Журнал научных разысканий о биографии, теоретическом наследии и эпохе М. М. Бахтина
ISSN 0136-0132
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Мы продолжаем публиковать поступившие в редакцию ответы на анкету, посвященную народно-празд ничной теории М.М.Бахтина (см.: «ДКХ». 1996, №4, с.5—45; «ДКХ». 1997, №1, с.5—33). Спектр уже высказанных мнений достаточно широк, однако при проведении любого опроса вполне логично стремиться к его максимальной полноте и репрезентативности. Поэтому мы вновь обращаемся к исследователям, занимающимся и интересующимся соответствую щей проблематикой, с приглашением принять участие в обсуждении поставленных вопросов. Надеемся, что эти вопросы — как и предлагаемый нами жанр — позволяют живо, неформально и объективно высказаться о том, что многих действительно волнует и побуждает к напряженным размышлени ям. Как и во все прежние годы существования журнала, мы и сейчас, проводя эту анкету, радеем не об апологетике М.М.Бахтина, а о получении реальной информации относительно того, как воспринимают ся и оцениваются его идеи современными учеными и деятелями культуры. Ответы на анкету будут печататься в 3 и 4 номерах журнала за 1997 год (а при необходимости и в первых номерах за 1998 год).
1. Насколько, по Вашему мнению, книга о Рабле «вписывается» в общий контекст теоретического наследия М.М.Бахтина? Насколько она была органична (или, напротив, чужеродна) в процессе духовной эволюции мыслителя?
2. Каковы, на Ваш взгляд, истоки теории карнавала? Является ли она обобщением исторических особенностей древней и затем неофициальной средневековой культуры Запада или же, как это иногда утверждается, в гораздо большей степени отражает «русское отношение к смеху» (С.С.Аверинцев), развивает «русскую идею соборности» (Л.Е.Пинский)?
3. В какой мере Вы считаете карнавальную концепцию убедительной и верной, соответствующей позднейшим данным гума
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нитарных наук? Кто из последователей или оппонентов Бахтина сделал, как Вам представляется, особенно много для ее усовершенствования или уточнения?
4. Как Вы оцениваете значение работы «Творчество Ф.Рабле и народная культура средневековья и Ренессанса» для мировой науки? Какова ее роль в мировом искусстве последних десятилетий?
1. To what extent, in your opinion, does the Rabelais book «fit» into the overall context of Bakhtin's legacy? To what extent it was organic (or, vice versa, alien) to the process of the thinker's spiritual evolution?
2. What do you think the backgrounds of the carnival theory are? Is it a generalization of the historical peculiarities of ancient and later unofficial medieval western culture or, as it is sometimes argued, to a much larger extent, it reflects «the Russian attitude to laughter» (Sergei Averintsev), develops «the Russian conception of "sobornost'" (conciliarism)» (Leonid Pinsky)?
3. To what extent do you find the carnival concept convincing, true and corresponding to more recent developments in the Humanities? Who of Bakhtin's followers and opponents, from your perspective, have made the largest contribution to its elaboration or clarification?
4. How do you estimate the importance of the work «Rabelais and His World» for the world science? What is its role in the world arts of the last decades?
Roumiana Deltcheva
University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada)
1. I believe that the book on Rabelais is in many respects crucial in understanding the architectonics of Bakhtin's philosophico-anthropological paradigm. Rabelais is one of the three pillars, together with Dostoevsky and Goethe, which in a way construct the volumetric space within which all of Bakhtin's philosophical and literary concepts are incorporated (cf. Averintsev and Bocharov in Bakhtin 1979, «Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva). From a spatio-temporal point of view, for Bakhtin, Rabelais is seen as a mediating figure whose essence inter
sects the two planes of boundary definition and respective
possibility/impossibility for external or internal evolution and emergence,
represented by the worlds of Dostoevsky and Goethe. If
Dostoevsky's universe is the ultimate illustration of the dissolution of the
boundaries (razlozhenie granits) foregrounding personal discourse and
the accompanying notions of polyphony and heteroglossia in a
time-independent context (crisis time), and Goethe's world is entirely
dependent on the plane of shaping of the boundaries (obrabotka granits)
within historical time foregrounding the discourse of historical evolution
in the Bildungsroman, in Rabelais the cosmos is artistically
reconceptualized as a perpetually «becoming» substance by means of social
discourse and carnivalesque ambivalence. Thus, in Bakhtin's
three-dimensional ideological space, the chronotopes of Dostoevsky and
Goethe are juxtaposed as the world of coexistence versus the world
of becoming, while the chronotopes of Goethe and Rabelais are
correlated as being two worlds of becoming. However, there is a
distinction between the two types of becoming which determine Rabelais's
mediating position. While Goethe focuses on man's becoming through
his influence ON the outer world (man-the-builder), Rabelais portrays
man's becoming in his contact WITH the outer world. Moreover, both
the participants in the Dialogue and the participants in the Carnival do
not approach their respective chronotopes objectively (Goethe's
«scientific» scrutiny of the observer), they just live in them. That is
why man's entire life may be compressed in a week or extended to
several hundred years and his environment may be reduced to a mere
symbolic dichotomy of «open» versus «closed» or expanded to the
dimensions of a megacosmos (cf. Vlasov, «The World According to Bakhtin»,
Canadian Slavonic Papers 1995).
