Discourse in the Wilderness: Bakhtin and the "Carnivalesque" in

Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans

--by Mitzi McFarland

[Named as One of Two "Best Analytical Essays,"
Sigma Tau Delta National Convention, Anaheim, 1998]

As the most popular of James Fenimore Cooper’s early American romances, The Last of the Mohicans is also, one critic has previously suggested, "his most ambiguous" (Philbrick 25). Over the years, the novel has attracted more critical attention than any of Cooper’s works, yet few scholars agree in their assessments of its major ideological and thematic implications. One explanation of disagreement may be that of all the Leatherstocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans is the most bloody, savage, and unrelentingly cruel. Cooper’s gruesome display of carnage, death, and warfare warrants wide-ranging and conflicting interpretations of the novel’s sociological and ethical emphases. Equally perplexing, perhaps, are the overtones of magic and myth which characterize Cooper’s wilderness. Particularly in the latter half of the book, Leslie Fiedler suggests, we enter " a world subject to magical transformations" in which the action takes on the surreal quality of "a dream ‘dreamt among the trees,’ a Midsummer Night’s dream" (201). Similarly, Thomas Philbrick describes the forest as a "domain of bewildering appearances and startling transformations," an archetypal "descent to the underworld" (32). Yet while thematic analysis renders, for many critics, a mythic reading of the wilderness, interpretations of Cooper’s symbolism, once again, differ sharply.

In view of the whole question of meaning, it seems to me that Cooper’s preoccupation with Gothicism and fantasy can be explained by Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s notion of the "carnivalesque," the saturnalian ambiance found in early European folklore. With its bawdy humor and comic assaults of the "pillars of society," the carnival evokes an atmosphere of parody and satire. More than merely venting society’s political and economic frustrations, however, carnival implements profound social change by exposing the truth about the "emperor’s new clothes": that traditional class distinctions between the elite and common are arbitrary. In The Last of the Mohicans, this disruption—and ridiculing—of hierarchy is manifest in the violence and masquerading that occurs in the forest. Significantly, Bakhtin reveals that the carnivalesque spirit, which turns everything topsy turvy, leads also to a change in language. Within the fluid social constructs of the wilderness, where lawlessness and chaos abound, language exhibits what Bakhtin calls a "dialogic" life of its own, implementing tensions between nationality (White European) and locality (Native American)—but also, to a certain extent, the intermingling of both. Thus, instead of wielding rational and deliberate speech to maintain order in the New World, words and language in the wilderness—Bakhtin’s carnival—functions as a cacophony of multicultural discourses to cover all phases of American social and democratic life.

In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin characterizes the carnival as a time in which "hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it" are temporarily unseated—everything, that is, "resulting from sociohierarchical inequality" (122-23). During these brief moments when the elite and common come together in suspended autonomy, an air of liberation gives rise to feelings of change and even, in rare circumstances, revolution. Parody and satire aiming at the aristocracy or church appear in everything from local plays, ballads, to dirty street-corner jokes (Sobchack 179). While elements of the carnivalesque are not always as explicit in The Last of the Mohicans, the disintegration of social order into disorder is present in virtually every unit of action. Carnival unleashes those decentralizing forces that mitigate official powers and ideology. Similarly, the wilderness, where a heterogeneous mixture of race and culture interact, employs a kind of carnival that disrupts conventional social and linguistic practices as well as prohibitions. In this environment, survival and communication depend upon new understanding of presupposed social arrangements and authority. Insofar as miscegenation is a dominant theme—"I, who am a man without a cross," Leatherstocking repeatedly boasts—categories of racial distinction are subverted and redefined during carnival. The blurring of social/racial distinctions is particularly evident in the way that characters articulate alternative responses toward marginalized and authoritative cultures. Hawkeye, for instance, points out that "there is reason in an Indian, though nature has made him with a red skin," while white people "have many ways, of which, as an honest man, I can’t approve" (22-3). Later in the novel, Cora reiterates the same point with equal force about Uncas: "Who, that looks at this creature of nature, remembers the shade of his skin" (48).

