dialogism in the novel and bakhtin's theory of culture.pdf

Dialogism in the Novel and Bakhtin's Theory of CultureAuthor(s): Maria ShevtsovaSource: New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 3, History, Politics, and Culture (Summer, 1992),pp. 747-763Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469228 .

Accessed: 11/04/2013 04:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 115.111.184.44 on Thu, 11 Apr 2013 04:44:53 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/469228?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Dialogism in the Novel and Bakhtin's Theory of Culture*

Maria Shevtsova

I. The Bakhtin Canon

AKHTIN'S INTERNATIONAL REPUTATION was well and truly es- tablished by the mid-1970s, primarily through Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and Rabelais and His World. The impact of

his ideas on contemporary intellectual life was greater still after the publication of The Dialogic Imagination in 1981. The volume comprises essays which were written during the 1930s but which were not published in Moscow until 1975. Two of them are central to this paper--"Discourse in the Novel" (1934-35) and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" (1937-38). The third essay of importance here, "The Problem of Speech Genres" (1952-53), appeared in Moscow in 1979 in a collection of unedited texts from the twenties and thirties and articles reprinted from several prom- inent Soviet journals.1 Bakhtin died in 1975.

What is curious, however, about Bakhtin's brilliant ascent is that several substantial essays and three major books, which had been published during his lifetime under the names of Voloshinov and Medvedev, were now being included in his canon, but, paradoxically, excluded from his fame. The books in question are Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929) and Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (1927), as Voloshinov, and The Formalist Method in Literary Scholarship (1928) as Medvedev. Some opposition to the merger came principally from specialists of Russian literature who, aware of material claiming Bakhtin was the sole author of the texts cited, also knew that Voloshinov and Medvedev were scholars in their own right. The sequence of events concerning claims made for Bakhtin-one al- legedly by him shortly before he died-has been set out admirably by Irwin Titunik.2 A debate ensued concerning whether Bakhtin

* This is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at the 21st International

Congress in Aesthetics, 29 August-2 September 1988 in Nottingham.

New Literary History, 1992, 23: 747-763



748 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

had actually written all or part of these books or whether he had contributed to them only through discussion. Titunik argues that, in the face of inconclusive evidence for Bakhtin's rights to authorship, Voloshinov and Medvedev must have priority over him. To recognize their status is not to deny that Bakhtin provided intellectual lead- ership for a group best described as the "Bakhtin School." The existence of this "School" does not necessarily mean anything was written collectively. The group fermented ideas to which individuals then gave their personal touch as well as name.

The authorship debate would look like another case of academic mania if it were not imbricated in a larger problem than the scholarly one of who wrote what. The contested texts deal with language, epistemology, aesthetics (particularly the genre of the novel) and cultural production in general from an explicitly Marxist standpoint. If Bakhtin participated in their gestation and/or wrote them partly or wholly, then they can be presumed to have some bearing on the texts signed by him. The authorship problem, in other words, is a content-perspective problem. It is compounded by the fact that the uncontested works are not transparently, "self-evidently," Marxist.' When the problem, like the debate on it, discloses its hidden agenda, namely, the issue of Bakhtin's Marxism, of whatever hue, and the assumption that there is a Bakhtin corpus to which a text may or may not legitimately belong, recourse to the notion of a "Bakhtin School" is less than satisfactory: it leaves the authorship case open while exonerating Bakhtin from sharing Voloshinov's and Medved- ev's Marxist viewpoint. The whole question is reviewed by Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark in their Mikhail Bakhtin.4 Holquist and Clark insist, on the basis of documents and anecdotes, that the hypothetically coauthored, or what they call the "disputed," texts were almost entirely written by Bakhtin. They restore, then, to Bakhtin what always rightfully (writefully!) belonged to him. Yet, at the same time, they expropriate from him not only his direct inheritance from Marxism, which they nonetheless acknowledge for the "disputed" texts, but also his indirect-let us call it "surplus"- gain from the Marxist cultural tradition. Put differently, this means that Holquist and Clark propose an integral Bakhtin, providing they can claim, at the same time, that, if Bakhtin is always Bakhtin, one Bakhtin is not the other.

It is not my purpose here to show, against Holquist and Clark, that a separation between (Marxist) Bakhtin and (Something Else) Bakhtin is fruitless for understanding his work, even though it is very fruitful for understanding ideologies.5 Irrespective of biograph- ical data, it is irrelevant to separate Bakhtin from himself precisely



DIALOGISM AND BAKHTIN'S THEORY OF CULTURE 749

because the material of, say, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is incorporated in the concepts of speech genre, heteroglossia, and dialogism in "Discourse in the Novel," which are indispensable for Bakhtin's aesthetics. We can derive his aesthetics from his analysis- literary criticism-of Dostoevsky's or Rabelais's novels, or take it straight from his theory of the novel as the prototype of culture. This theory is latent in the "disputed" texts. It is developed in "Discourse in the Novel" and "Forms of Time." And it guides Bakhtin's detailed studies of Dostoevsky and Rabelais. The coor- dination between concepts across his texts certainly suggests they constitute an ensemble, which is not to say the ensemble is homo- geneous. There are changes of focus and emphasis throughout, but all of them intervene in an intense, dense network of cross-referenced and cross-fertilized ideas. Any dislocation within, or truncation of, that network is damaging for the parts and ruinous for the whole.

