24th Feb 2004
A General Introduction
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is one of the most original and enduring literary theorists of the twentieth century. The original and enduring quality of his theoretical constructs rests on the fact that he based his theories on the liberal humanist interpretation and creative understanding of texts, particularly fiction. Two important intentions guide all his intellectual pursuits: the process of creativity and ethical responsibility. All his theoretical writings are firmly grounded in general human nature and the social context. The polemical power of his theories comes from his conviction that a literary work has to be interpreted in its own terms; that the tools of interpretation have to be literary in nature. His in-depth and socio-cultural interpretations of the Classical, Renaissance and Russian literatures not only arm the reader-critic with powerful tools of evaluation, but also induce him to return to those texts with fresh curiosity.
His Rabelais and His World (1968) is an elaborate discussion of the 16th century French novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, and his Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1984) is a theoretical study of Dostoyevsky’s novels. Whereas most of the literary theories making their rounds in the twentieth century academic circles have had their origin in non-literary fields of knowledge, Bakhtin’s theories emerge out of his in-depth interpretation of literary texts.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories of language supplied the foundation upon which Structuralism as a method of literary interpretation was built. The breakthroughs in analytical and applied psychology by Sigmund Freud and C.G.Jung, the socio-economic philosophy of Karl Marx, and the philosophical insights of Jacques Derrida into Western metaphysics, likewise, have given rise to Psychoanalytical criticism, Marxist criticism and Deconstruction respectively. In other words, the literary theorists have been consciously applying those borrowed methodologies to literary interpretation with a view to exploring the new meanings, hidden structures and untapped energies supposedly lying buried in literary texts. Those tools had been designed for certain areas of knowledge out of which they initially emerged. They were not meant for the interpretation of literature. In order to graft non-literary theories onto the literary texts, the literary critics had to whittle these theories down and tamper with their dynamics.
The law of dynamics guarantees a pragmatic interaction between theoretical know-how and literary oeuvres when they belong to the same category and are guided by the same set of principles and when they partake of the same situation. But linguistic, psychoanalytical, socio-economic and philosophical dynamics cannot be applied to a literary text for the simple reason that the latter is intrinsically different from all these branches of knowledge. A Structuralist critic would think her job completed as soon as she locates some common structures and cultural codes informing a particular text. Commenting on the aesthetic quality, ethical dimension and the meaning of that text is not one of her jobs. Such is the case with the Marxist critic and the Deconstructive critic of literary texts. Even if they are teachers or scholars of literature, they do not consider it necessary to comment on the literary merit of the texts they study. They under-perform knowingly. Just as a committed Marxist has to denigrate religion or ignore his own religious inclinations in order to be faithful to his ideological position as a believer in Marxism, a Marxist critic would read a text closely to find out the economic factors, class struggle, etc. that have gone into its making and ignore all other implications that text might have contained.
On the other hand, the Psychoanalytic critic tends to over- perform by superimposing the Freudian and Jungian models based on real human beings with real case histories on the imaginary characters peopling novels and plays. Any character possessing certain qualities, which cannot fall into normal patterns of behaviour, is quickly branded as a psychopathological freak, an eminently curable case. Ernest Jones’ treatment of Hamlet in his Hamlet and Oedipus may be cited as an example of how a complex universal problem is made particular and simple by subjecting it to a Freudian model of interpretation. While admitting that Marx, Freud, Saussure and Derrida have made solid contributions to their respective branches of knowledge, the very efficacy of the application of their celebrated theories for literary interpretation has always been far from satisfactory. Some of Bakhtin’s writings contain many withering comments on the fundamental premises of other theories. Bakhtin calls all these theories “theoretisms”, because they explain human behaviour in terms of an abstract system of norms, thereby impoverishing the real complexities of life and eliminating the meaningfulness of moral decisions and reducing creativity to mere discovery. While admitting that many of the methodologies and insights of those alien literary theories have enriched literary criticism and have come to stay as useful tools of academic research, it has to be stated that as total methods of interpretation they have not been able to replace conservative pedagogical practices.
But the case with Mikhail Bakhtin is different. While studying representative literary texts, he posited two fundamental questions: One, what types of social climate, historical forces, creative resourcefulness and ground realities had facilitated, and obtained in, the creation of a literary text? Two, what are the inherent virtues or qualities for which the appeal of these classics has been universal and timeless? Bakhtin’s quest for answers to these two questions and his intense engagement with literary texts enabled him, serendipitously, to discover certain theories of literature in general and fiction theories in particular. In this respect, Bakhtin’s theories when applied to the study of literature take on the text under discussion in its entirety and bring out its literary merit, its craftsmanship and its position in the general context as a work of art.
According to Bakhtin, all these literary theories –Saussurean linguistics, Formalism, Structuralism, Freudianism and Marxism or in principle any other- employ instantiation models for the interpretation of literary texts; they understand particular acts (parole) as mere instantiations of timeless norms (langue). Such models, according to Bakhtin, think away the eventness of events and lead to an under appreciation of the richness of daily life and particular actions.