According to Robert Stam, this kind of cultural decentering occurs when a "national culture loses its sealed-off and self-sufficient character and becomes conscious of itself as only one among many cultures" (122). Resulting is the tension between two opposing national identities: one that is democratically motivated and another that is censorial and authoritative. In The Last of the Mohicans, an aristocratic way of life, one in which wealth and title support the privileged few’s dominance, is briefly overturned by the marginalized masses. All too often, normative social institutions—mainly white European ones—are held up to ridicule in which case, as Edwin Fussell notes, "forest violence indirectly reveals the white man’s inability to adapt to a realm of existence for which his virtues and experiences have all too inadequately prepared him; throughout the novel, he is portrayed as irrelevant, ineffectual, and irresponsible" (40). Captain Duncan Heyward, for example, is frequently the butt of comic relief much like that of the Puritan singing-master, David Gamut, who proves "that a man may be born with too long a tongue" (63). Left to the mercy of Hawkeye and his companions, Heyward earnestly appeals, "’What is to be done?’ feeling the utter helplessness of doubt in such a pressing strait; ‘desert me not, for God’s sake’" (39). A once again helpless Heyward later demands, "’Is there nothing that I can do?’"—eager to assume a role that he is not cut out for. "’You!’ repeated the scout, who, with his red friends, was already advancing in the order he had prescribed; ‘yes, you can keep in our rear, and be careful not to cross the trail’" (195). Throughout The Last of the Mohicans, respectable white characters commit one act of folly after another, the consequences of the which they must be rescued by Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and Uncas: "Uncas is right!" Hawkeye snidely remarks at one point, "it would not be the act of men to leave such harmless things to their fate." As we see here, carnival gives a voice to a symbolic resistance, to internal hegemonies of class, race, and gender. Such dramatic reversals of power, David W. Newton suggests, implies that carnival "implicitly challenge[s] the sources of power within authoritative culture with its rigid social classifications and its claims of absolute control" (131).

As is dramatized in the novel, then, carnival cannot evade social tension and the realities of power, but it can amplify, critique, or point to the possible transcendence of these tensions by inverting traditional power structures. Whereas carnival "offers the chance to have a new outlook on the world . . . and to enter a completely new order of things" (RW 34), it constitiutes both a release for popular resentment and a locus of popular resistance. However, as Newton also emphasizes, not all tensions between various cultural forces are oppositional; rather, Bakhtin emphasizes the carnival’s "interrelationships and fluid boundaries between these opposing cultural forces" (131). With Cooper, this logic manifests itself in an inversion of race and ethnic crossover. The overtones of miscegenation—"the mixed ancestry of Cora, the vengeful and lurid passion of Mauga for Cora, and the courtly and muted love between her and Uncas"—are all evidence of "the erasure of conventional lines of distinction" (Philbrick 31). But this type of carnivalesque egalitarianism represents only one pole of the phenomenon in the novel. According to Robert Stam, democratic and egalitarian impulses at the core of carnival offer a "transindividual taste of freedom in which costumed revelers play out imaginary roles corresponding to their deepest desires" (130). Up until this point in the novel, elements of the carnivalesque are subtle, often overshadowed by the deathly atmosphere of the wilderness. Yet as Hawkeye and his men journey northward, they intrude upon a domain of startling transformations in which the confusion and masquerading of carnival are all the more fantasic.

One of the spectacles embraced by the carnival is the use of masks and costumes, as well as the presence of the "grotesque," as seen in giants, clowns, and fools (RW 8). Heyward, infected by the carnivalesque locale, consents to "play the madman, the fool, the hero; in short, any or everything to rescue her I love." Yet this is only the forerunner of a whole series of masquerades and deceptions. Shortly hereafter, Hawkeye joins in Heyward’s suit: "Change me; paint me, too, if you will; in short, alter me to anything—a fool" (239). As it turns out, Heyward

entirely sacrificed every appearance of the warrior to the masquerade of a buffoon . . . as [he] was already sufficiently disguised in his dress, there certainly did exist some reason for believing that, with his knowledge of French, he might pass for a juggler from Ticonderoga . . . (240)
The comical effect of Heyward’s disquise as a straggling juggler comments on the subversive pandemonium that occurs during carnival. Later, Duncan discovers Natty who has entered the Huron village in the guise of a "fierce and dangerous" (270) bear. Together, the two men carry Alice out of the camp under the pretense of a dying Huron woman. Uncas puts on Hawkeye’s bear costume, Hawkeye disguises himself as David Gamut (who passes freely in and out of the Huron camp), and Gamut escapes, last but not least, as the noble warrior Uncas. In this rather ridiculous scene at the Huron camp, with it comic repetitions of masquerade and transformation, we see the primary values of the carnivalesque: that the lines which distinguish race and nationality are crossed and blurred. Here, all social distinctions "are erased: master and servant trade places, the high and vulgar are enshrined. The fool reigns" (Sobchack 179).

Thus carnival dramatizes certain utopian aspirations of American culture: freedom, equality, and the mingling of the race. However, it can also foment political and social tension in its ability to embrace a variety of different voices and dialects that, together, resist the authoritative status of meaning and prevailing truths. In his essay Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin’s other well-known concept may explain why he was positive about the long-range, enduring effects of the carnivalesque. The term "dialogic" describes his view that voices in a community(ies) are constantly operating in dialogue: between any two speakers, between rulers and ruled, between system and individual, or between text and reader. In much the same way that carnival functions as a subversive social force, David Newton explains that "Bakhtin sees all forms of language caught between two opposing forces, one that creates change and diversity and one that imposes stasis and uniformity" (137). In relation to these two "dialogic" parties, meaning does not singularly relate to any one object or person, but is an evolving, ever-changing nexus for subjective truths and value-judgements (DI 670). Every apparently unified linguistic or social community is characterized by heteroglossia, whereby language becomes the space of confrontation among differently oriented social accents.

