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The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
These essays reveal Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975)--known in the West largely through his studies of Rabelais and Dostoevsky--as a philosopher of language, a cultural historian, and a major theoretician of the novel. The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.
Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.
Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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About the author
Mikhail Bakhtin
100books302followersVery influential writings of Russian linguist and literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in 20th-century poststructuralism and the social theory of the novel included
Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works
(1929, see Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky) and
The Dialogic Imagination
(1975).
This philosopher, semiotician, and scholar on ethics and the philosophy of language. He on a variety of subjects inspired scholars in a number of different traditions of Marxism, semiotics, and religionand in disciplines as diverse as history, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. Although Bakhtin acted in the debates on aesthetics that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, scholars rediscovered his not well known distinctive position in the 1960s.
This philosopher, semiotician, and scholar on ethics and the philosophy of language. He on a variety of subjects inspired scholars in a number of different traditions of Marxism, semiotics, and religionand in disciplines as diverse as history, philosophy, anthropology, and psychology. Although Bakhtin acted in the debates on aesthetics that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, scholars rediscovered his not well known distinctive position in the 1960s.
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May 20, 2017Bakhtin is our Aristotle of the novel. While Aristotle’s Poetics provides us with a theory of tragic drama (his legendary work on comedy is at best a lost work) Bakhtin provides us with a fundamental theory of the novel. All discussions of what a novel is, how it works, how it arranges its materials and creates its effects must begin with Bakhtin. If we can be banal--and I will only be banal in this Review; anything more would require a work of exposition beyond my means today--a novel is not merely “a work of prose of a certain length� or an assemblage of plot and character. Rather, a novel is an orchestration of heteroglossia, a dialogization of linguistic multiplicity, of cultures, worldviews and ideologies; a system of double-voiced images of languages. The novel is a genre which arises when languages become not only in-themselves--which monolinguistic situation produces epics and lyric poetry--but also for-themselves, having encountered other languages and received their own meaning reflected back to them from an alien discourse.
The Dialogic Imagination is a collection of four essays on the novel and its origin, arranged from more accessible to much more dense. The first essay, “Epic and Novel,� teases out the characteristics of the novel which distinguish it from the epic and from other genres of literature. The epic is a representation of events temporally far removed from its author and its audience; its characters are fully formed and fully self-present, experiencing no becoming and no interior psychology. The novel overlaps with its audience and its author, and its represented content is openended, unfinished.
The second essay, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourses,� traces the novel back to its pre-novelistic roots in such genres as the “Greek novel,� parodies and travesties, the Saturnalian tradition, Plato’s dialogues, mimes, satyrs, the literature of erudition, folk culture and carnival, and other similar genres which arose out of an experience of polyglossia and which created images of languages about which one could speak. One spoke also about a language (its image) and not merely about some object by means of a directly meaningful, “sincere� language. “Thus did the interanimation of languages occur in the very epoch that saw the creation of the European novel. Laughter and polyglossia had paved the way for the novelistic discourse of modern times� [p??].
The third and fourth essays, which take up the bulk of the volume, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel� and “Discourse in the Novel,� develop Bakhtin’s most profound theoretical concepts for thinking about the novel as a genre. Nor will I be of much help with explicating them today, other than to point out their direction. “Chronotope� is Bakhtin’s word for the organization of time and space. Exemplative here is Bakhtin’s analysis of Apuleius� The Golden Ass as a road novel. The final essay explicates the novel in terms of the dialogization of heteroglossia, which effectively describes the novel as an orchestration of a multiplicity of languages, a system of double-voicedness, in which the author’s language is never directly intended towards a non-linguistic object, but is always refracted through and towards images of languages. The language of a novel is always a dialogue between languages, whether that dialogue is an attempt itself to be monoglottic but speaking polemically against the background of a language outside the novel, or as is the case with the greatest examplars of the novel, contains within itself a dialogue of languages, a dialogue which is never resolved unequivocally.
Inadequate as my review is today, please, for those interested in questions of theory--what? why? how?--Bakhtin is indispensable. My mind works not so well in a monolinguistic genre, such as this review appears to be--but, proasaic as it is, polemically dialogizes against lesser theories of the novel, necessarily--perhaps the dialogue which can take place below in the comments will be more enlightening than these few indicators.
________
Bakhtin makes little to no reference to 20th century novels. Nevertheless, these associations occurred to me:
Finnegans Wake:
Regarding things that look like novels:
In regard to DFW’s “Westward� having been written in the margins of Barth’s “Funhouse�:
Characteristic of Joyce’s Ulysses:
Our final thought, that if we subscribe to Bakhtin’s characterization of the novel as an orchestration of dialogized heterglossia, then we must concede that the greatest novel of all time, the greatest achievement of this orchestration, is Finnegans Wake.
___________
One more stray:
From "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," section VI, "The Functions of the Rogue, Clown and Fool in the Novel," page 160-161:
The Dialogic Imagination is a collection of four essays on the novel and its origin, arranged from more accessible to much more dense. The first essay, “Epic and Novel,� teases out the characteristics of the novel which distinguish it from the epic and from other genres of literature. The epic is a representation of events temporally far removed from its author and its audience; its characters are fully formed and fully self-present, experiencing no becoming and no interior psychology. The novel overlaps with its audience and its author, and its represented content is openended, unfinished.
The second essay, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourses,� traces the novel back to its pre-novelistic roots in such genres as the “Greek novel,� parodies and travesties, the Saturnalian tradition, Plato’s dialogues, mimes, satyrs, the literature of erudition, folk culture and carnival, and other similar genres which arose out of an experience of polyglossia and which created images of languages about which one could speak. One spoke also about a language (its image) and not merely about some object by means of a directly meaningful, “sincere� language. “Thus did the interanimation of languages occur in the very epoch that saw the creation of the European novel. Laughter and polyglossia had paved the way for the novelistic discourse of modern times� [p??].
The third and fourth essays, which take up the bulk of the volume, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel� and “Discourse in the Novel,� develop Bakhtin’s most profound theoretical concepts for thinking about the novel as a genre. Nor will I be of much help with explicating them today, other than to point out their direction. “Chronotope� is Bakhtin’s word for the organization of time and space. Exemplative here is Bakhtin’s analysis of Apuleius� The Golden Ass as a road novel. The final essay explicates the novel in terms of the dialogization of heteroglossia, which effectively describes the novel as an orchestration of a multiplicity of languages, a system of double-voicedness, in which the author’s language is never directly intended towards a non-linguistic object, but is always refracted through and towards images of languages. The language of a novel is always a dialogue between languages, whether that dialogue is an attempt itself to be monoglottic but speaking polemically against the background of a language outside the novel, or as is the case with the greatest examplars of the novel, contains within itself a dialogue of languages, a dialogue which is never resolved unequivocally.
Inadequate as my review is today, please, for those interested in questions of theory--what? why? how?--Bakhtin is indispensable. My mind works not so well in a monolinguistic genre, such as this review appears to be--but, proasaic as it is, polemically dialogizes against lesser theories of the novel, necessarily--perhaps the dialogue which can take place below in the comments will be more enlightening than these few indicators.
________
Bakhtin makes little to no reference to 20th century novels. Nevertheless, these associations occurred to me:
Finnegans Wake:
Therefore the internal dialogism of double-voiced prose discourse can never be exhausted thematically (just as the metaphoric energy of language can never be exhausted thematically); it can never be developed into the motivation or subject for a manifest dialogue, such as might fully embody, with no residue, the internally dialogic potential embedded in linguistic heteroglossia. The internal dialogism of authentic prose discourse, which grows organically out of a stratified and heteroglot language, cannot fundamentally be dramatized or dramatically resolved (brought to an authentic end); it cannot ultimately be fitted into the frame of any manifest dialogue, into the frame of a mere conversation between persons; it is not ultimately divisible into verbal exchanges possessing precisely marked boundaries. This double-voicedness in prose is prefigured in language itself (in authentic metaphors, as well as in myth), in language as a social phenomenon that is becoming in history, socially stratified and weathered in this process of becoming [326].
