Civilized savages

After a survey of the exotica on display in fairs in the 18th-19th centuries, Stallybrass and White conclude that the fairs do not, as Bakhtin argued, enact a grotesque inversion of civilized hierarchies, but instead reinforce those very hierarchies. Two passages are particularly important:

“One could even mount the precise contrary argument to Bakhtin: that the fair, far from being the privileged site of popular symbolic opposition to hierarchies, was in fact a kind of educative spectacle, a relay for the diffusion of the cosmopolitan values of the ‘centre’ (particularly the capital and the new urban centres of production) throughout the provinces and lower orders.” Thus, for instance, pedlars at the fairs sold soal, medicines for teeth and gums, cosmetics, and mirrors, all the while displaying in their own dress and deportment the fashionable standards of the urban centers.

Second: “The marmoset dances Cheshire rounds; the ‘pigmey’ walks upright and drinks wine; the manteger drinks with his lips ‘like a Man’; the creature looking like a wild man politely removes his hat to the crowd. In each case the manners taught imitate European forms of culture or politeness and amusingly transgress, as well as reaffirm, the boundaries between high and low, human and animal, domestic and savage, polite and vulgar. We might say that these token transgressions model the double process of colonialism. The Other must be transformed into the Same, the savage must be civilized . . . ; but at the same time, the Other’s mimicry of the polite is treated as absurd, the cause of derive laughter, thus consolidating the sense that the civilized is always-already given, the essential and unchanging possession which distinguishes the European citizen from the West Indian and the Zulu as well as from the marmoset and the manteger.”

Yet, they also affirm what they call “Bakhtin’s central insight,” namely that “play, in the fair, is symbolic action which is rarely mere play.” And that means that, as Bakhtin emphasized, the fair and the carnival were site of contest, even political contest. But the critique of the dominant classes through the grotesque and the carnivalesque “tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms, designating what is high and low.” One of the “ruses of the dominant” is to insist that protest be lodged in reasonable and serious terms, “reasonable” and “serious” here as defined by the dominant classes; protest is permissible so long as it plays by the rules of what is protested. Bakhtin is right, they claim, to emphasize that the grotesque has a logic of its own in that it protests not only the dominant ideology but the forms in which the dominant ideology retains dominance: “This logic could unsettle ‘given’ social positions and interrogate the rules of inclusion, exclusion and domination which structure the social ensemble. In the fair, the place of high and low, inside and outside, was never a simple given: the languages of decorum and enormity ‘peered into each other’s faces’” (this last quoted from Bakhtin).

Bakhtin, in short, vacillates between two accounts of the carnivalesque. He treats it at times as the binary opposite of the polite and classical; this is the view that Stallybrass and White find inadequate. On the other hand, he also recognizes that the fair involves an “inmixing of binary oppositions, particularly of high and low, suhc that there is a heterodox merging of elements usually perceived as incompatible, and this latter version of the grotesque unsettles any fixed binaryism.”