the chorus make many imaginations on peaceful Athens, but no matter what fantastic events they come up with, there must be participation of the public. The shape of peace and happiness of the Greeks does not seem to be associated with tranquility or calmness, and the depiction of peace in this drama is more based on the carnival and chaos of rich material conditions. However, as a person growing up in modern society, my imagination of peace is always inseparable from the influence of individualism. Especially when I associate peace with farming, my first thought would be the lifestyle depicted in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Peace in modern days means more rights and freedoms; however, in Athens where Trygaeus is located, individuals are tied to groups. Although we mentioned yesterday that physical freedom is an interpretation of peace in this drama, I think that in modern concept, physical freedom should include the freedom to keep a distance from the crowd.
In class we seemed to come to a relative consensus that in our modern time we do not celebrate peace as a good thing in itself but only as an absence of war. As some people have already said, this is probably because for many people, daily life does not change a huge amount during war. While it does change for soldiers and their family, from an outsiders prospective things remain the same for most. I have been wondering if there are other things that prevent true “peace” that does effect peoples lives in a more noticeable way, if not for everyone at least for a large group.
I was specifically thinking about politics. I think if people were to talk about positive changes that would come from political changes, it is still mostly in the “negative”. For example, people would talk about ending discrimination, ending unjust imprisonment, ending drone striking, and so on. While there would be not “negative” ways of thinking like free health care and similar things, I still feel like those are about what changes, not the benefits of political “peace” itself. While this is just one way of abstracting the concept of “peace” there still seems to be a lack of celebrating this “peace” on its own but rather celebrating the absence of the bad. So far I haven’t really been able to come up with any concepts of “peace” that celebrate the “peace” for its own sake.
I think that my biggest takeaway from Aristophanes’ depiction of Peace was that a state of peace was depended upon the collective action of all parties involved in the war. Hermes remarks how wonderful it is to the see all the city-states of Greece laughing together and collaborating to recover Peace. That collective work was performed by most of the “ordinary” people of Greece as we learn when they list off their occupations. They are laborers who are fulfiled in life by the work that they do and their connections with the land. Still, their collective action did depend on the guidance of Trygaeus who had to unify the chorus’s energy away from celebratory but undisciplined dancing into the hard work of excavating Peace.
Peace did not fall upon Greece, it was fought for under the mortal threats of War’s insatiable appetite. With this example in mind, I am skeptical of ostensible anti-war or pro-peace movements in the United States that do not have a coherent strategy of action and repertoire of tactics that matches the truly colossal task of dismantling the country’s industrial war machine. Expanding upon Hannah’s comment of internal conflict and Prof Farmer’s post, so much of the daily maintenance of this country’s transportation, energy, and general commerce is deeply violent. Peace would not just mean bringing the troops back home and ceasing military opeartions abroad, but also returning land that has been illegally (even in the logics of Western property law!) stolen from the Indigenous peoples of this continent. I see a direct connection between the violent dispersal of the water protector’s encampments and blockade to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016-17, and the US military’s recent war-mongering belligerence with countries like Venezuela and Iran.
Even Canada, a country that is so annoyingly held up to be a haven of reasonable politics and a “hot” prime minister (who did blackface in college!!) is at this moment engaged in a military invasion of the land of the Wet’suwet’en nation in northern British Columbia. Canadian armed forces are encroaching to–you guessed it–build a oil pipeline to promote exports. The Wet’suwet’en nation has never signed any treaty with Canada and refuses to allow the construction of a pipeline that will certainly leak and bring death to the land’s prisitine waterways and healthy ecology.
So, to wrap this up, I absolutely agree that peace necessarily has to be a project of reconciling internal social conflicts and drawing those connections between the violence entangled in everyday life with the more visible atrocities of overseas invasions and interventions.
Donate here if you want to help out Wet’suwet’en land and water defenders: https://unistoten.camp/support-us/donate/
Remember when during class someone brought up the idea of carnival being the purge. I want to think about this more. In class the focus was on lawlessness and committing crimes that one usually wont like murder.