Regarding things that look like novels:
If the novelist loses touch with this linguistic ground of prose style, if he is unable to attain the heights of a relativized, Galilean linguistic consciousness, if he is deaf to organic double-voicedness and to the internal dialogization of living and evolving discourse, then he will never comprehend, or even realize, the actual possibilities and tasks of the novel as a genre. He may, of course, crete an artistic work that compositionally and thematically will be similar to a novel, will be “made� exactly as a novel is made, but he will not thereby have created a novel. The style will always give him away. We will recognize the naively self-confident or obtusely stubborn unity of a smooth, pure single-voiced language (perhaps accompanied by a primitive, artificial, worked-up double-voicedness). We quickly sense that such an author finds it easy to purge his work of speech diversity: he simply does not listen to the fundamental heteroglossia inherent in actual language; he mistakes social overtones, which create the timbres of words, for irritating noises that it is his task to eliminate. The novel, when torn out of authentic linguistic speech diversity, emerges in most cases as a “closet drama,� with detailed, fully developed and “artistically worked out� stage directions (it is, of course, bad drama). In such a novel, divested of its language diversity, authorial language inevitably ends up in the awkward and absurd position of the language of stage directions in plays [327].
In regard to DFW’s “Westward� having been written in the margins of Barth’s “Funhouse�:
This process. . .becomes especially important in those cases where a struggle against such images has already begun, where someone is striving to liberate himself from the influence of such an image and its discourse by means of objectification, or is striving to expose the limitations of both image and discourse. The importance of struggling with another’s discourse, its influence in the history of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous. One’s own discourse and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse [348].
Characteristic of Joyce’s Ulysses:
Every authentic stylization. . .is an artistic representation of another’s linguistic style, an artistic image of another’s language. Two individualized linguistic consciousnesses must be present in it: the one that represents (that is, the linguistic consciousness of the stylizer) and the one that is represented, which is stylized. Stylization differs from style proper precisely by virtue of its requiring a specific linguistic consciousness (the contemporaneity of the stylizer and his audience), under whose influence a style becomes a stylization, against whose background it acquires new meaning and significance. [362].
Our final thought, that if we subscribe to Bakhtin’s characterization of the novel as an orchestration of dialogized heterglossia, then we must concede that the greatest novel of all time, the greatest achievement of this orchestration, is Finnegans Wake.
___________
One more stray:
From "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," section VI, "The Functions of the Rogue, Clown and Fool in the Novel," page 160-161:
Indeed, compared with epic, drama and lyric, the position of the author of a novel vis-à-vis the life portrayed in the work is in general highly complex and problematical. The general problem of personal authorship (a particular problem that has arisen only recently, since "autographed" literature is a mere drop in an ocean of anonymous folk literature) is here complicated by the need to have some substantive, "uninvented" mask that would have the capacity both to fix the position of the author vis-à-vis the life he portrays (how and from what angle he, a participant in the novel, can see and expose all this private life) and to fix the author's position vis-à-vis his readers, his public (for whom he is the vehicle for an "exposé" of life--as a judge, an investigator, a "chief of protocol," a politician, a preacher, a fool, etc.). Of course such questions as these exist whenever personal authorship is an issue, and they can never be resolved by assigning the author to the category of "professional man of letters." By contrast with other literary genres (the epic, the lyric, the drama), however, questions of personal authorship in the novel are posed on a philosophical, cultural or sociopolitical plane. In other genres (the drama, the lyric and their variants) the most contiguous possible position of the author, the point of view necessary to the shaping of the material, is dictated by the genre itself: such a maximal proximity of the creator's position to the material is immanent in the very genre. Within the genre of the novel, there is no such immanent position for the author. You may publish your own real-life diary and call it a novel; under the same label you may publish a packet of business documents, personal letters (a novel in letters), a manuscript by "nobody-knows-who, written for nobody-knows who and who-found-it-and-where nobody knows." For the novel the issue of authorship is not therefore just one issue among others, as it is for the other genres: it is a formal and generic concern as well. We have already touched upon this question in connection with forms for spying and eavesdropping on private life.
The novelist stands in need of some essential formal and generic mask that could serve to define the position from which he views life, as well as the position from which he makes that life public.
And it is precisely here, of course, that the masks of the clown and the fool (transformed in various ways) come to the aid of the novelist.
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October 17, 2014Where to start? More or less everything I was taught about literary theory at my polite little liberal arts college derived from Bakhtin in some meaningful way, even if it was a riposte to his ideas. Heteroglossia, the role of the picaresque, intertextuality, the evolution of the novel as bourgeois object... it's not hard to see why these were revolutionary ideas in the interwar period, and not hard to see why they were taken up so enthusiastically since. An important read for anyone who thinks about how and why they read, and how and why they read what they read.
June 17, 2020
It is a shame that Anglo-American philosophy largely overlooks Bakhtin's work and instead exclusively hypes up Wittgenstein. Bakhtin's essays were published a decade before Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, include most of Wittgenstein's key insights, and articulate these insights in a deeper, more thorough way than Wittgenstein did. Not only are Bakhtin's essays so deep and innovative, but they are very well written and enjoyable to read. I wish I had encountered this work earlier in my studies.
There are many major ideas to be found throughout the four essays, and I will only summarize a few of them. First is Bakhtin's concept of polyglossia. This refers to the state of affairs in which different languages stand a certain relation to one another; each language can evaluate the other language, and also see itself 'in the eyes of' the other. Bakhtin, a language refers not to the syntax and semantics of a given conventional language, but rather it refers to the entire way of life of a given people or social group. A language includes the distinctive ways people, of a given group, attend to objects and events in the world; a language involves the particular features and meanings of objects that show up to the people of that group. When a language evaluates another language, the overall attentional style or way of life of a given group supplies standards or norms for the evaluation of another way of life.
For example, if I use my philosophical English (i.e., the way of life that students of analytical philosophy in the U.S. have) to evaluate the language of students who live in literature departments, when I encounter their fancy phrase of the 'decentralization of the subject' (Bakhtin does not talk about this at all, it's just something I've encountered in my life) I bring my analytical philosophy background into understanding the meaning of this; I might judge that it is an oversimplistic reaction to a scarecrow of Enlightenment rationality. If I have sufficient familiarity with the literature student way of life, I might use their language to evaluate my own philosophical English. I might see that analytical philosophical thinking takes its historically-contingent premises too seriously, and relies too heavily on logical principles to draw conclusions from these presumptions. As a more personal example, we each have a plurality of 'selves', ways of being that were developed in certain contexts and that are activated in those contexts. We're different people when we're with our professors v. with our lovers. Or, we're different people when we are in a bought of depression v. serenity. We can draw on the 'language' of each self to evaluate that of another self. My serene self can have certain insights about my depressed self, and vice-versa.
From my understanding, Bakhtin is influenced by Hegel's master-slave dialectic or account of recognition. According to Hegel, the possibility of our being self-conscious (understanding that we are responsible for our own self-conceptions; having an explicit concept about who we are at all) depends on being recognized by another person, whom we recognize ourselves. Simplistically put, we first see ourselves through the eyes of another; then we draw on that experience in order to be able to see ourselves at all. Bakhtin seems to draw on this concept and bring it to the level of languages, rather than concrete individuals.
Bakhtin shows how this implies that the meaning of any word depends on the language, way of life, or social group, from whose perspective this word is uttered. A single word or phrase might be used in multiple different languages; if the speaker is acquainted with these different languages, the word might have competing meanings, and the particular meaning that ultimately shows up for the speaker will result from either emphasized salience of one meaning over another (perhaps due to the speaker's immediate interests or other contextual features), or will from the combination or interaction between meanings. Bakhtin argues that people of a given social group have their particular needs, interests, and practices, and these determine which aspects of objects and events are important to attend to; these attentional styles select the semantic meanings certain words take on. This theory is essentially Wittgenstein's theory of language games. Wittgenstein argued that meaning comes from use, and the ways we use linguistic expressions depends on our practical interests and ways of life. All of this is the focus of the fourth essay "Discourse in the Novel".
