DIALOGICS--Criticism & Theory,
During 1960s and 70s the
dominant literary trends were structuralism and post structuralism. These two
theories shook the world of criticism “like a tidal wave after an earthquake”
(David Lodge) and European and American academia were much influenced by them.
But the situation underwent a drastic change with the discovery of Bakhtin
during the 80s. “The discovery of Bakhtin” may appear to be a slightly
ambiguous expression. Actually, it took nearly fifty years for the academia to
discover what Bakhtin discovered during the 30s and 40s. Thus it was a
discovery in both senses of the expression.
Today, Bakhtin is
considered to be a seminal influence in world Literature. Very few know the
challenges he faced, the persecution he underwent and the ‘purges’ he was
subjected to in the erstwhile Soviet Union.
Therefore a brief biographical sketch is in order here.
Mikhail
Milkhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) was born into an old family of nobles
in pre-Revolutionary Russia.
After finishing school he joined the historical and philological faculty of the
University of Odessa in 1913. From there he was
transferred to St.Petersburg
University. In the
University he came to know the leading critics of the period like Victor
Shklovsky. Bakhtin read prodigiously concentrating on the classics, philosophy
and literature. In 1918 he moved to Nevel to teach in a school. He and the
other intellectuals of the area used to discuss the philosophical, literary,
religious and political issues of the day. They came to be known as the Bakhtin
circle. In 1920 he moved to Vitebsk,
an area where a number of avante-grade artists and thinkers lived and many
lively journals were published. Bakhtin’s first major published work Problems
of Dostoevsky’s Poetics appeared in 1920. He advanced the concept of dialogism
in this book. During the purges by the Soviets in the 1930s, Bakhtin and his
circle suffered much. He was exiled to Kazakhstan for six years. Some of
his important essays such as “Discourse in the Novel” were written during this period.
From 1940 till the end of the Second World War, Bakhtin lived in Moscow. His work Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages
and Renaissance created a lot of controversies. It was allowed to be
published only after 1965. He was lucky to get some recognition before his
death in 1975. Today he is recognized as one of the greatest theoreticians of
the novel.
The above account of
Bakhtin’s life is taken from the biographical introduction to his The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Michael Holquist). From
Holquist’s narration, we may get the impression that Bakhtin lived a life of seclusion
in the Soviet Union. In fact, Bakhtin was
never a popular figure and in the rigid political and literary atmosphere of
the Soviet Union during the Cold War years,
many of his works were looked upon with suspicion by the authorities. His voice
was effectively silenced by the Communists and Holquist also mentions the
frequency with which Bakhtin used to lose his manuscripts. “One such manuscript
on the German novel disappeared, ironically enough, during the German invasion
and Bakhtin used the only other copy to roll his cigarettes during those days”.
Now let us look at some of the key concepts of Bakhtin.
1.
Dialogism – Bakhtin concept of language
Bakhtin’s concepts
of language are dialogic. The word is not a two-sided sign, as in Saussurian
linguistics – signifier and signified. But the Bakhtin it is a two-sided act.
The word is a dialogic construct. It is not based on lexical items alone. It
has connotations derived from other contexts. There is a clear relationship
between the sign, the sender and the receiver. Bakhtin says” “the word in
living conversation is directly, blatantly oriented toward a future answer
word”. It provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself in the
answer’s direction”.
Hence in Bakhtin
“parole” (individual utterance) is more important than “langue”. Katerina Clark
and Michael Holquist observe: “Bakhtin’s concept of languages differs from two
other current concepts of language. Humanists maintain that the source of
meaning is the unique individual. Deconstructionists locate meaning in the
structure of the general possibility of difference underlying all particular differences.
Bakhtin roots meaning in the social, though the social is conceived in a
special way”.
Monoglossia,
Polyglossia and heteroglossia
These three
terms are of great importance in Bakhtin’s view of language.
