To Bakhtin, the moment of a body’s degradation is also the moment for its
renewal and rebirth. Here, the body is not of the biological individual, but of a cosmic,
collective whole that keeps on growing and being renewed. He speaks of a “grotesque
realism” or “material bodily principle” embodied in the carnivals of the Middle Ages that
counters the official discourse by portraying “images of the human body with its food,
drink, defecation, and sexual life … in an extremely exaggerated form.”
He argues,
“The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, … the lowering of all that is
high, spiritual, ideal, abstract.”
This unofficial, folksy and popular realm of grotesque
realism, shown through people’s feasting and laughter, sexual/reproductive process, “the
slinging of excrement and drenching in urine,” and the candid showing of the material
bodily lower stratum (the zone of the genital organs), articulates an alternative
counterculture that means to debase and degrade the body in anticipation of a utopian
renewal: it destroys in order to regenerate. This is Bakhtin:
Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that
swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill
simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also
means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the
reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception,
pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a
destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not
imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to
hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new
birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and
the womb. It is always conceiving.
Neither prostitution nor race is a conspicuous subject in Bakhtin’s work, but his re-
imagining of the “low” is useful for reconsidering the degraded bodies of the prostitutes
and the racialized Third World women as the very site of a radical renewal.
To Bakhtin, however, the re-imagining of the “low” takes on a collective body, an
indivisible whole and a single procreating birth. He laments the gradual decline of this
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Convention