Like the purge, carnival is one day in the year where people generally are liberated from their normal lives. Let’s not focus on the small details(like the class divide) but on the big picture purpose of the purge. The purge is a night every year when “all” crime is legal so people for the most part are murdering others and stealing stuff. The purge was brought forth as a remedy of the apparent high levels of crime in the nation. During purge people are freed from their day to day life. And then the next day everything is normal and life continues.
In the reading for today Eagleton is brought up and his idea that carnival is a licensed release so in many ways it serves as some sort of control and goes against the official rules/culture it parodies. So this raises the question do the people need carnival(like the society needed the purge) or does it live within them?
I think that this an incredibly interesting point, even if the idea is a little scary to think about. Today’s discussion focused on how much of the carnival is perceived to be needed as a “release” from tension and potential unhappiness with the status of people’s lives. While the purge is a quite extreme version–because I don’t think murder would qualify as a necessary way to release pent up societal anger- it represents the same qualities as a carnival, so much so that I would imagine that those with enough resources would observe it like a Hunger Games Panem showing. The purge itself is a spectacle and carnival, and those who can survive it will by being more “advanced” in their society than others. carnival.
The question of if people of the church/government would participate in a medieval carnival seems to add a complication: do they get drunk and dance with those whom they would not usually? Or would they simply look down and be satisfied to see their people enjoying themselves and not questioning their rule in a truly threatening manner? I don’t have an answer to this, but I’d be interested in finding out more.
To answer your last question directly, I think that people do need a release from daily life because of the monotony and patterns that come with a “progressing” society, yet I am also hesitant to say this. Why would people need a release if they were happy in their lives? Of course, no one has ever lived in a utopia (that we have record of), so it makes sense that there will always been someone who needs to release tension through carnival or a purge. Does that mean that the way society works is inherently flawed? I think so. We would have to have a utopia to not need a release and find a form of government with which we’re satisfied and happy.
I think that the purge is a really interesting lens to look at the Carnivalesque, especially when we are trying to see where the Carnivalesque might become problematic. The similarity that you’ve pointed out between the two events is really striking and makes me wonder if there are limits to the Carnivalesque, and if so, what are they? It seems likely that in a circumstance where people are able to disregard anything serious and be their ‘true’ selves, things could go too far, like in the Purge. Bakhtin depicts the Carnivalesque as inherently positive in its rejection of hierarchy and authority figures, but I feel like the situation he portrays also has potential for crime or at least very offensive behavior. I think that most people would agree that a purge would be extremely harmful for society, but how do we prevent carnival from becoming an equally harmful event when it shares a lot of the same motivation of allowing people to do largely what they want for a day in order to control their behavior the rest of the time? This is especially interesting to consider in relation to peace, because when thinking about the Carnivalesque in these terms, it seems like a threat to peace, rather than a result of it. Although as a lot of people have said, celebrations and images of peace tend to be Carnivalesque in nature, the comparison to the Purge makes me think that there must be limits as to how far the Carnivalesque can go before it undermines the peace that it is meant to celebrate.
I think it is also important to consider the underlying politics of the Purge films, and how they line up with some of the concerns Stallybrass and White have in terms of the carnivalesque. The Purge itself is a government-sanctioned event, established by the US government “for the people.” The third movie is largely an investigation into the motives of this government-sanctioned murder-night and discusses how the purge is a means of erasing (literally having them killed) people of lower socioeconomic status. While the wealthy elites hide behind their elaborate security systems, people without homes are being hunted for sport, and this is what certain government officials in the films want (I don’t remember exactly who, it don’t think it’s the whole government, just some people – it has been a long time since I watched any of these movies). There is also a point made in the third film that certain high-ranking government officials are granted immunity from the purge, that is, if they are hurt in any way, there will be consequences for their attacker. The politics of this reminded me of the line from The Politics of Transgression that states, “carnival often violently abuses and demonizes weaker, not stronger, social groups – women, ethnic and religious minorities, those who ‘don’t belong’ – in a process of displaced abjection.” While carnival or the purge may be fun for certain individuals, it is not (especially in terms of the purge) at all enjoyable for others. This got me thinking about how the carnivalesque may potentially exist as a release at the literal expense of others. The excerpt from The Politics of Transgression also mentions Edward Said’s Orientalism, citing a line that stuck out to me in particular: “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of … underground self.” Said discusses how the east has helped “define” the western world by acting as a contrasting image, and he states that “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other.” According to Said, in order for the west to exist as it exists today, it first had to colonize, exploit, exoticize, and fetishize the east. In the same way, for the rich to release their rage in “The Purge,” they must prey on the poor, and for the western European Christian man to have his carnival, he must demonize “weaker social groups.”