Monoglossia is the
primary state of being of a language. It reflects the enclosed ‘world view’ of
its speakers. Homeric Greek can be called a monoglossic. It showed a desire for
maintaining purity as it divided the world into two – [Hellenes and Barbaroi]
(Greek speakers and the rest) Anglo-Saxon can be called another monoglossic
language before it was “bastardized in its miscegenation with the Norman
French” (Tony Crowley).
Polyglossia
A monoglossic
language becomes polyglossic when it becomes aware of other languages. Latin is
an example of polyglossia because it was aware of its limitations and the
existence of others. The Greek thought their language to be that of the God’s.
Latin knew that it was not self sufficient and was at least partly dependent on
Greek. Hence Polyglossia indicates a language system’s dependence in other systems
as well as awareness of its historical roots.
Heteroglossia
This is the final
stage. Polyglossia gives way to Heteroglossia. Both internal and external
differences in the language are revealed at this stage. The language drops all
claims for absolute unity and reveals its pluralistic nature. Heteroglossia is
a very important aspect of the language for Bakhtin. It shows the complex
stratification of the languages into genre, register, sociolect and dialect. In
Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin shows that language is stratified depending
on the professional usage – the language of the lawyer, the doctor, the
businessman, the politician etc. at this stage any pose of unity becomes
imaginary.
Bakhtin prefers
polyglossia and heteroglossia to monoglossia. “Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness
from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language (The Dialogic Imagination).
Bakhtin’s views on novel
Bakhtin considers the
novel as a polyphonic genre. In Bakhtin, polyphony is a synonym for dialogism.
By polyphony Bakhtin means a discourse in which more than one account or tone
is brought into play. The novel respects the dialogic nature of the language
and it we can hear more than one voice.
Bakhtin uses the term
‘novel’ in a broad sense. He does not limit it to prose fiction. “There is a
tendency in Bakhtin to assimilate everything that is progressive,
life-enhancing and liberating in writing to the concept of the novel” says
David Lodge. Clark and Holquist observe that Bakhtin assigns the term “novel”
to whatever form of expression within a given literary system (that) reveals
the limits of that system as inadequate, imposed or arbitrary”. He associates
the canonical genres like lyric, epic, tragedy to whatever “fixed, rigid,
authoritarian”. The novel, asserts Bakhtin, is an anti-generic genre: “It is
plasticity itself. It is a genre that is ever questing, ever examining itself
and subjecting its established forms to review”.
Bakhtin believes that
the canonic genres – tragedy, epic and lyric – suppress the inherently dialogic
quality of the language. These genres want to express a unified world view.
They are monologic. In the novel there is “discursive polyphony”, “subtle and
complex interweaving of various types of speech” – direct, indirect and
double-oriented” (e.g. parody). Moreover the novel shows irreverence to all
types of monologic ideologies.
Before Dostoevsky’s time
“The novel itself was monologic”, Bakhtin states in one context. He quotes the
example of Tolstoy. In Tolstoy’s novels, Bakhtin says that there is a dominant
authorial discourse which submerges everything else. However, Bakhtin changes
his opinion in another essay and asserts that even the pre-Dostoevskian novel
is dialogic.
To prove this point,
Bakhtin enthusiastically quotes from many eighteenth century novels. He says
that the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century is fully dialogic. In the
nineteenth century we get novels like Little
Dorr it where we can see even doubly oriented speech.
In the Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin recognize the greatness of Dostoevsky’s dialogic
method. The novelist allows different characters to articulate different
ideological positions in a text without subordinating them to his own authorial
voice. In Dialogic Imagination Bakhtin traces the genealogy of novel
“Back to the parodying – travestying genres of classical literature – the satyr
play, the Socratic dialogue and to the carnival folk culture which kept the
tradition alive through the middle ages and up to the Renaissance.
Bakhtin believes that it
is the Heteroglossic nature of the language that creates polyphony in fiction.