The idea of chronotope developed in «Avtor i geroi…» and «Formy vremeni…» becomes the crucial foundation of Bakhtin's literary theorizing. It is practically implemented in his study of Dostoevsky in «Problemy poetiki…» and of Rabelais in «Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable…» In «Problemy…», Bakhtin establishes the two general topics which underlie the ideological and emotional states of Dostoevsky's characters, namely the threshold (crisis and climactic events) and the public square (catastrophe, scandal, row). It is significant that the public square, topographically boundless and psychologically unrestricted, is in fact the same space where carnival acts occur. The carnivalesque nature of the public square makes it one of the basic constituents of the Rabelaisian chronotope. Yet, while the carnivalesque in Dosto
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evsky is oriented horizontally, along the axis «I» and «Other», in Rabelais the directionality is inverted along a vertical axis playing on the interaction «high» and «low». In this sense, the public square becomes the marketplace with all its relevant transmutations.
If Bakhtin's ouevre is scrutinized within the socio-political context of the situation in the Soviet Union, it is significant to observe that there is a certain correlation in the author's scholarly endeavours and the concrete political reality. His earliest inquiry focussed on dialogism and polyphony in the late 1920s is gradually superseded by a «monological» shift exemplified by two symbolic gestures: on the level of literary history and genres he proclaims the hierarchical supremacy of the novel («novel imperialism» in Morson & Emerson's typological classification) over other genres; on the level of authorship the multivoiced Dostoevsky is replaced by the consistently rational Goethe, and Rabelais with his socially determined ambivalence. (In this context, it is possible to trace some parallel developments in Bakhtin's literary theorizing, especially Goethe, and the rise of the Socialist Realist doctrine.) Ultimately, however, in lieu of the disappearance of the Bildungsroman manuscript, when Stalinism was eventually superseded by a milder political climate, Bakhtin never returned to Goethe, revising and republishing only the works on Dostoevsky and Rabelais, instead. All these considerations are indicative that the book on Rabelais (besides being his legitimizing scholarly effort) has a central place in Bakhtin's complex philosophical system.
2. The origins of the carnival theory can be traced back to
the ancient times and the emergence of the Menippean satire. There
are elements of it in the various old Greek dramatic festivals and the
Bacchus rituals which from religious practices were gradually
reconceptualized into secular public festivities. In the Middle Ages, the
carnival became an appropriate vehicle for popular emotion in a context of
rigid religious sanctimoniousness and socio-economic hardships
(including many health epidemics). In this sense, the notion of carnival
should be approached as a general phenomenon characteristic of human
civilization, rather than a specific manifestation of a particular
national group. At the same time, however, it would be too exclusive to
attribute carnival and the carnivalesque only to Western civilization. Any
superficial glance at the history of world literature, esp. on the
«lower», unofficial level, suggests that carnival by far transcends the
traditional
Eurocentric boundaries and elements of the carnivalesque are
present in the cultures of Africa, the Middle and Far East. In this sense
Averintsev's and Pinsky's appropriation of the term for the «Russian»
attitude to laughter or the «Russian» conceptualization of «sobornost'»
are not plausible alternatives, if we are striving towards a
comparatist understanding of carnival. Even if we assume that in writing the
Rabelais book Bakhtin was above all targeting the particular
«carnivalesque» state of affairs during the period of high Stalinism, we cannot deny
the objective validity of his observations in the context of French
medieval and Renaissance history. Notably, Bakhtin's monograph
always appears among the top sources in library catalogues dealing with
French literature and culture.
