surdulescu. the bakhtin school

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Surdulescu, Radu (2002) Mikhail Bakhtin and the Formalist Theories in Form, Structure, andStructurality in Critical Theory,Universitatea din Bucureti.

In the later period of the mainstream Russian formalists activity, another school of criticism, led by

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), shared some of their concerns, at the same time attempting to

reconcile formalism with a socio-historical approach. Bakhtins writings aroused less interest in hisactive years than they were to receive later on when the time of formalism was long overdue. His

stature has risen highest in critical milieus especially in the last 3-4 decades, that is since his studies

were published (some of them for the first time) in Soviet Russia and were translated in the main

Western languages. It is hard to assess whether his spectacular late career is due in the first place to

the innovatory nature of his concepts and critical analyses or to his sensational biography that came

to be known to the public as late as the 1960s. Indeed, there were quite a few spicy detective story

ingredients attached to it: a bone disease in his youth which led to the amputation of one leg, his

internment in a Soviet death camp in the 1930s - a sentence that was then commuted to internal

exile, his de facto disappearance from public life for several decades (which may have saved his life

during the Stalin years), the discovery by the literary students in the late fifties that the author of the

reputable book on Dostoevsky was not dead and lived somewhere in the provinces, his low profileto the very end despite the growing popularity his studies were enjoying.

Bakhtin did not belong to either of the formalist circles in Soviet Russia, but was claimed by

some of their members, including Jakobson, to be in their ranks. In actual fact what his studies do

share with formalism is the attempt to define the specific devices which articulate a literary genre as

different from others: Bakhtin was first and foremost the theorist of one genre, the novel, which he

contrasted with poetry (as in music polyphonic compositions differ from monophonic ones); also he

was interested in the literary structure per se, analyzing its dynamic function within the historical

traditions, particularly its subversive roles. Yet, his field of inquiry extends well beyond the

formalist concerns, as he researched not only the literary language, but also other socio-ideological

forms of expression, such as the carnivalesque one. The sweeping cultural preoccupations of this

literary theorist and philosopher of language explain why he was described in turns as a formalist,

Marxist, phenomenologist, proto-deconstructionist, or even as an orthodox Christian militant by

some Slavists.

Bakhtin could not have been a Marxist proper, although here and there he criticized the

formalists for neglecting the sociological factors. His main principles and concepts surpass by far

the reductionist determinism of classical Marxist tenets. However he associated himself with two

avowed Marxists, Valentin Voloshinov and Pavel Medvedev, and the paternity of several orthodox

Marxist articles is hotly disputed even today by commentators between the three authors: one of

these studies is a sharp attack against the Formalist School (the 1928 book The Formal Method in

Literary Scholarship, written either by Medvedev or by Bakhtin), which may have contributed to

the definitive banning of the movement.Out of Bakhtins plentiful and seminal contributions to the philosophy of language and of

culture as well as to literary theory we will focus our attention, within the framework of our study,

on his insights which are more closely connected with the formalist issues, such as the dialogic

mode and the uses of language in prose writings, particularly in the novel.

In the first phase of his career Bakhtins interests were mainly retained by the complex

relationships between ethics and aesthetics, between self and other: he propounded a philosophy of

the act which relied on Kantian categories. His studies written in the second phase of his activity

(about 1924-1930) are hallmarked by the discovery of the dialogic potential of the word and the

polyphonic mode of writing. His cornerstone study, Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, came out

in 1929.

In the following two decades, despite the obstacles which life in an entirely ideologizedcountry set before an independent intellectual like Bakhtin, he produced the most substantial

concepts for a prosaic description of the novel, such as novelistic consciousness and the


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chronotope. Discourse in the Novel, From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse, and Forms

of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel were written in that period. THE CHRONOTOPE is

Bakhtins term for the specific sense of space and time (in other words the social and the historical

components) which characterizes every genre, according to its specific ideology. If in the ancient

works the social element played a background role, in the novel it has a direct, molding impact

upon the characters: they and the society influence and change each other as it happens in actual

history, and this accounts for Bakhtins interest in the dialogic consciousness of the novel.Another direction of investigation which he pursued in the 1930s belongs to the sociology of

culture: in Rabelais and His World, a book which could be published only in 1965, Bakhtin

celebrated the joyously ambivalent carnivalesque mood in Rabelaiss writings, indirectly

referring to the life conditions and the constraints in an authoritarian state: this form of social

manifestation, having its own norms and rituals, subverts the official ideology, overturns the

established hierarchies, mixes up the opposites and provides an escape valve for discontent. Upon

literary genres, such as the novel, the carnivalesque mood, with its insistence on body and bodily

functions, has a molding effect, resulting in a parodic or grotesque style. Owing to his emphasis on

the socially liberating role of laughter and the carnivalesque forms of manifestation, typical of low

culture, Bakhtin is claimed today by the advocates of cultural studies as one of their predecessors.