Bakhtin argues for an interesting point that Wittgenstein never even skirted near. All language use is fundamentally dialogic; it always implies the presence of a listener. The listener's subjectivity partially determines the meaning of a linguistic utterance. It might intuitively seem that the speaker plus social conventions determine this meaning; the speaker chooses what she wants to say, and the meanings of her words are given by her language and overall social context. Bahktin argues this picture is incomplete. There is either an implicit or literal listener, and the listener's interests, conceptual background, and so on is necessarily taken into account by the speaker. What the speaker can possibly say is regulated by the listener's attentional quality and expectations. Bahktin does not examine in detail how this works out when we use language by ourselves (e.g., think silently, write in solitude, talk to ourselves).
It's implicit that dialogue with concrete others is the phylogenetic predecessor of individual speech; it'd be fascinating to investigate further whether this means that when we talk to ourselves, we necessarily have two separate 'selves', one doing the speaking, and the other doing the hearing, even if we feel that we are one person, and obviously have only one body. Kant and William James have influential work on that there are always two senses of subjectivity; there is the self that is the grounds of the possibilities of experience, and there is the self that is conceptualized or experienced, conditioned by those grounds. Perhaps this dualism of the self might be appealed to, in making sense of Bakhtin's claims.
Bakhtin primarily uses this concept of polyglossia to examine the literary genre of the novel (this is the focus of the first essay "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse"). He contrasts novelistic language with poetic language. The former fundamentally involves polyglossia; the author masterfully conjures many different languages (i.e., characters from different walks of life) and lets them evaluate one another and yielding an artistic unity or whole in the end. In contrast, poetic language is fundamentally monoglossic; even if other languages or ways of life are referred to by the speaker of a poem, they are appealed to in such a way that the speaker does not enter the perspective of that other language whatsoever, and rather treat that other language solely as an object.
Bakhtin also gives an interesting historical analysis on the origins of the novel (this is the focus of the second essay, "The Epic and Novel"). He argues that the novel was made possible by early satirical or comedic artistic works. The clown or vagabond is an outcast in society, an object of ridicule. This lets the clown or vagabond to be freed from the constraints of the social norms of her society's language. In this freedom, she can evaluate the society's language from a perspective independent of that language. She does this by representing the society's way of life in ways that satirize it, or show it as absurd. According to Bakhtin, this practice is the predecessor of aesthetic, literary representations of languages and ways of life. Making fun of something, and laughing at it, provides our first glimpse into the possibility of fundamentally distancing ourselves from that thing, of taking up a perspective that is independent of the initial perspective from which that thing showed up.
Bakhtin argues that different literary genres over human history have evolved in their fundamental configurations of space and time; this is presented in the third essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel". Space and time, in this context, refer to the structure of how characters' lives unfold; the structures limit the possibilities of the depictions of this unfolding. So a particular form of space and time is coupled with a particular form of how a character can be portrayed. In early epics and mythologies, space and time were such that fate was absolute. Characters cannot undergo any psychological change. Their actions follow the path set by fate, and they do not learn or grow from their actions. Characters are always personae or archetypes, rather than individual humans. Their actions are always types of action, rather than particular actions with all the idiosyncrasies that follow from occurring under concrete circumstances.
In contrast, contemporary novels involve a space and time that is contingent. Characters are concrete individuals. They make decisions, independently of fate, and learn or suffer from the consequences of these decisions. The details of their actions, and of the space and time that are presented, are determined relatively to the character's embodied standpoints. Hours and days of a character's life can be linearly traced in a contemporary novel; this is not the case in ancient epics. Bahktin gives a fascinating analysis of Rabelais as the first contemporary novelist. Bahktin argues that Rabelais could possibly write in the way he did because he was exposed to multiple different languages or ways of life, and he approached writing with irreverence and humor.
Overall, I'd highly recommend these essays to anyone who cares about late-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language; or Heidegger's curious remarks that language is the 'house of being'. I wish Bakhtin was as well known as these guys; his ideas are contemporary to theirs and just as deep. Moreover, Bakhtin examines language in its concrete material circumstances, and appeals to particular social and politic changes that drive the development of language and literature; this is a materialistic approach that I think is very important and many philosophers lack.
There are many major ideas to be found throughout the four essays, and I will only summarize a few of them. First is Bakhtin's concept of polyglossia. This refers to the state of affairs in which different languages stand a certain relation to one another; each language can evaluate the other language, and also see itself 'in the eyes of' the other. Bakhtin, a language refers not to the syntax and semantics of a given conventional language, but rather it refers to the entire way of life of a given people or social group. A language includes the distinctive ways people, of a given group, attend to objects and events in the world; a language involves the particular features and meanings of objects that show up to the people of that group. When a language evaluates another language, the overall attentional style or way of life of a given group supplies standards or norms for the evaluation of another way of life.
For example, if I use my philosophical English (i.e., the way of life that students of analytical philosophy in the U.S. have) to evaluate the language of students who live in literature departments, when I encounter their fancy phrase of the 'decentralization of the subject' (Bakhtin does not talk about this at all, it's just something I've encountered in my life) I bring my analytical philosophy background into understanding the meaning of this; I might judge that it is an oversimplistic reaction to a scarecrow of Enlightenment rationality. If I have sufficient familiarity with the literature student way of life, I might use their language to evaluate my own philosophical English. I might see that analytical philosophical thinking takes its historically-contingent premises too seriously, and relies too heavily on logical principles to draw conclusions from these presumptions. As a more personal example, we each have a plurality of 'selves', ways of being that were developed in certain contexts and that are activated in those contexts. We're different people when we're with our professors v. with our lovers. Or, we're different people when we are in a bought of depression v. serenity. We can draw on the 'language' of each self to evaluate that of another self. My serene self can have certain insights about my depressed self, and vice-versa.
From my understanding, Bakhtin is influenced by Hegel's master-slave dialectic or account of recognition. According to Hegel, the possibility of our being self-conscious (understanding that we are responsible for our own self-conceptions; having an explicit concept about who we are at all) depends on being recognized by another person, whom we recognize ourselves. Simplistically put, we first see ourselves through the eyes of another; then we draw on that experience in order to be able to see ourselves at all. Bakhtin seems to draw on this concept and bring it to the level of languages, rather than concrete individuals.
Bakhtin shows how this implies that the meaning of any word depends on the language, way of life, or social group, from whose perspective this word is uttered. A single word or phrase might be used in multiple different languages; if the speaker is acquainted with these different languages, the word might have competing meanings, and the particular meaning that ultimately shows up for the speaker will result from either emphasized salience of one meaning over another (perhaps due to the speaker's immediate interests or other contextual features), or will from the combination or interaction between meanings. Bakhtin argues that people of a given social group have their particular needs, interests, and practices, and these determine which aspects of objects and events are important to attend to; these attentional styles select the semantic meanings certain words take on. This theory is essentially Wittgenstein's theory of language games. Wittgenstein argued that meaning comes from use, and the ways we use linguistic expressions depends on our practical interests and ways of life. All of this is the focus of the fourth essay "Discourse in the Novel".
Bakhtin argues for an interesting point that Wittgenstein never even skirted near. All language use is fundamentally dialogic; it always implies the presence of a listener. The listener's subjectivity partially determines the meaning of a linguistic utterance. It might intuitively seem that the speaker plus social conventions determine this meaning; the speaker chooses what she wants to say, and the meanings of her words are given by her language and overall social context. Bahktin argues this picture is incomplete. There is either an implicit or literal listener, and the listener's interests, conceptual background, and so on is necessarily taken into account by the speaker. What the speaker can possibly say is regulated by the listener's attentional quality and expectations. Bahktin does not examine in detail how this works out when we use language by ourselves (e.g., think silently, write in solitude, talk to ourselves).
