[…] their existence is a reflection of some other’s mode of being–and even then, not a direct reflection. They are life’s maskers; their being coincides with their role, and outside this role they simply do not exist.¹

-The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin

That the Beatles are immortal is hardly a point to be disputed. A pointer to their perpetual status might be found in the hallucinogenic, Carnivalesque whirl of their art, found particularly in their 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the fantastical Magical Mystery Tour that followed it – the albums that propelled them to god-like status. Bakhtin’s assertion of the Carnivalesque

which promoted the profane, the vulgar, and the grotesque, the celebration of wine, dance, and the obscene as an expression of resistance to the official high culture of the [medieval] nobility, the Church and the State²

might easily be taken as a sophisticated blurb for a collection of the Beatles’s works. Indeed, the captured spirit of the show-man in their shadow band, Sgt. Pepper, appeals to the rebellious child within the listener, who is being taken to a grown-up pantomime of sensation. Through their own Carnival, as we may call it, the Beatles became one with their alter egos; creating stories told with flair and style and instilling commotion in the consciousness – commotion that comes only with the awareness that one has an active part in a festival masterpiece.

Rejecting their Edwardian collarless suits and dressed in spectacular bright satin colored uniforms in tune with the psychedelic era that they have come to represent, the Beatles surrendered their psyches to the members of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, freeing themselves from themselves. Bakhtin essentially captures this spirit in his Carnivalesque as the essence of the liberal atmosphere rendered into literary form. This is not to say, of course, that the essence of the unregimented in the Beatles was born with the conception of Sgt. Pepper, nor that the Beatles cowered behind flamboyant characters to make scrupulous, Carnivalesque proclamations. On the contrary, for instance, at the 1963 Royal Variety Show, with the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in the audience, Lennon delivered one of his still most quoted lines: ‘For our last number I’d like to ask your help: Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you’ll just rattle your jewelry’.³ With Sgt. Pepper however, the Beatles embraced the Carnivalesque in all its force of the topsy-turvy, which turned hierarchies on their heads: beggars dressed as kings, and noblemen as fools. Bakhtin’s Carnival, where opposites mingle, as hell sits besides heaven and the sacred is profane, thus encompasses the Beatles’s (and the world’s) first concept album, where all that is rigid and anarchic is converted into loose mockery and autonomy of will and meaning is continually asserted:

We would be Sgt. Pepper‘s band, and for the whole of the album we’d pretend to be someone else […] It liberated you – you could do anything when you got to the mike or on your guitar, because it wasn’t you.⁴

Including a set of cardboard cutouts in the album sleeve; a moustache, some sergeant stripes, and badges; the fictional band urges its listeners to create an illusory reality for themselves and become autonomous characters in their own Carnival. The aim of the Carnival seems to be, as Foucault puts it, to ‘extend our participation in the present system’,⁵ to make the prospect of the augmentation of the constricted of life achievable.

Sgt. Pepper unquestionably embraces the conventions of a concept album that is fused under a universal premise, be it lyrical, instrumental or narrative. Nonetheless, its fragments are unified in such a hypothetical way that they are less persistently insisting on the same motif, than they are different interpretations of the Sgt. Pepper signature of the Carnivalesque. The fragments that make up the unified whole of the LP each have their own life force, their own stake in the universal Carnival that the Beatles strove so hard to engrave on their art. The initial number quiets down a murmuring audience in the introductory track ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Band Club’, ushering the Sgt. Pepper band into the circus of madness. The function of silencing the enthusiasts is not as trivial as one may initially consider it. This track is in fact the first recording of an album that comes after a somewhat drastic decision never to perform live again, silencing the audience whose screams have been attested to blot out the Beatles themselves at their concerts. In having the ringmaster of the Carnival as it were, introducing the Sgt. Pepper’s band by suppressing the audience, the Beatles seem to be powerfully declaring that in what is to follow, no audience will stifle their vision – their Carnival is untainted by efforts to flatter the audience, thus affirming the Carnival that Bakhtin envisaged. In effect, Bakhtin mourns Carnivalesque’s popularity, which had decreased, he presumes, due to the ever-expanding individualistic world of capitalism.⁶ Inspired by Hindu, Harrison launches war on covetousness in ‘Within You Without You’, cementing this argument with