Hence, while Bakhtin shows that cultural processes are intimately related to social relations and that culture is the site of social struggle, his specific contribution lies in what we might call the linguistic dimension of class struggle. As Robert Stam explains, "the dominant class struggles to make the sign [or language] ‘uniaccentual’ and to endow it with an eternal, supraclass character;" the oppressed, on the other hand, "strive to deploy language for their own liberation" (8). In this respect, dialogue cannot exist apart from social constructs of power and the larger sociohistorical patterns which directly or indirectly inform them. In The Last of the Mohicans, power and language intersect in the form of attitudes, of talking down to or looking up to, of patronizing, respecting, ignoring, supporting, and misinterpreting verbal exchanges with others. Even from the beginning, it is apparent that language is often a divisive tool, blurring the boundaries between friend and foe, and implementing social and cultural tension in the novel. Mauga, for example, enters the narrative as the guide and protector of Heyward and the Munro daughters yet is revealed to be their enemy. As his Indian name implies, Le Renard Subtil profits from the duplicity of language in not only his ability to master multiple languages—English, French, Huron, Deleware—but also to use them in a way "which was most likely to excite the admiration of an Indian" (90) or the fear and confusion of an enemy. Much of Mauga’s use of language is filtered through his own "economic" or political battles with the White European culture, dramatized more specifically in his hatred for Munro. Henceforth, the ideological combat that lies at the heart of discourse enacts the fight against oppression, whether in the form of political rhetoric, artistic practice, or like Mauga, everyday language exchange.

In Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin also maintains that speakers are continually reacting to and struggling to understand the languages and discourses of other speakers. With Cooper, the Deleware, English, French, and Huron languages all generate their own discursive relationships which can be deciphered as microhistorical encounters, "overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in obscuring mist" (DI 670). Much of the focus for Bakhtin, then, is on the spoken word over the written word which has its roots in Cooper’s novel as well. Hawkeye says to Chingachgook that it is the White man’s custom "to write in books what they have done and seen, instead of telling them in the villages, where the lie can be given to the face of a cowardly boaster" (23). Whereas the meaning of any speech act can only be understood within the external, sociohistorical context in which it is placed, the wilderness is also a viable literary "text" that asserts its own meanings, narrative power, and dialogical voice. The descriptions of this bewildering, carnivalesque world, then, are not static, but progressive, characterized by a cacophony of multiple, diverse voices competing for their own values, meanings, and interpretations: from the despairing howls of a terror-stricken horse, to the piercing "death-halloos" (248) that signal an Indian attack, or to the perpetual noise of warfare—gunshots, rifles, bloodthirsty "war whoops" and a warrior’s "death song" (183). It is appropriate to say then that within this context, Bakhtin’s heteroglossia "transforms language into an act of creative dialogue between different speakers [and their environment] and which is continually transformed in the process of linguistic interaction" (139). Ultimately, dialogism refers to the relation between the "text" and its others not only in the relatively obvious forms of argument that we see in carnival—parody and satire—but also in much more diffuse and subtle forms that have to do with subtle attitudes which occur with the combination of voices in the novel and layering of meanings. Finally, while dialogism at its root is "interpersonal," it applies also to the relation between languages, literatures, genres, styles, and as we see with Cooper, entire cultures.

Although the examples provided in this essay are not exhaustive, they begin to suggest some of the ways in which Cooper uses elements of the carnivalesque to imagine the social and linguistic landscape of the wilderness in The Last of the Mohicans. The novel reveals Cooper’s interest in exploring the social power of words and in the capacity of language to create as well as disrupt the bonds of civilization. By focusing on the relationship between language and Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse, one begins to see more fully the complex hieroglyphics of meaning in Cooper’s fiction and his ability to take the materials of life—like carnival—and use them for the imaginative purposes of art.

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Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist.

Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

 

———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge: MIT, 1968.

 

Becker, George J. "James Fenimore Cooper and American Democracy." College English 17

(1956): 325-34.

 

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

 

Fussill, Edwin. Frontier: American Literature and the American West. Princeton: Princeton

UP, 1965.

 

Newton, David W. Bakhtin and the Cultural Context in the American Language. Unpublished

Manuscript.

 

Philbrick, Thomas. "The Last of the Mohicans and the Sound of Discord." American

Literature 43 (1971): 25-41.

 

Ross, John F. The Social Criticism of Fenimore Cooper. Folcroft: The Folcroft Press, 1969.

 

Sobchack, Tom. "Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque in 1950’s British Comedies." Journal of Popular

Film and Television 23 (1996): 179-85.

 

Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures. Baltimore: John Hopkin’s UP, 1989.