It's implicit that dialogue with concrete others is the phylogenetic predecessor of individual speech; it'd be fascinating to investigate further whether this means that when we talk to ourselves, we necessarily have two separate 'selves', one doing the speaking, and the other doing the hearing, even if we feel that we are one person, and obviously have only one body. Kant and William James have influential work on that there are always two senses of subjectivity; there is the self that is the grounds of the possibilities of experience, and there is the self that is conceptualized or experienced, conditioned by those grounds. Perhaps this dualism of the self might be appealed to, in making sense of Bakhtin's claims.
Bakhtin primarily uses this concept of polyglossia to examine the literary genre of the novel (this is the focus of the first essay "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse"). He contrasts novelistic language with poetic language. The former fundamentally involves polyglossia; the author masterfully conjures many different languages (i.e., characters from different walks of life) and lets them evaluate one another and yielding an artistic unity or whole in the end. In contrast, poetic language is fundamentally monoglossic; even if other languages or ways of life are referred to by the speaker of a poem, they are appealed to in such a way that the speaker does not enter the perspective of that other language whatsoever, and rather treat that other language solely as an object.
Bakhtin also gives an interesting historical analysis on the origins of the novel (this is the focus of the second essay, "The Epic and Novel"). He argues that the novel was made possible by early satirical or comedic artistic works. The clown or vagabond is an outcast in society, an object of ridicule. This lets the clown or vagabond to be freed from the constraints of the social norms of her society's language. In this freedom, she can evaluate the society's language from a perspective independent of that language. She does this by representing the society's way of life in ways that satirize it, or show it as absurd. According to Bakhtin, this practice is the predecessor of aesthetic, literary representations of languages and ways of life. Making fun of something, and laughing at it, provides our first glimpse into the possibility of fundamentally distancing ourselves from that thing, of taking up a perspective that is independent of the initial perspective from which that thing showed up.
Bakhtin argues that different literary genres over human history have evolved in their fundamental configurations of space and time; this is presented in the third essay "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel". Space and time, in this context, refer to the structure of how characters' lives unfold; the structures limit the possibilities of the depictions of this unfolding. So a particular form of space and time is coupled with a particular form of how a character can be portrayed. In early epics and mythologies, space and time were such that fate was absolute. Characters cannot undergo any psychological change. Their actions follow the path set by fate, and they do not learn or grow from their actions. Characters are always personae or archetypes, rather than individual humans. Their actions are always types of action, rather than particular actions with all the idiosyncrasies that follow from occurring under concrete circumstances.
In contrast, contemporary novels involve a space and time that is contingent. Characters are concrete individuals. They make decisions, independently of fate, and learn or suffer from the consequences of these decisions. The details of their actions, and of the space and time that are presented, are determined relatively to the character's embodied standpoints. Hours and days of a character's life can be linearly traced in a contemporary novel; this is not the case in ancient epics. Bahktin gives a fascinating analysis of Rabelais as the first contemporary novelist. Bahktin argues that Rabelais could possibly write in the way he did because he was exposed to multiple different languages or ways of life, and he approached writing with irreverence and humor.
Overall, I'd highly recommend these essays to anyone who cares about late-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language; or Heidegger's curious remarks that language is the 'house of being'. I wish Bakhtin was as well known as these guys; his ideas are contemporary to theirs and just as deep. Moreover, Bakhtin examines language in its concrete material circumstances, and appeals to particular social and politic changes that drive the development of language and literature; this is a materialistic approach that I think is very important and many philosophers lack.
November 7, 2016
The Introduction and the Four Essays proper are arranged in order of understandability, from clearest to most arcane. I got halfway through Essay Three before having to admit to myself I was kinda lost, and even now I would not be 100% able to tell a Chronotope from a watermelon if you put them on a table in front of me, or to diagnose whether your cat is suffering from heteroglossia, but I can tell you the Essays are some seminal shit.
Or, to put it differently:
The novel : The Blob That Ate Everyone = Other genres : It Came From Beneath the Sink!'s monster*.
(*when you start treating them as if they were ridiculous, they wither and squeal and die)
Or, to put it differently:
The novel : The Blob That Ate Everyone = Other genres : It Came From Beneath the Sink!'s monster*.
(*when you start treating them as if they were ridiculous, they wither and squeal and die)
February 2, 2022
"The language of the poet is his language, he is utterly immersed in it, inseparable from it, he makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to his own intention."
July 9, 2020
just badass. four essays, all full of stellar insights. this particular edition has a handy glossary of bakhtin-oriented terms--he's got to have one of the best solecist set of terms ever.
November 30, 2007
One of the things I remember most about this book is the day in class when someone mentioned that purple was the color favored by...schizoprenics? I don't remember exactly. And we all looked down at our texts, which were driving US insane, and then realized the professor was wearing a purple shirt too.
Bahktin is quoted so much that you really HAVE to read him. And then know his basic theories pretty well. And then speak knowingly, or at least nod your head thoughtfully.
That said, I think my thesis runs amuck with various theorists who are heavily Bahktin-influenced.
Bahktin is quoted so much that you really HAVE to read him. And then know his basic theories pretty well. And then speak knowingly, or at least nod your head thoughtfully.
That said, I think my thesis runs amuck with various theorists who are heavily Bahktin-influenced.
July 23, 2022
بیش� ارسطو دوبار ظهور کرده است: یکبا� قبل از مارکس، همو که بوطیقا یا فن شاعری را نوشت، و بار دیگر، بعد از مارکس؛ همو که بوطیقای رمان، این حماسه دنیای بورژوآزی را نگاشت: میخاییل باختین!
September 25, 2015
One of the best theoretical works on novel, language, and narrative. I read this at the same time I was reading a few Russian classics, and I think reading them simultaneously helped me understand both this work and the novels I was reading (and will read). I will probably sift through this at least once more to wrap my head around it better and dig deeper.
June 17, 2022
Yes, it’s super influential and groundbreaking (and also an excellent application of Saussure in a strictly literary context). But there was, and I cannot emphasize this enough, NO REASON for this to be almost 500 pages long. Academic writing isn’t good, but it’s definitely improved since Bakhtin was kicking.
Read
November 11, 2010EPIC AND NOVEL
Primary distinction being that between epic and tragicomic. The epic exists in dissociated and completed historical past (even its prophecies are necessarily completed or general; whereas novels can only predict). It peers exaltingly upward at its subject.
The novel, here defined in such a way that it existed in comic form from ancient times (a "comic Odysseus" is attributed to Homer himself), stands above the subject. Humor is possible only when the subject can be seen from multiple facets, in its mundane moments, and from the inside out. The novel is present; we laugh because we feel we have a grasp of it.
--
FROM THE PREHISTORY OF NOVELISTIC DISCOURSE
Monoglossic authorship takes itself as the only and the ultimate/true authority on its subject (cf. scripture as the Word of God). The development of heteroglossia and polyglossia began as early as medieval events with parodia sacra, when Latin grammar was turned inward on itself to be punned, lewd, bawdy. When multiple languages (or diglossic splits of a single language) appear in a text, irony emerges and from that irony is dialogue.
The novel is not a genre among other genres. Other forms of written art are completed genres, disclosed and circumscribed. The novel is always in tension with itself, revising old/learned forms of speech and putting them in dialogue with present-day speech. Its formal linguistic boundaries are unfixed.
