THE FANTASY PRINCIPLE IN CARNIVAL

Abstract

This paper examines the forms and ways of manifestation of fantasy principle in a culturally and artistic phenomenon such as carnival, with an aim to answer the question in which carnival forms the fantasy principle is the most expressed and why. On the basis of the lectures of dr Tijana Popović-Mlađenović at the subject for PhD students The phenomenon of fantasy in arts at University of Arts in Belgrade, I choosed main characteristics attributed to the fantasy. With a starting point that there are different levels and forms of both creative and receptive fantasy in the carnivals (understood in a way that Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted them), I marked and analyzed the intersection points of fantasy and carnival principle: improvisation, merging of differing, subversion of rules and laws, freedom, continuity, flowing, incompleteness and constant change, playing, changing of identities and transgression, fantastic and fantasmagoric, unconsciousness, intuition, the world of dreams, association and symbols, creativity, communication. This research also showed that the functions of fantasy principle in carnivals are the escape from the real everyday world, the subversion of the officialy accepted values and creating a strong feeling of the collectivity. I also analyzed the carnival in village Grebenac as a specific case study. As an archaic form of the carnival with a stress on freedom, playing and improvisation, it preserved a firm relationship with the fantasy principle. On the other side, the modernized forms of carnival (with separation between the participants and the audience and which highlight the expensive costumes and masks) loose their connection both with the fantasy and with the former essence of the carnival and become only the commercial touristic manifestations.