This principle is fundamental to my purpose: to show how some of the major aesthetic categories in Bakhtin are developed through his theory of language or, quoting Bakhtin, "translinguistics"; to indicate why and how the same categories are derived from his theory of culture. Bakhtin's theory of culture is, above all else, a theory of popular culture-people's culture or folk culture. Given that this theory is concentrated on verbal art, it is impossible to ignore the langue-culture nexus in Bakhtin. Language, for Bakhtin, is speech. It is first and foremost an oral form. Its most dynamic, corporal, or bodily form is to be found in popular speech. When this particular speech is the very spine and structure of the novel- as is the case, Bakhtin explains, in Rabelais-the "high art" of the novel maximizes oral, popular culture and achieves its greatest potential not only as a "high art" genre, but as a genre per se.

The foregoing suggests that any discussion of Bakhtin's aesthetics must necessarily occur on the borders between philosophy, translinguistics-which can be renamed adequately as social semiotics- and cultural studies. Does the image of borders denote an area so uncertain, so indefinite, that it precludes intelligible discourse? Bakh- tin thinks not. The border is his recurrent metaphor for the in- tersection between different spheres through which the identity of each is defined. Precise identity, then, has its source in the relation between entities. Therefore, while my focus is on "Discourse in the Novel" and "Forms of Time"-not an obvious choice given Bakhtin's volume on Rabelais-my peripheral vision encompasses Bakhtin's corpus. The latter is the "dialogizing background," to use Bakhtin's phrase, with which the essays exchange words in order to establish their own meaning. The question of Marxism in Bakhtin's aesthetics




(or, for that matter, of Bakhtin's Marxist aesthetics) is not foregrounded. It, too, is on that vital periphery whose play of light is refracted and absorbed in the essays. The quality of refraction- absorption is, for Bakhtin, the only absolute feature of language. Language shapes the novel, but is not predetermined. It is brought into existence by the women and men who make their culture in society.

II. Dialogism in the Novel

Bakhtin's conception of the novel is predicated on the idea that the novel is a specific speech genre, itself constituted by numerous speech genres. Speech genres of whatever type are not preset, fixed objects of, and for, mere reproduction and substitution. They are not things, not "reified" as Bakhtin sometimes puts it in "Discourse in the Novel." They are brought into being by determinate speakers who seek to address actual, implied, or imaginary interlocutors, among whom must also be counted the sifting thought processes through which one's own words succeed in finding formulation. Bakhtin calls the latter "interior speech."

But speech genres are not confined to the relation between the speaker and the listener, who is always a speaker and always ready to reply. They are determined by the time and place of utterance and, further, by the time in precise space-Bakhtin's "chronotope"- in which they are uttered.' Time, in Bakhtin, supersedes notions of quantity and chronology: let us designate it as historically saturated and historicized time. Similarly, speech genres arise from a concrete situation of social interaction, from a scene of utterance such as a podium, a courtroom, or a domestic fireplace. Since speech genres are formed out of multiple factors at play in the same instance (speakers, situations, time-space), there are as many speech genres as there is need for them at any definite moment of social life.

Observations on these issues in "Discourse in the Novel" are resonant with the critique of Saussurean linguistics in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. While this critique cannot be summarized in two lines, the points to be retained here are as follows: Saussure's langue/parole dichotomy means that langue (the predetermined, abstract system of language) and parole (individual speech or recur- rences of the system) are mutually exclusive. Further, langue always precedes parole, isolating speakers from the language system. Speak- ers, consequently, are not only denied a role in the language system (which itself jeopardizes the concept of langue in Saussurean lin-




guistics). They are also denied their role of social agents (which destroys the concept of society). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language argues that language is a creative-communicative action (and not a system of "laws," as in Saussure), which is shared by individuals- speakers who, together, act in and upon society. Therefore they are neither passive recipients of a pregiven "society," nor self-contained individuals pitted against "society." These principles are a constant of Bakhtin's writings and help explain why he gives priority to speech.7