--
FORMS OF TIME AND OF THE CHRONOTOPE IN THE NOVEL
I. The Greek Romance: adventure-time. Beginning and end pole (fall in love, consummate); the substance of the story lies in between as external conflict in the form of random contingency, chance simultaneity (meetings), and chance rupture (non-meetings, partings). None of these interruptions take place in biographical time, because the characters are altogether unchanged by the end, as if real life were put on pause for the adventure (Candide is an ironic exception; at the final consummation, so much time has passed that Cunegonde is an old hag). They exist in an abstract-alien world, exotic; what happens to them in one country could just as easily happen in any other. But the heroes are steadfast; they are strangers isolated and passing through a foreign world; their primary purpose is to pass through unchanged.
II. Apuleis (Satyricon) and Petronius (The Golden Ass): adventure novel of everyday life. Introduction of metamorphosis. Not yet biographical time, just exceptional moments of a life. Still outsider in private, personal existence subject to alien chance/fate, but initiated by some action. Golden Ass sequence: guilt > punishment > retribution > redemption > blessedness. Satyricon: guilt > redemption > blessedness. Everyday time comes out to support metamorphosis, not straight line but line with knots.
III. Ancient Biography and Autobiography. Platonic scheme: development of subject's ideas/virtues until a mature point of permanence. Rhetorical scheme: cf. encomium; event-based. But still no private individual emerging; in ancient times, no core or shell existed, only a fully public self. Two models for structuring biographies: Aristotelian energia (identity realized not by condition but by activity), and analytic (identity realized by type, by profession, etc). Three modifications that suggest but don't lead to privatization of individual: 1) satirico-ironic treatment of personal and private topics, 2) drawing-room rhetoric in familiar letters, in which "landscape" is born as a background/setting each man sees rather than interacts with as in pastoral idylls, and 3) consolationes as in Marcus Aurelius and Augustine, soliloquies with details only interesting to a self's addressing itself.
IV. The Problem of Historical Inversion and the Folkloric Chronotope. (?) Future-time was emptied out either with the concept of the past Golden Age or with eschatology. But fantastic folklore is realism because, at the expense of the empty/vague future, folkloric man manifests ideals now in time-space. Present time expressed as tensions of change?
V. The Chivalric Romance: epic adventure. Like adventure-time of the Greek type, but the "suddenly" is no longer a surprise; the hero seeks otherness and testing and the calamities of the mystical/mysterious world. Heroes become distinct from one another; while ancient epics were cycles of the same hero with different names, the chivalric romances are individual heroes going through different cycles. The hero comes to be part of an international (rather than national) common storehouse of images. Particularly acute in medieval times. Langland and Dante have at heart a feeling for their epoch's contradictions and nearing-end; they (especially Dante) realize the stretching-out of a historical world along a vertical axis, compressing the stagnant and isolated along the horizontal.
VI. The Functions of the Rogue, Clown and Fool in the Novel. The characteristic Shakespearean fool (and in medieval fabliaux, etc) who exists only in reflection/refraction of a character, who must be taken metaphorically. Emergence of allegory. Characters taking on deliberate masks, given the right to be other than they are.
VII. The Rabelaisian Chronotope. Dissolution of the medieval worldview which obfuscated real-earth time in favor of spiritual narratives (i.e. a universal Christian time of judgment). Direct proportionality of material world in its values, rather than virtue's representations diminishing vice's reps.
VIII. The Folkloric Bases for the Rabelaisian Chronotope...
IX. The Idyllic Chronotope in the Novel. Characterized by unity of space blurring time into cycles, basic realities of life only, and conjoining of human life with nature. Influence on modern novel: 1) provincial novels, 2) destruction of idyll by Bildungsroman, 3) Sentimental and Rousseauan novel, 4) family novel/novel of generations, 5) and other novels like those featuring "a man of the people."
X. Concluding Remarks (written later in 1973). "A literary work's artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope" (243). Chronotope of the road, the parlor, the salon, is how characters from different backgrounds converge, encounter; "this is where dialogues happen, something that acquires extraordinary importance in the novel, revealing the character, 'ideas' and 'passions' of the heroes" (246). Chronotope of the threshold is crisis/break: in Dostoevsky these are places/moments of "falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions" (248) and in Tolstoy they are biographically dragged-out stretches of time for the same.
Chronotopes have dialogic relationships to one another and exist for the author and the reader, but not within the fictional world itself (which is the concretization of time and space which gives meaning to narrative).
--
DISCOURSE ON THE NOVEL
Poetry is not heteroglossic because it's hermetic and each word is bonded entirely to its concrete, objective meaning (hence the significance of OED and etymologies to poets). "If, during an epoch of language crises, the language of poetry does change, poetry immediately canonizes the new language as one that is unitary and singular, as if no other language existed" (399). Poetry, as speech-song, depends on unity of voice.
One of his great premises for heteroglossia in novels is that language is at root historical and therefore ideological. The evolution of languages is the conflict of cultures and their ideologies. Novels are a ripe site for heteroglossia because of its dependence on characters, which are speaking people. Characters are ideologues and the "testing" of them--i.e. conflict of plot--is the dialogue of their linguistic ideologies, a process whereby we're "experimenting by turning persuasive discourse into speaking persons" (348). "The ideological becoming of a human being, in this view, is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others" (341). More than half on average of what we say is consciously the words of someone else, or referential thereto (how desperately concerned are we in everyday conversation with who said what, and on whose authority such and such?).
Two major distinctions: the authoritative discourse and the internally persuasive discourse (342). Think back to grade school when the distinctions were made: recite the words of books ("the Truth"), or rephrase them into your own words (which is frequently unacknowledged and insecure). The authoritative discourse can only be transmitted, never represented. Why this is undesirable and stagnant: "The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal even newer ways to mean" (346).
"The artistic image [consistency or system] of a language--such is the aim that novelistic hybridization sets for itself" (366).
But beware of poor or lazy writers who seem to achieve this double-voicedness, but who are simply using multiplicity already canonized by literary language, or are so inchoate in their own use of language that multiple languages are not orchestrated but mistakenly used for cheap effect (their already lost flavor).
Primary distinction being that between epic and tragicomic. The epic exists in dissociated and completed historical past (even its prophecies are necessarily completed or general; whereas novels can only predict). It peers exaltingly upward at its subject.
The novel, here defined in such a way that it existed in comic form from ancient times (a "comic Odysseus" is attributed to Homer himself), stands above the subject. Humor is possible only when the subject can be seen from multiple facets, in its mundane moments, and from the inside out. The novel is present; we laugh because we feel we have a grasp of it.
--
FROM THE PREHISTORY OF NOVELISTIC DISCOURSE
Monoglossic authorship takes itself as the only and the ultimate/true authority on its subject (cf. scripture as the Word of God). The development of heteroglossia and polyglossia began as early as medieval events with parodia sacra, when Latin grammar was turned inward on itself to be punned, lewd, bawdy. When multiple languages (or diglossic splits of a single language) appear in a text, irony emerges and from that irony is dialogue.
The novel is not a genre among other genres. Other forms of written art are completed genres, disclosed and circumscribed. The novel is always in tension with itself, revising old/learned forms of speech and putting them in dialogue with present-day speech. Its formal linguistic boundaries are unfixed.
--
FORMS OF TIME AND OF THE CHRONOTOPE IN THE NOVEL
I. The Greek Romance: adventure-time. Beginning and end pole (fall in love, consummate); the substance of the story lies in between as external conflict in the form of random contingency, chance simultaneity (meetings), and chance rupture (non-meetings, partings). None of these interruptions take place in biographical time, because the characters are altogether unchanged by the end, as if real life were put on pause for the adventure (Candide is an ironic exception; at the final consummation, so much time has passed that Cunegonde is an old hag). They exist in an abstract-alien world, exotic; what happens to them in one country could just as easily happen in any other. But the heroes are steadfast; they are strangers isolated and passing through a foreign world; their primary purpose is to pass through unchanged.
