of all structure and order". The act sanctifies ambivalence toward that which is normally considered absolute, single, monolithic. Carnivalistic symbols always include their opposite within themselves: "Birth is fraught with death, and death with new birth." The crowning implies the de-crowning, and the de-crowning implies a new crowning. It is thus the process of change itself that is celebrated, not that which is changed. The carnival sense of the world "is opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order." This is not to say that liberation from all authority and sacred symbols was desirable as an ideology. Because participation in Carnival extracts all individuals from non-carnival life, nihilistic and individualistic ideologies are just as impotent and just as subject to the radical humour of carnival as any form of official seriousness. The spirit of carnival grows out of a "culture of laughter". Because it is based in the physiological realities of the lower bodily stratum (birth, death, renewal, sexuality, ingestion, evacuation etc.), it is inherently anti-elitist: its objects and functions are necessarily common to all humans—"identical, involuntary and non-negotiable". Bakhtin argues that we should not compare the "narrow theatrical pageantry" and "vulgar Bohemian understanding of carnival" characteristic of modern times with his Medieval Carnival. Carnival was a powerful creative event, not merely a spectacle. Bakhtin suggests that the separation of participants and spectators has been detrimental to the potency of Carnival. Its power lay in there being no "outside". Everyone participated, and everyone was subject to its lived transcendence of social and individual norms: "carnival travesties: it crowns and uncrowns, inverts rank, exchanges roles, makes sense from nonsense and nonsense of sense." Carnivalization of literature Bakhtin's term the carnivalization of literature (which Morson and Emerson point out could also be called "the literization of carnival") refers to the transposition of the essential qualities of the carnival sense of the world into a literary language and a literary genre. Seriocomic genres The ancient seriocomic genres initiated the "carnivalistic line" in Western literature. Of these, the most significant were Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire According to Bakhtin, the seriocomic genres always began with "the living present". Everything took place "in a zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries." Unlike the "serious" genres (tragedy, epic, high