Bakhtin’s theories may be studied in terms of three Global Concepts, such as, Prosaics, Unfinalizability and Dialogism. All of his specially formulated coinages are related to, and center round, these three pivotal concepts. And these three Global concepts are dependent on one another in order to be fully comprehended.
Prosaics is the first global concept. It involves both the view of the world and as an approach to literature. As a view of the world, it is suspicious of explanatory systems or theoretism. Prosaics, in contradistinction to Poetics, is based on the assumption that the most important events of life are not necessarily grand, dramatic, spectacular or catastrophic events, but the apparently small and prosaic ones of everyday life. Novels and prose narratives capture the nuances of the small and prosaic events of everyday life more effectively than poetry. Novel as well as related prose writing is the site for real dialogue, for conversation. The study of prose is Prosaics in this sense. Two senses of Prosaics (a study of prose and a study of prosaic details of life) are valid and interrelated. The novel, Bakhtin opines, is the real site for “dialogized heteroglossia”, because it is capable of incorporating what he calls “active double-voiced words.” The meaning of these special coinages will be explained in the following passages.
Unfinalizability is another Global Concept. Bakhtin writes: “Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always remain in the future” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 66). The concept of Unfinializability is based on the above-cited assumption. It maps out the ethical dimension of Bakhtin’s theory. Recognition of each person’s unfinalizability and man’s never-ending capacity for “surprisingness” (ability to spring surprises while exercising his freedom of ethical choice) is central to Bakhtin’s ethical system. Bakhtin asserts: “Unrealized potential makes one human.” Each man possesses a surplus of humanness, which modern psychology of Freud and Pavlov does not take into account while studying man. Bakhtin is not a great admirer of Freud, nor is he in favour of applying Freud’s findings to literary interpretation.
Each person, according to Bakhtin, enjoys a “Surplus of Vision” with respect to each other person. He writes: “I can form an image of you, which you then incorporate into your sense of self.” That is to say, each man’s idea of his own self is more or less formed by other persons’ ideas about him. He forms his concept of Polyphony from this. Polyphony refers to a form of writing, which Bakhtin maintains Dostoyevsky has invented. Dostoyevsky has established a new relation of the author with the hero. Just as each person enjoys a surplus of vision with respect to each other person he interacts with, the author of a novel enjoys a surplus of vision with respect to his hero in particular and all other characters in general. The author has not only an essential surplus of vision with respect to his hero, he also knows in advance other essential information about the hero, which is inaccessible to the hero himself. The author is aware of the entire sweep of the hero’s life, the changes of his fortune, the nature of his choice. And what this means is that even authors who want to write novels demonstrating human freedom are implicitly contradicted by the very form in which they write. But Dostoyevsky devised a way to overcome this obstacle, to write about free people who are really represented as free. To do so, he relinquished his omniscience as the author; he surrendered his essential surplus of vision with respect to his heroes. By doing that, he placed himself on the same level as his heroes. By placing himself on the same level as his heroes, he knew about them at any given moment no more than would be possible for the heroes themselves to know. That voluntary surrender of knowledge made it possible for Dostoyevsky to argue with his heroes as equals. Sometimes, Dostoyevsky’s own ideological views lose out in these arguments. That is the case with all Polyphonic novelists. In polyphonic novels the characters may surprise their own authors as they are free to choose, as they are not the finished products but free human agents. Polyphony is a theory of the creative process whose nature is ethical, because it treats people as truly unfinalizable, incomplete, inchoate.
Bakhtin studies the language used in the prose narrative, particularly in a novel, as a body of utterances in which two voices are heard to be interacting with each other. These two voices can be in agreement, or in disagreement. When two voices are in disagreement, it is parody. These double-voiced words can be called dialogic irrespective of their agreement and disagreement. But when they are passive, the voice of disagreement is not strong enough to resist the first dominant voice. Only when they are active, these double-voiced words do incorporate from within “an assertion, the provocation of its denial, and a hostile reaction to that denial, potentially infinitely”(Morson, 66).
Heteroglossia is the condition that governs the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions- social, historical, physiological- that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions. All utterances are “heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve.”
Bakhtin uses two terms, centripetal and centrifugal forces, to elucidate his theory of heteroglossia. Heteroglossia is the outcome when these two forces collide. In all languages, in all cultures there is a centralizing or centripetal force. It has a homogenizing and hierarchicizing influence. The ruling class and the high literary genres make use of this force. Its characteristics are high seriousness, totalization, domination, and authority. There always exists an undercurrent of a decentralizing or centrifugal force along with the other force. This decentralizing or centrifugal force is apparently subversive, anticanonical, carnivalesque, represented by the clowning, mimicry, decrowning, the ribaldries of the marketplace, parody, mimetic degradation and desecration, grotesque representation of the sublime, etc.