II. Apuleis (Satyricon) and Petronius (The Golden Ass): adventure novel of everyday life. Introduction of metamorphosis. Not yet biographical time, just exceptional moments of a life. Still outsider in private, personal existence subject to alien chance/fate, but initiated by some action. Golden Ass sequence: guilt > punishment > retribution > redemption > blessedness. Satyricon: guilt > redemption > blessedness. Everyday time comes out to support metamorphosis, not straight line but line with knots.
III. Ancient Biography and Autobiography. Platonic scheme: development of subject's ideas/virtues until a mature point of permanence. Rhetorical scheme: cf. encomium; event-based. But still no private individual emerging; in ancient times, no core or shell existed, only a fully public self. Two models for structuring biographies: Aristotelian energia (identity realized not by condition but by activity), and analytic (identity realized by type, by profession, etc). Three modifications that suggest but don't lead to privatization of individual: 1) satirico-ironic treatment of personal and private topics, 2) drawing-room rhetoric in familiar letters, in which "landscape" is born as a background/setting each man sees rather than interacts with as in pastoral idylls, and 3) consolationes as in Marcus Aurelius and Augustine, soliloquies with details only interesting to a self's addressing itself.
IV. The Problem of Historical Inversion and the Folkloric Chronotope. (?) Future-time was emptied out either with the concept of the past Golden Age or with eschatology. But fantastic folklore is realism because, at the expense of the empty/vague future, folkloric man manifests ideals now in time-space. Present time expressed as tensions of change?
V. The Chivalric Romance: epic adventure. Like adventure-time of the Greek type, but the "suddenly" is no longer a surprise; the hero seeks otherness and testing and the calamities of the mystical/mysterious world. Heroes become distinct from one another; while ancient epics were cycles of the same hero with different names, the chivalric romances are individual heroes going through different cycles. The hero comes to be part of an international (rather than national) common storehouse of images. Particularly acute in medieval times. Langland and Dante have at heart a feeling for their epoch's contradictions and nearing-end; they (especially Dante) realize the stretching-out of a historical world along a vertical axis, compressing the stagnant and isolated along the horizontal.
VI. The Functions of the Rogue, Clown and Fool in the Novel. The characteristic Shakespearean fool (and in medieval fabliaux, etc) who exists only in reflection/refraction of a character, who must be taken metaphorically. Emergence of allegory. Characters taking on deliberate masks, given the right to be other than they are.
VII. The Rabelaisian Chronotope. Dissolution of the medieval worldview which obfuscated real-earth time in favor of spiritual narratives (i.e. a universal Christian time of judgment). Direct proportionality of material world in its values, rather than virtue's representations diminishing vice's reps.
VIII. The Folkloric Bases for the Rabelaisian Chronotope...
IX. The Idyllic Chronotope in the Novel. Characterized by unity of space blurring time into cycles, basic realities of life only, and conjoining of human life with nature. Influence on modern novel: 1) provincial novels, 2) destruction of idyll by Bildungsroman, 3) Sentimental and Rousseauan novel, 4) family novel/novel of generations, 5) and other novels like those featuring "a man of the people."
X. Concluding Remarks (written later in 1973). "A literary work's artistic unity in relationship to an actual reality is defined by its chronotope" (243). Chronotope of the road, the parlor, the salon, is how characters from different backgrounds converge, encounter; "this is where dialogues happen, something that acquires extraordinary importance in the novel, revealing the character, 'ideas' and 'passions' of the heroes" (246). Chronotope of the threshold is crisis/break: in Dostoevsky these are places/moments of "falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, decisions" (248) and in Tolstoy they are biographically dragged-out stretches of time for the same.
Chronotopes have dialogic relationships to one another and exist for the author and the reader, but not within the fictional world itself (which is the concretization of time and space which gives meaning to narrative).
--
DISCOURSE ON THE NOVEL
Poetry is not heteroglossic because it's hermetic and each word is bonded entirely to its concrete, objective meaning (hence the significance of OED and etymologies to poets). "If, during an epoch of language crises, the language of poetry does change, poetry immediately canonizes the new language as one that is unitary and singular, as if no other language existed" (399). Poetry, as speech-song, depends on unity of voice.
One of his great premises for heteroglossia in novels is that language is at root historical and therefore ideological. The evolution of languages is the conflict of cultures and their ideologies. Novels are a ripe site for heteroglossia because of its dependence on characters, which are speaking people. Characters are ideologues and the "testing" of them--i.e. conflict of plot--is the dialogue of their linguistic ideologies, a process whereby we're "experimenting by turning persuasive discourse into speaking persons" (348). "The ideological becoming of a human being, in this view, is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others" (341). More than half on average of what we say is consciously the words of someone else, or referential thereto (how desperately concerned are we in everyday conversation with who said what, and on whose authority such and such?).
Two major distinctions: the authoritative discourse and the internally persuasive discourse (342). Think back to grade school when the distinctions were made: recite the words of books ("the Truth"), or rephrase them into your own words (which is frequently unacknowledged and insecure). The authoritative discourse can only be transmitted, never represented. Why this is undesirable and stagnant: "The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal even newer ways to mean" (346).
"The artistic image [consistency or system] of a language--such is the aim that novelistic hybridization sets for itself" (366).
But beware of poor or lazy writers who seem to achieve this double-voicedness, but who are simply using multiplicity already canonized by literary language, or are so inchoate in their own use of language that multiple languages are not orchestrated but mistakenly used for cheap effect (their already lost flavor).
December 11, 2021
Quines olles Bakhtin. Però que xulo! Fa que la teoria literària sembli interessant i tot.
May 7, 2018
%200 sure Bakhtin would be another Derrida if he were French instead of a Russian who was stuck in 1920s Soviet Union only to be discovered years, years later. Both my dudes so we cool.
March 15, 2013
Bakhtin & Carnival
One of the most enjoyable things I’ve read in the last few years is Mikhail Bakhtin writing about Carnival... and since Lent starts this week, the festival of Carne-vale - the farewell to meat - must be just now. I think we need to reclaim it. Not just for a week, but throughout the year!
In his book on Rabelais, Bakhtin examines the phenomenon of Carnival as a subversive alternative lifestyle to the hierarchical power structures of the Middle Ages. The formal “celebrations� and “rituals� of the Church and the State are pompously dolled up in regalia and are “serious� occasions where everyone parades po-faced and are seated according to “rank.� They are public displays of power so that everyone knows their place - and knows what will happen to them if they step out of their place.
The festive Carnival turns this pomposity on its head. During the week of Carnival, revelers are disguised by masks and costumes which ape and ridicule their “betters.� Forms of language and address are changed. The result is that no-one knows who the other is. Anyone can be approached, chatted up, verbally abused without repercussion. A riot of free expression. Of course this was disapproved of by the authorities - but they knew it had to be allowed - I guess to “let off steam� and avoid Peasant Revolt / revolution/ regime change.
This might suggest that Carnival, in the long-term, disempowered the common man, but Bakhtin, as a Marxist, does not take this line. He sees it as an event that keeps alive the idea that rank is not God-given and can actually be stood on its head. Further he sees the practices of Carnival in politico-spiritual terms.
In his novels “Gargantua� and “Pantagruel� Rabelais best embodies all the discourse and ethos of Carnival. Bakhtin calls it “grotesque realism.� The characters all have unbelievable huge arses and Gargantuan genitalia. They consume grub by the barrowload, swally booze by the bucketful and sleep for months on end. They are charmingly stupid, lazy and clumsy. But the point of this, observes Bakhtin, is that Carnival returns us to the body - a need that so many writers these days seem to argue is crucial for humanity at our Darwinian stage of cerebral development and an ideology which has led to the likes of Plato / Augustine / the Church at times to appear to despise the body and its functions. Rabelais, on the other hand, is literally full of shit. Waterfalls of it.
