Carnivalesque Tradition
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#01
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.148
POWERS OF HORROR > CELINE: NEITHER ACTOR NOR MARTYR
Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that Céline's literary style operates as a site of abjection that cannot be reduced to thematic content, biography, or politics: through rhythm, carnivalesque polyphony, and an apocalyptic style that hovers between disgust and laughter, Céline transforms the abject into a writing practice that both enacts and momentarily stabilizes the dissolution of the subject — his anti-Semitism being readable as a symptomatic counterweight (a delirium) against the very identity-dissolution that his scription unleashes.
Bakhtin has shown that there is a fundamental dialogism, a basic bivalence in any speech, word, or utterance in novels stemming from carnivalesque tradition... To the carnival's semantic ambivalences, which pair the high and the low, the sublime and the abject, Celine adds the merciless crashing of the apocalypse.