SOURCE: Howells, Robin. “City, Market-Place, Meal: Some Figures of Totality in Voltaire's Contes.” In The Secular City: Studies in the Enlightenment Presented to Haydn Mason, edited by T. D. Hemming, E. Freeman, and D. Meakin, pp. 71-81. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994.

In the essay which follows, Howells reviews the representation of cities in Voltaire's contes, focusing on the “carnivalesque” as described by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Howells suggests that Babylon is the paradigmatic secular city for Voltaire, being the antithesis of a holy city and thus a manifestation of carnivalesque inversion. Howells cites passages from several contes that depict the “body in process”: the human body participating in sex, eating, and violence.

This will be a ‘carnivalesque’ reading of representations of the city, the market-place and the meal in the Contes. First I shall establish briefly the concept of the carnivalesque, and what it might say about...