Frenzied Survival

In the process of unscrambling Rabelais in his unique perspective of folk jocular culture, Bakhtin puts forward a surviving mode which contains frenzied particularities. The infective surviving mode taking freedom and equality as its core initially exists in the form of "the secondary world" in Dionysia and extends to literary areas, which contains a covert theory of Bakhtin — the theory on death. We have obtained the true meanings of the theory by means of systematically packing up his illustrations related to death that disperse in Study on Rabelais.Through his researches on the image system figured by Rabelais, Bakhtin has blazoned forth a concept of "macro-death" with dualism and jocosity. The image of death and theory of death existing in "the secondary world" and "the second type of life" displays its own charm to us through its particular subversiveness to the world that is not free. In the image system, we mainly choose the crownless festival images, banquet images and uncanny human body images to analyze the image basis of Bakhtin's death theories so as to find the existing system that these images have in common — frenzied and descendent. Bakhtin's discussions on the characteristics of death can particularly demonstrate his recognitions to the folk headstream of Rabelais. The folk and civil death embodies the complete penetrations of frenzied spirit to life; dualism and incompleteness express people's universal consciousness to transcend human body; humor and buoyancy completely carry out the spiritual essence the madness and delight of Dionysia. It is Bakhtin who finds Rabelais and it is Rabelais who finds Bakhtin. Bakhtin's death theory is an important clue to understanding Study on Rabelais. It is also a new and hard-won perspective of humanistic thinking. With the theory, we can have more intensive analyses and understanding to various literary and life phenomena which contain Dionysia spirit.