Basing itself on the literary aesthetic of the carnivalesque, fostered by Mijaíl Mijáilovich Bakhtin, the present text proposes the binary possibility of the literary carnivalesque aesthetic as a simultaneous degradation and internal revelation into the caverns of the human condition and existence. The disclosure of this will take place through the ingenuity that distils from the pen of the great Mexican writer, Juan José Arreola. In selected works by Arreola, most of them coming from his Confabulario definitivo and Bestiario, critical concepts located within the carnivalesque aesthetic will be explored, such as dehumanization, savage capitalism, alienating materialism, the oppression of traditional social normatives against the new challenges, the imbalances of modernity, and the human isolation from a worldview of Christian existentialism, all in order to establish the conceptual framework of Arreola towards the above mentioned. Along with the exploration of critical concepts, the subversion of social parameters, the suspension of everyday patterns, animalization, grotesque realism, eroticism, mockery, textual polyphonies, metamorphoses, among other concepts will be analyzed in order to support the proposed possibility of the carnivalesque as an environment in which the essence of the human condition is degraded, criticized and its core revealed.
