Carnivalized desire and the cult of the flesh: the erotic ethos of grotesque realism

Engaging with Mikhail Bakhtin's dual literary tropes of the carnival and the grotesque body, each a part of what he calls grotesque realism, this project traces the carnival's revalorization of Eros, a kind of carnivalization of desire, and its ethical implications. Carnivalized desire, through its dialogization of poetic discourse, invokes becoming for the authoritative lyrical voices in Walt Whitman's "This Compost" and Pablo Neruda's "Caballero solo" ["Single Gentleman"]. In novelistic discourse, carnivalized desire enacts these becomings through a masochistic and highly eroticized cult of the flesh in Virgilio Pinera's La came de Rene [Rene's Flesh], and through the similarly cult-like and sexually charged world of John Rechy's City o f Night. In each text, desiring bodies invoke and enact the grotesque body's acts of becoming, in turn postulating an ethical vision of selfhood that is exuberantly incomplete, constituted by difference, and multiplicitously loving.