Журнал научных разысканий о биографии, теоретическом наследии и эпохе М. М. Бахтина
ISSN 0136-0132
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп. → 1995 → 3
153
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 3
Brian Kennedy (Cedarville College, USA)
«Our» Bakhtin versus «Your» Bakhtin:
Is a Cold War Immanent?
There's no Iron Curtain up—yet—but one might wonder whether relations are beginning to grow cool between what might be broadly called the East and the West (with geography not the only factor1) in Bakhtin studies. In what follows, I will indicate what I see as the potential for a harmful division in the field as I review some of the papers given at the recent conference in Moscow and discuss at some length Caryl Emerson's closing address.
First, some history. I attended the 5th International Bakhtin Conference, in Manchester, in 1991. At the time, it seemed to me that many of the papers had a distinctly American feel to them2. Many of the papers were «Bakhtin and …» papers. That is, scholars took Bakhtin or his concepts and applied them, sometimes quite loosely, to their field of expertise. I further remember that the Russians in attendance expressed their concern with this method, standing during the question periods to lament what they viewed as the loose appropriation of Bakhtin. At the time, their reactions seemed forceful, their habit of standing aggressive. Since, I have come to realize that they stood as a measure of respect for being recognized as having the floor. Yet I continue to recall their reactions as direct, expressed out of a sense of despair that Bakhtin was being colonized by Western scholars pursuing an agenda which was peculiar to them. These Russian scholars felt, I am convinced, like one of their treasures was being taken from them and that, further, this object of value was receiving treatment which should have been much more careful.
In 1995, while the concerns of the Russian/Eastern Bakhtinians have not gone away, I noticed a distinctly different tone and approach at the recent conference in Moscow. The Russian scholars came prepared with a whole new set of critical concerns and approaches to Bakhtin, delivering papers in great numbers, and probing contexts which were previously unremarked upon.
Might we ask whether the post-1991 atmosphere in Russia has
ХРОНИКА. ФАКТЫ. ИНФОРМАЦИЯ Brian Kennedy
"Our" Bakhtin versus "Your" Bakhtin…
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 3
154 155
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 3
emboldened the Russian scholars, set them on their own course as it concerns the study of Bakhtin? If so, then how may the Western academy keep pace? How might the work of Western Bakhtinians, many of whom do not speak Russian, fit with that of those in the East? Can the two academies work together, or are we headed for division, not because of contentiousness on either side, but because the new vigor with which Eastern scholars are free to pursue their interests simply leaves no room or time for those in the West? These are questions that I hope to address further below.
Certainly some of the impatience which Eastern scholars may feel with their Western counterparts could stem from Bakhtin's reception in the American academy. By way of anecdote, a colleague from a university in the western United States said recently that in screening candidates for a composition theory job (such positions don't even exist in Europe, to my knowledge) her committee became weary as they interviewed what seemed like an endless chain of Bakhtinians. «Could Bakhtin really be so malleable as to be the catalyst for such a broad range of approaches?» the committee wondered to each other.
What she didn't say was that if it weren't Bakhtinians they were interviewing, it would have been another type of «-inians», or «-ists». That is, there's a relentless pressure in the American literary academy to fit into a camp. This manifests itself both in the kinds of dissertations people write, and the way they title and describe them, and in the way in which jobs are advertised. Both encourage one to be identifiable as an «-ist» (such as a deconstructionist, Marxist, etc.), or to be familiar with a set of «-isms» (for example, feminism, cultural criticism, and so on). My purpose here is neither to criticize nor to singlehandedly revise the system in which I was trained and in which I work. My point is that in the early 1990s, Bakhtin became the favored figure for a great number of graduate students to use as a way of arriving at a set of critical methodologies.
In the process of his popularizing, Bakhtin underwent a process which might also be thought of as a dilution. Suddenly, everyone knew terms like «carnival,» «dialogic,» and «heteroglossia,» and many were using them as reading methods without, sometimes, taking into account the originating contexts of the ideas.
