Introduction
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Notes Introduction 1. Robert Stam’s 1989 book Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (1989) remains the most coherent attempt to date for the establishment of both a rationale and a methodology for a Bakhtinian approach to fi lm. Stam’s own intellectual agenda, however, leads him more to linguistic matters, both in Bakhtinian theory and in cinematic expression. He is interested both in fi lm as language (invoking, as I do in Chapter 1, the theoretical paradigm of Christian Metz) and in language content and representation within fi lm (issues of translation, dubbing and so on). Thus, the chief Bakhtinian concepts utilized in his study are dialogism, heteroglossia and carnival (with a nod towards matters polyphonic and chronotopic), whereas my more narrative and reception-inclined agenda is concentrated around dialogism, the chronotope and polyphony, ideas which have more to say about narrative as construct and event. Stam has thus been less directly infl uential on the production of the present study than valuable as a dialogically friendly ‘fellow traveller’. R. Barton Palmer’s article (1989) deserves to be fl agged as a piece that carefully and critically sets out ways in which a number of Bakhtinian categories can have salience for fi lm studies. Scholars who have worked, sometimes very effectively, along the lines of deriving from Bakhtin general approaches to broad topics such as dialogic intertextuality or language, and applying them in fi lmic contexts, include Stadler (2003), Thornton (1996) and McWilliams (2001). Two notable essays that fi nd a rich fi t between the chronotope and specifi c time- space confi gurations (early 1990s ‘hood fi lms’ and art cinema, respectively) are Massood (2003) and Alexander (2007). Nafi cy (2001) accomplishes something similar in the fi eld of cinematic representations of diasporic and exilic states. 2. Like many aspects of Bakhtin’s biography, facts are diffi cult to establish and different versions attract different adherents. Hirschkop fi nds gaps in the records that cast into doubt whether Bakhtin ever attended university as an undergraduate (2001, p.3); that Bakhtin put himself forward for the Russian equivalent of a Ph.D in 1946 (where he defended material on Rabelais but, for ideological reasons, was not given an award until 1951 – and even then not the full award) does not seem to be in question. 3. Hirschkop posits the ‘critique of everything “given” ’ as the ‘most insistent’ point where Bakhtin’s Neo-Kantianism manifests itself in his work (1999, p.24). 4. Hirschkop talks about the (Russian-infl uenced) line that defi nes Bakhtin as a ‘philosopher fi rst’, in contradistinction to the emphasis suggested by the way the texts appeared (1999, pp.119–21). The same author also pinpoints Bakhtin’s specifi c appeal upon his fi rst emergence with Western intellectuals. In relation to the dominance of poststructuralism, ‘[i]n 1981 Bakhtin appeared 189 190 Notes as the literary critic who had made the linguistic turn without losing his humanist baggage along the way’ (1999, p.120n). 5. Quite aside from the dispute surrounding the Voloshinov and Medvedev texts, which is dealt with in the main body of this section, a number of editorial questions surround the management and dispersal of Bakhtin’s body of work. The most sustained attempt to draw all of his materials together – the multi-volume Collected Works – is in a cycle of Russian publication under the general editorship of Sergej Bocharov, Bakhtin’s literary executor, and awaits a translated edition for English readers. See Adlam (2001, p.244); Holquist (2002, pp.185–7). 6. Little Dorrit published in 1857. 7. Peter Ives points out that the legacy left by Bakhtinian thinking around the notion of the ‘monologic’ is not always helpful, as he illustrates in looking at Antonio Gramsci’s conviction of the merit of a progressive unifi cation/ centralization of linguistic practice in a specifi c national context. See Ives (2008, Chapter 2). 8. Turning a very nice image to illustrate this idea (and the related notion that theme cannot be divorced from the study of a speech unit), Voloshinov fi gures meaning as ‘like an electric spark that occurs only when two different terminals are hooked together’ (MPL, p.103). 9. The results were published in the September issue (Vol. 12, No. 9). 10. As in the accusations brought against fi lms like A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1972), Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone, 1994), and various early 1980s ‘video nasties’ (to use the term popularized by the UK press) which have been cited as inspiring acts of violence and murder. Accounts of how texts like these have become embroiled in so-called ‘effects’ debates can be found in Barker and Petley (2001). 