Bakhtin's examples of speech genres which are appropriated by the novel and reprocessed therein-aspects of the refraction noted in my introduction--cover a wide range. Speech genres include professional jargons (the language of doctors, lawyers, teachers, politicians, priests, for example) and more everyday occurrences (letters, diaries, travel accounts, itineraries, shopping and other lists, songs, diatribes, lovers' small talk, and the miscellany of newspapers). They are not used exclusively in the novel by characters and narrators, and by the author, or posited author, whose voice is heard, so to speak, between the lines, when it does not intercede as such in the narrative. They are all-pervasive, as audible in expository or descriptive passages, which do not come intentionally from the mouths of designated characters and narrators (or the author or posited author), as in dramatized events, in which characters and narrators may be implicated, but which are not directly constructed out of the evaluative tones-the particular points of view-indicative of designated characters and narrators (or the author or posited author). Because speech genres are the very stuff of language, we may say, glossing Bakhtin, that they cannot avoid being the essential structuring force of the novel. Consequently, the form of any novel is determined by the various speech genres that are written into it. We must note that, for Bakhtin, a specific instance of novelistic form is symptomatic of a novelistic type. In return, it permits generalization about types. Both this axiom and the method of oscillation it engenders bear out a preliminary axiom: a typology of the novel is a necessary, though not unique, item for a theory of the novel.

In "Discourse in the Novel" the function of speech genres is localized in three major groups of speech stylization (my term) in the novel: direct speech, indirect speech, and quasi-direct speech (style indirect libre). Examples are drawn from, among others, Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Dickens, Flaubert, Rabelais, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Their objective is to demonstrate how these speech stylizations produce differentiated discourse which, first, distin-




guishes novelistic types; second, introduces heterogeneity into one type; third, generates the diverse stylistic procedures (for instance, tropes, irony, humor, tone) of one type and works across other types; and, fourth, contours the multiple voices that coexist in the novel and justify the category of novel per se. If we do not understand how multiple voices combine, thereby expanding-or, conversely, restricting--both the content and its formulation in novels, such categories as the comic novel, the picaresque novel, the roman & clefs, or the Bildungsroman are eliminated. So too is the entire question of the genre of the novel.

This summary of the consequences for the novel of differentiated discourse is by no means exhaustive. Attention here must be given primarily to my "speech stylization" insofar as it elucidates Bakhtin's term discourse. Speech stylization (through direct speech, and so on) implements the discourses coming from, and going to, multiple voices. The discourses move and return from characters to characters, to narrators and posited authors, thereby totalizing, according to varying degrees, the voices and their discourses within a novel. The totalizing process-though not totalized, not closed-is also effectuated through the novelist's discourse, that is, in the very act of writing. Speech stylization, then, controls discrete units within a novel while channeling the flow of speech-plural discourse-that makes the novel.8

Quasi-direct speech may here serve as an example of how multiple discourses constitute the novel, allowing the totalizing process so distinctive of the genre. Take quasi-direct speech in Dickens. Bakh- tin's analysis of several passages side by side shows how Dickensian quasi-direct speech contains, in one and the same instant, a character's voice, a narrator's voice, and an open or even hidden quotation from another character on which, moreover, someone else-character, narrator, author, or posited author-is commenting. Bakhtin calls this procedure, whereby one discourse weaves into another, as if imperceptibly, "borrowing" the "word of another" or borrowing ("appropriating") an "alien word." He also indicates how quasi-direct speech may hold diffuse words which do not belong to anybody in particular but simply articulate a "received wisdom" or doxa prevalent in Dickens's society. Apart from being general, "wisdom" can be attributed to the specific social groups or classes who propagated it in the first place and for whom, in consequence, it has special resonance. Depending on the situation, the speakers, and the interlocutors framed by quasi-direct speech, as well as on the place of this speech in the narrative spectrum, the words of no one in




particular may have become the words of a character or narrator (or author or posited author). Furthermore, from the composite blend of words-voices, in which none loses its singular voice, may emerge a synthesized voice, as does another overarching voice from overtones in music. This particular mode of plurivocality-an underlying rather than resolute theme of "Discourse in the Novel"- is theorized in Dostoevsky's Poetics as "polyphony."

Bakhtin on Dickens indicates that a synthesizing voice, which is the potential outcome of plurivocality, may or may not mark a unit of quasi-direct speech. The point, however, for Bakhtin is that multiple discourse, wherever or however articulated, is the condition of the novel. Here Bakhtin's idea that language is always multiple is crucial. Language, in other words, is always borrowed, shared, and alien as well as mine. Yet Bakhtin does not seek to turn the novel's propensity for multiple discourse into a fatality. Multiple discourse can be intentionally curtailed. When this occurs, one voice predominates (the roman a these or the didactic novel, as in Tolstoy's Resurrection). This is the monologic novel and belongs to the First Stylistic Line. When the novel's propensity for multiple discourse is explored (the Bildungsroman), highly developed (Rabelais), or extreme (Dostoevsky), the result is the dialogic novel. The dialogic novel belongs to the Second Stylistic Line.

