Rabelais’ Carnival and Madness

Mary Barnes was a resident in R.D. Laing’s therapeutic community, Kingsley Hall, and her book is the only autobiographical account from this seminal time of both counterculture and psychiatry. This article presents part of an analysis of Barnes’ narrative using the Russian critical literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on ancient literary genres to help develop a deeper understanding of how Barnes embraced her unusual experiences and transformed the self. The author argues that a carnivalistic genre is discernible in Barnes’ more self-consciously stylised psychodynamic text. The exaggerated grotesques, profanities and debasements featured in carnivalistic genres provide Barnes with a moral discourse in which to position the self. By returning to the carnivalistic representation of experience characterised by mediaeval life, Barnes loses her finalised identity, becoming other, enabling her life to take different turns where new possibilities abound. The article concludes by suggesting that there is a fundamental relationship between the experience of and the expression of madness, which reference to Bakhtin helps elucidate.