1 Dialogism and Film Studies: The Dialogic Spectator 1. Many critics have disagreed with Bakhtin’s bracketing off of these forms in relation to dialogism, and have indeed found Bakhtinian categories to be very useful for dealing with them. See, for instance, Rachel Falconer on Bakhtin and the epic (in Adlam et al, 1997, pp.254–272); Robert Cunliffe on ‘Bakhtin and Derrida: Drama and the Phoneyness of the Phonè’ in the same volume (pp.347–365); Donald Wesling on Russian poetry (1992), and Ilkka Joki’s Bakhtinian reading of David Mamet’s stage work (1993). 2. A relationship explored by Julia Kristeva in the essay ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1980, pp.64–91). See also Stam et al (1992, pp.203–6). 3. See, for instance, Adlam (1997); Hirschkop (2001); Shepherd (2006, p.33). Tihanov (2000, pp.4–5) gives an account and examples of both ‘applicatory’ and ‘contextual’ positions. 4. Some of these infl ections are identifi ed and discussed by Hirschkop (1990). 5. The frequency and parameters of this term in Bakhtin are questioned by Cunliffe (1997, p.363); nevertheless, ‘novelness’ is used by Holquist to refer to the unique property of the novel to register degrees of otherness (2002, p.73). To clarify this, a remark from Booth might help: ‘Only “the novel” [. .] offers the possibility of doing justice to voices other than the author’s own, Notes 191 and only the novel invites us to do so’ (1997, p.xxii). Holquist also invokes novelness in a more general sense, as a synonym for ‘literariness’: ‘the study of any cultural activity that has treated language as dialogic’ (68). 6. The text referred to is ‘Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art (Concerning Sociological Poetics)’ in Freudianism, pp.93–116. See the introduction for an account of the disputed works. 7. ‘Re-accentuation’ is the typically evocative term which Bakhtin – ironically, given its theme – closes ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (419–22). It captures the way in which symbolic meanings reform in relation to changed contextual surroundings. Bakhtin uses it oppositionally with regard to concepts like canonization and reifi cation, and says that it is fuelled by changes in heteroglottic conditions, but also warns against it as a force that can distort if the conditions prompting it are not truly dialogic. ‘New images in literature are very often created through a re-accentuating of old images, by translating them from one accentual register to another (from the comic plane to the tragic, for instance, or the other way around)’ (DIN, p.421). 8. Lundberg (1989) provides an interesting perspective on this, while Shepherd (2001) attempts to take stock of scholarship on Bakhtinian ideas around readers/reading. 9. Although Bakhtin’s oeuvre does offer some direct engagement, most suggestively in the fi nal section of the essay ‘Forms of Time and of Chronotope in the Novel’ (pp.252–54). 10. See Morson and Emerson (1990, p.77–86). The existence of Medvedev’s full- length 1928 critique (‘the most comprehensive and even-handed critique of the work of the Formalists in the whole Soviet period’ – Brandist, 2002, p.73) is the most compelling element in the case against framing Bakhtin and the Circle in terms of a straightforward affi liation with the Formalist tradition. In addition to this, Thomson (1984) discusses how Medvedev (and, by extension, Bakhtin) takes issue with the Formalist conception of genre, while a ‘lost’ critique prepared in 1924 is attributed to Bakhtin (Hirschkop, 1999, p.112). 11. This infl uence is disseminated, Eagle speculates, through the agency of two of Bakhtin’s early champions, Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov (1981, p.53). 12. See, for instance, Holquist (2002, pp.45–7) and Hirschkop (1999, pp.213–9). 13. It is not the intention to over-emphasize this infl uence; the relation to Saussure is not at all straightforward, with the Swiss linguist spearheading the ‘abstract objectivist’ tendency much criticized in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. As dedicated contextual research by Craig Brandist (2004) has shown, Voloshinov’s theory of utterance as intersubjective social event depends on elements imported from fi gures involved in the tradition that emerges from the work of Franz Brentano (namely Karl Bühler, who contributes the intersection of psychology and social representation, and Anton Marty, who affi rms that ‘anticipated reception’ helps constitute the linguistic act itself, a position that can be clearly seen to fi lter through into Bakhtin’s dialogism via Voloshinov – Brandist, 2004, pp.98–107). Refl ecting ‘fundamentally anti-Kantian’ (p.98) ideas from Gestalt theory, the Brentanian legacy is combined by Voloshinov with a Marxist-infl ected interpretation of social classes acting in the manner of Kantian ‘juridicial’ entities. Determining that a class produces a juridicial ‘collective social dialect’ enables Voloshinov 192 Notes to bypass the problematic Saussurean individual parole (speech act) in refi ning his own concept of utterance, although this causes a certain misalignment with Bakhtin over the nature of extra-discursive reality (with the latter moving towards the position of the idealist Marburg philosopher Ernst Cassirer, a signifi cant but insuffi ciently acknowledged infl uence on Bakhtin; see Poole, 1998).