THE CARNIVAL IS OVER

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The carnival was over.  I was going home. I’d been teaching in Sydney and after three years of heat and hilarity was returning to the puritanical grey dullness of 1960s Britain.  In Britain, as everyone knows, the Swinging Sixties had to wait until the Seventies.  But Australia had stolen a march on us.  In Sydney, the Sixties were roaring, and I was turning my back on them.  I’d arrived as a buttoned-up Northern lad and now I was leaving as a buttoned-up Northern lad, though underneath the buttons a wild heart had begun to beat.

 I hung over the ship’s railings and watched the city slowly recede.  As though to rub it in, the ship played the Seekers singing The Carnival is Over.  And my tears were falling rain/ For the Carnival was over/ We may never meet again.

Back in Manchester, this haunting folksy ballad became the melancholy anthem to which I woke wet-eyed every morning and tumbled broken-hearted into bed every night.  I was 25 and felt as cold as stone.

 I summoned the strength to return for a second bite of the forbidden apple 5 years later only to find the garden of earthly delights bolted. The people with whom I’d frolicked stared at me uncomprehendingly.  Eve had married an accountant.  The snake was said to be asleep under a tree.  Carnival?  What Carnival?  That which had been a carnival for me had just been normal life for them.  And those for whom it had been something else remembered it as a time of drunken belligerence and boorishness.  Lovely to see me and all that, but what the hell had I come back for?

 I could answer that.  More of what I’d enjoyed when I was there last.  Good times fuelled by the study of literature.  You might want to hear me say that again - good times fuelled by the study of literature.  No, I wasn’t off my head.  I’d turned up in Sydney originally with a theory which, for a while, my students were prepared to go along with.  This theory held that every great novel – and the novel was my area of expertise – was comic, and that comedy liberated the mind, made the reader see everything both ways, so that neither dogma nor ideology could hold sway over our imaginations.  Thus disencumbered, we could dance and drink the night away discussing irony in Jane Austen.

Whether it was I or Jane Austen who fell out of favour in Australia, I didn’t know, but eventually the literary world caught up with my thinking and Carnival became the hot critical ticket for literary academics who needed to publish to gain promotion and wanted some sociological structure to justify the otherwise (as they saw it) self-indulgent study of mere literary texts.  The presiding genius of Carnival studies was the Russian Critic Mikhail Bakhtin.  Bakhtin did, in all fairness, centre his researches in the work of Rabelais, the great early-Renaissance French writer whose novels he saw as Carnivals in themselves, exemplifications of the destructive force of carnivalesque mockery which gave people a sort of second chance at life, overturning the prevailing hierarchical order, enabling the commoner to be king for a day, restoring the illusion of equality, removing the barriers that separated rich and poor, the sacred and the profane, the allowable and the forbidden, in effect - as we Carnivalizers liked to put it - turning the world upside down. 

Wasn’t this what I’d been saying for years?

From photographs, Bakhtin looked like a washed-out Dostoevsky who had never been to a fleshly carnival in his life.  Whether that was true of him or not I couldn’t say, but it is not uncommon, in my experience, for the greatest academic proponents of vitality and disorder to be frightened to leave the house.  I held similarly contradictory positions about Carnival myself, believing in the power of the people to overturn everything that was outdated and unjust while never enjoying being part of a crowd myself.

Eventually I began to wonder whether my contradictions weren’t driven by contradictions at the heart of Carnival itself.  There was, it seemed to me, a disconnect between Carnival’s antic ambitions – holding nothing to be sacred or so solemn that it couldn’t be mocked - and the uniformity of ritual and spirit – a sort of orthodoxy of jouissance – it expected from and even imposed on its participants. 

This we can test, whether or not we’ve been to Trinidad or Rio, as live or television audiences at any comedy club event.  A show like Live at The Apollo, where the comedy consumers are seated and self-conscious, can’t be called a carnival, I know, but it shares Bakhtinian assumptions about the power of scorn, the democracy of laughter and the release it brings.   If the poet is, in Shelley’s words, the unacknowledged legislator of mankind, the comedian is our unelected liberator from cant and cowardice.  

Ask yourselves, though, whether the price we pay for this liberation isn’t servitude to sameness.  We stomp and applaud before the curtain rises, laugh together at the same jokes and at the same time, and are still joined in laughing at the same things when the curtain descends.  Do the best comedians truly turn our world upside down or do they merely strap us into a fairground roller-coaster so that we can feign fear and scream in unison?

Recent events at the Soho Theatre in London, where a couple of Jewish Israelis were told to f-off out by a comedian because they wouldn’t stand for a Palestinian flag, are well documented.  The politics have inevitably obscured the issue of what is appropriate or even sacred to comedy.  Caring only for a show of pious unanimity, the comedian forgot he was in a temple of dissent.  As, indeed, did many in the audience who - instead of leaping on to the stage and pulling the unfunny comedian by the nose, or storming the box office and demanding their money back since they’d paid to enjoy the liberation of laughter not to be suborned into a political cause – submitted to authority and booed the dissenters out into the street. 

‘It became a political rally,’ one observer noted.  Another compared the audience to lemmings.

 We are right to fear the lemming in our nature.  Let one person wave a flag and a thousand lemmings will immediately unfurl theirs.  Let one person whoop at a music festival and in a minute whole fields of lemmings will be whooping likewise.  Let one person berate or beat a Jew….

Though Carnival should be the antithesis to lynchings and pogroms, it is not unknown for it to yield to the will of the mob.  As in a Carnival, the world was turned upside down by the massacre in Southern Israel on October 7, not by those who killed, but by those who saw beauty in the killing.   Television and social media extend the concept of the Carnival, so that we don’t have to be present to join in.  The whole world is a Carnival now, so long as the conditions for Carnival are met.

On the face of it, that was not the case on October 7.  Murder and rape have marred many a carnival, but this might be the first time they were the occasion for it.  Even as the horrible events were still unfolding, the norms of outrage were jettisoned.  Shock turned to joy; exultation took the place of pity; ecstasy shouldered aside revulsion.

We are all inviolable, progressive thinking has taught us.  We have a word for the smallest act of disrespect to another person – microaggression.  At a stroke, October the 7^th inverted all that.  Micro/macro – who gave a damn?  Let the cause be one we shared, and no defilement of another person could appal us.  Who knew that in the small print to those bills of human rights we claimed to live by was a provision to exclude some peoples from the category of ‘human’ altogether?  And where you are not human you cannot have a human right.

As for our insistence that victims must never be held responsible for crimes committed against them – that went the way of all other cherished beliefs in the frenzy and bloodlust of Carnival.  Once the world is turned upside down, humanity and justice fall like loose change from our pockets. 

It's taken me a long time to get from my Carnival longings of 1965 to my mistrust of Carnival today.  The Carnival is over, I sang then.  ‘This will be our last goodbye.’ 

If only…

A POINT OF VIEW - BBC RADIO 4

If you are at a loose end in North London on Wednesday Feb 28, why not come along and hear me discuss my new ‘romantic’ novel at Northwood Book Club, St Helens School, Eastbury Road, Northwood HA6 3AS.

Time 19.30

https://ow.ly/i3mC50QH3KO