3. The carnival theory comes in quite handy when applied to the discussion of art and literature at the present stage of humanitarian scholarship. Carnival is an inherent component of postmodernism with its subversive modes, generic inversions, fragmentation of the master narrative, and general relativization of traditionally accepted concepts. Moreover, the theory of carnival and the carnivalesque plays an extremely beneficial role in literary and cultural studies today by providing the much needed «sophisticated» theoretical framework within which the foregrounding of mass culture becomes legitimized. My claim does not necessarily entail that ground-breaking research is in the making. More often than not, carnival theory and the inevitable connection with Bakhtin is brought in out of context and without much understanding often due to the fact that the English version «Rabelais and His World» is a very poor, inaccurate rendition of the original and the lack of competence in Russian of the scholars. Nonetheless, together with the concepts of dialogism and polyphony, carnival has been used and abused in current North American cultural and feminist studies (sometimes in contexts such as poetry which would have probably caused Bakhtin to turn in his grave…).
As far as Bakhtin's opponents are concerned, I am not sure that I can name any, in North America in any case. The only name that comes to mind off the top of my head is V.Linetski (in Israel) whose «Anti-Bakhtin» is to date the only critical study I have come across. (I personally had a futile attempt to publish a manuscript which traced some disturbing parallels in the scholarly biography of Bakhtin and the ideological mission of M.Gorky without any success. I am not claiming that the paper in question was necessarily worthy of publication, but I do
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find it strange that all the assessments dwelt more on my choice of «desanctifying» Bakhtin and my «vendetta» against him rather than at least in part to comment on the actual merits or deficiencies of the article). What is even more striking is the enthusiasm with which Bakhtin's theoretical legacy has been embraced by North American feminist critics, given his highly gender insensitive stance, both discoursewise and in terms of his focus.)
The above remarks should not be understood as my personal «anti-Bakhtinian» position. I do not have the necessary self-confidence and scholarly achievements for such a gesture; in fact, I cannot but admire Bakhtin's erudition and faculties, his enormous contribution in dire economic, physical, and intellectual conditions. At the same time, I do believe in an objective and multi-faceted assessment of any thinker's overall oeuvre. Idolization, or the epic folkloric man for that matter, cannot become a productive enterprise for academics. True dialogue is born only in the process of accepting but also questioning theoretical postulates.
Having said that, I must add that many of Bakhtin's concepts, not only carnival, can be applied successfully in the analysis not only of literary texts, but also in film studies (my particular area of interest). One such illustration is provided by Robert Stam and his use of Bakhtin's conceptualization of the carnivalesque in his studies of Latin American (Brazilian) cinema — quite a successful endeavour given the inherent kinship between carnival and Brazil — and Woody Allen («Zelig»). Nancy Pogel also utilizes concepts such as carnival and polyphony in approaching Woody Allen, whose artistic production renders itself successfully to a Bakhtinian treatment. The chronotope is another all-encompassing and visualizing notion which can potentially find wide application in the theory of film studies.
4. I touched upon the significance of the Rabelais monograph
in my discussion above. In my opinion, this book has a central place
in terms of our understanding of how historically the world was
conceptualized, through the mechanisms of unofficial culture and in the
framework of the Renaissance worldview. At the same time, the book
highlights some transcendental philosophical issues: the idea of the
constant process of man's becoming, the idea of the unity of time
and space for private and public life, the idea of the uninterruptedness
of human existence and the notion of immortality. Underlying these
issues is the optimistic belief in the uninhibited power of Laughter. In
a
time of total relativism, at the threshold of a new millennium (how
accurately Bakhtin described the threshold essence), lacking more
than ever the ability to communicate among one another, Bakhtin's
apology of laughter becomes a welcomed pillar of hope. It's high time that a
new and highly improved translation in English were published.