Those of us in the American literary academy have not seen
the popularity of Bakhtin without some consternation. We remember
a decade ago, when everyone was deconstructing everything.
Deconstruction, first a method of rethinking Western metaphysics, had
be
come colonized by literature departments, and suddenly no text
was beyond its purview. This is not to say that in fact anything can
NOT be deconstructed; the real question, and the one which not too
many dared to ask, was SHOULD everything be? Is there—was
there—value in the endless Derridian readings of all things literary?
Similarly with Bakhtin, we might ask what we sacrifice for having him so
widely read and applied? This is a question few of us in the West
have asked. Perhaps we have been overtaken with the euphoria of
Bakhtin's success? Yet it seems that while such a state of affairs
neither bothered nor perplexed us, those in the East (and here one may
include Russianists working in American universities) seem to have
been feeling a mounting offense at the colonizing of Bakhtin. Further,
while the rest of us have been content to continue our familiar
course, scholars with an Eastward orientation seem to have been mounting
a strategy, to put it crassly, to take Bakhtin back. This was evident
in certain of the papers, and notably in Prof. Emerson's closing
address, at the recent 7th International Bakhtin Conference in Moscow.
This is not to say that the conference was particularly vituperative. Instead, a healthy variety of papers on various facets of Bakhtin were read and discussed with cordiality by all. Yet at the same time, there existed an underlying sense that Bakhtin scholars are starting to be occupied by two different, if not conflicting, sets of concerns.
On the one hand, scholars discussed the nature of Bakhtin himself. Was he, is he, a philosopher, or a literary critic? If he was a philosopher, then how may his work be read? How ought it to be read? What sorts of contexts should we think in when we read and study Bakhtin? Several papers that I attended addressed this question.
Ken Hirshkop (University of Southampton, UK) discussed «Discourse in the Novel» and «Author and Hero,» suggesting that Bakhtin's method throughout his career was to revisit a set of familiar questions; in this case Bakhtin makes two attempts a decade apart to create a dialogue which would heal the fissures of modernity. In «Author and Hero,» the aesthetic is supposed to solve a historical problem (that of modernity) but also supposed to solve the question of history itself. Yet it fails because Bakhtin indicates that the authorial voice is no more above history than is that of the hero. This kills the notion of art as salvation. However, Hirshkop suggested that the question was not solved for Bakhtin, for «Discourse in the Novel» advances the notion of dialogue, which Hirshkop parallelled to the relationship Bakhtin proposes between the author and hero.
ХРОНИКА. ФАКТЫ. ИНФОРМАЦИЯ Brian Kennedy
"Our" Bakhtin versus "Your" Bakhtin…
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 3
156 157
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 3
The later essay has, according to Hirshkop, a sense of cultural-ideological redemption in it which provides an answer to the sense of loss in «Author and Hero.» The novel, it turns out, is both a genre which takes centuries to develop and something which happens among people in the marketplace all the time, and thus, one might say, lives in and of history.
Another essay which talked about Bakhtin and modernity/Modernism was delivered by Stacy Burton (University of Nevada, USA), who asked why Bakhtin left absent from his work the texts of great contemporary writers? His partial references to figures like Mann suggest that he could have discussed current figures, yet he chose the great writers of the nineteenth centuries, and earlier, for his complete investigations. Burton suggested that indeterminacy drew Bakhtin, that he was especially interested in literatures which show cultures in transition, but that he also was fond of naming, and categorizing, and it may have been that he came to contemporary texts too early to do this. Still, he does, in «Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,» hint at the concept of Modernism, Burton claims.