But this is not just crudity, profanity, swearing, etc for the sake of it says Bakhtin. This sort of humour, laughter in general, and particularly the belly-laugh are enemies of the State. Some nun pal of Rachel’s last week gave her a picture last week and said, “I bet you’ve never seen a picture of that before.� It was a drawing of Jesus laughing. The State Church has to keep Jesus serious - like the king - because, I guess if you start laughing then things can get out of control. The peoples� laughter does not sit well with power.
But there’s also a spiritual side (though Bakhtin wouldn’t describe it in those terms.) He says:
“The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes... Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect,but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of non-existence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.�
This sounds to me like revolution - and resurrection. Bakhtin calls Carnival “a banquet for all the world.�
I’ll try to append a scan of Bakhtin to this e-mail - it’s just 7 pages, but I think it’s fantastic.”Gargantua� is a very funny read too. It begins:
“Most distinguished boozers, and you, most dearly beloved pox-sufferers, it is to you, and no-one else, that my writings are dedicated. Writing should laugh, not weep, Since laughter is of man the very marrow.
LIVE IN JOY�
OK, chums, let’s Carnival!
One of the most enjoyable things I’ve read in the last few years is Mikhail Bakhtin writing about Carnival... and since Lent starts this week, the festival of Carne-vale - the farewell to meat - must be just now. I think we need to reclaim it. Not just for a week, but throughout the year!
In his book on Rabelais, Bakhtin examines the phenomenon of Carnival as a subversive alternative lifestyle to the hierarchical power structures of the Middle Ages. The formal “celebrations� and “rituals� of the Church and the State are pompously dolled up in regalia and are “serious� occasions where everyone parades po-faced and are seated according to “rank.� They are public displays of power so that everyone knows their place - and knows what will happen to them if they step out of their place.
The festive Carnival turns this pomposity on its head. During the week of Carnival, revelers are disguised by masks and costumes which ape and ridicule their “betters.� Forms of language and address are changed. The result is that no-one knows who the other is. Anyone can be approached, chatted up, verbally abused without repercussion. A riot of free expression. Of course this was disapproved of by the authorities - but they knew it had to be allowed - I guess to “let off steam� and avoid Peasant Revolt / revolution/ regime change.
This might suggest that Carnival, in the long-term, disempowered the common man, but Bakhtin, as a Marxist, does not take this line. He sees it as an event that keeps alive the idea that rank is not God-given and can actually be stood on its head. Further he sees the practices of Carnival in politico-spiritual terms.
In his novels “Gargantua� and “Pantagruel� Rabelais best embodies all the discourse and ethos of Carnival. Bakhtin calls it “grotesque realism.� The characters all have unbelievable huge arses and Gargantuan genitalia. They consume grub by the barrowload, swally booze by the bucketful and sleep for months on end. They are charmingly stupid, lazy and clumsy. But the point of this, observes Bakhtin, is that Carnival returns us to the body - a need that so many writers these days seem to argue is crucial for humanity at our Darwinian stage of cerebral development and an ideology which has led to the likes of Plato / Augustine / the Church at times to appear to despise the body and its functions. Rabelais, on the other hand, is literally full of shit. Waterfalls of it.
But this is not just crudity, profanity, swearing, etc for the sake of it says Bakhtin. This sort of humour, laughter in general, and particularly the belly-laugh are enemies of the State. Some nun pal of Rachel’s last week gave her a picture last week and said, “I bet you’ve never seen a picture of that before.� It was a drawing of Jesus laughing. The State Church has to keep Jesus serious - like the king - because, I guess if you start laughing then things can get out of control. The peoples� laughter does not sit well with power.
But there’s also a spiritual side (though Bakhtin wouldn’t describe it in those terms.) He says:
“The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes... Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect,but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of non-existence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.�
This sounds to me like revolution - and resurrection. Bakhtin calls Carnival “a banquet for all the world.�
I’ll try to append a scan of Bakhtin to this e-mail - it’s just 7 pages, but I think it’s fantastic.”Gargantua� is a very funny read too. It begins:
“Most distinguished boozers, and you, most dearly beloved pox-sufferers, it is to you, and no-one else, that my writings are dedicated. Writing should laugh, not weep, Since laughter is of man the very marrow.
LIVE IN JOY�
OK, chums, let’s Carnival!
August 19, 2017
Ever hear of the aeolipile? It was basically a steam engine invented in the first century in Greece which, if it had been adapted a bit, could have advanced human civilization a couple of thousand years. But, instead, it was only seen as a curiosity and its potential wasn't realized until Jimmy Watt came around seventeen centuries later. This book is a lot like that. It establishes a theory of the novel ("a genre of becoming") and a corresponding theory of language that are both way ahead of their time. My most recurring thought while reading this was that Bakhtin was a post-structuralist before there was even such a thing as structuralism, which, I think, is most in evidence with his concept of "heteroglossia" (which is kind of like the valence of contexts that surrounds the sign that allows it to signify) and the application of heteroglossia to the novel. Bakhtin's theory of the novel is also significant. Instead of positing the novel's material qualities, Bakhtin claims that the novel is a form that is never finished developing and functions through difference (again, post-structuralist) within societies and languages. Therefore, Bakhtin sites the novel's origins all the way back to Plato and the Socratic dialogues, which is radical and convincing. He seemed unwilling to go as far as Derrida eventually would and claim that language was manifestly unstable - even though his arguments imply this again and again - which means that he seems to vacillate on his own points at times, which is annoying. Yet, this is so good that if it had been translated sooner then we would never have heard of Derrida or De Man and the transition from Victorianism to Modernism to Postmodernism would have made a lot more sense. The third and fourth essays are way too long, the examples he uses are obscure and unhelpful, but his foresight is astounding and so this is a must-read for any academics working in contemporary lit.
July 19, 2008
I must admit, Bakhtin used to scare the heck out of me. His was the first hardcore work of theory that I read before starting my MA, and I felt like the stupidest person in the history of literature. But the more I've gone back to him and the more his work has seeped into my consciousness, the more I value what he had to say (and just to say carnIval the way it's supposed to be pronounced ... so snooty!)
But I can't help but share my favorite Bakhtin story, which serves only to show that I can take the piss out of geniuses just as well as the next person at the pub (and also helped me get over my fear of the great man). Apparently Bakhtin had an incredible chain-smoking habit. Couldn't continue without a cigarette in hand. And during the war rolling papers were incredibly hard to come by. Bakhtin was writing one of his dissertations at the time (I envision him sitting in a sod hut by the light of a kerosene lamp before an ancient typewriter, for some reason), and in desperation he tore the entire manuscript up and smoked it. THAT'S being a slave to your addiction!
But I can't help but share my favorite Bakhtin story, which serves only to show that I can take the piss out of geniuses just as well as the next person at the pub (and also helped me get over my fear of the great man). Apparently Bakhtin had an incredible chain-smoking habit. Couldn't continue without a cigarette in hand. And during the war rolling papers were incredibly hard to come by. Bakhtin was writing one of his dissertations at the time (I envision him sitting in a sod hut by the light of a kerosene lamp before an ancient typewriter, for some reason), and in desperation he tore the entire manuscript up and smoked it. THAT'S being a slave to your addiction!
February 16, 2013
I bought this book largely because Bakhtin has been an influential analyst of the novel as a literary form. I was particularly interested in his observations on polyglossia -- the various forms of expression used in dialog, including formal language as spoken, specialized technical and professional vocabularies, class argot and other variations on common speech, and speech genres, the ways in which these forms of expression are used. Bakhtin's observations help me better understand that authors such as George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard have characters use underworld slang and speech patterns to establish their essential character as members of particular socioeconomic groups.
July 24, 2023
Although Bakhtin foregrounds spurious definitions (eg the novel as a fluid genre that destabilizes others), he uses them in interesting literary histories.
