Chapter 3 - Bakhtin and Critical Theory
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As we have seen, Bakhtin's dialogic philosophy of language was developed and
refined over the course of a long and prolific life that straddled a number
of turbulent periods in Russian history. Based in part on several strands of
Western philosophy ranging from Socrates to phenomenology, dialogics
overturns older paradigms that viewed communication as being so much mail
relayed by a sender to a particular receiver; instead, dialogics sees
communication and meaning residing on the boundaries of consciousness
between two people, who use words that are both socially originated and
infused with past and future voices.
Before examining Bakhtin's influence within critical theory, it is important
to understand the theoretical context into which his ideas were appropriated
during the 1980s. For Bakhtin's ideas did not become popular at this time
only because they were first undergoing translation, but because they
answered a deep theoretical need that had arisen ever since the
deconstructive angel first spread its wings. That need concerns the question
of how -- given all the poststructural theoretical challenges to rationalist
views of discourse -- we ever manage to communicate with one another at all.
Prior to the 1960s, critical theory had little of the importance in English
studies that it has today. Modern English philology arose in the nineteenth
century, modelling itself on the "long-established study of Biblical and
classical texts" (Felperin 23). This hermeneutic influence continued into
the twentieth century and was challenged only during the 1930s and 1940s
with the advent of New Criticism as practiced in America by the Agrarian
critics at Vanderbilt University. This school of criticism concentrated on
"highlighting the text and refining techniques for its analysis," as opposed
to the factual scholarly research of the earlier philological tradition
(Cain 95). While it espoused a pseudo-scientific method based on a "close
reading" of the text, the New Criticism was far from scientific and
contained a certain amount of idealism about literature, as Howard Felperin
points out:
[O]nce upon a time there was a special category of works
designated as Literature, within which an even more privileged
group of works was set apart and conscientiously re-edited,
reinterpreted, and taught. This latter group was known as the
"canon" or the "great tradition". All of these "works" were
thought of as "created" by "authors" endowed with godlike powers
of originality, wisdom, and clairvoyance. (10)
However, as the body of new interpretations began to reach critical mass
under New Criticism, it soon became apparent that many of the analytical
interpretations of canonical works were often contradictory.
Though some elements of New Criticism continue to have an underlying
influence even today, many of its central tenets were soon called into
question, particularly with publication in 1957 of Northrop Frye's Anatomy
of Criticism. In this seminal text, Frye sought to introduce a more
systematic, scientific form of critical study by drawing upon the methods of
semiotics and stylistics as applied to historical, ethical, rhetorical, and
archetypal criticism. Felperin argues that Frye's book caused a shift from a
hermeneutic to a semiotic method of critical inquiry (26), which in turn
opened the door for the structural and poststructural revolutions of the
next two decades. This "triumph of theory" quickly consumed literary
criticism:
For what was at stake was the capacity of theory, not merely to
describe, not even to control and correct, but to dictate
practice, to prescribe it in the fullest sense of the word. And by
the end of the decade . . . the battle had been all but won, the
triumph of theory assured. Theory, that is, had established itself
as not only a legitimate literary-critical activity, but its
guiding light. (28)
Though Frye's ideas continue to be influential, the new-found field of
critical theory was ruled in large part during the 1960s by the tenets of
structuralism. The distinction between signifier and signified made in
Course in General Linguistics led Saussure and many of his followers to
question the rationalist notion of a direct connection between words and
their referent objects, a concept later expounded upon in deconstructive
theory. First published in 1915, Course in General Linguistics had a
far-ranging impact, and during the next 50 years, Saussure's ideas were
adopted and extended by a number of Continental and American structuralists
who interpreted his thought in various ways.
In terms of literary criticism, however, structuralism's basic goal was to
apply the scientific methods of linguistics to the study of literary texts.
This scientific analysis placed a primary emphasis on the language of a
creative work as interpreted by the reader, while simultaneously reducing
the importance of authorial intent as a subject of critical study. This
attitude was expressed most famously in Roland Barthe's essay "The Death of
the Author," in which he states that the "image of literature to be found in
ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his
life, his tastes, [and] his passions . . ." (143). The actual physical
author was not presumed to be dead, but instead the institutional concept of
authorship that had long dominated criticism at the expense of linguistic
and semiotic analysis.
Structuralism ruled academic theoretical debates through much of the 1960s
until a new wave of French thought found seed in American soil. At a
conference on structuralism held at Johns Hopkins University in 1966,
Jacques Derrida delivered his famous paper "Structure, Sign, and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences," which created quite a stir and "acquired a
mythological significance as the fountainhead of American deconstruction"
(Bergonzi 139). Derrida's writings are extremely dense and complicated, and
have been interpreted in a variety of ways, but the basic gist of his
thought hinges on Saussure's division between words and their referents.