I think that this discussion surrounding the Purge is an incredibly interesting and unique example of how the Carnivalesque has made its way into mainstream media. The first thing that popped into my head when I thought of the Purge as a manifestation of the Carnivalesque was––similar to Elinor–– our discussion in class about the lack of universality within the carnival. The Purge, along with several other dystopian future films, focuses on the storyline of a wealthy family trying to survive the violence happening outside of their security bubble. Part of the premise of the first film is that there are groups who target the wealthy who think that they are safe because of the resources they have diverted to their security systems; on the other hand, the majority of those who are lower on the socioeconomic ladder are used as pawns and are hunted like animals. These deliberate acts of violence against these different groups detracts from the Carnivalesque nature of the film. The carnival is intended to be a place of equality and lack of discrimination––the Purge is, in essence, the complete opposite.
This comment and the other comments on the Purge (purge?) got me thinking about the apocalypse and its portrayal in media, a topic of particular interest for me. A quick google scholar search landed me on an article called “Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini” by Lior Barshack. He says: “The apocalyptic images in Fellini’s cinema center on the borderline between civilization and wilderness or bring out the alien and the uncanny in familiar objects and places. Since apocalypse is an inevitable moment of carnival, the apocalyptic mode is ubiquitous in Fellini’s films” (1038). I think, like carnival, apocalyptic media, of which the Purge is a mutated offshoot, has the power to make that which is taken for granted alien (this can’t be emphasized enough–no norm stands after truly apocalyptic catastrophe) and those who were once crowned un-crowned. There are any number of articles about how YA post-apocalyptic novels have been a place to center the teen girl as the author of her own destiny and how this is one of the only places that the teen girl *can* be the author of her own destiny. Even etymologically, apocalypse, coming from ἀποκάλυψις (revelation), seems obviously connected to the carnivalesque, especially Bakhtin’s discussion of the truth found in laughter. There is, of course, little *revelry* in the apocalypse, but if we didn’t think it was fun to pretend to exist in a totally “revealed” and “raw” world we wouldn’t spend so much time making stories about it. I think it would be interesting to explore further how (an un-historical, hypothetical and absolute) carnival might be a kind of apocalypse– in fact, it might be the *best* kind of apocalypse.
t the end of our Thursday meeting, Juliana’s views on the varying definitions and manifestations of carnivalesque and grotesque in different times and races made me rethink the relationship between carnival and purge. In Peace, carnival is more like a state in which people live. In the utopian world that Aristophanes presents to us, feast is supported by long-term uninterrupted human labor and fertility of land; so it is reasonable to say that in ancient societies with collectivism exists as the core, carnival is not exactly a purge. Aristophanes has repeatedly mentioned the cycle of desire and the fulfillment of desire; however, this does not seem to mean that it is a process from lent to carnival, but rather a process from the beginning of carnival to its climax. Moreover, the ancient Greeks’ affection for symposiums and parties also illustrates such a state of carnival. For Greeks, soberness in the day time after a symposium is just for better preparation for the symposium in the next evening, and farming in Peace has a similar effect. However, we cannot deny that what Aristophanes has depicted is just a utopian society; when the actual disaster cuts off the chain that maintains the stability, or when the most basic element of the carnival composition–the crowd, is destroyed, the carnival may change into a purge, or the state of carnival will no longer exist.