Towards a Reconciliation of the Carnivalesque with Bakhtin's Christian Weltanschauung
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Towards a Reconciliation of the Carnivalesque with Bakhtin’s Christian Weltanschauung by Irina Denischenko Submitted to Central European University Department of History In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Supervisor: Professor Matthias Riedl Second Reader: Professor György SzĘnyi CEU eTD Collection Budapest, Hungary 2008 Copyright Notice Copyright in the text of this thesis rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Central European Library. Details may be obtained from the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. CEU eTD Collection ii Abstract The religious dimension of the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin’s work currently remains under-explored in Western criticism, where the image of Bakhtin as a literary critic overshadows his contribution as a Christian thinker. In this thesis, I reinterpret some Christian motifs, such as kenotic Incarnation, in Bakhtin’s early as well as late works as foundations for some of his most important terminological innovations, such as the carnivalesque. Bakhtin’s latent religious discourse not only illustrates his familiarity with Orthodox theology, but also reveals his engagement in dialogue with some of the major religious philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia, among whom are Soloviev, Florensky, Bulgakov, and Berdyaev. Thus, one of the main aims of this thesis is to articulate a common intellectual paradigm loosely framed around the interpretation of Incarnation as kenosis. In this study, I mainly rely on the approaches of the Cambridge School for tracing the usage history of the term kenosis. An understanding of kenosis as a functional rather than substantive process, which can be applied to explain a variety of (substantively) different (but functionally similar) phenomena, grounds the celebration of matter one finds in the writings of both the fin de siècle Russian religious philosophers and Bakhtin. CEU eTD Collection iii INTRODUCTION 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 9 LITERATURE REVIEW 17 CHAPTER I 24 A THEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE: THE KENOTIC PRINCIPLE IN RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY 24 1.1 INTRODUCTION. THE DUAL TENDENCY OF RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY AND THE REBELLION AGAINST ABSTRACTION 24 1.2 THEOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE CELEBRATION OF THE MATERIAL WORLD: ICONOPHILE DEFENSE OF MATTER ON THE BASIS OF INCARNATION 27 1.2.1 THE ESSENTIALIST MODEL 28 1.2.2 THE NON-ESSENTIALIST MODEL 31 1.2.3 LEO OF CHALCEDON 33 1.3 CONCEPTUALIZATIONS OF KENOSIS 37 1.4 PAVEL FLORENSKY. KENOSIS AS THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND LOVE 43 1.5 SERGEI BULGAKOV. USAGE EXTENDED: CREATION AS A KENOTIC PROCESS 52 CONCLUSION 56 CHAPTER II 58 TOWARDS A RECONCILIATION OF “ANTINOMIES”: KENOSIS AND CARNIVALESQUE DEGRADATION AS FUNCTIONALLY COMPATIBLE CONCEPTS 58 2.1 INTRODUCTION 58 2.2 KENOSIS AND MATERIALITY AS ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE EARLY PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS 60 2.3 THE AESTHETIC FUNCTION OF KENOSIS IN PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S ART : THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORIAL INCARNATION 65 2.4 CARNIVAL DEFINED 69 2.5 THE MATERIAL BODILY PRINCIPLE: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH 73 2.6 KENOTIC INCARNATION AND DEGRADING CARNIVAL AS FUNCTIONALLY ANALOGOUS CONCEPTS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS 81 2.7 CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE BODY IN CARNIVAL AND ORTHODOX SERVICES 85 CEU eTD Collection CONCLUSION 93 CONCLUSION 95 BIBLIOGRAPHY 100 iv Introduction General Introduction A true atheist must concede that Dostoevsky, and not Russia’s nineteenth-century progressives, was right. The latter were wrong in believing that the collapse of the tsarist regime would mean the end of willful arrogance, greed, the lust for power, guile, servility, and inhumanity whether through cruelty or quiescence. – Czeslaw Milosz The religious dimension of the Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin’s work currently remains under-explored in Western criticism, where the image of Bakhtin as a literary critic overshadows his contribution as a Christian thinker. Even when the presence of Eastern Orthodox theology is recognized at the periphery of Bakhtin’s writings, it is often cast in a negative light as a theoretical limitation to his critical approach. Rather than viewing the echoes of Christianity in Bakhtin’s thought as a defect, in my thesis I propose to reinterpret these motifs as foundations for some of his most important terminological innovations, such as