As soon as you allow a variety of discourses into a textual space – vulgar as
well as polite ones, vernacular as well as literary, oral as well as written –
you establish resistance to the dominance of ant one discourse.”
Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival
The concept of
the carnival has influence in literary criticism of the 1980s and 90s. This
concept is seen as a method of subversion by the black and feminist critics, in
fact by all those who feel themselves existing on the borders of the dominant
culture. Carnival offers them a means to get equal with the oppressing and
dominant culture. Bakhtin points out the example of a Russian peasant urinating
from the steeple of a church during the carnival season. Bakhtin says that
there is an element of the carnival even in Christianity. In the beginning of
Christianity, it was not a totalizing monologic ideology. Actually it existed
at the periphery of the Roman Empire. Bakhtin
says that the New Testament is essentially dialogic. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on as ass and
the crowning with thorns are distinctly carnivalesque. Carnival offers the
common man a change to protest and a chance to show irreverence to the holy the
mighty.
Bakhtin
Theories and the English Novel
Bakhtin’s theories
have a great impact during the 1980s and this is felt more in fiction tan anywhere
else. Critics began to look at the subversive, carnivalesque elements in
fiction. David Lodge, to point out an example, quotes elaborately from D.H. Lawrence
anticipated Bakhtin in many ways. In this After
Bakhtin (1990), Lodge quotes Lawrence:
“You can write Hamlet in drama: if you write him in a novel, he’d be
half comic, a trifle suspicious, like Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Somehow you sweep the
ground a bit too freely. Now in a novel there’s always a tom-cat, a black tom-cat
that pounces on the white dove of the word, if the dove doesn’t watch it: and
there is a banana-skin to trip on, and you know there is a water-closet on the
premises. All these things help to keep the balance”.
This lengthy quotation
from Lawrence
was necessary to show how Bakhtin’s concepts were at work in Lawrence. Lawrence sets an opposition between Hamlet
and the novel of Dostoevsky at the beginning itself. Tragedy is canonical and Hamlet
will be monologic only. The same Hamlet will become a comic piece if the
dialogism of the novel is introduced. Similarly, Lawrence represents the carnivalesque
elements also – the black tom-cat, the banana-skin and the water closet. The
same carnivalesque elements are present in Lawrence’s Women in Love. Again, in much
recent fiction, carnivalesque elements are present. In Lucky Jim, the
academic discourse is parodied. Lodge gives us many other examples from the
British fiction. Things in them appear quite different when looked at through
the Bakhtin prism.
Loose Ends
in Bakhtin’s thought
There are many
contradictions and loose ends in Bakhtin’s thought.
1.
Bakhtin’s ideas about languages and
literature are binary – monologic // dialogic, poetry // prose, canonical //
carnivalesque etc. this habit of thought belongs to the structuralist tradition
of Saussure, Roman Jakobson and Roland Barthes [Langue // Parole, Metaphor // Metonymy]
Sometimes, as in the case of structuralism, one of the terms in these binaries
may become privileged. This weakens “the explanatory power” – of the terms.
2.
Bakhtin sees the word as a
two-sided act. “It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is
meant. A word is a territory shared by both addresser and addressee, by the
speaker and the interlocutor”. (Bakhtin) if languages are innately dialogic how
is it possible to have monologic discourse? Bakhtin asserts that canonical
genres – tragedy, epic etc. – are monologic while the novel is dialogic? This
paradox is at the very center of Bakhtin’s concepts.
Summary
The lesson gives
an overview of certain concepts of Bakhtin – mongolism dialogism, polyphony,
monoglossia, diaglossia, heterglossia etc. these are key concepts in Bakhtin.
Then the lesson looks at Bakhtin’s theory of the novel. For him, the novel is
superior to all other genres because of its dialogic discourse.
Books for
further reading
Lodge, David. After
Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990
Hirschkop, Ken and David
Shepherd. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory New York: Manchester UP, 1989.
Dr. S. Sree Kumar
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