However, Derrida carried this concept one step further by stating in his
1967 book Of Grammatology, "There is nothing outside of the text" (158). By
denying the possibility of a knowable reality outside of written language,
Derrida emphasizes that our only source of reality is the free play of
signifiers, which ultimately deconstruct of their own accord and call into
question previous Western concepts of meaning. As Michael Holquist explains:
[The] Deconstructionist view . . . holds that "No one owns
meaning": the very conception of meaning, to say nothing of
persons, invoked in most traditional epistemologies, begins by
illicitly assuming a presence whose end Nietzsche really was
announcing when he let it be known that God had died in history.
("Politics" 164)
Derrida makes a number of other claims about language and philosophy, such
as his assertion that the whole of Western discourse is "logocentric"
because it erroneously privileges speech over writing; however, for
brevity's sake it is more important to concentrate discussion on his
influence within critical theory.
Derrida's concept of deconstruction had an immense impact on theoretical
debates during the 1970s, gathering a number of dedicated and vocal
proponents and a varied assortment of equally dedicated and vocal
detractors. Among those who took Derrida's theories to heart was a
contingent of critics at Yale University, where Derrida maintains part-time
residency. These critics spent much of the 1970s applying Derrida's ideas in
different ways to a host of canonical works; for example, Paul de Man sought
to demonstrate how the language of any written text deconstructs of its own
accord (Richter 949-50). However, at least one deconstructive critic,
Rodolphe Gasche, has suggested that application of Derrida's thought to
exploring new interpretations of literature is:
paradoxical, almost perverse, since Derrida's revolutionary
contribution was to treat philosophical texts as if they were
bound by the same sorts of linguistic ambiguity and fluidity that
had long been thought to characterize literature. (qtd. in
Richter: 949)
Indeed, Derrida's main purpose, if he could be said to have one, seems to be
the decentering of Western philosophy, to show that its metaphysics has
incorrectly assumed a guiding "presence" in the whole of its inquiries; as
we shall see later, this is one area where Bakhtin's thought differs
radically from deconstruction. Bernard Bergonzi sees Derrida's followers
taking either one of two forms: those who view him as a "subverter of
meanings, including his own" and those who believe he is "a true
philosopher...restating traditional philosophical problems in a new way"
(133).
As the deconstructive star began to rise in the American academy during the
1970s, the next decade saw the emergence of an eclectic band of critics from
various backgrounds and ideologies who began to attack Derrida's ideas,
often citing the ideas of other philosophers and language theorists as
support. One early example of such a challenge was John Searle's heated
rebuttal of Derrida's critique of John Austin's speech-act theory. [1]
Another challenge that came from within poststructuralism itself was that of
New Historicism, which drew its critical inspiration from a number of
sources, but relied primarily on the ideas of French thinker Michel Foucault
and Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser regarding discourse and power.
Though some critics from this school have cited Bakhtin's theories of
dialogics and carnival as support for their ideas (Abrams 249 and Selden
108-09), most of the influential New Historicists have concentrated on
Foucault's ideas about how discourse through history has been controlled by
the ruling elite for its own purposes.
New Historicism and other schools of thought have had some success in
curbing Derrida's growing influence, but Bakhtin's arrival on the American
critical scene in the early 1980s presented deconstruction with one of its
most potent challenges to date. Bakhtin's theories have served to counteract
deconstruction by acknowledging some of the inherent vagaries of language
detailed by structuralism and deconstruction, while simultaneously holding
out hope that meaning could be found in our dialogic exchanges of language.
As Michael Holquist points out, Bakhtin and a host of other Slavic thinkers
emphasized the social nature of language and felt that meaning resided
neither with the individual, as the traditionalists believe, nor with no
one, as deconstruction would have it, but in our collective exchanges of
dialogue: "The Slavic view holds that `We own meaning.' Or...`If we do not
own it, we may at least rent meaning'" ("Politics" 164).
As we have seen, Bakhtin wrote the bulk of his works prior to 1950, yet it
would be more than 30 years before the first of his texts made their way
into English translation. Rabelais and His World was printed in English in
1968, followed by Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics in 1973. Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language -- a text of disputed authorship that is viewed by
many scholars as being at least influenced by Bakhtin [2] -- also was
translated into English in 1973, positing, among other things, a social view
of language theory.
During the 1960s and 1970s, while American criticism seemed obsessed with
structuralism and deconstruction, Bakhtin was being studied to a large
degree by European scholars who had earlier access to his works. According
to The Bakhtin Newsletter, between 1929, when Bakhtin published the first
version of his Dostoevsky book in Russia, and 1981, when The Dialogic
Imagination was translated into English, there appeared 142 critical
articles making at least passing reference to the Bakhtin Circle; only 14 of
these were in English (Thomson, The Bakhtin Newsletter No. 3 1-19). Although
this bibliography is far from exhaustive, it does demonstrate the English
and American academies' lack of interest in Bakhtin during this period,
despite the fact that three of the Bakhtin Circle texts had already been
translated.