In the last two decades of his life, the Russian scholar revised and added some earlierstudies, and returned to the broader philosophical themes of his early writings, extending his

concerns to the humanities and the interpretation theory in general.

Critics have identified three overall concepts which subsume Bakhtins theoretical findings.

The first one is PROSAICS, as opposed to poetics: the term, coined by his commentators, describes

his mistrust of theoretism (i.e. the belief that everything can be explained through wide-ranging

systems, such as Saussureanism, Freudianism, Marxism, formalism), the importance he attaches to

small, prosaic facts of life instead of the dramatic, catastrophic events, and as concerns the

novelistic genre, the emphasis he lays on its complexities: the novel cannot be analyzed with

reference to tropes, like poetry, but insisting on its dialogic nature. DIALOGUE, the second global

term, refers to the fact that authentic consciousness can be revealed only by presenting the

interaction of at least two voices: truth resides in conversation rather than in a set of sentences. The

third basic concept in Bakhtins thought is UNFINALIZABILITY: in dialogic prose the world

appropriately appears as an unfinalizable, open, creative space; in his Dostoevsky study Bakhtin

states that

/n/othing 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 be in the future.1

With Bakhtin, not only is the literary work open (Umberto Ecos opera aperta), or writerly (le texte

scriptible, with Roland Barthes), but the world it creates is never to be finished.

The most seminal finding of Bakhtins research as concerns the novel is its polyphonic (ordialogic) nature. In order to understand the meaning in which the Russian scholar used these terms,

it is yet necessary to dwell first on the related concept of HETEROGLOSSIA 2 (REZNORECHIE).

The term heteroglossia belongs to linguistic theory, just as polyphony does to fictional studies.

It is meant to reveal the way in which meaning is produced by discourse through the use of a social

diversity of speech types, as Bakhtin observes in his renowned 1935 essay Discourse in the

Novel3. There are numberless discursive strata in every language, such as

social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of

generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, .... languages that

1 M. Bakhtin,Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 166.2 From Gk. heteros (other, different), andglossa (tongue, language).

3M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel, in J. Rivkin, M. Ryan, Literary Theory, 32. Hereafter cited parenthetically inthe text.


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serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour, for, says Bakhtin, each day

has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphasis. (32)

It is even possible to speak of a family jargon, with its special vocabulary and its unique

accentual system, as in the case of the Irtnevs, in Tolstoy. At any moment in history, language is

heteroglot from top to bottom. Bakhtins dynamic perspective on language can be described as in

vivo, a Romanian scholar has observed, in contradistinction to the in vitro view of the formalists

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.

In Discourse... Bakhtin claims that some of the best instances of heteroglossia at work can

be found in the English comic novel, where there is a re-processing of almost all the levels of

literary language, both conversational and written, that were current at the time, (36) from

parliamentary eloquence, to the language of the speculators dealings. For instance, in one of the

excerpts he supplies from Dickenss Little Dorrit, the speech of another (in a highly ceremonious

tone) is inserted for the sake of parody into the authors discourse, in a concealed form, that is

without any formal markers such as quotation marks. Bakhtin observes that this is not a mere case

of anothers speech in the same language, but anothers utterance in a language that is itself other

to the author. (38)

He commends mostly those writers and literary forms which exemplify heteroglossia, that

is a Galilean language consciousness: Dostoevsky as compared with Tolstoy, the novel versuspoetry. After a long tradition of prose writings of a monologic type (revealing a Ptolemaic

consciousness), such as the Greek and chivalric romance, the pastoral, the sentimental novel,

heteroglossia, with its subversive and liberating potential, began to be foregrounded in prose with

Rabelais and Cervantes, reaching a climax in Dostoevskys novels.

Although the Russian theorist did comment on the place of heteroglossia in the novelistic

genre, the proper term that describes the dialogic nature of the novel is POLYPHONY (a concept

derived from music) or DIALOGISM as such. Actually heteroglossia is a linguistic reality, whereas

polyphony is just a possible (and desirable) fictional mode, to be contrasted with the monologic

one. The first detailed references to novelistic polyphony appeared in Problems of Dostoevskys

Poetics; yet Bakhtin reformulated the concept several times in his studies.

