PLAY IN THE CITY

00.
Carnival, in particular, has a strong connection to the Christian
calendar, as it occupies the days which occurred in the run up to lent.
So, despite carnival creating an opportunity to ‘celebrate a temporary
liberation from the prevailing truth’, the fact it is controlled to a frame
of time, undermines its ability to liberate.
Bakhtin also turns, within his polemic, to the medieval feast through
which he explores the layer of the official and unofficial. Of the unofficial
feast, found in medieval folk culture, he writes:
They offered a completely different, non-official, extra-ecclesiastical
and extra-political aspect of the world and a second life outside
officialdom, a world in which all medieval people participated in
more or less. 21
And of the official he states:
The link with time became formal; changes and moments of crisis
were relegated to the past. Actually, the official feast looked back
at the past and used the past to consecrate the present. Unlike the
earlier and purer feast, the official feast asserted that all was
stable, unchanging, and perennial: the existing hierarchy, existing
religious, political, and moral values and norms, and prohibitions. 22
Where the designation between the official and the un-official can
further our thinking of the feast is that it gives us a framework in which
to identify the coercive element of the event. Both events, official and
unofficial, create an altered space in time, and time in space. They are
differentiated by whether they act to further the prevailing ordinary
order, or whether it act to go against it. By this, one could understand
the unofficial as a play event which starts and finishes beyond the
ordinary; the official starts and finishes within the ordinary.
_
21. Bakhtin, “Rebelais and His World, 1965”, p. 199.
22. Bakhtin, “Rebelais and His World, 1965”, p. 199.
18