Bakhtin's distinction between the two Lines is of great importance for his aesthetics, as well as for the theory of culture inscribed in it. Briefly, multiple, interpenetrating, and mutually transforming discourse in the novel simultaneously draws on and creates heteroglossia in the novel. This discourse is dialogic because it is shot through with many coinciding voices. The concept of heteroglossia, though related to that of dialogism, is arguably the precondition for dialogism (since its significant reduction or absence produces monologism and the monologic novel). What was described above as a synthesizing voice is made possible through heteroglossia. This synthesizing voice is part and parcel of an intensified process of totalization in the dialogic novel. And this special, intensified but also extensive totalizing process is the principle of aesthetic unity. The dialogic novel is a constructed whole (sometimes "totality" in Bakhtin) precisely because no one voice is its decisive voice. The monologic novel, on the other hand, is made whole by, as it were, coercion. Its obligation to be whole makes it a closed structure. It is also closed because it gives the reader-another voice interpenetrating the novel-little or no room for maneuver. The dialogic novel, by virtue of its inconclusive nature, is an open structure. Not




only does it give the reader maximum scope for interference through interpretation but, as it traverses cultures, it sounds and resounds anew.

We cannot assume from the preceding summary that heteroglossia is a purely formal, or even formalist, category. Heteroglossia is heterosocial. It therefore carries all meanings it has acquired in society in whichever area of activity language is used, from a con- glomeration like politics to a streamlined activity like a simple greeting between friends. It is a formal feature of the novel because it is stylized-that is, reworked--therein. Thus, following Bakhtin, it is "art." However, Bakhtin does not reinstate through it a theory of verisimilitude or mimesis. Social reality is not outside the novel waiting to be reflected or imitated in it. Social reality, which, Bakhtin insists, is not only heterogeneous but contradictory, is everpresent within the novel because its languages are the only languages available to the novel. Which languages are borrowed and reworked identifies the types of culture with which the novel engages (for instance, popular, learned, criminal, salon cultures). When they are largely popular languages, as is the case in Rabelais and Dostoevsky, the novel moves closer toward its source, "at the beginning of time," according to Bakhtin, in popular culture.

Since heteroglossia is heterosocial, the dialogism it produces ipso facto historicizes the novel. The novel's own historical time saturates its discourses. Furthermore, in its passage through time, which is made possible through consecutive readers in their diverse cultures (taken globally or partially, as in "popular," "learned," and so on above), it accumulates the historical changes undergone by words for the material changes (in, for example, institutions, behaviors, class composition) undergone by societies. Bakhtin's argument leads one to conclude that the novel is acculturated by the history posterior to it. Continual acculturation occurs because readers accumulate the social semioses of their own time-space ("chronotope," again, though now directly referring to the exact historical location of readers, which sets some limits on their semiotic).

III. The Novel in Popular Culture

As should be clear, Bakhtin's view of culture can be broadly described as materialist. In "Forms of Time" this idea is centered on an unsophisticated anthropology: humankind, at a time almost beyond the reach of memory, cultivated the earth, living according to the cyclic rhythms of nature and the ongoing rhythms of birth,




growth, death, fertility, and regeneration that knitted the com- munity. Early fantasy-making or symbolic representation through ritual, myth, song, dance, and tale was therefore intimately related to both social labor and biological destiny. Bakhtin's remarks sketch out, albeit roughly, what can be adequately termed a labor theory of culture, one that can be discerned in any case throughout his writings, now with industrial connotations, in such terms as process and production.

Hints in "Forms of Time" as to the indelible association between speech and bodily motion, and particularly between speech and labor-generating motion, support this contention. So does Bakhtin's thesis on language, namely, that language is a social activity em- bedded in a host of social actions. Even the hypothesis that a labor theory of culture lies, in embryo, in Bakhtin's volume on Rabelais is not implausible. Page after page of the book focuses on the human body's creativity and productivity and on how Rabelais's inventive, extravagant vocabulary draws on bodily functions (defecation, cop- ulation, giving birth--labor!--among innumerable roles played by the "material bodily lower stratum" which Bakhtin believes Rabelais exploits to the maximum in his imagery and narrative structure). The hypothesis gains credibility from the fact that Bakhtin never opposes nature to culture. Rabelais and His World stresses that, on the contrary, nature, which endows the body of the people (and it is a potent body), is inherent in their culture, made in the market, public square, fair, and carnival. A vast assembly of detail from Gargantua and Pantagruel suggests, as do the collocations of Bakhtin's own vocabulary, that the labor and products of labor sold and bought at the market converge with the performances of jugglers, mountebanks, actors, clowns, and fools, holy as well as unholy-all belonging to the one continuum. The performing body-culture- is productive in countless ways along this continuum. Popular culture, we could say by deduction, is an ensemble defying separation between verbal and nonverbal action, art and collective action, and private and public life.

