Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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KRAZY & IGNATZ: THE COMPLETE SUNDAY STRIPS 1935-1944

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Although much smaller in size than the actual strips, the mere fact they existed delighted me. And I already owned the Sunday Press huge, full color, 'Krazy Kat: A Celebration of Sundays'

Edited December 19, 2019 by Flex Mentallo

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..and then along came Taschen,  in May 2019, to publish George Herriman's "Krazy Kat". The Complete Color Sundays 1935-1944. It measures 35.6 x 8.9 x 50.8 cm and is in full color. So of course, I had no choice but to buy it!

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One might call it the ultimate Krazy Kat publication...

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Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais

Illustrated by Gustave Doré

Introduced by Stephen Greenblatt

Translated by Professor M. A. Screech

Limited to 500 hand-numbered sets

Essay by Milan Kundera

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The Folio Society limited edition of Rabelais 'Gargantua and Pantagruel' may have been the highlight of the year, given that it also integrates the astonishing illustrations of Gustav Doré for the first time. I love Dore and these illustrations may be his masterpiece. [More on him later perhaps.]

 

The books are enormous, and magnificently produced.

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As everyone probably knows, [even if they have not read him], François Rabelais was a French Renaissance writer of fantasy, satire and the grotesque, who is now considered one of the founders of modern European writing. He wrote in a time when the French language had barely been codified and as such had a profound influence in shaping it.

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Milan Kundera, in a 2007 article in The New Yorker, commenting on a list of the most notable works of French literature, noted that Rabelais was placed behind Charles de Gaulle's war memoirs, "Yet in the eyes of nearly every great novelist of our time he is, along with Cervantes, the founder of an entire art, the art of the novel."

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Merriam-Webster defines the word 'Rabelasian' as describing someone or something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism". If he had been alive in the mid-twentieth century, he would probably have written for Mad magazine.

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Gargantua and Pantagruel was controversial and considered deeply subversive of existing institutions [especially the Catholic Church]. Today it is seen as the embodiment of the form of humanistic social expression embodied in Medieval Carnival, long lost to us today.

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The medieval carnival treated people of all ranks and classes together as equals and encouraged the interaction and free expression of themselves in unity. The natural order is overturned. Unacceptable behaviour is welcomed and accepted in carnival, and one's natural behaviour can be revealed without consequences. Respect for official notions of status, piety and the sacred are stripped of their power — blasphemy, obscenity, debasings, 'bringings down to earth', celebration rather than condemnation of the earthly and body-based.

 

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Above all, in the crowning of a carnival 'king', who each year is replaced, carnival celebrated change itself [not that which is changed].

 

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Perhaps the world needs more carnival in the medieval sense, to counteract the swing to the right that is evident in the West, in India, in Brazil – to say nothing of our helplessness in the face of Global Warming. The spirit of carnival grows out of a "culture of laughter". In its focus on the bodily functions common to all, in its bawdiness, in its anti-elitism, carnival is empowering of the common people rather than their masters.

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Medieval Carnival was a powerful creative event, not merely a spectacle. The Russian writer Mikhael Bakhtin suggested that the separation of participants and spectators has been detrimental to the potency of Carnival. Its power lay in there being no "outside": everyone participated, and everyone was subject to its lived transcendence of social and individual norms: "carnival travesties: it crowns and uncrowns, inverts rank, exchanges roles, makes sense from nonsense and nonsense of sense."

Carnival King or Queen today, maybe we would crown Greta Thunberg.

 

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Rabelasian!

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And yet - and yet counter to my own argument, according to  Anastasia Denisova [ Lecturer in Journalism, University of Westminster] it would seem that it is the Far Right that has most successfully appropriated Carnival: '...the 2016 US election highlighted... the carnivalisation of public politics. Memes are arguably instances of medieval-like carnival: it is the logic of upside down, ridicule and mockery, stupidity and opposition to any possible elites.

'Originally, of course, the carnival was limited to one week before Lent. People gathered in the central marketplace to unleash their desires and let off steam. The e-carnival is dramatically different: it expands beyond the constraints of time and space. It is ever present, and here to stay. Increasingly, attention-deficit voters draw their news and opinion from the fast food media communication and then return their inputs to the same shallow realm.'

 

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent.

Edited December 20, 2019 by Flex Mentallo