The people who gain the world and lose their soul

They don’t know – they can’t see – are you one of them?⁷

Sgt. Pepper featured transcendental lyrics comparable to mirages, their effects so fascinating and abstract akin to refracted lightshone directly into crystal:

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,

Tower over your head.8

The overwhelming madness runs amok throughout the album, in a demented compulsion to gratify the id instinct. As with the Carnival itself, there is no exact definition for the id, but

we all approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations [...] It is filled with […] a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.⁹

‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ particularly fits this description. Still the subject of many a heated discussion today, it was seen as a blasphemous proud declaration of drug use, despite multiple astute critics eliciting poetical and musical value. Still, the flower-power generation held the lyrics as sacred verses, and revered them along with Tolkien’s peace-loving hobbits in The Lord of the Rings. The hippies wanted power to overturn the conventional hierarchies. This was a time when the U.S and Russia were engrossed with the divided Vietnam and the overwrought Cold War; freethinkers rallied for peace, emancipation for women and tolerance for emerging modern technologies. Embracing the counter culture, the Beatles adopted the Carnivalesque inversion of roles and include such tracks as ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ in Sgt. Pepper. In the former, the long-respected dynamic of respect for the older generation is turned on its head as

quietly turning the backdoor key

Stepping outside she is free.¹⁰

Autonomy is encouraged, dependence on the institutionalized entity looked upon in a certain pitiful way. In McCartney’s ‘When I’m Sixty Four’, the relationship between youth and old age is expounded on yet again, embodying the prototypical force of the Carnivalesque this time with the young singer putting on the ‘grotesque body’ of his older counterpart. This out-of-character conception extends to an out-of-culture approach, exhibited intricately by all the Beatles but especially by Harrison in ‘Within You Without You’, where he embarks on his quest to discover Eastern religion and culture. The hippies wholeheartedly welcomed the glamorous and exotic Eastern influence, starting with their yoga, the effects of which they achieved through addictive substances. Whilst some might deem the analogy implausible, one certainly cannot negate that ‘the aim of all Eastern religion, like the aim of LSD, is basically to get high; that is to expand your consciousness and find ecstasy and revelation within’.¹¹ Leary’s claim is additionally solidified by the discernible neat row of marijuana plants positioned in front of the colourful Beatles on the cover of their album.

Sgt. Pepper became the soundtrack for the Summer of Love, advocating the imaginative journey that is the drug-induced hallucination. Many right-wing conservatives, like Birch, debased the album as an attempt to indoctrinate youth, and echoed F.R. Leavis’s criticism of Hollywood movies:

They provide now the main form of recreation in the civilized world; and they involve surrender, under conditions of hypnotic receptivity, to the cheapest emotional appeals, appeals the more insidious because they are associated with a compellingly vivid illusion of actual life.¹²

Despite this (or perhaps because of this), the album continued to soar in popularity as the Beatles flaunted rebellion and appreciation of performers in insignificant festivals. Interlaced with circus organ music, one such display of admiration is evidently ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’. Based on an old circus poster, the piece identifies the crowd as dependant on Carnival whilst keeping it in check almost to the point of alienating it, and focusing instead on the entertainer, as the Beatles unquestionably wanted to do. The song and (on a greater scale) the album exhibits that which Todorov distinguishes as ‘fantastical’,¹³ comprising the ambiguous quality of the album, as well as its supernatural and spectacular nature. The track ‘Lovely Rita’, for instance, showcases unsuppressed lust, highlighting the undeniable fantasy of the dominatrix woman in uniform. After the suggestive line ‘Give us a wink and make me think of you’¹⁴ comes the 12-bar aural orgasm that cements the Beatles’s wholehearted support of Bakhtin’s emphasis of the ‘free intermingling of bodies’; a sort of sexual frankness that advocated a shameless display of bodily functions, including carnal knowledge. This is accentuated again in the risqué ‘I’d love to turn you on’. This notion of the carefree and unbounded will, however, does not necessarily infer sheer disinterest in serious and often grim issues of life. On the contrary, ‘Day in the Life’, inspired by the death of Tara Browne, specifically deals with death. As ‘a crowd of people stood and stared’¹⁵ at the spectacle that is death, Lennon and McCartney turn the crowd itself into the spectacle, pre-empting Boal’s concept of ‘spect-actor’.¹⁶ Comparable with T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’,¹⁷ the final track of the album suggests the death of the magnificent Carnivalesque and brings out a particularly jarring aspect of the concept. The Carnival is perhaps a slightly pathetic show that provides only temporary leave of the strict and authorial situation. The Beatles’s music in Sgt. Pepper grew to be a mirage, exemplar of Carnivalesque in concept but ultimately transient in substance.

