Mikhail Bakhtin: a Justification of Literature

Mikhail Bakhtin: A Justification of Literature Sonya Petkova Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century. He was born in 1895 and lived in St. Petersburg at the time when the Russian Formalists were publishing their innovative theory on art and language. His own theory, however, is generally thought to transcend the work of the Formalists, and to anticipate structuralism and poststructuralism. His most famous study, “Discourse in the Novel,” written in the 30s-40s (but not published until 1967), presents the theory of dialogism in language and the claim that a work of art is not a self-sufficient whole. Bakhtin’s writing is often seen as the foundation of poststructuralism. This essay will focus on Bakhtin’s earlier work Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo (1929) and its notion of polyphony which is, I argue, the cornerstone of the theory of heteroglossia developed later in “Discourse in the Novel” (written in the1930-40s). Part I of the paper examines the idea of polyphony in Problemy; part II discuss- es heteroglossia in “Discourse in the Novel.” Part III delineates the continuation of Bakhtin’s thought in the work postsructuralist critics Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. I also investigate, in part IV, a hardly examined aspect of Bakhtin’s work—his criticism of poetry. “Lectures on the History of Russian Literature” was published in the five-volume Sobrannie Sochinenii (Collected Works). These lectures, many of which on poetry, complicate Bakhtin’s theory of language and reveal his work as encompassing far more than previously thought. Moreover, they help us to realize that Bakhtin’s work not only preempts poststructuralism but disagrees with its tendency to merge artistic discourse with discourse in general. I. The Polyphonic Novel: Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo (1929) Bakhtin’s idea of heteroglossia in the novel emerges as early as his analysis of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels, whose style he labels “polyphonic.” Problemy Poetiki Dostoevskogo (The Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics), published in 1929, presents a detailed analysis of the different aspects of Dostoyevsky’s stylistics. It is centered on the claim that Dostoyevsky’s novel is dialogical, as opposed to the traditional notion that the novel is a monologic whole driven by the author’s ideology. The term “polyphony” was coined by the critic Komarovich, who used it to draw an analogy between Dostoyevsky’s novel and the polyphony of a musical piece (Problemy 28). Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Volume 1, Spring 2005 2 Petkova / Mikhail Bakhtin However, Komarovich considered polyphonic music as well as the novelistic genre to be monologic, to represent the unity of an individual act by a unitary will. Bakhtin overturns this philosophy and presents what will become the poststructuralist view on language. All voices in polyphony, he claims, are autonomous, brought together in the artistic event. Unlike poetry, the language of prose is heterogeneous, and multiple social voices come forcefully together in the discourse, even though some of these voices remain unacknowledged. Bakhtin sees Dostoyevsky’s prose as the prototype of the polyphonic novel (as well as of the novel characterized by heteroglossia, as described later in “Discourse in the Novel.”) Dostoyevsky, he says: is the creator of the polyphonic novel. He invented a new novelistic genre. The new kind of character appearing in his work has a voice constructed in the same way as the authorial voice is constructed in an ordinary novel… The character’s speech of himself and of the world is as weighty as the traditional authorial discourse; it is not subordi- nated to the objective character of the hero, as one of his characteristics; at the same time it does not serve as an expression of the authorial voice. (Problemy 13) The polyphonic novel subverts the notion of an omniscient narrator and characters subordinate to the main moralistic purpose of the novel. In the first chapter of Problemy, Bakhtin reviews in great detail the previ- ous critical responses to Dostoyevsky’s work. They explained Dostoyevsky’s novels either as a reflection of the social reality of the time, or as deeply psychological works that mirror the inbuilt contradictions in Dostoyevsky’s own mind. Until Bakhtin, critics had been applying an analytical method that later, in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin calls “poetic.” Traditional criticism on prose, according to Bakhtin, used “poetic” modes of analysis, which revolved around the idea of unity of style and narrative voice and were insufficient to describe the polyphonic novel (“Discourse in the Novel”). It failed to acknowledge the different social forces that make the heterogeneous style of the novel. One assumption that critics made was that one or other of the characters conveyed the moral philosophy of the novel. Thus a critic assumed that the author’s philosophy