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210  15 Castaway Carnival and Sociobiological Satire in We Who Are About To . . . Tess Williams We Who Are About To . . . is an SF story of a doomed group of castaways, a “lifeboat population” stranded on a tagged but uncharted planet. It is also a dark tale about physical vulnerability and the failure of social identity and power. Eight characters, from very different backgrounds, suddenly lose context and/or authority. The millionaire family does not know what to do without money to protect them and the academic finds his particularized and theoretical knowledge useless in a survival situation. They all die, together with a football player, a wannabe government agent, and a hooker. The only character that retains power (but not life) in this hopeless situation is the narrator , a member of a despised religious sect and a witch figure. Russ’s novel is driven by a feminist politic but it is clear from this story that the author is also interested in the genre because of its “seams,” its potential to represent the irregular, aberrant, subversive, and grotesque. This is a carnival text with carnival characters acting to destabilize much of late twentieth-century mainstream Western culture. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory, and Mary Russo’s feminist extension of it, I address here the various subversions of literary forms this work offers, the textual challenges of exploring carnivalized bodies and social identities, and Russ’s lampooning of neo-Darwinist stories of science and survival. The theory of carnival, as first developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work on Rabelais, is grounded in medieval spectacle but has considerable relevance to contemporary culture as a critical and philosophical tool. Carnival maps transgression and subversion in discourse and materiality, particularly in relation to bodies. It also speaks to society, the environment, and time in a very different way to both modernism and postmodernism. A broad-based and plastic theory, carnival embraces category crisis and provides a “guerrilla epistemology” (Hitchcock 1998) that undermines the dominant politics of the day, whatever they may be, and transforms currencies of meaning and significance into satire, farce, and vulgar humor. Despite criticisms of utopianism , naïveté and essentialism, based primarily on Bakhtin’s uniting of Williams, Castaway 211 the individual body with the social body and ultimately with the regenerative and fecund body of the planet, the theory of carnival remains relevant. As a tool, many critics who employ carnival express a degree of frustration with it; but they also acknowledge carnival as an antidote to repression, and concede that its transgressiveness and inclusivity is useful. It is particularly important , however, to recognize the ambivalence of carnival theory with regard to gender.1 Rabelais’s women are unvoiced and generally portrayed as archetypal figures such as the birthing woman and “the bride” in popular festive forms (Bakhtin 1965). Bakhtin takes his critical cues from Rabelais’s work and fails to further follow issues with women and carnival expression. However, Mary Russo extends carnival to address women through carnival and the grotesque. She argues that the male body represents the classic closed and transcendent body, with its connections to rationalism and individualism, while the female is the protruding, secreting, multiple, changing, and connected body. The female body, therefore, is “other” and is more identified with carnival space and time, a space and time needed for cultural rejuvenation and the possibility of real change: “The figure of the female transgressor as public spectacle is still powerfully resonant, and the possibilities of redeploying this representation as a demystifying or utopian model have not been exhausted” (Russo 1994). Russo rehabilitates the feminine through dramatic flight, which she sees as “a freedom from oppressive bodily containment.” When the hysteric decides to jump or fly, thus escaping a phallocentric world, she reconstitutes herself as central and forces male spectatorship. While this action may mean the literal death of the female subject, it is also, according to Russo, the point where the masculine becomes the liminal, the female subject becomes realized , and the arbitrary, imposed boundaries constructed between “individual and society, between genders, between species, and between classes” become blurred and brought into crisis (79) . Russ’s novel is consistent with Russo’s feminist interpretation of carnival as she uses the philobatic moment of her particular narrator’s escape to achieve a feminist critique of text and body, and her other archetypal/universalized characters demonstrate a carnival collapse of social mores and demystification of many cultural values. Genre In the mid-1960s, there...

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