Rabelais and His World, in sum, may be interpreted as an argument on the interchange between nature and culture which takes place in field, village, and town and between class-fractions of a popular mass for whom rural and urban work are as closely intertwined as work and leisure, "art" being part of both. The feasts, masquerades, and pageants of carnival can therefore be said to celebrate the double bond between nature-culture and work-leisure. Once these points have been extrapolated from Rabelais and His World, the cryptic statements in "Forms of Time" on labor-the source of




speech-and speech-an act of labor-become transparent. They also help explain why Bakhtin, in the essay, finds in an archaic, rural "folk" appropriating the earth a suitable image of the interchange between nature and culture which is posited, in one way or another, throughout his work: this interchange is proper to the common people and, consequently, is a distinguishing feature of popular culture, whatever its characteristics may be at any finite moment of history. The "folk" of immeasurable time, besides found- ing popular culture, establish the bases of culture and society as such. When the conditions for social life are created, so too are the conditions for its regeneration. While Bakhtin implies that the regeneration of social life is dependent upon the resourceful, con- structive use of nature, it would be a mistake to think that regeneration is thereby, in his eyes, merely a matter of human force over a savage landscape. Nor can we presume that his concept of regeneration can be reduced to automatic reproduction, natural, biological, or systemic. New, variegated culture assuming heterogeneous forms comes from efforts to renew social life. It moves slowly or by leaps and bounds, as happened, Bakhtin claims, during the Renaissance. The section devoted to Rabelais in "Forms of Time" maintains that the Renaissance is a long period of unprecedented renewal for culture in toto and popular culture in particular. Here, already, not only in anticipation of Rabelais and His World, but of its "juicy marrow," to borrow a Rabelaisian idiolect, Bakhtin sees Gargantua, who leaps with joy from his mother's ear clamoring for wine, as the very embodiment of the Renaissance. His birth, which changes nature, and his yells for wine instead of milk-another deviation from what is natural--are the triumph of socialized culture. Giant of Rabelais's giants, Gargantua is Bakhtin's superlative emblem of qualitative cultural regeneration.

Since Gargantua is also Bakhtin's primary symbol of the people, it is important to pause before his laughing figure. The laughing body of the people (certainly not the body beautiful-this is an energetic, hyperbolic, body grotesque) is regenerative because it is ambivalent: Gargantua is born from Gargamelle's dying body; from the enormous, destructive flood of Pantagruel's urine are born the rich, life-giving plains of Beauce. The words of this body are no less ambivalent, for an affirmation arises from within a curse or oath, albeit sideways and not unlike Gargantua from his cursing mother's ear. These acts of destruction-construction, whether pre- dominantly verbal or physical, though the two are conjoined, are, Bakhtin argues, the source of that rejuvenating irony which is characteristic of popular culture overall. And this irony is the source




of irony in the novel per se. In Rabelais it retains its original popular verve. In subsequent metamorphoses of the novel, and-by extrap- olation from Bakhtin- particularly in those distanced from the people, this creative, flexible irony is reduced down to a deadly, univocal, and unilateral power. In view of Bakhtin's commentary on unequiv- ocal irony ("Discourse in the Novel" and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language), Flaubert would be a case in point.

However, ambivalent irony is not only peculiar to the popular culture foregrounded by Rabelais. It is deployed in folktales coming from obliterated time, to which are added, encrustations upon encrustations, hundreds of comic, oral forms that surface and resurface again, unevenly, throughout the Middle Ages and the Ren- aissance. Folktales, accompanied by their quality of oral and physical immediacy, resurface in a variety of literate forms (soties, facdties, farces, ballads). In Rabelais, who plunders folktales and legends about giants still being told in rural France, they actually increase their oral and physical immediacy through their encounter with mediated written language of which the novel, for Bakhtin, is the most mediated form possible. Rabelais, then, a humanist imbued with learned culture, took direct (oral) or indirect (literate and literary) expressions of popular culture from the entire stock available to him, showing in the process that perpetual artistic/social renewal surges from the laughing body of the people.

The movement described here for popular culture taken as a distinctive phenomenon as well as an informing presence in literature is cumulative, though not repetitive; and although cumulative, is fraught with discontinuities, partial losses and even complete dis- appearances. Interpreting Bakhtin, once again, it would seem that the noncyclical regeneration of culture prevents time from being natural: into time enter the complex knots and gaps of history. While organic images abound in Bakhtin, especially images of growth and development, his concept of history is not so much organicist as "clustered" (for want of a better word). With the Renaissance the contradictions of ages upon ages past have so crossed and clashed and clogged that from their massive congestion is thrown up a totally new era, whose "new man" (Bakhtin) is now commensurate with his universe, a post-Galilean universe of unlimited dis- covery, intellectual and geographic.9 Nothing is beyond his capa- bilities and will. From a social point of view he is analogous with Gargantua, the novelistic incarnation of all the heroes of folklore who stride across the earth in seven-league boots. Rabelais's heroes are not the exceptional heroes of aristocratic culture, as exemplified by chivalric romance. They are everyday beings "raised to a higher