Yet what might finally have kept Bakhtin from an interest in the Modernists is that their texts tend to look heteroglot, but in fact reduce words, or language, to monoglossia in order to gain finality. Bakhtin was drawn to narrative because of its focus on experience, but the Modernists tend to encounter the other and write so as to subvert it to the same. Modernists may fill their works with polyglossia, and here Burton used Eliot as her example, but only to create a sense of containment. Bakhtin felt more comfortable, thus, studying the great realist novels, because they better embodied his sense of the world.
Several papers talked about the Bakhtin cannon, many mentioning the recent book by Morson and Emerson, and the subsequent discussion of this work by Thomson and Wall in their essays in Diacritics. I must say, after I read the book and the review, I felt, as I believe Thomson and Wall did, that Morson and Emerson were attempting to put a cap on Bakhtin studies. That is, it seemed like they were unafraid to set limits on Bakhtin's work, its meaning, and its potential for use as a method of literary criticism. It was thus refreshing to hear so many mentions of Morson and Emerson along with Thomson and Wall, indicating that this has not been a stopping point in Bakhtin studies, but simply a place of departure for a new series of debates.
Irina Balabanova (Russian State Humanitarian
University,
Moscow, Russian) suggested that the situation of the disputed
texts (DT) parallels that of Bakhtin studies as a whole. She talked
about Holquist and Clark's view of these works and that of Morson
and Emerson, taking neither side but claiming that the common
ground between both is their attempt to find unity either within (Holquist
and Clark) or behind (the other pair) the texts. She suggested a
synthesis by viewing Bakhtin's strategy as operatic. The texts of different
periods are responses to questions which appeared interesting to
Bakhtin at different times; he then used different language in different
situations, almost like masks. Seeing Bakhtin as one who put on masks
allows us to read the DTs as events, which have historical currency
but which also appear to us in remote and different contexts.
Bakhtin neither refused authorship of the texts nor signed them, but
maintained the sense of the actor, who never gave away his persona yet
never became other than himself either.
Alistair Renfrew (Bakhtin Center, University of Sheffield, UK) commented that carnival has been adapted freely by Western scholars as a subversive tool which furthers their cultural projects. He suggested, however, that Morson and Emerson issue a useful caution when they say that Western readers don't mediate between the carnival of Rabelais and that of «Forms of Time», which is more transgressively joyful and also more sober in its laughter than the carnival so often used as a literary-cultural tool. Carnival, to Renfrew, has become like deconstruction—used in every which way. Yet in so doing, critics forget that carnival has a (real) social end. He quoted Stalleybrass and White, who said that critics move too quickly from a social event (carnival) to textual structures or interpretive tools. The result is that those who do, who are many in the Western academy, have turned carnival back on themselves, creating a carnival second life for themselves in their theorizing—the actual conditions of work become a carnival, lived out because only in this ritual is power available, so impotent is the literary critic to affect any real change. The paper had a subtle undertone of the sort that I have been describing here as Eastern in its orientation, with Renfrew challenging those in the Western academy to be less cavalier in their use of Bakhtin and his ideas.
Finally, Ramon Alvarado's (UAM, Mexico) paper may serve as a sort of hinge between those I have discussed above and the more «Western» approach I will identify below, in that he confronted those who would closely guard Bakhtin, yet still talked about Bakhtin alo
ХРОНИКА. ФАКТЫ. ИНФОРМАЦИЯ Brian Kennedy
"Our" Bakhtin versus "Your" Bakhtin…
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 3
158 159
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 3
ne, rather than about «Bakhtin and … .» Alvarado talked about carnival as having a utopian bent, and thus a radical potential. Carnival revolutions are self-generative, not projections of a prefigured model, thus carnival is enthusiastic, allowing for liberation and creativity.
