Experience The Carnival World

Frangois Rabelais is a great writer with special artistic charm. In Gargantua & Pantagruel, his famous works, folk culture have great historical significance, though it is rejected by religion culture at Middle Ages. After Bakhtin explained Rabelais with, carnivalesque theory, the research about Rabelais receive great development, or research Bakhtin and carnivalesque theory to announce the essence of folk culture.Bakhtin tries to find the intension of Rabelais with new angle. He uses the folk as the opposition to the official with the humanistic tradition of the Russian intellectuals. Based on this point of view, the folk is the opposition world to the official, and the carnival is the form of struggle to escape the cruel reality.Rabelais sees also the form of playing on carnival as the main way of characterization and expressing in his works. The folk humorous culture is enlarged and handed down in Gargantua & Pantagruel, and become the culture content in the tradition of carnival. The folk humorous have active vitality and oppose the religion dominant at Middle Ages. The thesis holds that the theory of Bakhtin is dualism. He confirms the strength of the folk culture, but the theory can be realized just in the carnival environment. In fact, Bakhtin's confidence for the folk is confined the power of official. The folk will be always failure in the struggle to the official, it just audacious actions of the people in the unreal world. In the reality, the folk discourse is the Weak opposition to the official discourse.