power."'1 Bakhtin's trope from mathematics is significant. It evokes the new, scientific age, which also announces the age of the people; it refers to the scientific discourses that weave into the mass of learned and profane discourses of Rabelais's novels (thus returning to Bakhtin's proposition that the novel is constructed out of the heterosocial activities pertinent to a specific historical period). By the same token, Bakhtin's focus on these everyday beings allows him to discuss concrete and historical time, which in his view distinguishes folklore and epitomizes both Rabelais's achievement and the "new man's" situation in history, now real rather than sublimated or fantasized. With Rabelais the novel enters into concrete, real time. As such, it can be contrasted with the chivalric romance which, probably more than any other genre, conceives of time as abstract and eternal.

Bakhtin's somewhat elliptic comments on the "new man" are further clarified by what he believes is the ultimate significance of Gargantua: this gigantic being, who is conversely a common hero, is the figure of democracy itself. "Forms of Time" starts from the assumption that folklore predates class distinctions. When we com- pare the section on Rabelais with passages touching on folklore in general and the folktale in particular, we find a unifying motif relative to the folk hero of the long-distant past and the popular hero of modernity. One is traced over the other by Rabelais. Rabelais, then, projects through the composite figure of Gargantua an image of humanity, in a class-driven society, equal only to the human reality of primordial classless society, that is, of folk culture. In other words, the popular, quintessentially democratic hero of the modern age-a collective hero, like his predecessor--brings popular culture to the forefront of society, its rightful place in a democracy. The Renaissance is the harbinger of this as yet politically unrealized democracy. My interpretation, when extended to the novel, gives us the following: when popular culture is no longer understood to be a subaltern culture, or a subculture, the novel steeped in it is nothing less than a summit in the history of the genre.

Some brief remarks on elements peculiar to the folktale and how they resurge throughout the history of the novel are now useful. Bakhtin collates a significant number of narrative items common to the folktale. Among them are mysterious parentage, lost or aban- doned children, siblings or lovers separated through misadventure, enforced or desired journeys, tests and trials imposed on the protagonists, mistaken identity of parent, child, or lover, recognition and reconciliation. In folktales these items establish a dynamic of learning and transformation. Folk heroes traverse real time in real




space in that, by the end of the story, they and/or their world have changed. At the heart of folkloric fantasy lies, Bakhtin believes, an ordinary, realistic logic.

The Greek romances of antiquity resume folktale elements and, according to cases listed by Bakhtin, either render them static (thus the narrative forecloses change for hero and world) or complicate their intrinsic dynamic as does, for example, Apuleius's The Golden Ass. Here a man is transformed into an ass (a physical metamorphosis typical of folktales), but he also undergoes an internal metamorphosis which is made possible through his experiences of the life of others. Since he is presumed to be an ass, he participates in scenes of private life which the novel discloses to the public eye. Life made public, with universal implications, is, for Bakhtin, symptomatic of folklore. Folkloric elements in The Golden Ass, where they are nonetheless considerably altered, are regrouped once more around the servants, adventurers, parvenus, prostitutes, and courtesans of the modern novel. Furthermore, during their respective modifications they retain vestiges of the folkloric chronotope-that is, of real time in real space as explained above. On the other hand, if they shed all signs of this chronotope, as does, for instance, the chivalric romance, they usually also lose contact with the folktale. Most importantly, when they reiterate the folkloric chronotope, in whatever guise, they avoid anachronism, unless anachronism ironically reenforces real time in real space. How this process occurs can be illustrated by Don Quixote, where the titular hero's conceptions and modes of behavior revert to a feudal chivalry whose historical basis has been sufficiently eroded to make them irrelevant. Sancho Panza's earthy sense of the present overlays his master's illusions. It casts a critical perspective on them. At the same time, it confirms Sancho Panza's concrete, realistic assessment of their shared world, though one they do not experience in common. The exchange of views between servant and master, which in kaleidoscopic fashion, breaks through numerous "alien" discourses, shows how dialogism in the novel necessarily historicizes the novel vis-a-vis the time it first addresses. In the light of these remarks, it is now possible to state that dialogism is the very instrument of real time-space operating in any novel belonging to the Second Stylistic Line. The rogues, clowns, and fools peopling the novel across the centuries are similarly historicized, dialogic renditions of the folkloric complex. It would probably be true to say, following Bakhtin's whole argument, that, when they appear in the novel as major protagonists, as they do in Dostoevsky, archaic folk heroes acquire the status of popular heroes.