Alvarado suggested Morson and Emerson's view that carnival is not anarchic but rather a dead end, with only laughter remaining, but countered that Bakhtin is not simply a philosopher of everyday life, but rather gives hope through his diffuse emphasis on carnival. The concept does not appear in only one place in Bakhtin; rather his works are «capricious maps,» themselves not a finalized social model, not easily systematized. Morson and Emerson do not see the pieces as scattered, but centralize carnival as a single concept. When they don't find it represented as a singular entity throughout the Bakhtin corpus, they assume the notion was superseded in his thinking, but Alvarado claimed that carnival is less easy than this to find. Alvarado finally suggested that Bakhtin's life was carnival, in that he lived new ideas under difficult social conditions. He embodied a utopian momentum, which we often leave out of our views of his life.
All of the above papers deal with Bakhtin alone, taking up questions of authorship, comparing one of his texts to others, and trying to clarify his concepts and motivations for speaking as he did. Yet there is another side to the study of Bakhtin, and this too had its echoes in the conference. If Bakhtin was a literary critic, then many influenced by him have used his work as a starting point for unique theoretical investigations. Especially among those whose approach I am broadly labelling «Western,» there is a tendency to extrapolate literary-critical techniques from Bakhtin's ideas, applying them to texts he might never (or in some cases, could never) have heard of.
Julian Connolly (University of Virginia, USA), for example, talked about the author-character interaction in Nabokov's fiction, showing how Bakhtin's «Author and Hero» helps to solve the problematic question of identity, the relationship of author to narrator and characters. Nabokov tends to offer various images of the same character, and Bakhtin's notion of unfinalizability provides a tool with which to understand these multiple subjectivities.
My paper talked about W.Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, using
the notion of carnival to rethink the social contexts of this novel. I
attempted to show that the Modernist text, which combines an emphasis
on linguistic purity with a focus on social elitism, is fractured by a
number of carnivalesque moments. The resulting tension creates a sense
of
expectation that carnival may break out, but a fear among those
in power that it will.
Clive Thomson (University of Western Ontario, Canada) outlined some preliminary thoughts on the problem of the subject in Bakhtin and Foucault, with the intention of going ahead with a project on homosexual texts of the 19th century. His essay showed that both these critics dealt with the construction of the subject, along with being concerned with resistance, power, and agency. For example, he pointed out that Foucault seeks to trace how subjects in history are constituted via institutionalized ideology, and that Bakhtin similarly talks about subjectivity when he suggests dialogism as an embodiment of otherness via signs shared by subjects. Both reflect an anti-essentialist, historical consciousness.
Lauro Zavala (UAM, Mexico) talked about dialogic strategies in contemporary writing, discussing the intertextuality between current literary theory and contemporary metafiction. He then expanded Kristeva's famous coinage, «intertextuality,» to «interCONtextuality,» indicating that the field of literary studies has taken on a dialogical flavor. Readers, now, are thought of as constructors of texts, and truth is now an effect of reading, whereas in Modernism it was claimed as the content of reading. The structure of truth as rhizomatic, wherein many truths may lay in circles on top of one another, undermines the mainstream Western tendency toward monologism. Our new interdisciplinary focus has a dialogic, conversational feel to it, Zavala said.
I have indicated above that the papers at the conference reflected two types of Bakhtin scholars, maybe two Bakhtins: one, based on what I am calling the «Eastern» approach, deals with Bakhtin alone, his texts, and contexts. The second, more «Western,» is also more freewheeling, applying Bakhtin's ideas more broadly, perhaps even thematically. Both approaches, taken with care, seem to me to be useful and within the spirit of what Bakhtin might himself think appropriate.
Yet I sense a growing impatience with the Western model among some Bakhtinians, and I saw a clear indication of this in Caryl Emerson's speech. In the talk, delivered with grace and precision as it was, Emerson gradually established a series of limits and exclusions in the study of Bakhtin, making a subtle yet unmistakable move away from Western critical practice and toward what one sensed she felt was a more limited yet more careful and ultimately more fruitful approach
ХРОНИКА. ФАКТЫ. ИНФОРМАЦИЯ Brian Kennedy
"Our" Bakhtin versus "Your" Bakhtin…
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 3
160 161
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 3
to Bakhtin.