Those European scholars who took early note of the Bakhtin Circle included a
host of structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, including Roman
Jakobson, Rene Wellek, Julia Kristeva, and Tzvetan Todorov. Jakobson was
perhaps the first of these to cite the Bakhtin Circle as a prominent
influence, though he comes to Bakhtin through a book of disputed authorship,
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. As early as 1931, in a letter to
Nikolaj Trubetzkoy, Jakobson spoke the praises of this text, and later, in
his book Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb, he cites it
again as a main influence (Matejka and Titunik vii). Wellek, in an overview
of Dostoevsky criticism first published in 1962, briefly described Bakhtin's
book on the Russian author as "ingenious" ("Introduction" 5), though years
later he would take Bakhtin to task and "refute the description of
Dostoevsky's works as polyphonic or carnivalesque" (German 357). Kristeva,
in the 1966 essay "Word, Dialogue, and Novel" written prior to her
poststructural conversion, enthusiastically endorsed Bakhtin's theory of
dialogics, stating it "may well become the basis of our time's intellectual
structure" (59).
But among all those European scholars taking an early interest in Bakhtin,
Tzvetan Todorov was the one who embraced his theories the most emphatically.
In a 1984 article, "A Dialogic Criticism?" Todorov details his conversion
from structuralist thought to Bakhtinian dialogics (Goodson 27), and in the
same year, he published Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, one of
the first monographs to address Bakhtin's theories as a whole.
During this initial period of European interest in Bakhtin's works, those
English language articles that did appear were mostly scattered reviews of
Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World. However, a few detailed English language
analyses of Bakhtin's works did exist; perhaps the most noteworthy of these
was a translation of Soviet linguist Vyacheslav V. Ivanov's 1974 article,
"Growth of the Theoretical Framework of Modern Linguistics," in which he
finds "striking parallels between Bakhtin's theoretical work and Joyce's
writing in Ulysses" (Thomson, Bakhtin Newsletter No. 3 6).
Other than being an early proponent of Bakhtin's work, Ivanov's interest in
Bakhtin is important for another reason. The year before this piece was
published, Ivanov created quite a sensation in Moscow when he publicly
declared at a celebration of Bakhtin's 75th birthday that certain works
attributed to Bakhtin's friends, Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov,
were instead penned by Bakhtin, including Voloshinov's Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language. Though Ivanov provided no proof for his argument,
and Bakhtin himself never officially acknowledged authorship of these texts,
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language has ever since been associated with
Bakhtin and rose to theoretical prominence mainly because of its connection
with his name (Matejka and Titunik ix).
So while three texts of the Bakhtin Circle had been translated into English
by 1973, it would be almost 10 years before British and American academic
circles would stand up and take full notice of Bakhtin's work. The
burgeoning interest in his theories began in earnest with the 1981
publication of The Dialogic Imagination. In the decade following publication
of this book, critical articles on Bakhtin increased exponentially, with
some of America's leading critics jumping on the Bakhtin bandwagon. Perhaps
most prominent among these was Wayne Booth, who, in his introduction to the
1984 edition of Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , said of Bakhtin:
I can think of no critic of recent years...who more effectively
performs that essential task of all criticism: prodding readers to
think again about critical standards as applied to the various
canons and anti-canons those standards lead to. (xxvii)
Don H. Bialostosky sees Booth, in this introduction, as "establishing a
common ground between his Chicago Aristotelianism and Bakhtin's dialogism on
the questions of ideology and form" ("Booth's Rhetoric" 23). Still, Booth
does have some criticisms of Bakhtin's thought, particularly Bakhtin's
contention that Dostoevsky's "polyphonic" novels lack any authorial voice;
as he states in a 1981 interview, "[Bakhtin's] a great mind, who is -- like
all great minds, I suppose -- just as challenging when you think he's wrong
as when you think he's right" (Hopkins 48).
Bialostosky himself has been instrumental in promoting Bakhtin's dialogics
within both literary criticism and rhetorical theory. His 1986 PMLA article,
"Dialogics as an Art of Discourse in Literary Criticism," has been highly
influential in making Bakhtinian criticism an accepted part of literary
studies. In this essay, Bialostosky advocates a form of literary criticism
in which all schools of critical theory engage in a continual conversation
that steers clear of the closure inherent in Aristotelian definitions of
"rhetoric" and "dialectic" (792).
Chapter End Notes
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Lee Honeycutt (honeyl@iastate.edu) 10 November 1994
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