Welcome back, all of you, to another lecture
on Literary Theory and today we are going
to talk about the works of Mikhail Bakhtin,
who has been one of the most influential figures,
not only in the field of Western literary
theory, but also in the field of 20th century
humanities in general.
And this is in spite of the fact that Bakhtin
was able to publish only two book length works
under his own name during his lifetime.
And we will come to this publishing works
under his own name, this might sound a bit
odd, but when we go through our lecture today
you will understand why I am using this word.
So, he was able to publish only two book length
works under his name during his lifetime.
And the rest of his creative output is primarily
available in the form of long essays many
of which were compiled and published only
after his death.
So, why is Bakhtin so popular?
One of the reasons why Bakhtin enjoys such
a great reputation within the field of literary
studies is because of the striking uniqueness
of his work.
Thus, though Bakhtin was associated with the
intellectual circles of a Russian Formalism
and though he too like the Formalists was
repressed by the communist government of the
day his theoretical works on literature cannot
be easily categorized under the rubric of
Formalism.
On the other hand, attempts to categorize
his theories as Post-structuralist are also
I think equally misplaced.
And such attempts to categorize his works
as part of the greater category of Post-structuralism
were actually made, because his works became
widely known in the Western world only during
the 1980s and 1990s, when Post-structuralism
as a theoretical school was on the rise both
in Europe as well as in America.
But this categorization is flawed and I do
not think it can really be sustained, because
Bakhtin’s major works preceded by quite
a few decades, the rise of Post-structuralism
and were not in any way influenced by any
of the major theorists who ushered in the
Post-structuralist wave during the second
half of the 20th century.
And, therefore, this resistance to easy categorization
makes it imperative to study Bakhtin and his
theoretical works separately, as a separate
category all together.
Thus, in this course we will be dedicating
two lectures exclusively on Bakhtin; we will
be dedicating two lectures to elaborate on
the contribution of Bakhtin from within the
field of literary theory.
Now, in this as well as in the following lecture,
I will be using the word “dialogism” and
I will be using it as a blanket term to discuss
some of the key theoretical concepts that
Bakhtin introduced.
Concepts like polyphony, concepts like heteroglossia,
like carnivalesque, and chronotronpe.
So, these are some very unique concepts that
Bakhtin came up with.
But here, I would also like to introduce a
caveat, because I know that some of these
concepts that I just mentioned are distinct
as theoretical ideas.
And therefore, they deserve to be studied
individually and on their own right.
But I also believe that in spite of this distinctness
there is an underlying coherence connecting
all of these concepts.
And in any case I will be using the term dialogism
not to bulldoze the distinctness of these
different concepts, but rather as a sort of
rough and ready category to signify the theoretical
works of Bakhtin in its entirety.
But, before I move on to discuss Bakhtin’s
theoretical concepts let us go through some
of the historical context that framed this
work, and also, we will acquaint ourselves
with a bit of his biography.
Now to narrate the life of Bakhtin is also
to narrate the various stories of his being
discovered and rediscovered by the academic
circles.
The first time Bakhtin was quote “discovered”
was actually in 1960’s.
When he had already lived for six decades
and had finished some of his most important
theoretical works.
In this case he was discovered by a group
of young scholars, who had come across his
works in the Maxim Gorky Institute of Moscow,
and who then went on to rescue Bakhtin from
obscurity and bring him to limelight.
He was also discovered by the Western academic
world at large during the same time when his
book Rabelais and His World was published
in English translation in 1968.
But, it is important to note here that for
long, this was the only text, Rabelais and
the World was the only text, of Bakhtin through
which the Western academia knew him.
His popularity surged further only during
the 1980s and during the 1990s when his other
works were also made available in translation.
And through both these discoveries, first
by the group of students in Moscow and then
by the Western academia at large, Bakhtin
emerged onto the world stage not only as a
scholar, but also as a kind of a semi mythical
heroic figure, who had been both a victim
as well as a survivor of political persecution.
And even more remarkably as someone who had
continued to produce wonderfully thoughtful
pieces during this period of hardship.
Now, the problem of this emergence as a heroic
figure is that the biography of Bakhtin that
we have with us is almost a kind of mythologized
history in which one is never quite sure about
the boundary line separating fact from fiction.
But nevertheless, these are some of the broad
outlines of his biography.
So, Bakhtin was born in 1895 in a Russian
town called Orel, but mostly grew up in cities
like Vilnius and Odessa.
Now, the reason I mentioned these places is
because of the impact they had on Bakhtin
in terms of languages.
Bakhtin from his early days could speak not
only Russian which was his mother tongue,
but also a German which he picked up from
his governess.
And this acquaintance with multiple languages
was only enhanced with his move to Vilnius,
where though the official language was Russian,
the locals usually spoke in Polish or Lithuanian.
