Mikhail M. Bakhtin is best known for his visionary conception of carnival—the carnivalesque, "carnival consciousness," "the culture of laughter"—as a model for the regeneration of time and the world and the emancipation of the human spirit: "This carnival spirit offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things" Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky, 1968. Bakhtin elaborated this model most fully in his best known work, Rabelais and His World, written largely in 1940, though not published until 1965, partly at least because of its anti-Stalinist implications. But the role of the carnival spirit and its revolutionary potential—its power "to consecrate inventive freedom, and to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of...