MENIPEA, CARNEVAL, SCANDAL: HOMO FESTIVUS AND HOMO FANTASIA

Text topic: Cultures of Rhythms and Spectacle

Text author: Јадранка Божић

Festivals have always been present in the social life, their rhythm being periodical or cyclic. By anthropological inertion, each mass public performance becomes a pattern or reflection of a social order, or rather its expression, reflection, creation and transformation. The performative character of culture is one of the basis of spectacle studies. The spectacle turns permanence of festival into a situation by means of attaining effects of wholeness and edited visualization.

The ancient and medieval comic culture which implies a grotesque mix of fantastic and real ties original mythology (ritual) to high literature. Menipea has always been one of the major bearers and transmitters of the carneval feeling of the world in literature. Scenes of scandals and various breaches of the usual course of events characterize Menipean literary tradition, especially in Dostoevski. Elements of carneval representation are to be fund in the works of Rablais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dostoevski. The very emergence of contemporary cultural manifestations is inseparable from festivals, i.e. ancient archaic mythological tradition. The festival was a time break connected to the sphere of sacral. From the very beginning it influenced the emergence and development of art and esthetic consciousness.In the context of everyday life culture, festivals have been essentially transformed at the expense of their ritual elements.