And also in Odessa where young Bakhtin spent
some part of his youth he encountered multiple
languages, because Odessa was a port city,
is still a port city, where the inhabitants
came from different cultural communities and
they spoke varied languages.
Now, Michael Holquist, who is a Bakhtin scholar
in his book titled Dialogism: Bakhtin and
His World identifies this exposure to different
social milieus, where various languages were
equally accepted and were equally current
as one of the key influences that later inspired
Bakhtin theory of many languages.
Now there is a technical term for this I am
deliberately not using it, because otherwise
you might get confused.
We will go into this many language-ness, or
what I am calling many language-ness right
now, during the course of this lecture and
the next lecture.
Now, as far as Bakhtin education is concerned,
he seems to have mostly followed on the footsteps
of his elder brother Nikolai, but there is
also this opinion that in reality Bakhtin
received very limited formal education beyond
the school level and actually passed off his
brothers more successful academic career as
his own later on in his life.
Indeed, one Bakhtin scholar is of the view
that because Bakhtin formal higher education
was next to nonexistent, his approach to academic
research remained somewhat cavalier, and he
had little scruple while lifting entire sections
from the book of a German philosopher named
Ernst Cassirer,
and using them in his doctoral thesis on Rabelais.
But in the decade following the Bolshevik
revolution in Russia, Bakhtin was able to
gather around himself, and, irrespective of
how well educated he was able to gather around
himself a diverse group of intellectuals,
which included people like Valentin Voloshinov
and Pavel Medvedev.
Again, I refer to these names, as these names
are important, because during the 1920s a
number of works were published under the names
of Valentin Voloshinov, Medvedev, and other
acquaintances of Bakhtin which have been claimed
by later scholars as being written by Bakhtin
himself.
And the examples of such works of disputed
authorship would include a study on Freudianism
and another on Marxism and the Philosophy
of Language which were published under the
name of Voloshinov, and another work titled
The Formal Method in Literary Study which
was published under the name of Medvedev.
So, some scholars quite a number of scholars
actually claim that these works were actually
written by Bakhtin.
But irrespective of whether they were entirely
written by Bakhtin himself or not, these works
bear testimony to the diverse topics of research
and discussion that characterizes a circle
of friends that Bakhtin had gathered around
himself during this time.
And during the 1920s Bakhtin also published
a work under his own name which was a study
of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky.
And the work was titled Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Art and this work is widely regarded as one
of the seminal contributions of Bakhtin to
the field of literary theory and this is a
work which he later expanded and published
under a slightly different title and the title
is Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics so
not Dostoyevsky’s Art but, Dostoyevsky’s
Poetics.
We will discuss this work in further details
when we start elaborating Bakhtin’s theoretical
concepts later during our lecture.
But for now, let us move on to the discussion
of his life the year 1929 was the year when
this Dostoyevsky book was published, but that
was really a calamitous year for Bakhtin.
Because, that was also the year when Bakhtin
was arrested and he was sent to exile to a
distant part of Kazakhstan, modern day Kazakhstan,
which was at that point of time part of the
Soviet Union.
But nevertheless, this period of exile proved
very fruitful intellectually for Bakhtin,
because this was a time when he worked on
some of the very important monographs important
studies on novel which later became very famous
and which later were translated, and collected
in the book The Dialogic Imagination.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Bakhtin
completed two other works.
The first was a study on Bildungsroman, or
novel of growing up, novel of education, but
this work today only exists as a fragment,
because the manuscript that Bakhtin had sent
to the German publisher was destroyed during
the bombing of the Second World War and the
copy that Bakhtin had with himself was apparently
used up by him to roll cigarettes in the absence
of cigarette paper.
So, that document is largely lost.
The second book that he produced during this
period was actually his thesis on Rabelais
which he submitted in 1941 to the Maxim Gorky
Institute of World literature in Moscow, and
he submitted that for a doctoral degree, but
it was only admitted by the institute years
later and after much controversy.
And this is in fact, the work that was later
published under the title Rabelais and his
World, and became again one of Bakhtin seminal
contributions to the field of literary theory.
Bakthin’s fortune really began to turn in
the 1960s when as mentioned earlier he was
“discovered” not only by a large number
of readers within Russia, but also abroad.
Bakhtin whose health was ravaged by years
of hardship and who had also lost one of his
legs to a decaying bone disease was now suddenly
transformed from being a German teacher in
an obscure town of Russia, to being an intellectual
hero.
And his last years were spent in Moscow in
academic limelight where he returned back
to some of the philosophical interests that
he had in his younger days and during this
period of time he worked on essays which he
had produced before his Dostoyevsky’s book.
These were, however, not published during
his lifetime and it was only after his death
in 1975 that these along with most of his
other important monographs on literary studies
were compiled and published.