To begin, Emerson suggested that her early translations of Bakhtin, whose ideas were often mysterious and whose coinages were unique, are now outdated, since later translation (though of Bakhtin's earlier work) has indicated where some of his ideas came from, and thus more clearly shown his meanings. The early problem for Emerson as a translator was the lack of context available to indicate Bakhtin's range of secondary references. It was difficult even to pinpoint him to a particular school. So Emerson identified what she thought was Bakhtin's voice as a whole and brought it over into English. As we know, the Western academy liked what they heard, and the Bakhtin industry in the West was born. Yet as Emerson talked, it became increasingly clear that she feels uncomfortable with the industry that she is largely responsible for creating. As she elaborated on this point, she began to pull the scaffolding out from under English-speaking Bakhtinians, who have based their work on hers.
She said that the American Bakhtin, whose creation was a strange and protracted affair, differs from the Post-Communist Russian Bakhtin. For one thing, the West's interest in Bakhtin came first in France in 1968, where Rabelais was received in a spirit of revolutionary excitement. When The Dialogic Imagination came out, thus, Bakhtin was already known as an apologist of carnival. He was thus quickly appropriated to the new radical project starting to take hold in the American literary academy. However, Emerson said that carnival, in Bakhtin, is not liberating but rather horrible, with criminals, fools, and violence. The Western version, as we know, was hardly focused on the negative, but rather on carnival's freeing potential. However, she indicated that «serious researchers» realized that carnival was not useful in the way it had been appropriated for radical projects. There is no radical social-ethical Bakhtin. Carnival laughter, Emerson claimed, helps us AS INDIVIDUALS deal with pain, horror, the fear of death. It does not create durable collective political structures; carnival fools were too busy laughing to construct a politics. As clearly as if she had said it aloud, Emerson indicated that Kristeva was wrong, as are all of those who followed her lead.
While Emerson did not say it directly, she suggested that
Bakhtin studies in the West might have to be entirely revised as better
translations of his work become available. For example, by 1986,
Bakhtin's early philosophical material was available in Russian. This
produced, for one thing, a clearer sense of the concept of
polyphony,
which owes as much to architechtonics as it does to dialogue. In
light of these new materials, Emerson has become convinced that The
Dialogic Imagination needs changes, because the terms which she had
translated are now known in their origins.
Her claim that her translating was done in a vacuum suggests that, to be responsible as scholars, we now have to go back and do the contextualizing that we could not do before. Yet in so doing, we run the risk, it seems to me, of rendering obsolete the work of an entire generation of scholars, whose grasp of Bakhtin would now appear to have been erroneous. This is a tricky issue, for above all, Bakhtinians should want to live in the real, historical contexts of their work, even though this may be messy or unfavorable. Yet to suggest that the work done based on earlier versions of Bakhtin was mistaken ignores the fact that texts like those of Bakhtin (translated or in the original) take on a dialogized life of their own when critical commentary begins to form around them. Should anyone be able to come along later and say that they now offer another, purer voice, and that because of this, prior secondary work is suspect?
If his major philosophical and literary terms are now up for revision, so, Emerson indicated, should his reputation as a literary critic be reconsidered. Emerson indicated that she started sensing Bakhtin's omissions regarding, for instance, Dostoevsky. As she described her renewed reading of Bakhtin as a literary critic, one listening between the lines of her talk might have sensed that her purpose was to chide American critics for ignoring Bakhtin's literary criticism and instead working in the thematic «Bakhtin and … » mode that I have been describing. She seemed to hint at an attempt to limit Bakhtin, appealing for a gentler, less crassly American or volatiley political Bakhtin. The message behind the words sounded something like, «Enough with the thematized applications of Bakhtin's ideas. He was a literary critic, but one should study him as he read Dostoevsky [etc.], not apply him to this, that, or the other figure.»
