Magersfontein, O Magersfontein! as karnavaleske roman

Abstract

Summary The aim of this investigation is to demonstrate that Etienne Leroux's novel Magersfontein, O Magersfontein! can be decribed as as a carnivalesque work. The concept “carnivalesque” is used in the sense in which it is applied by Mikhail Bakhtin in his Rabelais and His World (1984) in which he investigates popular humour and folk culture during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as portrayed in the novels of François Rabelais. The following aspects of the said cultural-historical phenomenon, as highlighted by Bakhtin in the work of Rabelais and presented in Leroux's novel, will be focused on: (a) The perspective on history, (b) the suspension of hierarchy and authority and of the dogmatic and (c) of the accepted use of language, (d) the bodily principle, (e) laughter and the comical as forms of truth and liberation, (f) rebirth, (g) transgression of the boundaries between play and life and (h) the transfer from the spatially-vertical to the historically-horisontal.