Andrew M. Favell
(Canada)
1. Bakhtin's «Rabelais and His World» at first glance appears to conflict, or better mark a distinct break, with his earlier works. However, having said this, this break is an important line of escape from the developments that Bakhtin had engaged in as regard to bounded bodies and dialogism. In «Rabelais and His World», Bakhtin appears to dispense with the work of the "novelistic self" and instead proposes the loophole, the unfinalizability, of the self, such that in «Rabelais and His World» he proposes a self that appears to open to the world, expands through its meeting with the world and to some extent even disappears. This is brought about by Bakhtin's attention to the bodily orifices and protuberances — mouth, anus, breasts, genitalia, defecation, eating, reproduction, pregnancy — that violate any boundedness of the body that would separate the self from the world, and instead draw a convergence between self and world, as if the world plunged into the body and the body into the world: «[T]he grotesque body […] is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits» («Rabelais and His World»:26) and again, the body «is blended with the world, with animals, with objects» («Rabelais and His World»:27). Such a vision of the open, incomplete body provides a basis from which Bakhtin is able to develop what appears to be a theory of becoming, to which I will return later drawing on other motifs to substantiate, and could even be considered to be a theory of becoming-other. The emphasis is on change and transformation, not stability and finalizability. By opening the body to the world that surrounds it, Bakhtin is able to overcome the hierarchical divisions of order — a move that is itself shown in the Carnivalesque denial of the participants' status and orders of office: everyone is fair game for fun and jokes and laughter and "billingsgate" and office no longer removes one from such affairs; no-one is immune. In some sense then, there is a grand equalizing of all persons, and this strips every
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one of the ideals and abstract categories by which persons clothe themselves. All persons, irrespective of office and social standing, are orifices and bodies that operate in direct contradiction to the import that any previous hierarchical order may impose: the belching and flatulence, gorging and copulation, laughter and shouting come to the foreground and connects all persons and animals in a collectivity. It is as if persons have given up trying to come up with reasons and excuses for their bodies and now instead surrender to their animalistic and "uncivilized" aspects, glorifying these aspects in all their baseness. It is perhaps only with such a move that Bakhtin is able to propose his most radical idea however — that of unfinalizability: the future is open and individual acts are no longer bound to specific and historic time and space, and an intoxicating freedom is introduced. In short, it is as if Bakhtin rethinks his earlier concept of the chronotope and challenges it by means of an "anti"chronotope. What does such a challenge afford? Basically, it plunges the individual into a dissolving collectivity — the word becomes impersonal and the body no longer marks a division of a self from the world. The use of carnival masks connects the joy of change, of transformation, metamorphosis, and transition — the grand proliferating flux through which individuals became other possibilities, a license of freedom to engage in acts and presentations that ordinarily may have been shunned and steered away from. The carnival was a time of experimentation, but one that did not allow a distinction between actors and audience — «While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. […] life is subject only to […] the laws of its own freedom» («Rabelais and His World»:7). As Bakhtin points out, historically carnivals were linked to Church feasts, which in turn was linked to moments of crisis, «breaking points in the cycle of nature or in the life of society and man» («Rabelais and His World»:9), and these points of rupture are important, if not crucial, points for the development and exploration of alternate possibilities, both for Bakhtin in terms of his "spiritual evolution" as well as for cultures themselves. For example, most of the significant technological and disciplinary advancements have happened when the known has been either suspended or radically critiqued, when breaks or ruptures have been prodded and poked, a finger inserted into a tiny crack in the apparent seamlessness of a given arrangement, and that crack widened such that the resultant opening produces a new universe of possibility. The seamlessness of the Newtonian universe has been cracked by the finger of quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and an entirely different picture of the
universe explored and developed, one that is more in keeping with the unfinalizability of a *process* — no longer a static state — of perpetual becoming.