Turning back to Bakhtin as philosopher, Emerson went on to say that Bakhtin's key idea is architechtonics, or the need to create the «I,» to place one's signature on an act. No longer does she view him as primarily a literary critic. She sees him now as a philosopher of individual responsibility. The question is, she indicated, whether I (any speaking person) will deny what I have done or whether I will place my signature on an act? Yet one might ask whether architechtonics itself would not indicate that Emerson cannot stand above the Bakh
ХРОНИКА. ФАКТЫ. ИНФОРМАЦИЯ Brian Kennedy
"Our" Bakhtin versus "Your" Bakhtin…
Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 1995, № 3
162 163
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 1995, № 3
tin whom she has created, and disavow him as incomplete because of what he has become to the Western literary academy?
Emerson turned last to the 1990s, discussing the freeing of scholarship in Russia and indicating that much of what is going on in the country, or in the Russian language, is not being translated. Again, she drew no implications from this, but there was a hint that those scholars who cannot read Russian may be left behind. Perhaps that is so. Maybe we in the West, particularly those of us who do not read Russian, have no right to appropriate Bakhtin as our model and then expect others to do the work of translating which will give us ever new texts to mine.
However it would be a shame, particularly in this newly freer (if not unqualifiably free) world, to see Bakhtin studies retreat behind a new sort of Iron Curtain—that of language. My plea, then, is to those I have been calling «Eastern» scholars. The cultural analogy which strikes me most forcefully is to the contents of the Kremlin Armoury and the Pushkin Museum. Anyone touring these places recognizes that Russia is certainly not a poor country. The thrones, scepters, crowns, and carriages of the Armoury are only surpassed in beauty and value by the paintings in the Pushkin. Yet these great assets are hardly of the sort that one could liquidate, for in selling them, the Russians would be selling their past (in the former case) and their access to great aesthetic beauty (in the latter). Yet in not selling them, neither do the Russian people horde them. Instead, they allow anyone to view them, enjoy them, and interpret their meaning, even if, because we cannot read the signs, and we rely on the help of a guide speaking her non-native English, we occasionally make interpretive mistakes.
I want to suggest that this approach also needs to be applied to Bakhtin studies. Those of us in the West may be somewhat less informed about Bakhtin's contexts and nuances than those who live in, or study professionally, his culture and can speak his language. Many of us have to depend on translated work, and on secondary access to his contexts.
Yet my hope is that we don't work so far apart as Bakhtin
studies moves into its next phase that we develop two Bakhtins so
radically different from one another that we cannot talk about them as if
they were, at some level, the same person. Be assured that the faddish
interest in Bakhtin in the West will fall off as the next figure or
movement comes along. Perhaps in this sense Emerson's words are
prophetic; maybe those of us in the Western academy who remain interested
in
Bakhtin while our colleagues move on to someone or something
else will look back at the Bakhtin explosion of the 1980s and early
1990s and laugh. But at the same time, we need not encourage the demise
of the American Bakhtin, for while he holds widespread appeal,
Bakhtinians have opportunities to publish and research that they may
not enjoy forever. And, finally, many enduring works of criticism
have been written from a Bakhtinian perspective, and in English.
1 On the use of the terms «East» and «West»: I mean to establish no firm lines here, particularly in terms of geography. The metaphor is largely a thematic approximation. The main issue is the differences between work on Bakhtin per se and work which has the «Bakhtin and … [some other critic, artistic work, or concern]» flavor. Eastern scholars, it seems to me, are more intent on guarding Bakhtin, hedging him off from the broad-ranging approaches which have been popular in the West. My purpose in this essay is to discuss this state of affairs without judging either side.
2 By American, I mean North American broadly speaking. I don't intend to disparage any one scholar or any one academy.
ХРОНИКА. ФАКТЫ. ИНФОРМАЦИЯ Brian Kennedy
"Our" Bakhtin versus "Your" Bakhtin…