Bakhtin delves deep into the Renaissance literature to find reasons for its being so rich, original and daring. He considers Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel “the most fearless book in world literature”(Rabelais and His World, 39). Any reader of this book will subscribe to Bakhtin’s opinion. According to him, during the European Renaissance the folk culture emerged as a strong and counter force, and interacted with the sanctimonious official culture and classical literature. By interacting with the official culture and classical literature, the folk culture carnivalized them and made the real dialogue possible. Two powerful traits of the folk culture during the Renaissance were laughter and the grotesque. During the medieval period, laughter lost its comic and regenerative quality and degenerated into angry satire, and the grotesque failed to amuse and inspired fear. He contrasts the Romantic Grotesque (with its alienating apparatus, its tendency to arouse terror) with the Folk Grotesque of the Renaissance characterized by fearless gaiety, by its celebration of “bodily life, such as eating, drinking, copulation, defecation,” by its “parody of official reason, of the narrow seriousness of official truth”, “by its gay relativity, merry negation of uniformity and similarity.” The Folk Grotesque and liberated, universal laughter are/ were indispensable tools for the process of carnivalization of the official rigidity. And it took place during the Renaissance. “True ambivalent and universal laughter” writes Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World:
“does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness. Such is the function of laughter in the historical development of culture and literature” (123).
Carnivalization is an important concept of Bakhtin. It is related to his Dialogic structure. In carnival, the social hierarchies- solemnities, pieties, etiquettes and ready-made, time-honoured truths - are deliberately profaned. The voices of the margin invade the centre and claim an equal, dialogic status, challenge the authority, turn the world upside down, playfully subvert the truth-claims, pull up the pompous and the exalted with a view to testing and moderating truth. Dialogue and carnival are related terms, complementary to each other. In a given culture, these two mutually antagonistic forces are perpetually engaged with each other. According to Bakhtin, the period known as the Renaissance was a real site for the intense engagement of these two forces, and their hostile interaction generated a peculiar creative energy. And it resulted in such masterpieces such as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantaguel, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and the plays of William Shakespeare. According to him, Carnival is not substantive, but functional. Its aim is to achieve ‘a joyful relativity of everything.’ Bakhtin writes in Rabelais and His World:
“In the Renaissance, laughter in its most radical, universal, and at the same time gay form emerged from the depths of folk culture; it emerged but once in the course of history, over a period of some fifty or sixty years (in various countries and at various times) and entered with its popular (vulgar) language the sphere of great literature and high ideology. It appeared to play an essential role in the creation of such masterpieces of world literature as Boccaccio’s Decameron, the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes, Shakespeare’s dramas and comedies, and others” (72).
Dialogue or Dialogism or Dialogic Structure is the third Global Concept of Bakhtin. It is related to his other concepts, such as, carnival, chronotope, heteroglossia and polyphony. It refers to a concept of truth as a conversation rather than a series of propositions. It is the opposite of dialectics. He writes: “Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, then cram everything into one abstract consciousness- and that is how you get dialectics” (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, 1986. P.147). In other words, dialectics is supremely monologic, because one voice drowns or suppresses all other voices. Bakhtin writes: “Dialogue is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically.”
The language is constituted of intersubjectivity and social communication in the dialogic process. In this sense, all languages are by nature dialogic. Just as dialogue precedes and shapes the language, the language, in its turn, precedes as well as shapes the individuality and subjectivity of its users. Autonomous individuality, Bakhtin maintains, is an illusion. “Consciousness is in essence multiple, Pluralia tantum…. Not another person remaining the object of my consciousness, but another autonomous consciousness standing alongside mine, and my own consciousness can exist only in relation to it” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 288).
Bakhtin divides the theory of interpretation into three categories. “Enclosure Within the Epoch” type of interpretation tries to see the world in terms set by the other periods and other cultures. The second type of interpretation he names “Modernization and Distortion”, which reads into the text the concerns and values of its own epoch, which are assumed to be especially wise and privileged. The literary theories of the twentieth century belong to this category of interpretation. Here we see how Bakhtin differs from the modern theorists who “pillage other cultures only for those themes useful for debates set by current American politics.” Each approach recognizes only one side of the potential dialogue, hence partial and lopsided. The best approach is “Creative Understanding”. It recognizes the otherness of the other without giving up its own “outsidedness”. One person is engaged in a special sort of dialogue with the other. As in all the dialogues, the result is likely to be the creation of insights that neither side had separately; in other words, each side realizes the ‘potential’ of the other in a way neither could have foreseen.
Bakhtin tries to understand the dialogic nature of language in terms of heteroglossia. The idea of heteroglossia is based on the premise that each language is composed of many languages. Each of these constituent languages is a product of a particular type of experience that people acquire by virtue of their association and interaction with their respective professions, ethnic groups, social classes, peer groups and regions. Each of these experiences has its own peculiar way of understanding and evaluating the world. Each of these languages, produced as they are from a variety of experiences, competes with the other languages for the privileged position in the novelistic discourse. When “dialogized heteroglossia” takes place in a novel, we are enabled to view one aspect of experience, which we are accustomed to treat in one language, through the eyes of another. Bakhtin writes in his essay, “Discourse in the Novel,”
Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel, is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions… double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized (Dialogic Imagination, 324).