2. To answer this question, I wish to reference the work of Deleuze and Guattari (*Kafka: towards a minor literature* 1986), especially in terms of their work towards minoritarian literature and languages. Such literature and languages are ruptures, or better becoming-alien, within the dominant or major literature or language. In many respects then, I think «Rabelais and His World» and the carnival "theory" are ruptures or breaks, the becoming minoritarian, of the official and dominant church-based and authoritarian cultures. The carnival has a crucial role to play in elaborating the contradictions, the fallacies, and the follies of Official Reality such that alternatives may be explored and experimented with. The carnival, while linked to the Church feasts historically as Bakhtin points out, nevertheless engages in something that much Church dogma tends to avoid, shun, or attempts to put in its place; that is, a celebration and a renewed interest in the body and its operations, especially those that challenge and undo the tenuous facade of civilization and higher spirit that the Church promotes. Most laws — even of the modern day — appear to have as their locus of intent, the control of the body, its functions, and its operational processes. Children are raised to have "good manners", to not belch or pass wind without the excuses and procedures that will (re)subjugate the body to the dominance and control of the mind and the higher cultured attributes of civilization. The penal laws segregate and confine bodies, dominate what a body may or may not do, isolates minds within those bodies and effectively effects a blockage to collective political action. But, the body is pure anarchism: it does not correspond to the categories into which it is trained from an early age, and will continue to give off strange odours, to act as if it had a "mind" of its own, and so on, despite the thousands of dollars one spends on advertising and perfumes, etc. The body will always rebel against the constraints of cerebral transcendent and abstracted culture, and continually calls attention to itself. «Rabelais and His World», to my mind, is a celebration of such anarchy, of such political collectivity, of the necessity to move against the chains that dogma has thrust us into and isolated us with. «Rabelais and His World» is a minoritarian literature in the sense that it works right underneath the noses of the Church Fathers, lifting their frocks and shouts «See, you too have genitals and an arse!!» The
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carnivalesque is an equalizer: it celebrates the baseness of being human, and reminds us not to get too full of our own self-importance. It points to a fearless world, because here there is no death as such, but continual renewal — «complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless world» («Rabelais and His World»:47) — and death (with all its attachments to Hell and Heaven, the endless criteria that will secure one entrance to either, and so on) is the only true source of fear. The person is the most free at the moment that they no longer fear, but rather make use of, their death.
3. The question of the degree of "truth" as regards more
recent developments in the Humanities is, I think, itself exposed as the
last remnant of faith in the sanctity of knowledge and the inevitable
progress toward a final complete vision of the world as an exhausted source
of curiosity. What strikes me about «Rabelais and His World» is that
it puts the very notion of truth to the test, and finds it wanting. Truth
is no longer an abstraction that can sit in judgement, because with
«Rabelais and His World» there is no outside from which to gain a
bird's-eye-view of the world. Objectivity, and its opposing dualist pole
subjectivity, become points of convention, polemical and political
forces of leverage by which to convince others of the absolute validity
of one's own knowledge. With «Rabelais and His World» this
changes radically. There is an inversion of such points of reference, such
that they are rendered precisely that—points of reference—that
change, mutate, shift, and are ultimately invalidated at the moment that they
are made transcendent. In similar ways, much of the recent work in
both postmodernism and poststructuralism have advanced
corresponding arguments—the alleged "death" of the author, the deferred closure
of meaning, the eschewal of stasis and end-points, the disavowal of
transcendent references, the valorization of immanence and a crucial
commitment to the development of a situationalist ethics that
recognizes diversity and becoming. Moreover, with the emphasis on the body
in «Rabelais and His World» that is open to the world, the ideas of
collectivity, the celebration of crises, breaks, interruptions, etc., all
these suggest to me reason to rejoice in an overcoming of dogmatic
predeterministic Grand Plans, and an eviction of the human from its
previous occupation of the Crown of Creation. We, as humans, are no longer
at the center of the universe, with a special relationship to a god,
but rather are compelled to assume full, unflinching, and radically
extreme and throughgoing responsibility for what we make of ourselves,
the life we discover we are living, and the planet and its diverse
popula
tions of which we are but one of many. It requires an ethic that can
no longer be abstracted, limits that are no longer accepted solely on
the basis of tradition, transcendent authority, and a celebration of our
sexualities (all ten thousand tiny sexes, as Deleuze and Guattari
would say) and possibilities for a future that we are each and
collectively responsible for in a way that historically we have abdicated from
assuming. This would be in keeping with the thrust of Guattari's
(*Chaosmosis* 1995) "ethico-aesthetic paradigm".
4. In many instances, «Rabelais and His World» heralds a celebration of the body, the uncertainties of life, the folly of knowledge that considers itself true, certain, and definite. In some respects, one might draw a parallel with the thematic of «Rabelais and His World» and more recent advances in, especially French, poststructuralism and the challenges to symbolism and significatory fidelity that the latter poses.
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