September 14, 2022
Still a banger
Read
April 26, 2025(Reconstructing a read from 4 years back.) Only read start-to-finish the 150+ page essay 'Discourse in the Novel' included in this collection of four. It posits the novelist as orchestrator of multiplicitous voices, each voice implying the particular world-view of its speaker, which in turn reflects (or grows out of) the speaker's imaginative, dialogic (simultaneously going two-ways, as a line which an arrow on both ends) relation with those who are addressed to hear. Each utterance of voice is addressed to what one imagines is the others' worldview(s).
These worldviews take shape in the mind of the readers and shed light on one another, and that is the art: creating meaning through the possibilities of multiplicity. These voices, and the space of the breath between, become our own utterance - which cuts through pretension to possession of truth. Our voices evolve in triangulation of dialogue.
These worldviews take shape in the mind of the readers and shed light on one another, and that is the art: creating meaning through the possibilities of multiplicity. These voices, and the space of the breath between, become our own utterance - which cuts through pretension to possession of truth. Our voices evolve in triangulation of dialogue.
October 26, 2023
Such a complex and deep book on literature. I loved it, however it was slow and such a deep thinking book that it made my brain feel too busy.
October 20, 2012
This book consists of four essays of Bakhtin's "Middle Period", two short and two longer works which have been arranged, according to complexity, with the most accessible essay first and the most difficult last. Cooincidentally, this is also the reverse order in which they were written. None of these essays were avaiable in English before the present translation/compilation by Emerson and Holquist, and judging from its many reprintings (the 10th by 1996), quotations and misquotations, and various interpretations, it is the most influential of Bakhtin's works.
Some brief notes on the four Essays:
1. "Epic and Novel" dated 1941 - A rather straightforward comparison of the Novel and the Epic. Its aim is to show the distinctiveness of the Novel. This can be seen as a transitional essay between the Chronotope Essay and the Bildungsroman Fragment. It is well organized and introduces several characteristics unique to the novel such as three-dimensionality, imagery and openendedness.
2. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" dated 1940 - This is in essence a brief history of the novel according to Bakhtin. It concentrates on style, theory and as the title states, discourse, beginning with Greek works and going to the Renaissance. Conceptually this is strikingly similar to Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis". This essay is incomplete.
3. "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel" dated 1937-38 - Another long (175 page) discussion on the distinctiveness of the novel. The concept of the Chronotope is introduced simply as "time space" and the essay seeks to show its use from the Greek Romance to the novel of the 19th Century. Bakhtin inserts here also a discussion of the "Rabelaisian Chrontope", the role of the clown, etc. Special emphasis is also given to the Blidungsroman. This essay, it seems to me, is essentially, Bakhtin's own favorite Reading list in which he experiments with his own concept of Chronotope, skillfully fitting it to each work. Despite its digressions it is basically a chronological presentation.
4. "Discourse in the Novel" dated 1934-35 - Another lengthy essay which is in essence Bakhtin's discussion of his philosophy of language. This essay also seems to be unfinished. It consists of five distinct parts in which Bakhtin experiments with different approaches to discourse in the novel. As is often the case with Bakhtin, this essay is also open-ended.
I find this compliation of four essays to be most stimulating. It seems to be well translated and edited. Ample footnotes assist the reader with Bakhtin's many, sometimes obscure, literary references. In my opinion, particularly the last two essays, constitute Baktin's most important work on the novel. Those expecting distinct conclusions and theories will be disappointed, because this is not the aim here at all. Bakhtin instead provides many different starting points from which to continue the study of the novel. This is, for example, what makes the chronotope indefinable, because it is constantly changing. I highly recommend this surprisingly accessible book. I believe that it is, along with "Speech Genres and other late Essays" Bakhtin's most important work on the novel.
Some brief notes on the four Essays:
1. "Epic and Novel" dated 1941 - A rather straightforward comparison of the Novel and the Epic. Its aim is to show the distinctiveness of the Novel. This can be seen as a transitional essay between the Chronotope Essay and the Bildungsroman Fragment. It is well organized and introduces several characteristics unique to the novel such as three-dimensionality, imagery and openendedness.
2. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" dated 1940 - This is in essence a brief history of the novel according to Bakhtin. It concentrates on style, theory and as the title states, discourse, beginning with Greek works and going to the Renaissance. Conceptually this is strikingly similar to Erich Auerbach's "Mimesis". This essay is incomplete.
3. "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel" dated 1937-38 - Another long (175 page) discussion on the distinctiveness of the novel. The concept of the Chronotope is introduced simply as "time space" and the essay seeks to show its use from the Greek Romance to the novel of the 19th Century. Bakhtin inserts here also a discussion of the "Rabelaisian Chrontope", the role of the clown, etc. Special emphasis is also given to the Blidungsroman. This essay, it seems to me, is essentially, Bakhtin's own favorite Reading list in which he experiments with his own concept of Chronotope, skillfully fitting it to each work. Despite its digressions it is basically a chronological presentation.
4. "Discourse in the Novel" dated 1934-35 - Another lengthy essay which is in essence Bakhtin's discussion of his philosophy of language. This essay also seems to be unfinished. It consists of five distinct parts in which Bakhtin experiments with different approaches to discourse in the novel. As is often the case with Bakhtin, this essay is also open-ended.
I find this compliation of four essays to be most stimulating. It seems to be well translated and edited. Ample footnotes assist the reader with Bakhtin's many, sometimes obscure, literary references. In my opinion, particularly the last two essays, constitute Baktin's most important work on the novel. Those expecting distinct conclusions and theories will be disappointed, because this is not the aim here at all. Bakhtin instead provides many different starting points from which to continue the study of the novel. This is, for example, what makes the chronotope indefinable, because it is constantly changing. I highly recommend this surprisingly accessible book. I believe that it is, along with "Speech Genres and other late Essays" Bakhtin's most important work on the novel.
May 28, 2015
The initial curiosity in discovering what a chronotope is and however tangentially it is connected Einstein's quantumish theory gets a thorough explanation in the four essays on the novel's place within language and literacy. Where this place is and the many names it gets called is the journey most readers have to take for themselves, but having a good background in the classics helps along with a patience tolerance for not-quite classic material (at least from this end of western culture). It will be a while before I delve into the bizarre world of Rabelais but there are many more mysteries the novel has in store for me that I eagerly anticipate reading the next 400-page tome.
Want to read
October 5, 2008Wow...wow...
This guy was amazing.
It's pretty readable too.
All of these ideas coming from one of the most hectic periods in Russian history, from a guy who was pretty hounded...
anyway, I think this will change the way I read and write about novels. It really seems to give the novel form a delineation according to what makes it different, and it makes me happy to have a reason to think the stuff I like working best with really has the revolutionary potential I've felt there.
This guy was amazing.
It's pretty readable too.
All of these ideas coming from one of the most hectic periods in Russian history, from a guy who was pretty hounded...
anyway, I think this will change the way I read and write about novels. It really seems to give the novel form a delineation according to what makes it different, and it makes me happy to have a reason to think the stuff I like working best with really has the revolutionary potential I've felt there.
July 7, 2011
Granted, no one besides Bakhtin is so utterly smitten with Rabelais, but I find heteroglossia everywhere after reading this book. Especially, I recommend reading Dorthy Sayers mysteries, which are so thick with it that the narration is downright schizophrenic. B's generalizations about poetry as opposed to the novel, though, seem rather narrow in their definition and I doubt any poets would see themselves thus reflected.
July 18, 2016
Bakhtiiin, you were slow going. Started reading this one back in ye olde 2013, for my first ever European Classical Literatures class, finished it finally after the odious course involving everyone's mutual friends Messrs Turgenev and Dostoyevsky. /Finally/ through with this golden gem of a book in early 2016. This book ought to be made required reading for the English Honours course imo. But more on that later.
January 31, 2020
Bakhtin is very dense, but I find his ideas refreshing after I let the ideas settle. I first encountered him in a grad schedule class on pedagogy. After that, I found myself reading his works for pleasure when I was in the mood.
February 17, 2018
One of my favorites. This book is the foundational text for my thesis.
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