and moralistic view were revealed through the character. The fact that there were contradictory characters and ideas in the novel none of which seemed to pre- vail morally, and different styles of speech none of which was predominant, critics explained with the conflict- ing ideas inside Dostoyevsky’s mind, his complex philosophical beliefs, his Orthodox Christian beliefs, and so forth. Grossman, for instance, praised Dostoyevsky’s great personality which was able to combine all the diverse elements in his novels (Problemy 22) All these critics adhered to what Bakhtin called “poetical principles of writing,” which posit that the artistic text is organized around one main narrator and one philosophy. While Bakhtin grants merit to some of the critics’ arguments – such as the nature of Capitalist society and its reflection in the structure of the novel – he claims that none of the critics before him was able to understand the main principle behind Dostoyevsky’s work, which he believed was a matter of style and formal structure rather than of ideology and psychology. He agreed that the world in Dostoyevsky’s novel might reflect the multi- leveled world of Christianity, for instance, in the world of Dante’s Inferno. However, he continued: Even the image of the church remains simply an image which explains nothing about the pure structure of the novel. The artistic task executed in the novel is independent from this secondary ideological deflection [prelomlenie] by which it may have been accompanied in Dostoyevsky’s conscience. The concrete artistic links among the different levels of the novel, their combination into the unity of the work, must be explained and shown through the material of the novel itself.” (Problemy 35) Dostoyevsky’s novels present many examples to illustrate the presence of multiple autonomous voices. Stanford’s Student Journal of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Volume 1, Spring 2005 3 Petkova / Mikhail Bakhtin In the first chapter of Crime and Punishment, amid his silent contemplations, the main character Raskolnikov enters a pub where a drunken man named Marmeladov approaches him and begins to tell his life story. As Marmeladov gives his drawn out monologue, the reader completely forgets about Raskolnikov. He confronts a narrative just as intense and detailed as Raskolnikov’s thoughts. Marmeladov’s speech, in its lengthy, detailed description of characters and events in his personal life, becomes the major narrative. Raskolnikov himself, dur- ing the time of the tirade, is excluded from the narrative. He has no connection to Katerina Ivanovna, Marmeladov’s wife, or to Sonya and their dramatic relationship. Marmeladov does not tell his story in order to hear Raskolnikov’s opinion and advice. From the beginning until the end it seems that he is telling the story to himself. This leads Bakhtin to the following conclusion: Dostoyevsky’s novel does not combine “a multiplicity of characters and destinies in the unified objective world of the author’s mind…but a multiplicity of equal minds, each in their private world, all combined without being coherent, in the unity of a given event.” (Problemy 7) An important assertion about the polyphonic novel is that the interrelations of the layers of diverse social language types are dialogic. The concept of “the dialogic imagination” was inspired by the role of dialogue in Dostoyevsky. The understanding of what Bakhtin means as “the dialogic imagination” in his later work is close- ly tied to his study of Dostoyevsky, in which Bakhtin opposes the “monologic” novel to the “dialogic” novel. The dialogic form reveals language in its “natural,” as opposed to its linguistic state. That means that in each character’s speech different social styles are fused as opposed to an all-pervading unitary style dictated by the author. “Dostoyevsky’s novel is dialogic,” he claims (Problemy 25). The dialogic form allows two characters to remain independent of each other, just as, in the example above, Raskolnikov is excluded from Marmeladov’s world. Discourse (slovo, a character’s speech) in Dostoyevsky’s work is dialogical. A character’s discourse always stands in a dialogic relationship to another’s discourse. For example, Bakhtin describes the character from Notes from the Underground as someone who constantly examines himself through other people’s eyes, and who also invents their words in his mind. Bakhtin argues: The man from the underground more than anything else thinks about what others think and could think of him, he strives to envisage each stranger’s conscience, each stranger’s thought about him… he tries to predict any possible evaluation given to him by others, guess the meaning and tone of this evaluation and to meticulously formulate these possible stranger’s words about him, incorporating in his own speech the imaginary phrases of the stranger. (Problemy 49) What we have then are not simply internal conversations with other people but the active adoption of their vocab- ularies.

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