And as mentioned before, Bakhtin really became
a prominent name almost a phenomenon in the
Western academia after 1980.
So, though some of his works now date back
almost a century, their impact nevertheless
retains a kind of freshness within the field
of Western literary theory.
So, with this background in place, let us
now move towards his theoretical concepts
and the first set of ideas that we are going
to take up is the notion of polyphony, and
how this notion of polyphony is related to
the concept of dialogism.
Now, if you open your dictionary and look
for the term polyphony, you will see that
it is usually used to denote certain pieces
of music, certain pieces of music, in which
different melodic lines are sung or played
simultaneously.
They are played parallel to each other and
this achieves a kind of harmony.
So, this playing simultaneously of different
melodic lines to achieve a harmony is what
is usually known as a polyphony.
Bakhtin in his study problems of Dostoyevsky’s
Poetics which was published as Problems of
Dostoyevsky’s Art borrowed this term from
the world of music and used it to signify
what he considered to be a unique feature
that characterized Dostoyevsky’s novels.
In his author’s preface Bakhtin writes,
and I quote:
(“We consider Dostoyevsky one of the greatest
innovators in the realm of artistic form.
He created, in our opinion, a completely new
type of artistic thinking, which we have provisionally
called polyphonic”.)
Now, we will have to come back to this idea
that polyphony is something that was invented
as a literary device by Dostoyevsky, later
on, because, we will see that in his later
essays like Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin
treats polyphony and the associated notion
of dialogism as a much more universal phenomenon
than he is ready to admit in his Dostoyevsky
book.
But for now, let us move down a few pages
to read the lines in which Bakhtin explains
more elaborately, what he means by the use
of polyphony in Dostoyevsky’s novels.
And this is a long quotation from his book
Problems of the Dostoyevsky’s Poetics:
(“A plurality of independent and unmerged
voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony
of fully valid voices is in fact the chief
characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s novels.
What unfolds in his works is not a multitude
of characters and fates in a single objective
world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness;
rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with
equal rights and each with its own world,
combined but are not merged in the unity of
the event.
Dostoyevsky’s major heroes are, by the very
nature of his creative design, not only objects
of authorial discourse, but also subjects
of their own directly signifying discourse”.)
Now, there are two things here that I would
like you to focus on.
The first is how polyphony is being defined
here.
And if you notice carefully you will see that
it is here defined in terms of plurality,
yes, but what is important to note here is
this plurality is referred to as plurality
of “independent and unmerged voices as well
as consciousnesses”.
So, here the qualifiers independent and unmerged
are as important as a notion of plurality
and we will see why this is so in a moment.
But there is also a second thing that is important
to note in the quoted passage which is how
polyphony is contrasted with the unity of
a “single authorial consciousness”.
Now try to think of any novel that you might
have read recently and the chances are that
you have encountered in that novel a number
of characters.
And each of these characters speak their different
lines this is definitely a kind of plurality
of voices, but according to Bakhtin this does
not automatically mean that the novel that
you have read can be categorized as a polyphonic
novel.
In other words plurality of voices does not
automatically lead to genuine polyphony.
And why is that so?
Well this is because according to Bakhtin
many novels are written in a way that conveys
just the single consciousness the worldview
of its author, and the numerous characters
that one might encounter in such a novel act
merely, as so many mouthpieces of that single
authorial consciousness.
So, there is plurality of speeches, but not
plurality of ways in which the world is being
looked at and is being engaged with and this
uniformity is not only to be found in certain
kinds of novels, but may also be encountered
in other literary genres.
In a drama, for instance; and why I mention
a drama, because in a drama the illusion of
plurality might be even more intense as we
physically encounter different characters
coming up on the stage and speaking their
own different lines.
But these too might not be truly polyphonic,
because though the author might not be visible
on the stage, the lines that all the characters
speak might just be so many echoes of the
single authorial consciousness.
So, this underlying unity and the sameness
in a novel and by extension any other literary
form is what Bakhtin describes as monologism.
This is an important term monologism which
would literally mean a single discourse or
a single utterance.
Now, in problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics,
Bakhtin argues that Dostoyevsky’s novels
were able to break free from this monologism
and
Bakhtin puts this very well in his own words
and I am quoting, “Dostoyevsky’s major
heroes are by the very nature of his creative
design, not only objects of authorial discourse,
but also subjects of their own directly signifying
discourse”.
So, this is the last line of the previous
quote and this means that each of these characters
that we encounter in a novel by Dostoyevsky
has a unique consciousness, he or she has
a unique way of interpreting the world around
him or her, and that person also has a unique
way of engaging with this world.
And this translates into what Bakhtin calls
the plurality of independent and unmerged
voices which forms the essence of genuine
polyphony.
