Thursday, December 4, 2008
Chapter 10: Question 2
According to Bakhtin, the people who come to a carnival make up a group. At a carnival people are not individuals, but rather a united community. Such is seen true throughout 100 Years of Solitude. After Macondo was just founded, the gypsies would come every March for a carnival-like celebration. At these carnival-like celebrations, the community would come together. As Macondo grows larger, it becomes more spread out, however the carnival in chapter 10 brings the people of Macondo together. The carnival was considered a "Catholic tradition" (197). All the people of Macondo come together with Remedios the Beautiful as the queen. The masks that the people of Macondo where wearing, which were only taken off for a moment to get a better look at Remedios the Beautiful, allow the people of Macondo to, as Bakhtin says, forget about, "caste, property, profession, and age."
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It is interesting to me that the carnival brings people together in Macondo because Carnivals can also be a from of chaos. With the ability to forget about caste and social difference there is also the potential problem of becoming lost in it. Being brought together in principal is a good thing but if things go back to the way they were after the carnival it makes the microcosm of the carnival almost sad. If the people of Macondo who started off as a united group need something like a carnival to forget about differences that they themselves have forged between each other then it seems disturbing to be flipping reality in an unnatural manifested way.
Jenny, you're on to something here. Carnaval was a time in which social stratification was subverted. What are the elements that seem reversed? For example, a woman who smears her excrement on the wall is crowned queen.
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