Finally, though by no means conclusively, the idyllic chronotope must be mentioned. In folk culture it concerns love, agricultural labor (hence also food, drink, and growth), craftwork, and the family. In the novel it takes five basic directions: the provincial novel, the novel of the idyll destroyed, the sentimental novel in the manner of Rousseau, the family novel/novel of generations, and an indeterminate category about which Bakhtin says surprisingly little except that it includes such figures as "a man of the people" who is "very often of idyllic descent."" The idyll destroyed is the most significant example of popular culture's diminished role in and for the genre of the novel. Whilst it requires particular attention-and more than Bakhtin gives it himself-a few notes will have to suffice. Bakhtin's main point about this type of novel, especially when it is fully elaborated (Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert), is that, in over- turning and demolishing the psychology and world view of the idyll, it shows that the idyll is inadequate to the new capitalist world. It is still tied to popular culture, however tenuously, insofar as popular culture is its alienated referent. However, this novel's cutting, fre- quently bitter irony is incompatible with the Rabelaisian laughter that laughed the old world out of existence.

IV. Bakhtin's Culture

Assuming that the interpretation offered in the preceding pages is not off the mark, we could say without exaggeration that, on the question of popular culture, Bakhtin's is a populist vision of the narodnik (populist) type. And yet this does not altogether describe a worldview so punctuated by a utopian impulse as is Bakhtin's. In his volume on Rabelais Bakhtin accentuates the utopian character of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and here as well as in the essays cited he notes the popular inspiration of the utopian genre, itself a modern transposition of the folktale, the folkloric chronotope, and the realist logic encapsulated by the latter in folk fantasy. The difference between Rabelaisian utopia and its folk manifestations after archaic times (or, for that matter, its learned, high-cultural manifestations) lies in the difference between the possibilities for historical reality opened up by the first and the ultimately imaginary, though desired, order of the second. The time internal to Rabelaisian utopia is commensurate with time external to it in the unprecedented historical change of the Renaissance. Rabelais is on the transition point between two epochs, the old, which still returns to the dogmas of Church and class privilege, and the new, which foresees and concretely




prepares for freedom from class restraints and from the monolothic institutions that are Church and State; and this "new" occurs, seem- ingly paradoxically, at a moment when the modern state is only just beginning to come into existence, but also when-the crucial, underlying proposition in Bakhtin-the nation, too, composed of all its people, is coming into being. Democracy lies in the emergence of the nation. We have gathered, however, that for Bakhtin the ideal democracy is a fundamentally classless situation, which is possible only when the people (folk, narod, subaltern classes) and the nation are one. Rabelais in the Renaissance, and like the Ren- aissance, has a vision of this ideal (hence utopian), though not impossible (hence utopian-real), world.

These observations lead us to Bakhtin's world, to the post-1917 years in which he largely formulated his ideas-Rabelais and His World included, the basic tenets of which were written by 1940, though it was not published until 1965. Here, of course, we are in a vast field of struggle and survival, of political, economic, and cultural fermentation, and of the hard labor of building a new society from a society in ruins. Bakhtin's pointed references to the Renaissance, not least his emphasis on transition, can be read as statements of his acute awareness of the implications of his own time. Or, to reformulate this proposition, his preoccupation with transitional periods overall (supremely illustrated, in his view, by Rabelais and, again, in a nascent--for Russia--capitalist period by Dostoevsky) expresses his interpersonal history of a society which was nowhere if not at a decisive turning point. We need not con- jecture about questions of "influence": what is at stake is the capacity for dialogism Bakhtin diagnoses in the novel and in society. That he was in a dialogic relation to his society can be ascertained without hazard to Bakhtin's theoretical views. However, what, precisely, he dialogized with is beyond the reach of this paper. Our access here must be limited to the broad strokes already marked for Bakhtin on utopia in Rabelais.

As is well known, the debates before 1917 and during the 1920s and 1930s in Soviet Russia on utopian versus scientific revolution, on populist, popular, and proletarian cultures and on the equivalent perspective on society, for each term named, were locked in the politics of the state-government-state and nation-state or, conversely, though not in contradiction with the latter, the state dissolved in the name of a civic entity called the people. Since the adjectives given overlapped at some point, creating the "borders" of ambiv- alence central to Bakhtin's thought, the expression "equivalent perspective" should not be taken to imply singular or uniform per-




spective: its predominant line distinguished one perspective from the next, a demarcation that was made to be of vital importance by the pragmatics of power. The same holds for "utopian" and "scientific," especially when the first contains the idea of possibility, as in Bakhtin. Bakhtin's reflections on popular culture bounce off this "heterosocial heteroglossia." We can add to them the cultural and political matrices peculiar to the 1930s. Take such factors as state initiatives to preserve folklore, the accelerated merging, in symbols as well as in social mobility, between the peasant "folk" and the industrial proletariat, the populist glorification of the "folk" which cast a critical light on the collectivization of agriculture and systematic industrialization, and the prevalent notion of the "hero" living in a heroic age, with its myriad variations, ranging from the Stakhanovite to the rustic hero. Bakhtin's description of "heroic age" for the Renaissance is in a vocabulary characteristic of his time.