Characterized as it is by the fusion and interplay of voices, which don’t necessarily complement each other, Sgt. Pepper flawlessly fulfills the requirements of a polyphonic text set by Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: ‘A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of valid voices’.¹⁸ Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony – the multi-faceted nature of dialogic discourse, is itself based on the musical term, which denotes a texture composed of simultaneous sounds. By thus applying the Bakhtinian notion of the polyphonic and Carnivalesque, crucial questions have been brought forth as regards reconstruction of canonical authors such as Shakespeare, Joyce and Woolf. It is not then, a stretch to say that this co-occurrence of multiple accents, tones and styles is a defining feature, if not the impetus, of the Beatles’s Carnival atmosphere, reflected, but by no means encompassed by ‘every fashionable face from the pantheon of Pop art pseudo worship’, ¹⁹ that is the cover of the album. Its fusion of figures from diverse walks of life inflict on the Carnival not just the alternate identities of the pseudo-Beatles, but also a unique heteroglossia – the complex dynamic of multiplicities identified by Bakhtin in his essay ‘Discourse in the Novel.’²⁰ In channeling their heroes’ cores, the Beatles further immerse themselves into grotesque costume, claiming a wide range of meaning carried forth by signifiers, like the friends and celebrities behind them. Bringing fresh undertones to objects with dilapidated connotations is a prominent feature in both the burlesque and Sgt. Pepper. Nevertheless, Lennon and McCartney poked fun at critics who ‘go bullshitting off into intellectualism’,²¹ maintaining that the album cover is not a detective novel and the songs do not have one specific, transcendent resolution meant as the ultimate prize for the keen seeker. Merely a year before the release of Sgt. Pepper in fact, Julia Kristeva had described Bakhtin’s Carnivalesque as ‘composed of… analogies and nonexclusive oppositions’.²² This assortment of nuances is further defined through the cacophony of luminous colour on the cover, bearing similarities to a psychedelic, self-conscious piece of art and often compared to The White Album cover to gauge the Beatles’s evolution of style.

Bakhtin memorably describes the Carnivalesque as the Holiday of Fools, identifying such characteristics as self-parody, as well as using other’s language to poke fun at them, that is, making strange ‘ostranenie’. Many have identified this as analogous to the Shakespearean conception of the Fool perceived in the multi-layered, dialogic Falstaff, or in the Fool in King Lear, whose conundrum-like diction makes Lear’s intense highborn affliction seem detached and illusory. Shakespeare proficiently captures the essence of the deep and complex Fool in As You Like It, as Touchstone declares that ‘the fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool’.²³ One might say that the Shakespearean and Bakhtinian Fool have lent many of their distinctive qualities to the Beatles in Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, wherein obscure, sardonic lyrics and mask-wearing are defining features. In these particular two albums

They grant the right not to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking, the right not to be taken literally, not “to be oneself”; the right to live a life in the chronotrope of the entr’acte, the chronotrope of theatrical space, the right to act life as a comedy and to treat others as actors, the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage–and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets.²⁴

With soul, wit and songs like ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, ‘Fool on the Hill’, and ‘I am the Walrus’, the Beatles emerged as the quintessential modern Fools, as they weaved opaque and beautifully aloof music that transcends even the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. More a predominant Fool than the others, Lennon strategically cast himself in the role, ceaselessly associating his name with all that was chaotic and anarchic. ‘I’m John, and I too play a guitar. Sometimes I play the fool’,²⁵ he confidently introduced himself to a radio audience.

With the issue of Sgt. Pepper, the realm of popular culture was transfused with high culture: an innovative, highbrow approach to pop was congealed and the Beatles’s music was no longer held as a commodity produced for sale or short-lived fashion but became recognized as work of genius in its own right. The Beatles’s Carnivalesque album featuring animal sound effects, orgasms, sitars and spiral grooves is anything but ‘predigested’, so that one might declare that Sgt. Pepper presumes to negate Adorno’s concept of pseudo-individualization,²⁶ and given its idiosyncrasy, demands to be listened with at least some degree of academic endeavor.

