The Carnivalesque Summary

3.3. The Third Paradigm: The Carnivalesque
A theory of postcolonial eco-poetics begins with this larger, more inclusive reading of Bakhtin's dialogic, or many-voiced discourse. In a sense, Bakhtin's belief that polyglossic narrative is a kind of "carnival" of interactions could be said in a postcolonial eco-poetical reading to be a "menagerie" of narrative, or more accurately, an ecosystem of narrative. This interactive postcolonial ecological understanding of narrative lends itself to the third paradigm of postcolonial eco-poetics, namely, the carnivalesque paradigm. This carnivalesque nexus works to disintegrate the borders between the self and other; the subject and object cannot be disentangled.
From a postcolonial eco-critical point of

This time it is a human-nonhuman encounter for man’s sake. Buck is torn between the inner call of the wild and the “civilised” society. His ideal master, Thornton, is killed by the Indians. By killing Thornton, the Indians claim authority over Thornton’s property including all his dogs and money. This results in the first direct showdown between Buck and the human Yeehats. The carnivalesque scenario starts with Buck noticing the Yeehats dancing over the camp’s wreckage. Buck, out of revenge, decides to oust the anthropocentric hegemony represented by the Yeehats. Buck manages to subdue the humans to his own authority. The Yeehats start making myths around the Ghost Dog who established “the imagined community”, in Benedict Anderson’s words. In this eco-imaginary community, man is no longer has authority over non-humans. In such a community, there is a sense of belonging produced between Buck and the wilderness. Equipped with ecological romantic discourse, the native people, the Yeehats, mythologise Buck as a mythical Ghost Dog who terrorises the inhabitants of the valley. The romantic idealisation and myth-making are characteristics that represent the superstitious nature of the native people who are away from being civilised. Laden with deeper ecological concern, the end of the novel eradicates any anthropocentric authority in wilderness and depicts a picture of human-free

The function of this mythical mask is to deny the conformity of voices, discourses, identities in the ecological context. This carnivalistic mask is “connected with the joy of change and reincarnation” of Buck from a mere slave dog to a heavenly Evil Spirit, “with gay relativity and with the merry negation of uniformity and similarity” to any other human or non-human creature (Bakhtin, Rabelais 40). The carnivalistic mask of Buck is connected to his own spiritual transition and metamorphoses and indicates a violation of natural boundaries that exist between humans and non-humans. As a characteristic of the most ancient rituals and spectacles, the mythmaking of Buck’s identity contains the playful element of life; it shows how Buck, the non-human creature overcomes both life and death and masters not only civilised and primitive humans but the non-human species as well. Buck’s identity has been developed and shaped on both biological and cultural spheres in a way that troubles all the boundaries and limits. The major purpose of this carnivalesque scenario is to displace, dismantle, and subvert the dichotomy of the hegemonic anthropocentric superior and the inferior ecological