Bakhtin calls dialogized heteroglossia a “relativized, Galilean consciousness” (Ibid, 327).
The concept of Chronotope is one of the lasting contributions of Bakhtin. The Chronotope literally means “Time-Space”. The Theory of Relativity of Einstein is based on the fact that time and space are inseparable; that time is the fourth dimension of space. Bakhtin was somewhat indebted to Einstein and some other scientific thinkers for developing his idea of the Chronotope. The Chronotope, for Bakhtin, is “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” In his influential essay titled “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937-38), he writes:
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. … The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic (The Dialogic Imagination, 84-85).
The chronotope is the organizing centers for the events narrated in a novel, and at these centers the knots of narrative are tied and untied. To these centers belongs the meaning that shapes the narrative. The chronotope functions as the primary means for materializing time in space; it concretizes representation. “All the novel’s abstract elements- philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect- gravitate toward the chronotope and through it takes on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work” (The Dialogic Imagination, 256-257). Bakhtin goes on to say that the nature of the literary image, the language that produces that image and the words shaping that image all are chronotopic. According to him, the Chronotope of a book defines the relationship of that book’s artistic unity with the actual reality it tries to reflect, and for that reason, so far as a work of art or literature is concerned, its temporal and spatial aspects are not only linked to each other, they also determine the emotions and values we associate with that work of art or literature.
Bakhtin has made some important and original contributions to the study of high literary genres as well as the genres of low literature, such as “oratorical, publicistic, and journalistic”. He defines a genre as a way of seeing the world. Each high literary genre – poetry, drama, epic, fiction, etc. – has come into existence, through a long period of time, out of a particular way of knowing, experiencing, interpreting and evaluating the world. Each vision or habit of thought is capable of shaping a distinct form. He calls it the “form-shaping ideology.” The dialogic sense of truth, which is presented in a polyphonic and heteroglot novel, is one such form-shaping ideology. He avers that a work of literature will reveal its intrinsic meaning if it is approached in terms of the form-shaping ideology which has made it possible and contributed to its generic becoming. He writes in “Discourse in the Novel”:
Literary language – both spoken and written – although it is unitary not only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but also in its forms for conceptualizing these abstract markers, is itself stratified and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system, that is, in the forms that carry its meanings.
This stratification is accomplished first of all by the specific organisms called genres (Dialogic Imagination, 288).
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Bakhtin wrote his books and articles between the late twenties and the early seventies. The discovery of his real worth as a theorist and the emergence of his theories as viable models of interpretation have been gradual, but remarkably steady. Most of his seminal ideas on society, history, culture and, above all, on literature as a byproduct of the interaction of all these forces, lie dispersed in his many essays and book-length treatises the list of which has been supplied at the end of this article. He kept on refining and supplementing his ideas in the course of his career as a writer, which spanned more than four decades. One important reason for Bakhtin’s “gradual” popularity in the academic circles is his discursive style, the Gargantuan size of his oeuvres, his exasperating habit of stretching, and digging for, one concept until it merges into another concept, his generalizations and repetitiveness, his axiomatic claims that seem to be vague, his minting of neologisms to designate any new discovery he chances upon and his wide-ranging encyclopaedic references from all types of books written during the last three thousand years of the Western civilization. All of his socio-cultural-literary theories and neologisms are inextricably inter-connected in a bewildering network of references and cross-references, and they make any scholarly expedition naturally daunting. But in spite of all his apparent faults, Bakhtin is arguably one of the most consistent and profound thinkers of the twentieth century. Wayne C. Booth, in his Introduction to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, sums up Bakhtin’s contributions to literary theory and offers a valid reason for his being what he is. He writes:
(E)very thinker must pay the price every virtue, and I find that most of what look like weaknesses are the inevitable consequences of his strengths. If he is “vague,” so is every thinker who attempts to approach difficult and general concepts that stand for ultimate and thus ultimately elusive concerns. What is vague from a hostile point of view is wonderfully “suggestive” when we consider it from inside the enterprise. If he is repetitive, why should he not be, when what he is saying will surely not be understood the first, or third, or tenth time? When talking about truths like these, once said is not enough said, because no statement can ever come close enough and no amount of repetition can ever overstate the importance of elusive yet ultimate truth.
I can think of no critic of recent years… who more effectively performs that essential task of all criticism: prodding readers to think again about critical standards as applied to the various canons and anti-canons those standards lead to (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, xxvii).
Works Cited and Consulted:
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
[ Epic and Novel, From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel and Discourse in the Novel]
( Translated from Russian by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist . Edited by Michael Holquist ).
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. [Edited and Translated from Russian by Caryl Emerson. Introduction by Wayne C. Booth.]
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8.
Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Rabelais and His World.
[Translated from Russian by H.Iswolsky.
Foreword by Krystyna Pomorska. Prologue by Michael Holquist].
New York: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. “Bakhtin, M.M.”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism,
A General Introduction
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is one of the most original and enduring literary theorists of the twentieth century. The original and enduring quality of his theoretical constructs rests on the fact that he based his theories on the liberal humanist interpretation and creative understanding of texts, particularly fiction. Two important intentions guide all his intellectual pursuits: the process of creativity and ethical responsibility. All his theoretical writings are firmly grounded in general human nature and the social context. The polemical power of his theories comes from his conviction that a literary work has to be interpreted in its own terms; that the tools of interpretation have to be literary in nature. His in-depth and socio-cultural interpretations of the Classical, Renaissance and Russian literatures not only arm the reader-critic with powerful tools of evaluation, but also induce him to return to those texts with fresh curiosity.
His Rabelais and His World (1968) is an elaborate discussion of the 16th century French novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, and his Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics (1984) is a theoretical study of Dostoyevsky’s novels. Whereas most of the literary theories making their rounds in the twentieth century academic circles have had their origin in non-literary fields of knowledge, Bakhtin’s theories emerge out of his in-depth interpretation of literary texts.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories of language supplied the foundation upon which Structuralism as a method of literary interpretation was built. The breakthroughs in analytical and applied psychology by Sigmund Freud and C.G.Jung, the socio-economic philosophy of Karl Marx, and the philosophical insights of Jacques Derrida into Western metaphysics, likewise, have given rise to Psychoanalytical criticism, Marxist criticism and Deconstruction respectively. In other words, the literary theorists have been consciously applying those borrowed methodologies to literary interpretation with a view to exploring the new meanings, hidden structures and untapped energies supposedly lying buried in literary texts. Those tools had been designed for certain areas of knowledge out of which they initially emerged. They were not meant for the interpretation of literature. In order to graft non-literary theories onto the literary texts, the literary critics had to whittle these theories down and tamper with their dynamics.
The law of dynamics guarantees a pragmatic interaction between theoretical know-how and literary oeuvres when they belong to the same category and are guided by the same set of principles and when they partake of the same situation. But linguistic, psychoanalytical, socio-economic and philosophical dynamics cannot be applied to a literary text for the simple reason that the latter is intrinsically different from all these branches of knowledge. A Structuralist critic would think her job completed as soon as she locates some common structures and cultural codes informing a particular text. Commenting on the aesthetic quality, ethical dimension and the meaning of that text is not one of her jobs. Such is the case with the Marxist critic and the Deconstructive critic of literary texts. Even if they are teachers or scholars of literature, they do not consider it necessary to comment on the literary merit of the texts they study. They under-perform knowingly. Just as a committed Marxist has to denigrate religion or ignore his own religious inclinations in order to be faithful to his ideological position as a believer in Marxism, a Marxist critic would read a text closely to find out the economic factors, class struggle, etc. that have gone into its making and ignore all other implications that text might have contained.
On the other hand, the Psychoanalytic critic tends to over- perform by superimposing the Freudian and Jungian models based on real human beings with real case histories on the imaginary characters peopling novels and plays. Any character possessing certain qualities, which cannot fall into normal patterns of behaviour, is quickly branded as a psychopathological freak, an eminently curable case. Ernest Jones’ treatment of Hamlet in his Hamlet and Oedipus may be cited as an example of how a complex universal problem is made particular and simple by subjecting it to a Freudian model of interpretation. While admitting that Marx, Freud, Saussure and Derrida have made solid contributions to their respective branches of knowledge, the very efficacy of the application of their celebrated theories for literary interpretation has always been far from satisfactory. Some of Bakhtin’s writings contain many withering comments on the fundamental premises of other theories. Bakhtin calls all these theories “theoretisms”, because they explain human behaviour in terms of an abstract system of norms, thereby impoverishing the real complexities of life and eliminating the meaningfulness of moral decisions and reducing creativity to mere discovery. While admitting that many of the methodologies and insights of those alien literary theories have enriched literary criticism and have come to stay as useful tools of academic research, it has to be stated that as total methods of interpretation they have not been able to replace conservative pedagogical practices.
But the case with Mikhail Bakhtin is different. While studying representative literary texts, he posited two fundamental questions: One, what types of social climate, historical forces, creative resourcefulness and ground realities had facilitated, and obtained in, the creation of a literary text? Two, what are the inherent virtues or qualities for which the appeal of these classics has been universal and timeless? Bakhtin’s quest for answers to these two questions and his intense engagement with literary texts enabled him, serendipitously, to discover certain theories of literature in general and fiction theories in particular. In this respect, Bakhtin’s theories when applied to the study of literature take on the text under discussion in its entirety and bring out its literary merit, its craftsmanship and its position in the general context as a work of art.
According to Bakhtin, all these literary theories –Saussurean linguistics, Formalism, Structuralism, Freudianism and Marxism or in principle any other- employ instantiation models for the interpretation of literary texts; they understand particular acts (parole) as mere instantiations of timeless norms (langue). Such models, according to Bakhtin, think away the eventness of events and lead to an under appreciation of the richness of daily life and particular actions.
Bakhtin’s theories may be studied in terms of three Global Concepts, such as, Prosaics, Unfinalizability and Dialogism. All of his specially formulated coinages are related to, and center round, these three pivotal concepts. And these three Global concepts are dependent on one another in order to be fully comprehended.
Prosaics is the first global concept. It involves both the view of the world and as an approach to literature. As a view of the world, it is suspicious of explanatory systems or theoretism. Prosaics, in contradistinction to Poetics, is based on the assumption that the most important events of life are not necessarily grand, dramatic, spectacular or catastrophic events, but the apparently small and prosaic ones of everyday life. Novels and prose narratives capture the nuances of the small and prosaic events of everyday life more effectively than poetry. Novel as well as related prose writing is the site for real dialogue, for conversation. The study of prose is Prosaics in this sense. Two senses of Prosaics (a study of prose and a study of prosaic details of life) are valid and interrelated. The novel, Bakhtin opines, is the real site for “dialogized heteroglossia”, because it is capable of incorporating what he calls “active double-voiced words.” The meaning of these special coinages will be explained in the following passages.
Unfinalizability is another Global Concept. Bakhtin writes: “Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always remain in the future” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 66). The concept of Unfinializability is based on the above-cited assumption. It maps out the ethical dimension of Bakhtin’s theory. Recognition of each person’s unfinalizability and man’s never-ending capacity for “surprisingness” (ability to spring surprises while exercising his freedom of ethical choice) is central to Bakhtin’s ethical system. Bakhtin asserts: “Unrealized potential makes one human.” Each man possesses a surplus of humanness, which modern psychology of Freud and Pavlov does not take into account while studying man. Bakhtin is not a great admirer of Freud, nor is he in favour of applying Freud’s findings to literary interpretation.
Each person, according to Bakhtin, enjoys a “Surplus of Vision” with respect to each other person. He writes: “I can form an image of you, which you then incorporate into your sense of self.” That is to say, each man’s idea of his own self is more or less formed by other persons’ ideas about him. He forms his concept of Polyphony from this. Polyphony refers to a form of writing, which Bakhtin maintains Dostoyevsky has invented. Dostoyevsky has established a new relation of the author with the hero. Just as each person enjoys a surplus of vision with respect to each other person he interacts with, the author of a novel enjoys a surplus of vision with respect to his hero in particular and all other characters in general. The author has not only an essential surplus of vision with respect to his hero, he also knows in advance other essential information about the hero, which is inaccessible to the hero himself. The author is aware of the entire sweep of the hero’s life, the changes of his fortune, the nature of his choice. And what this means is that even authors who want to write novels demonstrating human freedom are implicitly contradicted by the very form in which they write. But Dostoyevsky devised a way to overcome this obstacle, to write about free people who are really represented as free. To do so, he relinquished his omniscience as the author; he surrendered his essential surplus of vision with respect to his heroes. By doing that, he placed himself on the same level as his heroes. By placing himself on the same level as his heroes, he knew about them at any given moment no more than would be possible for the heroes themselves to know. That voluntary surrender of knowledge made it possible for Dostoyevsky to argue with his heroes as equals. Sometimes, Dostoyevsky’s own ideological views lose out in these arguments. That is the case with all Polyphonic novelists. In polyphonic novels the characters may surprise their own authors as they are free to choose, as they are not the finished products but free human agents. Polyphony is a theory of the creative process whose nature is ethical, because it treats people as truly unfinalizable, incomplete, inchoate.
Bakhtin studies the language used in the prose narrative, particularly in a novel, as a body of utterances in which two voices are heard to be interacting with each other. These two voices can be in agreement, or in disagreement. When two voices are in disagreement, it is parody. These double-voiced words can be called dialogic irrespective of their agreement and disagreement. But when they are passive, the voice of disagreement is not strong enough to resist the first dominant voice. Only when they are active, these double-voiced words do incorporate from within “an assertion, the provocation of its denial, and a hostile reaction to that denial, potentially infinitely”(Morson, 66).
Heteroglossia is the condition that governs the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions- social, historical, physiological- that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions. All utterances are “heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve.”
Bakhtin uses two terms, centripetal and centrifugal forces, to elucidate his theory of heteroglossia. Heteroglossia is the outcome when these two forces collide. In all languages, in all cultures there is a centralizing or centripetal force. It has a homogenizing and hierarchicizing influence. The ruling class and the high literary genres make use of this force. Its characteristics are high seriousness, totalization, domination, and authority. There always exists an undercurrent of a decentralizing or centrifugal force along with the other force. This decentralizing or centrifugal force is apparently subversive, anticanonical, carnivalesque, represented by the clowning, mimicry, decrowning, the ribaldries of the marketplace, parody, mimetic degradation and desecration, grotesque representation of the sublime, etc.
Bakhtin delves deep into the Renaissance literature to find reasons for its being so rich, original and daring. He considers Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel “the most fearless book in world literature”(Rabelais and His World, 39). Any reader of this book will subscribe to Bakhtin’s opinion. According to him, during the European Renaissance the folk culture emerged as a strong and counter force, and interacted with the sanctimonious official culture and classical literature. By interacting with the official culture and classical literature, the folk culture carnivalized them and made the real dialogue possible. Two powerful traits of the folk culture during the Renaissance were laughter and the grotesque. During the medieval period, laughter lost its comic and regenerative quality and degenerated into angry satire, and the grotesque failed to amuse and inspired fear. He contrasts the Romantic Grotesque (with its alienating apparatus, its tendency to arouse terror) with the Folk Grotesque of the Renaissance characterized by fearless gaiety, by its celebration of “bodily life, such as eating, drinking, copulation, defecation,” by its “parody of official reason, of the narrow seriousness of official truth”, “by its gay relativity, merry negation of uniformity and similarity.” The Folk Grotesque and liberated, universal laughter are/ were indispensable tools for the process of carnivalization of the official rigidity. And it took place during the Renaissance. “True ambivalent and universal laughter” writes Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World:
“does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores this ambivalent wholeness. Such is the function of laughter in the historical development of culture and literature” (123).
Carnivalization is an important concept of Bakhtin. It is related to his Dialogic structure. In carnival, the social hierarchies- solemnities, pieties, etiquettes and ready-made, time-honoured truths - are deliberately profaned. The voices of the margin invade the centre and claim an equal, dialogic status, challenge the authority, turn the world upside down, playfully subvert the truth-claims, pull up the pompous and the exalted with a view to testing and moderating truth. Dialogue and carnival are related terms, complementary to each other. In a given culture, these two mutually antagonistic forces are perpetually engaged with each other. According to Bakhtin, the period known as the Renaissance was a real site for the intense engagement of these two forces, and their hostile interaction generated a peculiar creative energy. And it resulted in such masterpieces such as Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantaguel, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and the plays of William Shakespeare. According to him, Carnival is not substantive, but functional. Its aim is to achieve ‘a joyful relativity of everything.’ Bakhtin writes in Rabelais and His World:
“In the Renaissance, laughter in its most radical, universal, and at the same time gay form emerged from the depths of folk culture; it emerged but once in the course of history, over a period of some fifty or sixty years (in various countries and at various times) and entered with its popular (vulgar) language the sphere of great literature and high ideology. It appeared to play an essential role in the creation of such masterpieces of world literature as Boccaccio’s Decameron, the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes, Shakespeare’s dramas and comedies, and others” (72).
Dialogue or Dialogism or Dialogic Structure is the third Global Concept of Bakhtin. It is related to his other concepts, such as, carnival, chronotope, heteroglossia and polyphony. It refers to a concept of truth as a conversation rather than a series of propositions. It is the opposite of dialectics. He writes: “Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices (the partitioning of voices), remove the intonations (emotional and individualizing ones), carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, then cram everything into one abstract consciousness- and that is how you get dialectics” (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, 1986. P.147). In other words, dialectics is supremely monologic, because one voice drowns or suppresses all other voices. Bakhtin writes: “Dialogue is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically.”
The language is constituted of intersubjectivity and social communication in the dialogic process. In this sense, all languages are by nature dialogic. Just as dialogue precedes and shapes the language, the language, in its turn, precedes as well as shapes the individuality and subjectivity of its users. Autonomous individuality, Bakhtin maintains, is an illusion. “Consciousness is in essence multiple, Pluralia tantum…. Not another person remaining the object of my consciousness, but another autonomous consciousness standing alongside mine, and my own consciousness can exist only in relation to it” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 288).
Bakhtin divides the theory of interpretation into three categories. “Enclosure Within the Epoch” type of interpretation tries to see the world in terms set by the other periods and other cultures. The second type of interpretation he names “Modernization and Distortion”, which reads into the text the concerns and values of its own epoch, which are assumed to be especially wise and privileged. The literary theories of the twentieth century belong to this category of interpretation. Here we see how Bakhtin differs from the modern theorists who “pillage other cultures only for those themes useful for debates set by current American politics.” Each approach recognizes only one side of the potential dialogue, hence partial and lopsided. The best approach is “Creative Understanding”. It recognizes the otherness of the other without giving up its own “outsidedness”. One person is engaged in a special sort of dialogue with the other. As in all the dialogues, the result is likely to be the creation of insights that neither side had separately; in other words, each side realizes the ‘potential’ of the other in a way neither could have foreseen.
Bakhtin tries to understand the dialogic nature of language in terms of heteroglossia. The idea of heteroglossia is based on the premise that each language is composed of many languages. Each of these constituent languages is a product of a particular type of experience that people acquire by virtue of their association and interaction with their respective professions, ethnic groups, social classes, peer groups and regions. Each of these experiences has its own peculiar way of understanding and evaluating the world. Each of these languages, produced as they are from a variety of experiences, competes with the other languages for the privileged position in the novelistic discourse. When “dialogized heteroglossia” takes place in a novel, we are enabled to view one aspect of experience, which we are accustomed to treat in one language, through the eyes of another. Bakhtin writes in his essay, “Discourse in the Novel,”
Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel, is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions… double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized (Dialogic Imagination, 324).
Bakhtin calls dialogized heteroglossia a “relativized, Galilean consciousness” (Ibid, 327).
The concept of Chronotope is one of the lasting contributions of Bakhtin. The Chronotope literally means “Time-Space”. The Theory of Relativity of Einstein is based on the fact that time and space are inseparable; that time is the fourth dimension of space. Bakhtin was somewhat indebted to Einstein and some other scientific thinkers for developing his idea of the Chronotope. The Chronotope, for Bakhtin, is “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” In his influential essay titled “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1937-38), he writes:
In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. This intersection of axes and fusion of indicators characterizes the artistic chronotope. … The chronotope as a formally constitutive category determines to a significant degree the image of man in literature as well. The image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic (The Dialogic Imagination, 84-85).
The chronotope is the organizing centers for the events narrated in a novel, and at these centers the knots of narrative are tied and untied. To these centers belongs the meaning that shapes the narrative. The chronotope functions as the primary means for materializing time in space; it concretizes representation. “All the novel’s abstract elements- philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect- gravitate toward the chronotope and through it takes on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art to do its work” (The Dialogic Imagination, 256-257). Bakhtin goes on to say that the nature of the literary image, the language that produces that image and the words shaping that image all are chronotopic. According to him, the Chronotope of a book defines the relationship of that book’s artistic unity with the actual reality it tries to reflect, and for that reason, so far as a work of art or literature is concerned, its temporal and spatial aspects are not only linked to each other, they also determine the emotions and values we associate with that work of art or literature.
Bakhtin has made some important and original contributions to the study of high literary genres as well as the genres of low literature, such as “oratorical, publicistic, and journalistic”. He defines a genre as a way of seeing the world. Each high literary genre – poetry, drama, epic, fiction, etc. – has come into existence, through a long period of time, out of a particular way of knowing, experiencing, interpreting and evaluating the world. Each vision or habit of thought is capable of shaping a distinct form. He calls it the “form-shaping ideology.” The dialogic sense of truth, which is presented in a polyphonic and heteroglot novel, is one such form-shaping ideology. He avers that a work of literature will reveal its intrinsic meaning if it is approached in terms of the form-shaping ideology which has made it possible and contributed to its generic becoming. He writes in “Discourse in the Novel”:
Literary language – both spoken and written – although it is unitary not only in its shared, abstract, linguistic markers but also in its forms for conceptualizing these abstract markers, is itself stratified and heteroglot in its aspect as an expressive system, that is, in the forms that carry its meanings.
This stratification is accomplished first of all by the specific organisms called genres (Dialogic Imagination, 288).
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Bakhtin wrote his books and articles between the late twenties and the early seventies. The discovery of his real worth as a theorist and the emergence of his theories as viable models of interpretation have been gradual, but remarkably steady. Most of his seminal ideas on society, history, culture and, above all, on literature as a byproduct of the interaction of all these forces, lie dispersed in his many essays and book-length treatises the list of which has been supplied at the end of this article. He kept on refining and supplementing his ideas in the course of his career as a writer, which spanned more than four decades. One important reason for Bakhtin’s “gradual” popularity in the academic circles is his discursive style, the Gargantuan size of his oeuvres, his exasperating habit of stretching, and digging for, one concept until it merges into another concept, his generalizations and repetitiveness, his axiomatic claims that seem to be vague, his minting of neologisms to designate any new discovery he chances upon and his wide-ranging encyclopaedic references from all types of books written during the last three thousand years of the Western civilization. All of his socio-cultural-literary theories and neologisms are inextricably inter-connected in a bewildering network of references and cross-references, and they make any scholarly expedition naturally daunting. But in spite of all his apparent faults, Bakhtin is arguably one of the most consistent and profound thinkers of the twentieth century. Wayne C. Booth, in his Introduction to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, sums up Bakhtin’s contributions to literary theory and offers a valid reason for his being what he is. He writes:
(E)very thinker must pay the price every virtue, and I find that most of what look like weaknesses are the inevitable consequences of his strengths. If he is “vague,” so is every thinker who attempts to approach difficult and general concepts that stand for ultimate and thus ultimately elusive concerns. What is vague from a hostile point of view is wonderfully “suggestive” when we consider it from inside the enterprise. If he is repetitive, why should he not be, when what he is saying will surely not be understood the first, or third, or tenth time? When talking about truths like these, once said is not enough said, because no statement can ever come close enough and no amount of repetition can ever overstate the importance of elusive yet ultimate truth.
I can think of no critic of recent years… who more effectively performs that essential task of all criticism: prodding readers to think again about critical standards as applied to the various canons and anti-canons those standards lead to (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, xxvii).
Works Cited and Consulted:
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
[ Epic and Novel, From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel and Discourse in the Novel]
( Translated from Russian by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist . Edited by Michael Holquist ).
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. [Edited and Translated from Russian by Caryl Emerson. Introduction by Wayne C. Booth.]
Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8.
Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1984.
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Rabelais and His World.
[Translated from Russian by H.Iswolsky.
Foreword by Krystyna Pomorska. Prologue by Michael Holquist].
New York: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. “Bakhtin, M.M.”
Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism,
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