Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. Bakhtin considers that the vision we had of the Middle Ages was anachronic and deeply inspired by the vision of the Renaissance. He argues that our knowledge of that era is very limited and that searchers didn’t go as deep as they should have in their research on the Middle Ages and medieval culture and customs. He says: “Laughter and its forms represent the least scrutinized sphere of the people's creation. The element of laughter was accorded to the least place of all in the vast literature devoted to myth, to folk lyrics, and to epics”. This is a big mistake for him as one of the prime examples of the culture of the Middle Ages was carnival and the importance of humor and laughter in carnival culture.
Bakhtin sees a link between mass culture and the market, which for him is where carnival laughter and folk culture were the most visible. He argues that folk culture was dualistic. People lived a double life: on the one hand, they had their normal, official life which was serious, dogmatic, and complied with strict hierarchic orders, and on the other hand, there was the carnivalesque life, which was free and unbounded, filled with ambivalent laughter, familiarity, and sacrilegious humor. In carnivalesque life, everything from the social order to the people was turned upside down. The part where he mentions the upside down and reversal of the order of the carnival culture is quite reminiscent of ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ by Victor Hugo, and that very important scene where Quasimodo is sacred King of the Fools, and the passage just after when Pierre Gringoire finds himself in the Court of Miracles, where truands and people that were despised by the normal order have organized a counter-society devoted to crime and thievery, with its own hierarchy and institutions. It’s also reminiscent of Shakespeare’s carnival use in his books such as ‘The Winter's Tale’ or ‘The Tempest’, with the notion of a topsy-turvy word and a reversal of power and order. Bakhtin, instead of opposing this duality or favoring one part of medieval life, considers that both of them were legitimate as they were separated by strict temporal borders. They never happened at the same time, and there was a time and order for each event. And for Bakhtin, understanding this duality and its organization in time and space is the key to understanding medieval cultural consciousness. Because carnivalesque imagery is always dualistic and contradictory, it encompasses both birth and death, wisdom and idiocy, beauty and horror, up and down. It’s like the circle of life itself. And as the carnival was confined in time, not in space, it was a universal democratic concept that belonged to everyone, uniting the two poles of change and crisis. And in that, the marketplace played a key role, according to Bakhtin, as it was the center of the unofficial, the junction of the duality, a place where new types of communication could be spread and exchanged, creating new forms of speech or giving a new meaning to old words or forms of speech. The culture of the marketplace, the one that defied social order, for Bakhtin represented peak human culture, a physiological symptom of social cohesion.
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Thus, Bakhtin's vision of the carnival and marketplace is interesting because it completely contradicts the vision of mass culture as the alienation of the individual in favor of the group and the mass. Bakhtin takes the more positive sides and rather sees the unity in it, how it assembles us as a group instead of depriving us of our peculiarity.
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