dialogism, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque. Bakhtin’s latent religious discourse not only illustrates his familiarity with Orthodox theology, but also reveals his engagement in dialogue with some of the major religious philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia, such as Vladimir Soloviev, Mikhail Tareev, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, and Nikolai Berdyaev. Although the parallels between Bakhtin’s newly invented terminology and Christianity are not immediately apparent, his literary terms nonetheless reach back and speak to one another through their common Christian base. A case in point is the CEU eTD Collection carnivalesque, which subsumes heteroglossia and dialogism, as both are derived from carnivalistic folklore. On the surface, it appears that the Bakhtinian carnival is fundamentally incompatible with Christianity, which supports the “official seriousness” that carnival, and specifically carnival laughter, aims to overthrow. As a 1 liberating spirit, carnival seeks to undermine all structures of authority, the purpose of which is to terrify the subjects into submission. How, then, can an authority- suspending concept of carnival, which Bakhtin wholeheartedly supports in Rabelais and His World, and its pagan origins, be consistent with a Christian worldview? The primary purpose of this study is to reevaluate Bakhtin’s concept of carnival and to point to possible ways of reconciling the carnivalesque with Bakhtin’s religious inclinations in his early essays. An analysis of Bakhtin’s theoretical treatment of carnival and the derivative literary genre of grotesque realism seems to reveal that Bakhtin paradoxically supports the liberating power of the pagan carnival festivals on the basis of a particular perception of materiality, which has roots in the understanding of Incarnation as kenosis or emptying. Following the fin de siècle Russian religious philosophers’ reading of the Incarnation, and similar, previously existing discourse on the nature of “God-Man,” for early Bakhtin the divine becomes the material in the process of Incarnation; that is, the divine is not deposited within the material, but actually becomes flesh. Consequently, the Neo-Platonic distinction between the material and transcendent, of which the latter is deemed superior in every dichotomy, no longer makes sense, since there is nothing transcendent that has not become flesh. This functional process of validating the material is transformed in his later works into a defense of the Formalist insistence on the unity of form and content. A similar understanding of the role of the physical body underlies Bakhtin’s CEU eTD Collection discussion of carnival. For Bakhtin, one of the main functions of carnival is to bring down the high and the abstract to the level of the body and earth, or materialize them – another form of incarnation. If, according to Bakhtin, “The Gospel, too, is carnival,” perhaps the function of the New Testament for Bakhtin is embodied in the 2 materialization of God. In other words, through the incarnation of Christ, the Christian God becomes less abstract than the Judaic God of the Old Testament. This materialization, in turn, minimizes the distance that is used by power structures, such as the Church, to terrify its subjects. This kind of de-abstractification is important for Bakhtin precisely because abstraction is connected with monologism, whereas the polyphonic principle can only occur in the framework of carnival. In the following chapters by arguing that Bakhtin exhibits elements of Russian Orthodox thought as it developed around his time, I do not mean to suggest that Bakhtin embraces Orthodox dogma unequivocally, and, even less so, that he embraces the institution of the Orthodox Church. Rather, he develops his own selective set of convictions, which he nevertheless perceives as Orthodoxy, not unlike his contemporaries viewed their own work when it came to contextualizing it within the existing framework of Orthodox thought. That is, emphasizing some themes while downplaying others, Bakhtin selectively reinterprets Orthodoxy in his own particular way, which may or may not reflect official Orthodox teachings. As Bakhtin’s biographers point out, his religious views “came not so much from traditional Orthodox thinking within the church as from the religious revival in the early twentieth century among Russian intellectuals who sought to break new ground in theological thought”.1 Consequently, my concern is rather with the way Bakhtin perceived Orthodoxy, than with the reconstruction of official Orthodox doctrines. Moreover, the endeavor to reconstruct the aspects in which Bakhtin conformed to the CEU eTD Collection Orthodox doctrine and those in which he departed from it is further complicated by the reinterpretation that Russian Orthodoxy had undergone in the English language 1 Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: