INTRODUCTION BEGINNING THE DIALOGUE: BAKHTIN AND OTHERS
Dialogics enables the differential unification of ecology and feministics that can produce a new perception of the relationship of humanity and world, and a praxis that works toward the decentering dealienation of andro/anthropocentric humanism and the reintegrative, affirmative dissolution of the intellectual isolation of “radical” skepticism. (Murphy 1991, 40)
At base, Bakhtin was an intentionalist and a neohumanist — revisionist, quirky, at times provocatively inconsistent, but on balance the textual record indicates it is with “poststructuralism's nemesis, a banal humanism” […] that Bakhtin's values lay. His thought can be applied to other movements and ideologies, but it should not be considered foundational for them. (Emerson 1994, 296, emphasis hers)
Situating the work of Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to contemporary literary, theoretical, and philosophical discourse is in no way a straightforward proposition. A body of scholarship central to the main concerns of contemporary thought yet capable of generating the contrary evaluations evidenced in our two epigraphs will not be classified according to any easily recognizable schemata. At the same time, feelings have run high. It has seemed at times that there was no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction1 and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term.2 That Bakhtin's work has inspired such diverse responses, both “faithful” to him and antagonistic to each other, no doubt reveals important characteristics of his work, but, as Bakhtin himself recognized, there is no speech act that is not also the statement of an attitude toward the world and a declaration of the speaker's own ideological presuppositions in relation to the interlocutor (DN. 271; MPL, 105; Morson and Emerson 1990, 134, 312; Gardiner 1992, 85). Thus it is inevitable that dialogues initiated by his work are conditioned by the positions of his various addressees. It would be unrevealing, however, to conclude from this discussion that Bakhtin is merely a cipher for expressing the ideologically motivated views of his adherents, for he too speaks from a unique subject position. We are not simply left with the false dichotomy between crediting Bakhtin with having “always already anticipated and surpassed the most significant theoretical trends of recent decades” (Shepherd 1989, 91) and establishing what Carl Rubino has termed a “Bakhtinian philology” — a description that denotes not only intellectual rigor but also a search for origins that would seek to police Bakhtin's unwieldy corpus (1993, 141–142; see also Pechey 1989, 44–46).
What then can be said with reasonable certainty? Bakhtin was certainly not a feminist, a deconstructionist, or a poststructuralist (though he was a post-Saussurean). Such labels represent cultural anachronisms and ideological impossibilities in the world of Soviet life and thought. Throughout his work, he remained, in a certain sense, a humanist, to the extent that all his thought was founded upon the concrete interactions taking place between human beings (Emerson 1984, xl). Yet he rejected both the bourgeois individualism and the fetish of the undivided consciousness for which humanism often stands (Holquist 1990, 53, 90; Emerson 1984, xxi: Morson and Emerson 1990, 50–51, 221–222). Indeed, for Bakhtin, consciousness is always linguistically — and hence ideologically and socially — constituted.3 It is internally dialogized and hence divided (Todorov 1984, 30; Morson and Emerson 1990, 59–60, 157–163, 200–201; Gardiner 1992, 28–29). Thus Bakhtin's humanism is far less removed from the concerns of postmodern thought than the label might lead one to believe. And while Bakhtin never mentions feminism, deconstruction, or poststructuralism per se, his work not only has the capacity to make a genuine contribution to these areas, but, as David Shepherd has shown in the case of reader-response criticism, it can also serve as a valuable corrective to their moments of monologism and undertheorization (1989). With this in view, the remainder of this essay will be given over to a brief examination of the relation between Bakhtin, feminism, deconstruction, and the poststructuralist analysis of discourse, as pioneered by Michel Foucault. We will then go on to examine in more depth the importance of Bakhtin's work to the study of the classics, as well as, in less detail, its already well-documented significance for the criticism of modern literatures, before ending with a brief survey of the essays in the present volume.
In some ways, the question of Bakhtin and feminism presents one of the most difficult cases, for while Bakhtin is clearly interested in the philosophical and linguistic issues relevant to both deconstruction and poststructuralist discourse theory, he is almost completely silent on the topic of gender (Shepherd 1993b, xxviii). The closest he ever comes to discussing objects of feminist concern is his praise of fertile feminine body in the carnivalesque tradition of Rabelais and His World. But Bakhtin appears to be singularly unaware of the potential such images have for destructive misogynist satire in place of carnival's celebratory gaiety (see Byrd 1987). That said, Bakhtin's work has proven to be a very productive tool for feminist theory. His contributions can be roughly divided into three areas: ethics, carnival, and dialogism. The early ethical writings have really only started to enter the consciousness of his non-Russian audience during the past five or six years. Their impact has thus far been more muted than that of the better-known texts. Nonetheless, Nancy Felson has already developed a model that uses Bakhtin's concepts of “I-for-another”, “another-for-me”, and “I-for-myself” to examine not only the dissymmetries of agency between men and women in ancient Greek texts but also women's capacity for resistance to these assymetrical relations and their struggles to wrest a realm of intersubjective commitment from the zero-sum, agonistic realm of Greek masculinist culture (1993). Felson continues that work with her essay in the present volume. Similarly, Carol Adlam has shown how “Bakhtin's insistence [in his early work] on the unfragmented, socio-historic, material self […] enriches feminist theories which have become trapped in a view of language systems which ultimately deny the subject any sort of autonomy, or simply deny the subject” (1997a, 156).
Carnival's focus on fertility, by contrast, begins with an orientation toward the life-giving maternal body that feminists have not been slow to pick up on. The female body with its leakages and powers of generation thus becomes in the work of critics such as Mary Russo (1986), Clair Wills (1989), Ruth Ginsburg (1993), and Marroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed (1993) an unassimilable moment of unruly resistance to a monologizing and specularizing discourse of phallic authority. In the process Bakhtin's work is itself often supplemented, expanded, and corrected by the work of such contemporary feminist theoreticians of carnival and hysteria as Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (1986). This is the direction Sharon Nell has taken in her analysis of the powers of the feminine in Flaubert's Salammbô (1995) and which she continues with her examination of the work of the rococo poet, Alexis Piron. in the present volume.
Finally, there is a substantial body of work on the relation between feminism and dialogism. To a certain extent, it is artifical to separate dialogism from either carnival or the early works on ethics, inasmuch as a certain degree of dialogical interplay is essential for comprehending both carnival's relativization of existing discursive hierarchies and the ethical texts' ideal of answerability (Hirschkop 1989, 34). Yet while all three conceptual areas are clearly cognate, they are not identical. Indeed, there already exist at least two books wholly devoted to the topic of feminism and dialogism, Dale M. Bauer's Feminist Dialogics (1988) and a volume she and S. Jaret McKinstry edited, Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic (1991). Work in this area revolves around three main axes. First, there is the position that novelistic language as Bakhtin defines it describes a phenomenon very similar to ‘“feminine language’, as elaborated by French and American feminist theorists”. On this view, the feminine writer, inasmuch as she always writes in the shadow of the name of the father, must use a voice which is not her own and thus one that is of necessity internally dialogized, since it must feature at least two opposed accents in every word, the patriarchal and the feminine (Herndl 1991, 7, 11). Second, there is the argument that women's language has never occupied the position of authoritative discourse and so must necessarily promote dialogic relations if it is to be heard. It cannot become authoritative discourse because it is always already decentered (Herndl 1991, 10–11). Third, there is the example of the French feminists themselves, who have developed particular writing styles. Thus, a writer such as Cixous in “The Laugh of the Medusa” seeks simultaneously to break language as an instrument of phallocentric repression and yet retain its addressivity, its orientation toward an audience. Her goal is not to exclude or dictate to her readers but to seek their active participation in the construction of new, liberatory forms of signification (Murphy 1991, 47; Cixous 1981). Similarly, Luce Irigaray's “theoretical stance has always been that of a respondent or questioner”. Her essays do not lay down a series of immutable truths but respond to other texts' pretensions to monologic authority, posing questions which reveal their internal repressions, their blind spots, and their double talk about the questions of gender, property, and selfhood (Schwab 1991, 57–61).
The dialogue between Bakhtin and feminism has thus been fruitful, and one not limited to any single aspect of the Bakhtinian corpus. It may well be the case that the great Russian theorist never dreamed that his work might be put to such uses. And these interactions have certainly caused consternation among both Bakhtin's Russian advocates and some of his more conservative American expositors. But there is no reason to believe they will not continue or that this dialogue should or could be brought to a premature end (Shepherd 1993b, xvii–xxix).
Bakhtin's relation to deconstruction is in many ways more straightforward. Like Derrida, Bakhtin eschews any concept of a transcendental signified capable of policing the borders between dominant (or what Bakhtin calls authoritative) and subordinate discourses (Gardiner 1992, 90). Disciplinary taxonomies of discourse and power that seek to confine different speech genres4 to their specified realms, so as to forestall any loss of discursive authority that would result from their generic “impurity”, are seen as factitious and provisional by both (Pechey 1989, 40–41; Holquist 1990, 71; Derrida 1980). However much a given official or privileged form of speech seeks to assert its own monological privilege, it is in fact always already constituted out of the same dialogic relations as gave rise to its unofficial, centrifugal other. Indeed, it is constituted out of dialogicrelations with that other, and so must ultimately rest its claim to authority on that very other whose existence as a possible interlocutor it must (to claim the privileges of monologism) forever deny (see DN, 276, 279, 281; PDP, 120; PSG, 91, 93; Todorov 1984, x; Morson and Emerson 1990, 49, 146, 131). As such, any given set of discursive oppositions in which privilege is asserted is always reversible and so potentially able to be undone.5 Yet, while Derrida deals almost exclusively in texts, and deconstruction's American proponents have often become so absorbed in problems of rhetoric that any connection to lived experience or social life has seemed tenuous at best, Bakhtin's project always remains grounded in the social life of words and their speakers. It never allows itself to be reduced to a formalism, but instead, through its relentless contextualization, encourages what Michael Gardiner has termed the “‘popular deconstruction’ of official discourses and ideologies” (1992, 2–3). At the same time, Bakhtin's rejection of dogmatism never slides into the relativism in which so much postmodern discourse and some practitioners of deconstruction have become mired (138) — though it would perhaps be unjust to include within this latter group Derrida, whose more recent work has if anything become more politically committed, although not in any naive or simplistic fashion (1993).
We will finish this section on Bakhtin and contemporary theory by examining the affinities between Bakhtin's formulation of the problem of speech genres and Foucault's concepts of the “archive” and of “orders of discourse”. With one notable exception (Brandist 2000), little work has been done on the relation between these two central intellectual figures of the twentieth century other than to note their seeming lack of contiguity (Pechey 1989, 52). But, in the case under consideration, both thinkers begin with a common problem and from there move to solutions that, while not identical, are sufficiently similar to be profitably compared. The common problem stems from a lacuna in Saussurean linguistics: its inability to describe discursive units which do not rise to the level of abstract linguistic rules, or langue, but are sufficiently regular as not to fall within the realm of that pure spontaneity Saussure attributes to parole (PSG, 81 n. f). This gap between monolithic regularity and pure spontaneity, in turn, is one of the major factors preventing Saussurean linguistics from ever being able to give an adequate account of historical change, since there is no way of mediating this opposition between the unchanging and the patternless. In Foucault's case, the perception of this problem led to the establishment of the concept of the archive:
Between the language [langue] that defines the system of constructing possible sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words [paroles] that are spoken, the archive defines a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipulated. […] between tradition and oblivion it reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and undergo regular modification. (Foucault 1972, 130; see also Kremer-Marietti 1985, 148–149)
The archive then is that system of empirical regularities between a given set of utterances that makes them comparable to one another, assigning them to the same social and discursive space. Such regularities are not precisely linguistic but rather refer to that series of canons operative within a given context that allow an utterance to be recognized as a proposition within physics, philosophy, literature, or law and so be adjudicated by the standards that apply within those realms. The positive, regulatory functions that give rise to the archive and determine “what can and cannot be said in given situations” are known as the orders of discourse, which Michael Gardiner notes recall Bakhtin's speech genres (1992, 81–82). Speech genres are the codified, and thus repeatable. forms of utterances, which are unique and unrepeatable. A given utterance can never be repeated because context is constitutive of utterance and context is always changing, even in the case of verbatim repetition or self-quotation. Nevertheless, any given utterance is filled with repeatable forms that go well beyond simple lexical choice and grammatical regularity. These forms are necessary in order to situate a given utterance in its correct social, professional, and/or disciplinary field or archive (PSG, 60; Morson and Emerson 1990, 291; Frow 1986, 67). Bakhtin's concept, in spite (or rather because) of its more prosaic formulation, is in at least two ways superior to Foucault's. First, the notion of speech genres explicity includes all levels of language from the homeliest and most intimate to the grandest and most authoritative (PSG, 61–62, 87, 95, 97; Morson and Emerson 1990, 275). Foucault's account on the other hand seems clearly to privilege scientific and philosophical forms of discourse without ever fully arguing for the distinction on which this privilege rests. Second, only Bakhtin makes explicit the relationship between speech genres and historical change. He sees each new unrepeatable utterance as adding a new piece of connotative information to its repeatable forms, and while it is true that any given utterance's modification of the semantic or grammatical field may be infinitesimal, it is precisely the dialectic between the unrepeatable contexts of language and its stable forms that makes change at the level of langue and not simply at the level of parole thinkable in terms other than catastrophe or inexplicable rupture (PSG, 65).
BAKHTIN AND CLASSICAL STUDIES
The works of Greco-Roman antiquity always occupied an important place in Bakhtin's work. Trained (whether formally or, as the latest biographical information seems to suggest, informally or largely autodidactically: see Hirschkop 1999, 111–114) as a classicist at the University of St. Petersburg, he often returned to these authors in his writings, even when his interests led him to the study of literatures produced at times and places far removed from classical Greece and Rome (Clark and Holquist 1984, 30–34; Emerson 1993, 123–137).
The value of Bakhtin's work for classicists in the West has only begun to be appreciated since the mid-eighties, after the publication of the majority of his texts in English.6 This appreciation looks set to grow as the contents of the new scholarly edition of his work in Russian become available in English. In particular, the first of the planned seven volumes to appear (actually volume 5) contains a number of previously unpublished and untranslated works from the 1940s to the 1960s, including “Satire”, an article commissioned in 1940 for the never-published tenth volume of the Soviet Literary Encyclopaedia. This overview of the development of satire from its ancient roots to its modern European forms (complete with obligatory nods towards the achievements of Soviet satire), notwithstanding the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia article form and the impossibility of elaborating a sustained theoretical argument, offers further evidence of the extent of Bakhtin's acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature, and of the role he granted it in his magisterial accounts of literary history (see Bakhtin 1996, 11–38, esp. 15–25).7
The path that this appreciation has followed to date is substantially similar to, if somewhat later than, that taken by the humanities in general. It begins with expressions of interest in Bakhtin's model of carnival culture, as developed in Rabelais and His World, and only gradually takes account of the rest of Bakhtin's oeuvre. An early isolated application of Bakhtin's formulations on carnival applied to the epinician poet Pindar occurs in Pindar's Art: Its Tradition and Aims (Newman and Newman 1984), and is discussed in Nigel Nicholson's essay in this volume. For the most part, however, the first references to Bakhtin are by scholars concerned with comic genres, particularly the comedies of Aristophanes, Juvenal's Satires and Petronius' Satyricon. Indeed, some of these early preferences are still reflected in the present volume with McGlathery's essay on Petronius, Miller's on Juvenal, and Platter's on Aristophanes. With time and the greater dissemination of Bakhtin's writings on the construction of character, the novel, and linguistics, new areas of research have opened up. These range from assessments of Bakhtin's work on the chronotope of the Greek romance to novel readings of serious authors who might reasonably be supposed to stand outside the Bakhtinian pantheon (represented in this volume by Nancy Felson's analysis of character interaction in Euripides). Other work has examined lyric poetry, particularly that of Catullus, whose evident literariness would seem to locate him far from the carnival world of gay relativity. While it is not desirable to produce an exhaustive annotated bibliography in this introduction, it will be of value to sketch some of the paths that have been taken.
Studies of carnivalesque aspects of ancient classical literature have concentrated on Greek authors and on the tendency of Greek comic genres to upset the structures of everyday life by mockery, inversion, and parody. They have also investigated the origins of this activity and have identified striking parallels in the rituals and institutions of ancient mediterranean societies. Kenneth Reckford has argued persuasively for the connection between comic obscenity and the religious context in which it arises (1987, 461–67), linking this idea to the carnival culture described by Bakhtin (384). Anthony Edwards has contextualized such observations to account for the fact that folk laughter, which is so liberatory in Bakhtin's medieval model, is not necessarily oppositional in Aristophanic comedy (1993). Simon Goldhill also sees the difficulty of applying Bakhtin's concept of folk laughter to late-fifth-century Athenian democratic culture, with its complex and often contradictory ideological make-up (1991). Ralph Rosen emphasizes the historical genealogy of laughter, as he documents the status of iambic poetry, with its prominent abusive element and strong folk base, as an antecedent of the “carnivalized” laughter of literary writers like Aristophanes (1988). Gregory Dobrov has studied the complexities of the comic poet's voice and its self-presentation in terms of dialogism, drawing in part on Paul Allen Miller's essay “The Dialogism of Lyric” (Dobrov 1995; Miller 1993). Charles Platter has emphasized the difference between Aristophanes and the folk tradition upon which his work rests (Platter 1993) and extends this approach in his essay in the present volume, where he argues that the most profitable approach to Aristophanes is to supplement Rabelais and His World with the techniques Bakhtin developed for analyzing the novel. In the same vein, Peter von Mollendorf has recently published the first monograph on Bakhtin and Aristophanes (1995), attempting to describe the chronotope of Aristophanic comedy and to bring a wide variety of Bakhtinian texts to bear on it.
Work on Latin comic genres has also been influenced by Bakhtin's work. Relihan sees his study of Menippean satire in its ancient form as a continuation of Bakhtin's sketchy (and relatively modern) treatment of the genre (1993). Siegmar Döpp has investigated the tradition of Saturnalia in Latin literature and connects it with Bakhtin's model of the carnivalesque (1987, 1993). Two essays in the present volume address the work of Latin comic authors: Daniel McGlathery's analysis of the “Widow of Ephesus” asserts the carnivalistic vision of Petronius' Satyricon, while Paul Allen Miller uses Rabelais' work to argue that Juvenalian satire is essentially anti-carnivalesque.
Other work in Classical studies has sought to explore the ramifications of Bakhtin's work for the ancient novel and for philosophy, as well as for genres that he either ignored (e.g. lyric poetry) or whose carnivalistic significance he deliberately downplayed (tragedy, epic). Steve Nimis (1994) and David Konstan (1994) have examined the ancient novel in the light of Bakhtin's work. Konstan contests Bakhtin's notion that linear development in the Greek novel is simply subordinated to the progressive movement of the characters through space, arguing that the complex itineraries of the ancient novel are an expression of the ongoing tests of the fidelity of the separated couple. Nimis extends the analysis of the novel beyond Bakhtin's discussion of its chronotope and situates it linguistically within the “prosaics” of a rapidly changing Hellenistic world. In philosophy Andrea Nightingale's recent Genres in Dialogue (1995) uses a Bakhtinian framework to show how Plato exploits generic interaction to create a space in which philosophy can exist (see also Rubino 1993).
Among studies of epic poetry John Peradotto's analysis of the Odyssey (1990) contests Bakhtin's characterization of the epic voice as hermetically sealed off from the present and essentially without dialogism. In this text, and in a later essay (1993), he shows how the fine structure of the poem reveals various centrifugal (anti-epic in Bakhtin's sense) forces at work in the Odyssey. Nancy Felson-Rubin (1993), too, sees a dialogical component at work in the Odyssey, as she argues for a relationship between Odysseus and Penelope that is non-hierarchical and unstable, based on a principle of like-mindedness in couples that is articulated by Odysseus early in the poem (see also Felson-Rubin 1994). In her contribution to the present volume Felson takes up several problems of Greek tragedy, another monological genre according to Bakhtin, in order to show how a Bakhtinian focus can open up unexplored aspects of the interaction between estranged couples. Likewise, in the tradition of Roman national epic, Jeffrey Carnes' essay in the present volume shows how the ambivalent presence of Achilles' son, Neoptolemus, opens Vergil's Aeneid to a thoroughgoing dialogization, both from within and without.
Although lyric poetry is almost wholly neglected by Bakhtin, apart from the reading of Pushkin which appears in his early works, several studies of Greek and Latin poetry make the case that this is an area worthy of exploration (see also Emerson 1993). Paul Allen Miller (1994) finds in the earliest traces of Greek lyric poetry the spirit of the camivalesque as part of the dialectic of praise and blame, articulated by Nagy (1976, 1990) and others. In this volume Nigel Nicholson, too, sees carnival in the epinician praise poetry of Pindar. Miller (1993) also shows how Bakhtin's work on genre and dialogue allows readers to explore the intergeneric relationship between the oral lyric poetry of Sappho 31 and the written lyric of Catullus 51, a poem which on the surface is a translation of Sappho, but which in fact presents a fundamentally different dialogic situation.
BAKHTIN AND MODERN LITERATURES
The trajectory which the application of Bakhtin to modern literatures has followed is so familiar as to make its rehearsal here unnecessary. Indeed, that trajectory has been punctuated by critical evaluations of the imbalances between the quantity (overwhelming) and the quality (on the whole somewhat less impressive) of the uses made of Bakhtin for literary ana-lysis. It is already over ten years since Ken Hirschkop spoke of the “domestication” of Bakhtin, the transformation of his terms and concepts into a mere extension of the already formidable array of instruments developed by literary criticism and, more recently, literary theory to dissect and describe an object whose identity remained, notwithstanding such minute scrutiny, remarkably stable (Hirschkop 1986). That domestication, although it has been resisted in some quarters, persists in more: carnival, dialogism, heteroglossia, and the rest continue to roll off the tongues, and out from under the keyboard-caressing fingers, of scholars and graduate students who find in them a useful analytical framework which does not in itself need to be interrogated. Such uses of Bakhtin are not, of course, by definition abuses, but at their worst they are banal and de trop, while even at their best they can sometimes make accusations of theoretical modishness difficult to deflect. At the very least, “using” or “applying” Bakhtin has become difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from “exploiting Bakhtin”, to use the title of a recent collection of essays in which sensitivity to this problem finds expression in a productively suspicious introduction and a shrewdly analytical overview of recent trends (see Renfrew 1997b and Adlam 1997b).
These shortcomings are not confined to work carried out by non-Russian Bakhtinians (a hideous substantive which encapsulates the actually or potentially degraded nature of its bearers' engagement with Bakhtin's work). In Bakhtin's homeland, too, even before its boom of the 1990s the Bakhtin industry's production of finely crafted pieces was always accompanied — as in other, notoriously wasteful, Soviet industries — by greater than necessary quantities of swarf (see Shepherd 1992 and 1996). But it is from Russia that the greatest impetus for a sea-change in our approach to Bakhtin is likely to issue. This is not because of any privileged access — whether practical-linguistic, or mystical-nationalistic — enjoyed by Russian scholars to the “truth” of Bakhtin, a truth which would be significantly shaped by his categorical assertion that he was not a literary scholar but a philosopher obliged by circumstance to adopt the pliable idiom of literary criticism (see Shepherd 1996, 145). Russian approaches are different, and are sometimes better by virtue of the different mediations attendant upon the specific institutional contexts in which they are pursued (for examples of recent Russian work, see Adlam et al. 1997 and Shepherd 1998). But the single most important development is the publication of Bakhtin's Collected Works, in which a small number of new texts will appear alongside newly edited, and in many cases very different, versions of those we have come to rely upon so heavily. This eagerly awaited scholarly venture will not provide us with all the answers to our outstanding questions about Bakhtin; but it will furnish us with a whole new set of hitherto unforeseen, and in some cases unwanted, questions. In particular, we will learn more about Bakhtin's sources, but also more about the ways in which they are (mis)recognized (for a foretaste, see Poole forthcoming). And as the new versions of his work become available in English, with an editorial apparatus and hinterland unfettered by hard or soft covers, we will have the opportunity to revise our imaginings of Bakhtin's “dialogical imagination”, to detect a hitherto underacknowledged rigour and consistency in his terminology, and to re-evaluate his intellectual affiliations (see Brandist and Shepherd 1998). Once this new phase of Bakhtin studies is properly under way, the topic of “Bakhtin and modern literatures” is unlikely to lose its actuality any more than is the theme of “Bakhtin and the classics”; but the corpus of applications, including those in this volume, which has developed under a regime at once muscular and flabby, may look grotesque indeed.
THE PRESENT VOLUME
Nancy Felson in our first essay continues her pioneering work using Bakhtin's ethical writings to produce feminist readings of ancient Greek literature. Deriving a model of intersubjective reciprocity from Bakhtin's essays Toward a Philosophy of the Act and “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, she uses this paradigm as a diagnostic tool to examine the failed marital relationships featured in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (405). Alcestis (438), and Medea (431). This Bakhtinian model allows Felson to produce precise formulations of the ways in which these relationships fail to offer the kind of ideal reciprocity found, most notably, in the Odyssey. Thus rather than simply presenting a reading that “discovers” that women were oppressed in ancient Greek culture — an uncontroversial claim in all but the most reactionary circles — Felson uses Bakhtin to create a model that argues that reciprocity was in principle possible and that therefore we must examine not simply the static fact of oppression but also the ways in which women were depicted as struggling, often without success, to achieve some form of gender symmetry. The struggle in individual cases may not be successful, but neither is the possibility of change foreclosed from the start. Women, according to this view, are not simply the passive victims of oppression but are active agents of resistance, seeking recognition of their own status as subjects. History according to this Bakhtinian ethical model remains fundamentally open, and this lack of a preordained, monological closure allows Felson to offer a feminist reading of Euripides that is both sensitive to the nuances of characterization, so that different women's struggles are presented differently, and possessed of significant political advantages, since resistance always remains a real possibility.
In “Novelistic Discourse in Aristophanes”, Charles Platter sketches the intellectual conditions under which Bakhtin's exclusion of Aristophanes makes sense. He argues that Bakhtin saw the classical period in mythical terms, characterized by a “harmonious interaction of the genres” in which literary genres do not intrude on one another. This reductive view of generic interaction is not tenable in the light of contemporary research on ancient Greek literature, but nevertheless helps to account for his attitude toward Aristophanic comedy. Platter continues by shifting the focus of the debate on Bakhtin and Aristophanes from the controversial question of comedy's origins in ritual to the fluid movement within the plays from one speech genre or language level to another, a subject concerning which there is no shortage of concrete material. The resulting double-voicedness of this tactic is an integral part of comic technique, as he shows with an examination of tragic parody in the Acharnians and a detailed analysis of a fragment from Aristophanes' lost play, the Daiteles. Platter argues that the sophisticated intertextuality employed by Aristophanes, together with his attempt to position his work as a master genre, the only one capable of comprehending all others, makes Aristophanic comedy an important predecessor of the novelistic consciousness Bakhtin describes.
“Victory Without Defeat? Carnival Laughter and Its Appropriation in Pindar's Victory Odes”, by Nigel Nicholson, presents what at first seems an oxymoron, a reading of the Pindaric ode as the site of carnival festivity. The victory ode is one of the highest, most aristocratic forms of ancient Greek literature. It was a form commissioned by wealthy patrons to celebrate athletic victories at one of the four Pan-Hellenic games, and its language is notoriously difficult and far removed from common speech. In short, the ode is everything carnival is not: official, aristocratic, and monoglot. Even so, Nicholson is not the first to suspect the presence of a carnivalesque element in the poems of Pindar. J. K. and F. S. Newman had in fact already produced a monograph on the subject (1984). Nicholson argues that, whatever the flaws of this work, the Newmans' initial intuition was correct. Indeed, one of the most fundamental areas in which the kinship between Pindar's encomiastic poetry and the tradition of carnival can be seen is in the word enkomion itself. For a komos was originally a festive procession that involved poetry, singing, and often drunken revelry. Thus komos is thought to represent the etymological root of comedy (komoidos) as well as of encomium. The song on such occasions might as easily turn to praise or blame depending on the direction the whims of the encomiasts took them. This of course is completely consonant with Bakhtin's notion that in ancient festive forms praise and blame were originally two sides of the same coin.
Nicholson's argument is that Pindar's choral odes manifest their carnivalizing heritage most prominently in the trope of cuckoldry. Bakhtin, of course, identifies the cuckold as one of the primary victims of carnival's uncrowning of established authority in its celebration of the triumph of the lower bodily stratum. Nicholson contends that, in the figure of the cuckold, a reduced form of carnival laughter is deliberately introduced into the odes as a means of establishing an aristocratic strategy for the poetic containment of disorder. By allowing the carnival spirit of the originary komos to appear within the restricted context of the athletic celebration, the ode permits the traditional claims of disorder both to be acknowledged and contained within the wider structure of an aristocratic and aesthetic hierarchy. Nicholson, however, recognizes that such a univocal reading risks being reductive. Thus, employing Jameson's concept of the double hermeneutic, he goes on to argue that while the express purpose of the inclusion of carnival disorder within the structure of the encomiastic ode may have been to inscribe that centrifugal moment within a larger centripetal form, nonetheless the utopian desire figured by the reduced laughter of this official carnival still points to a world beyond such attempts at historical closure.
Jeffrey S. Carnes' article, “Degenerate Neoptolemus: Praise Poetry and the Novelization of the Aeneid”, returns us to the Pindaric epinician poem, but now as seen within the context of epic. Carnes points out that Bakhtin's dismissal of epic poetry as monologic has long been thought problematic for post-Iliadic poetry. In his reading of Aeneid 2.518–58, Carnes goes beyond merely taking Bakhtin to task for his reductive reading of epic to identify specifically how Vergil creates a novelistic moment of heteroglossic dialogue by intertwining traditional epic discourse with a series of intertextual references to Pindar's Olympian 14 and Nemean 7. Such a moment of plurivocity, as recent Vergil criticism has recognized, is hardly unique to this passage. This search for further voices in the Aeneid, as Carnes notes, “is intimately linked to [the poem's] generic polymorphism”. What Bakhtin provides that traditional philological approaches do not is, first, a sophisticated model for mapping the signifying function of Vergilian intertextuality. The dialogic paradigm of novelistic discourse does not merely note references to different genres of discourse or reduce them to a factitious model of aesthetic unity. It allows us to see how these texts interact with and relativize one another, creating a complex literary artifact. Second, the Bakhtinian model allows us to see how Vergil juxtaposes two genres of discourse — each of which in its own ideal self-image aspires to monologic completion — so that their limited and contingent natures are exposed and ultimately surpassed. The hierarchy of genres and the privileging of certain poetic modes are thus radically called into question. Third, the Aeneid, as every student of literature knows, was on one level propaganda for the Augustan regime. At first blush, the creation of a heteroglot, novelized epic might well be seen as an anti-authoritarian gesture that is ultimately subversive of that intent. But, as Carnes points out, it was not in Augustus' interest to present himself as the founder of a new monological authority, but rather as the restorer of traditional freedoms. As such, a novelized epic might very well be that which would best serve his political ends. Thus Carnes and Bakhtin ultimately make us question whether dialogism and novelistic subversion might not themselves, under certain circumstances, serve as tools for the maintenance, rather than the subversion, of centers of power.
As Carnes invites us to rethink the nature of the Pindaric odes in the context of Vergilian epic, so Daniel B. McGlathery's paper, “The Tomb of Epic: Bakhtinian Parody and Petronius' Tale of the Widow of Ephesus”, invites us to rethink Vergilian epic in the context of the Satyricon. McGlathery's contention is twofold: first, that the tale of the Widow of Ephesus is filled with allusions to the Aeneid, and in some cases outright quotations; and second, that the function of those references is to parody the epic's, at least superficial, pretense to authoritative discourse. This latter task is fulfilled by bringing the lofty realm of epic into contact with the low world of the carnivalesque folk tale. The “Widow of Ephesus” tale is ideal for this purpose since it tells how a widow is saved from excessive grief by the entreaties of a young soldier and is at length convinced to eat, drink, and finally make love in her recently deceased husband's tomb. High seriousness here is converted into the triumph of the lower bodily stratum, as death is overcome by the forces of grotesque realism. In this context, the quotation of epic can only be seen as a form of parody that aligns the master genre with the very powers of death and high seriousness that the tale itself subverts. The tomb that becomes the love nest of the widow and the soldier is thus also the site where epic is buried only to be resurrected in the genres of the novel and the Mennipean satire.
The claims of carnival and the lower bodily stratum are, in turn, precisely the central concerns of Paul Allen Miller in his article, “The Otherness of History in Rabelais' Carnival and Juvenal's Satire, or Why Bakhtin Got it Right the First Time”. Miller notes that the book that first made Bakhtin's reputation in the West, Rabelais and His World, has come under increasing attack from two separate quarters: scholars of the French sixteenth century and professional Bakhtinians. Miller also notes that these attacks frequently have political overtones, since the most conservative scholars in each of these camps tend to be the least favorably disposed to Bakhtin's book on Rabelais. Likewise, while these two groups are nominally independent, they each find support for their own arguments in the work of the other. Miller sets out to answer these charges by showing, first, that the most serious arguments advanced by the seizièmistes against Bakhtin's book do not stand up to critical scrutiny and, then, that the validity of Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais can best be shown from a historical and comparative perspective by juxtaposing the carnivalesque adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in their openness to history and the other, with the closed world of Juvenalian satire. In particular, Miller shows that Richard Berrong (1986), Bakhtin's most stringent and influential detractor among professional scholars of sixteenth-century France, substantially misreads both Bakhtin and Rabelais. Miller's argument is thus double. On the one hand, Bakhtin's critics can be shown to be in error, and, on the other, the essential correctness of the Bakhtinian reading of Rabelais can be positively demonstrated. Consequently, any attempt to dismiss the Rabelais book must be based on a much more serious and profound reading of Bakhtin's actual text than has yet been essayed.
Sharon Diane Nell's “The Last Laugh: Carnivalizing the Feminine in Piron's ‘La Puce’” continues our engagement with French literature, but now from the rococo period. This essay also picks up on a theme first broached in Felson's article, Bakhtin's usefulness for feminist theory. But whereas Felson draws from the early ethical writings, Nell focuses specifically on the concept of carnival, starting from Bakhtin's observation that in “the literature of the rococo the gay positive tone of laughter is preserved. But everything is reduced to ‘chamber’ lightness and intimacy. The frankness of the marketplace is turned into privacy, the indecency of the lower stratum is transformed into erotic frivolity, and gay relativity becomes skepticism and wantonness” (RW, 119). She then goes on to examine how this rococo reduction was effected and in particular how this reduced carnival was used as a strategy of containment for women. In the process she notes the deep affinities recognized by authors from Catherine Clément to Mary Russo between carnival and certain traditionally marginalized aspects of women's cultural lives. Hysteria itself can be seen as a form of reduced carnival. Her reading of Alexis Piron's little-known rococo masteipiece “La Puce” shows how the reduced carnival of rococo is in turn deployed as a tool in the attempt to maintain a phallocratic and specular control of female sexuality, a tool, however, that on one level at least fails, since the girl at the end of the poem “wakes up”. Rococo carnival, thus, is shown not to be an insubstantial aristocratic amusement, as popular depictions of this literary period would lead one to believe, but the site of complex sexual, gender, and power negotiations at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Four articles undertake the study of texts written in English. Not only is this group relevant because of the new light it sheds on aspects of English- speaking cultures when examining them from the perspective of Bakhtin's writings; more interesting still is the confluence of socio-discursive practices in the English texts and in Bakhtin's theoretical accounts. José Lanters' “Carnivalizing Irish Catholicism: Austin Clark's The Sun Dances at Easter” re-examines Bakhtin's understanding of carnival in human consciousness. Clarke's novel — written in 1952 — is set in early medieval Ireland. It carnivalizes, rather than satirizes, the world it depicts, and thus it restores the continuity of a shattered narrative logic. The choice of subject is not accidental; it enables the writer to draw on analogies in criticizing his own oppressive, church-dominated Irish society. The title refers to an Irish superstition — rooted in pre-Christian origins — according to which the sun dances with joy on Easter morning, celebrating the renewal of life with the coming of spring. Dancing and the laughter of Irish folklore liberate participants from the established, hierarchical order represented by the Roman Catholic church, which hypocritically denounces amusement and worldly joy. Its language is “serious”, autocratic and monologic, intolerant of other voices, fearing that its authority would falter if challenged by competition. The carnival in the discourse of the novel debunks the arid and suffocating powers-that-be while celebrating the abundance and spontaneity of nature.
Christian Moraru argues that Bakhtin's dialogism is dependent on a linguistic, cultural and ideological conglomerate that includes various “others”. His article, “Reading the Other, Reading Other Readings: Bakhtin, Willa Cather, and the Dialogics of Critical Response”, considers Cather's novel My Antonia. Moraru's evaluation of this novel is undergirded by the dialogue between various interpretations of the text. In light of the fact that the author's canonical status is still subject to debate, Moraru's Bakhtinian method is particularly productive. He studies the hermeneutic differences — consequences of formulating the otherness that the novel embodies — which the readings of My Antonia proclaim. Cather's own position in her environment was that of an eccentric, marginal figure. Her celebration of her own otherness rubs against the alterity of the interpretive voices of her writing which produce a “readerly heteroglossia”.
“Difference and Convention: Bakhtin and the Practice of Travel Literature” by Stacy Burton looks at heteroglossia and dialogue in travel narratives. Travel literature occupies an ambiguous position on the border between fact and fiction. Narratives of this type frequently accommodate and disguise repressive discourses. Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia offers a means to problematize travel accounts under whose smooth surface discordant discourses enmesh and reshape each other. Bakhtin's method and concepts help Burton to expose the rigid and repressive code intrinsic in such sets of binary opposition as subject/object, European/other and inside/ outside, typical of the assumptions made in travel literature. The dialogical understanding of otherness conflicts with the traveler-narrator's impulse to produce a monologic, authoritative vision. The article raises the question whether postcolonial is also postmodern, and examines travel narratives by women and experimental travel texts by men.
Dean McWilliams applies Bakhtin's analysis of the novel to the genre of film in “Bakhtin in Brooklyn: Language in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing”. McWilliams argues that literary prose has ceased to provide the most significant narratives by the end of the twentieth century: television and film have assumed this role. He considers a Bakhtinian analysis to be highly beneficial as film provides the ultimate carnival in which semiotic codes are transformed. McWilliams is primarily interested in the function of language in film, an area which has hitherto failed to be in the focus of attention of film critics. The film Do the Right Thing figures a distinctive form of carnival in its portrayal of a day in the life of a black community in Brooklyn, New York. The community is distinctive in its use of various dialects of English and foreign languages; McWilliams considers the role of these as discourses of power. Applying Bakhtin brings a better understanding of Spike Lee's orchestration of his characters' voices.
This volume arises from a conference under the same title held at Texas Tech University in January 1993. It was the twenty-seventh in a series of annual symposia sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature. Thanks are due to the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Jane Winer, the Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, Otto Nelson, and the Director of International Affairs and Co-director of the Conference, Idris Rhea Taylor. A debt of gratitude is also owed to Donald R. Haragan, then Provost and now President of Texas Tech University, Peder G. Christiansen, Chair of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures, Wendel Aycock, Chair of the Department of English, and Norwood Andrews, Director of the Program in Comparative Literature. Invaluable aid was also provided by the Department of Geosciences, the Russian Club, and the Classical Society. We wish to thank Brandon Wester for his work on the index. Our heartfelt gratitude is offered to all who assisted us with this project. Without their support, it would not have been possible.
NOTES
1. See Eaglelon 1982, 74–86; White 1984, 123–146; discussion in Hirschkop 1989, 2; and Pechey 1989, 47. For categorical rejections of this view, see Morson and Emerson 1990. 67 and Emerson 1994, 294 n. 6.
2. Hirschkop 1989, 20. See also Emerson's description of the postcommunist Russian reception of Bakhtin's work in relation to the classics, particularly T. G. Malchukova's comments on Bakhtin's understanding of “the task to which an aristocracy of the spirit is called amid the democratic majority”, and V. E. Khalizev's evaluation of Bakhtin as a classicizing critic who had “faith […] in a stable authoritative tradition; belief that existence is accessible to rational cognition […] and an acknowledgement that order, measure and harmony, and the middle way are among life's highest values” (1993, 129–130). For an up-to-date survey of the state of Bakhtin criticism based on the analytical database maintained at the University of Sheffield's Bakhtin Centre, see Adlam forthcoming; for the database and related information, see URL http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/A-C/bakh/bakhtin.html.
3. See Todorov 1984, 17–18, 32; FM, 7–8, 14: MPL, 12–15, 26, 33–38; Morson and Emerson 1990, 200–203; Gardiner 1993, 12. For an analogous position, see the work of Bakhtin's Russian contemporary, A. R. Luria (1976, 9).
4. On “speech genres” and the social stratifications they imply, see DN, 271–272; PSG, 64; MPL, 19–20; and Frow 1986, 67–68.
5. See Derrida's famous thumbnail sketch of deconstruction in Positions (1972, 56–57).
6. For a critique of the tendency in Classics to place classical antiquity “out of nature”, i.e. inaccessible to dialogic interrogation, see Rubino 1993.
7. On the project under way at the Bakhtin Centre to publish an Russian and English version of the Collected Works in electronic form, see Brandist and Shepherd 1998.
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