MEET BAKHTIN!
"But if you don't eat people like all the others," Sophie said, "then what do you live on?"
"That is a squelching tricky problem around here," the BFG answered. "In this sloshflunking GIant Country, happy eats like pineapples and pigwinkles is simply not growing. Nothing is growing except for one extremely icky-poo vegetable. It is called the snozzcumber."
"The snozzcumber!" cried Sophie. "There's no such thing!"
The BFG looked at Sophia and smiled, showing about twenty of his square white teeth. "Yesterday," he said, "we was not believing in giants, was we? Today we is not believing in snozzcumbers. Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own two little winkles, we think it is not existing..."
-The BFG, pages 43-44
The BFG by Roald Dahl
The BFG holding a snozzcumber, page 45
If you have never read Roald Dahl's book The BFG, you should: The Big Friendly Giant (BFG) kidnaps Sophie from her bed at the orphanage and takes her with him to Giantland, where Sophie meets lots of other bigger, scarier Giants. The BFG catches dreams in a net and saves them in jars to give to good children during the night while the other, mean giants terrorize the world in the middle of the night. Sophie and the BFG decide to put an end to the mean giants, once and for all!
Bakhtin would have loved this conversation between Sophie and the BFG. The words "sloshflunking", "pigwinkles", and the infamous "snozzcumber", a yucky vegetable the BFG is forced to eat because he does not eat people ("human beans"), are all words that are silly, made-up, and out of the ordinary. They break the social contract, or what is commonly practiced in the community (in this case, in the world of words). The words are carnivalesque because they are unexpected, unique, and imaginative. Bakhtin would have liked the feeling one gets when reading those words!
How do you feel when you read the word "sloshflunking"? What do you think about that word? Do you like it or dislike it?
Bakhtin would have also liked the sentence, "Just because we happen not to have actually seen something with our own two little winkles, we think it is not existing..." This sentence is carnivalesque because it suggests thinking outside of the box, or outside the realm of normal, common thought. It encourages stretching the imagination, something Bakhtin thought was important in his definition of carnivalesque!
