Carnivalising the Sacred: A Bakhtinian Approach to Nikos Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucified

Abstract

This paper applies Mikhail Bakhtin’s insights on carnival and carnivalised literature to Kazantzakis’ Christ Recrucified, in an attempt to unearth the subversive elements inherent in the transfigurative novel. The term carnival signifies a long, complex set of traditions and rituals practiced and especially prevalent in the Middle Ages culminating in public spectacles. Ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions and various genres of billingsgate are the three distinct forms of its manifestation. Carnival celebrates “liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” (Rabelais and His World 10). During carnival, no life exists outside the festival; there are no idle spectators but only participants. Bakhtin characterizes carnival as the working out of a “new mode of interrelationship between individuals, counterposed to the all-powerfull socio-hierarchical relationships of non-carnival life” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 123). He adds that it “brings together, unifies, weds and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid” (123). There is a co-mingling of all society in the carnival space.