So, whereas the assertion of the single authorial
consciousness results in monologism, the presence
of a genuine polyphony creates what Bakhtin
calls dialogism.
He therefore, categorizes Dostoevsky’s novels
as not just polyphonic, but also dialogic
in nature.
Now here we need to understand that a literary
work like a novel or even a drama might have
dialogues without being dialogic in nature.
That is to say even a monologic novel or a
monologic drama might have what is conventionally
regarded as dialogues or lines uttered by
different characters.
But if these lines are all pervaded by the
single consciousness of the author then the
literary piece will not count as dialogic
in Bakhtin’s scheme of things.
Bakhtin points this out, in fact, in no uncertain
terms and I quote:
(“The polyphonic novel is dialogic through
and through.
Dialogic relationships are a much broader
phenomenon than mere rejoinders in a dialogue,
laid out compositionally in the text; they
are an almost universal phenomenon permeating
all human speech and all relationships and
manifestations of human life, everything that
has meaning and significance”.)
Now, this quotation makes clear the difference
that Bakhtin observes between dialogues as
mere rejoinders and true dialogic relationship
between independent and unmerged voices.
But what is interesting here, is Bakhtin’s
assertion that dialogism is not something
unique to certain kinds of literature, but
rather is
and I quote, “an almost universal phenomenon,
which permeates all human speech and all relationships
and manifestations of human life, and which
permeates everything that has meaning and
significance”.
But, though he states this universality of
dialogism in the Dostoyevsky book he does
not really develop it, or at least he does
not really develop it till his later essay
Discourse in the Novel.
So, let us now have a look at this essay.
This particular piece, which was written during
his exile in Kazakhstan, elaborates on why
dialogism is a universal characteristic of
human discourse.
In this essay Bakhtin, argues that whenever
we direct our utterances towards an object,
and this object might be a physical object,
or it might be an idea, or a concept, an abstract
object.
So, whenever our utterances are directed towards
any object, then our words enter into a dialogue
with other utterances and to quote Bakhtin:
“Between the word and its object, between
the word and the speaking subject, there exists
an elastic environment of other, alien words
about the same object”.
Now though this might sound rather esoteric
and rather difficult to comprehend actually
the idea behind it is really very simple.
So, imagine discussing with your sister the
last movie that you watched, or arguing with
your friends about which restaurant serves
the best kebabs, or conversing with your classmate
about the nature of romanticism in the poetry
of John Keats.
Now we will, in all of these instances, you
will notice that your utterances are directed
towards different objects, some of these objects
are material, like for instance, material
restaurants, and very material kebabs, and
others are abstract objects like for instance
the nature of romanticism in the poetry of
Keats.
Now, none of these utterances are spoken in
a vacuum.
All of these objects have already been spoken
about by others and also by the people that
you are at that point of time communicating
with.
And therefore, your words are articulated
within a space which is already marked by
all these previous utterances, or to use Bakhtin’s
phrase “alien words” that have been spoken
by others.
So, your utterance is always in a dialogue
with these previous utterances and it is precisely
by being in a dialogue that any particular
utterance gains any meaning.
If for instance I were to come up with utterance
about something that nobody has ever heard
or nobody has ever spoken about then there
is little chance of me making any sense.
Thus, in Bakhtin own words:
(“Any concrete word finds the object towards
which it is directed always and already qualified,
as it were, disputed, evaluated, enveloped
by an obscuring mist, or, on the contrary,
by the light of other words already spoken
about it.
[…] The word directed towards its object
enters this dialogically agitated and tension
filled environment of other words, evaluations
and accents, weaves itself into their complex
inter-relations, merges with some, [and] recoils
from or intersects with others”.)
Therefore, any concrete language use is automatically
dialogic because utterances can only be meaningful
once it enters the tension filled environment
of other words, which are articulated by other
people with consciousnesses that are independent
and unmerged from my own.
This will mean that an example of a concrete
language use like a novel, for instance, cannot
but be diological and dialogism is therefore,
not something that is merely confined to particular
novels of the Dostoyevsky’s.
Of course, it is very possible that in certain
texts like those written by Dostoyevsky this
dialogism is made more pronounced by stylistic
innovations.
And in the novels of some other author monologic
tendency might be observable where there is
an attempt by the author to assert a single
viewpoint.
But even in these later kinds of texts it
is possible to hear the echo of alien words,
of other independent consciousnesses which
creates the field of signification and meaning
making.
So, even if the authors tendency is monologic
it is possible for a text to be read dialogically,
by going beyond authorial intention and by
locating the traces of the tension filled
environment within which utterances ultimately
gain meaning.
We will see how this possibility of reading
the underlying conflicts, contradictions,
and plurality within any particular text plays
an important role in other Bakthinian concepts
like heteroglossia or like carnivalesque.
And we will take these concepts up in our
next lecture.
Thank you.
