Un’utopia del corpo. Rabelais e il carnevale nella lettura di Bachtin

Abstract

This paper seeks to place recent scholarship on the various forms of utopia in François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel in dialogue with Bakhtin’s interpretation. Its primary aim is to determine whether, and to what extent, the text can be read not as a coherent and systematic utopia, but rather, following the Russian critic’s intuition, as animated by a pervasive “utopian spirit” running through the whole work. To address this question, the paper reconsiders Bakhtin’s conception of the grotesque body, defined as open, unfinished, collective, and in perpetual transformation. More than a mere physical object, the grotesque body emerges here as the symbolic center where heterogeneous levels of Rabelais’s text converge. The paper will therefore argue that the tension highlighted by recent criticism—between utopian and dystopian elements—finds its unifying principle in the symbolism of the grotesque body, understood, in Bakhtin’s wake, as the point of convergence of Rabelais’s entire figurative universe.