Polyphonic novels, such as Dostoevskys, make up a new novelistic genre, according to theRussian theorists initial views. In this kind of fiction the reader hears several contesting voices,

which are not subject to an attempt at unification on the authors part: these voices are engaged in a

dialogue in which no point of view is privileged, no final word is heard. The author stands on the

same level as his heroes, relinquishing his surplus of vision. He knows nothing more than they do

and may be surprised by their words at any point:

Dostoevsky brings into being not voiceless slaves ... but free people, capable of standing alongside

their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him,

states Bakhtin5.Conversely, in monologic novels, such as Tolstoys, the general perspective is solely

the authors one, and the characters points of view are orchestrated in accordance with hispositions. (We can notice that there is a slight resemblance between Tomashevskys concept of skaz

in the narrative, and Bakhtins polyphony.)

In the polyphonic, non-Aristotelian plot, despite the plurality of independent and unmerged

consciousnesses, the unity of "the given event (5) is preserved, but this is a dialogic unity, based

on the coexistence of spiritual diversity. The dialogic process is basically unfinalizable, unlike the

closed product of the monologic whole: each thought of Dostoevskys heroes looks like a rejoinder

in a never-ending tense debate.

One particular aspect of polyphony is DOUBLE-VOICING - a case when in a single

utterance two voices are meant to be heard as interacting: the words should be understood as if they

4Mihaela Irimia, The Stimulating Difference (Bucharest: University of Bucharest, 1995), 75.

5Problems ..., 6. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.


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were spoken with quotation marks. This mode of speaking reflects the fact that, according to

Bakhtin, the language of communication is never free from the intentions of the other people

socially involved in an event. Single-voiced verbal constructions can be found only in professional

discourse, not in rhetorical or fictional language. In the cases of passive double-voicing the two

voices may seem to be in agreement or in disagreement (as in parodic speech); when resistance or

tension between them appear, the double-voicing is active: such is the status of the word with a

loophole, in which there is included a statement, its rebuttal, the response to the rebuttal, and so on,possibly ad infinitum.

EMBEDDING is a specific type of double-voicing form, in which the heros perspective on

himself is infiltrated by someone elses words about him.(209) Bakhtin illustrates this with a

scene from Dostoevskys novel, Poor People, in which the protagonist is writing a letter to a

woman, confessing he lives in a kitchen; his sideward glance and his recoiling as he thinks about

her negative reaction to this embarrassing news are easy to imagine: his discourse is penetrated by

the words of another and therefore it becomes distorted.

If inProblems... Bakhtin claimed that Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel,

later on he slightly altered his views, stating that dialogism is more or less present in all novels,

especially in those imbued with a carnivalesque mood. Thus in Discourse..., he defined the novel

as a diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity ofindividual voices, artistically organized.(32) There is polyphony even in some non-fictional prose,

such as the early Platonic dialogues where Socrates appears not so much as the teacher, the owner

of truth, but rather as a kind of grotesque midwife, one who incites to dialogue in order to search for

truth. Or in satires such as the Menippean ones, Apuleiuss The Golden Ass, and so forth.

In its general sense, then, polyphony is not only a technical characteristic of the novel

(related, yet not restricted to, the notion of dramaticism), but also a principle of the creative process

and of moral philosophy, owing to its implications of unfinalizability.

The Bakhtinian concept has made a significant career in the last decades. Contemporary

critics have used the term mainly to refer to the modernist and postmodern fiction (Julia Kristeva,

for instance), but others (such as David Lodge) have rightfully argued that polyphonic elements can

also be found in realistic prose. Some feminists have appropriated it in reference to lcriture

fminine, and connections between the notion of dialogic speech and psychoanalytical or

deconstructive approaches have also been established. Some even claim to discern a particular

critical approach of late, DIALOGICAL CRITICISM, inspired by such concerns of Bakhtins as the

polyphonic heterogeneity of the discourse, and the function of subversive, carnivalesque elements

in prose narratives. Tzvetan Todorov, for instance, has made use of these concepts in La conqute

de lAmrique (1982), a study of the dialogue between the European, colonizing voices and the

Indians colonized ones6.

6Todorov is, moreover, the author of a book dedicated to dialogism: Mikhail Bakhtin: Le principe dialogique (Paris:Editions du Seuil, 1981)

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