Many more traces of his epoch appear in Bakhtin, not least the imprint of the very phenomenon of multiple discourses which ran through the streets and squares in the first few years of the Rev- olution-a veritable "cacophony of voices," to revert to a major organizing concept of Dostoevsky's Poetics, and a life definitely made public whose virtues Bakhtin extolled in his versions of archaic folklore and Rabelaisian popular culture. There can be no doubt that Bakhtin's age sensitized him to the importance of such categories as multiple discourse which, if relevant for real life, promised infinite potential for aesthetics. Bakhtin's writings are an example in them- selves of his thesis that discourse is not pure mind.

UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

NOTES

1 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, tr. R. W. Rotsel (1929, rev. 1963; rpt. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973); Rabelais and His World, tr. Helen Iswolsky (1965; rpt. Cambridge, Mass., 1968); The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981); "Discourse in the Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" are in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 259-422 and pp. 84-258 respectively; and "The Problem of Speech Genres" is in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, tr. Vern W. McGee (Austin, Tex., 1986), pp. 60-102. 2 Irwin R. Titunik, "M. M. Baxtin (The Baxtin School) and Soviet Semiotics," Dispositio, 3 (1976), 327-38. See also Irwin R. Titunik, "Bakhtin &/or Volosinov &/ or Medvedev: Dialogue &/or Doubletalk?" in Language and Literary Theory, ed. Benjamin A. Stolz et al., Papers in Slavic Philology, 5 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984), pp. 535-64; and Irwin R. Titunik, "The Baxtin Problem: Concerning Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist's Mikhail Bakhtin," Slavic and East European Journal, 30 (1986), 91-95.




3 As are, for example, in the fields of literary criticism and aesthetics Anatoly Lunacharsky, Georg Lukaics, Bertolt Brecht, Antonio Gramsci, and Lucien Goldmann. 4 See Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). 5 I have discussed this issue in my review of Holquist's and Clark's Mikhail Bakhtin, in Science and Society, 49 (1985), 373-77, and in "Bakhtin/Medvedev: 'Sociological Poetics,' " CEA Critic, 52, no. 3 (1990), 62-70. 6 It is worth noting that speech genres, for Bakhtin, are typical forms of utterances which, though grammatical structures, are not the same as sentences. The sentence is what can be called a norm-setting and normalizing "unit of language" by contrast with the utterance which is a personalized, interpersonal and situational "unit of speech communication." See Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres," p. 73. 7 Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, who were students of Saussure and edited the lecture notes constituting Cours de linguistique gdndrale, stress that "Saussure never approached linguistics of speaking. . . We recall that a new speech form always owes its origins to a series of individual facts. ... We might say that the author refused to classify these as grammatical in the sense that an isolated act is necessarily foreign to language and its system, which depends only on the set of collective patterns" (Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade Bakin and Peter Owen [London, 1974], p. 143). It is clear from these comments that Saussure probably envisaged parole as an "isolated act" and not as commonly used speech shared by interlocutors (in other words, as nonisolated). Hence speech is aleatory, "necessarily foreign to language." Both points support Bakhtin's argument against Saussure. The sociological dimension of Saussure's thought may be compared to Durkheim's idea that individuals are outside the system of "social facts" which precede them. 8 We may now pause before the term discourse in relation to speech genre. Discourse is usually interchangeable in Bakhtin with speech, word, and utterance. It often coincides with speech genre, though it is not always its synonym (see also n. 5). The malleability of Bakhtin's vocabulary is daunting, but we may nonetheless now submit these distinctions. A speech genre is a particularized element of discourse from which an extended discourse is constructed. However, when a speech genre behaves like a "complete" utterance, whether long or short, or when it profoundly characterizes a discourse, it is discourse. Take the professional jargons mentioned earlier. The special form of greeting used by a judge in the courtroom is a speech genre (particularized element of judicial discourse). The utterance itself is discourse. When this form of greeting characterizes the sentences uttered by a judge in a novel (say, in Dickens), thus also becoming characteristic of the judge's persona, this speech genre is discourse. 9 Bakhtin, "Forms of Time," p. 240. 10 Bakhtin, p. 241. For a discussion of the idea of concentration at a "higher power" or at a "higher level of cultural development" (p. 211), see esp. "Forms of Time," pp. 204-24. 11 Bakhtin, "Forms of Time," p. 235. Such figures, Bakhtin indicates, are the servant in Walter Scott, Dickens, Maupassant (Une Vie), and Proust. Furthermore, a "'man of the people' appears in the novel as one who holds the correct attitude towards life and death, an attitude lost by the ruling classes (Platon Karataev in Tolstoy)."



Documents

dialogism in the novel and bakhtin's theory of culture.pdf