Endnotes

¹ Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 159.

² Ibid., pp. 259-422.

³ Elizabeth M. Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 463.

⁴ The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology <http://www.wingspan.ru/bookseng/ant/10.html> [accessed 3^rd January 2010].

⁵ Michel Foucault, Critical Assessments, ed. Barry Smart, Vol. I (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 108.

⁶ Carol Adlam, Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), p. 171.

⁷ George Harrison, ‘Within You Without You’. Lyrics. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone, 1967.

⁸ John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’. Lyrics. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone, 1967.

⁹ Sigmund Freud, New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, ed. by James Strachey (Chicago: [n. pub], 1965), p.91.

¹⁰ John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘She’s Leaving Home’. Lyrics. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone, 1967.

¹¹ Adam Huber, Chris Lemieux and Marlon Hollis, The Hippie Generation: A brief look into the hippie culture <http://users.rowan.edu/~lindman/hippieintro.html> [accessed 3 January 2010].

¹² Frank R. Leavis, ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’, in The Raymond Williams reader (Cornwall: Blackwell Publisher Ltd., 2001), p. 4.

¹³ Stanislaw Lem, ‘Todorov’s Fantastic Theory of Literature’, trans. by Robert Abernathy, in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 1.4 (1974), pp. 227-37.

¹⁴ John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘Lovely Rita’. Lyrics. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone, 1967.

¹⁵ John Lennon and Paul McCartney, ‘A Day in the Life’. Lyrics. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Parlophone, 1967.

¹⁶ Doug Paterson, ‘A Brief Biography of Augusto Boal’ <http://www.ptoweb.org/boal.html> [accessed 3 February 2010].

¹⁷ T. S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ in poems and poets <http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/t_s_eliot/t_s_eliot_the_waste_land.htm> [accessed 3 February 2010].

¹⁸ Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 6.

¹⁹ Philip Norman, Shout!: the Beatles in their generation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. 288-96.

²⁰ Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, op.cit., pp. 259-422.

²¹ Jann S. Wenner, ‘John Lennon’s Rolling Stones Interview’, in Beatles Beatles Beatles <http://taz4158.tripod.com/johnint.html> [accessed 3 February 2010].

²² Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, The practice of everyday life: Living and cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 33.

²³ William Shakespeare, As You Like it: A comedy in five acts, ed. by William J. Rolfe (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2008), p.103.

²⁴ Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, op.cit., p. 163.

²⁵ Richard Corliss, ‘Becoming the Beatles’, in Time <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,982003,00.html> [accessed 4 February 2010].

²⁶ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On popular music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. 9 (1941), pp. 17-48.

References

Adam Huber, Chris Lemieux and Marlon Hollis, The Hippie Generation: A brief look into the hippie culture <http://users.rowan.edu/~lindman/hippieintro.html> [accessed 3 January 2010].

Carol Adlam, Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997)

Doug Paterson, ‘A Brief Biography of Augusto Boal’ <http://www.ptoweb.org/boal.html> [accessed 3 February 2010]

Elizabeth M. Knowles, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Frank R. Leavis, ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’, in The Raymond Williams reader (Cornwall: Blackwell Publisher Ltd., 2001)

Jann S. Wenner, ‘John Lennon’s Rolling Stones Interview’, in Beatles Beatles Beatles <http://taz4158.tripod.com/johnint.html> [accessed 3 February 2010].

Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, The practice of everyday life: Living and cooking (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)

Michel Foucault, Critical Assessments, ed. Barry Smart, Vol. I (New York: Routledge, 1994)

Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)

Philip Norman, Shout!: the Beatles in their generation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982)

Richard Corliss, ‘Becoming the Beatles’, in Time <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,982003,00.html> [accessed 4 February 2010]

Sigmund Freud, New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, ed. by James Strachey (Chicago: [n. pub], 1965)

Stanislaw Lem, ‘Todorov’s Fantastic Theory of Literature’, trans. by Robert Abernathy, in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 1.4 (1974)

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On popular music’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. 9 (1941)

The Beatles, The Beatles Anthology <http://www.wingspan.ru/bookseng/ant/10.html> [accessed 3^rd January 2010]

William Shakespeare, As You Like it: A comedy in five acts, ed. by William J. Rolfe (Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2008)

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