bloggingprof 2b's List: Bakhtin

Extending his argument, Bakhtin proposes that all languages represent a distinct point of view on the world, characterized by its own meaning and values. In this view, language is "shot through with intentions and accents," and thus there are no neutral words. Even the most unremarkable statement possesses a taste, whether of a profession, a party, a generation, a place or a time. To Bakhtin, words do not exist until they are spoken, and that moment they are printed with the signature of the speaker.

Bakhtin identifies the act of speech, or of writing, as a literary-verbal performance, one that requires the speaker or author to take a position, even if only by choosing the dialect that they will speak in. Separate languages are often identified with separate circumstances. Bakhtin gives the example of an illiterate peasant, who speaks Church Slavonic to God, speaks to his family in their own peculiar dialect, sings songs in yet a third, and attempts to emulate officious high-class dialect when he dictates petitions to the local government. The prose writer, Bakhtin argues, must welcome and incorporate these many languages into his work.

heteroglossia describes the coexistence of distinct varieties within a single linguistic code. The term translates the Russian разноречие [raznorechie] (literally "different-speech-ness"), which was introduced by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his 1934 paper Слово в романе [Slovo v romane], published in English as "Discourse in the Novel."

Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech: the speech of characters, the speech of narrators, and even the speech of the author. He defines heteroglossia as "another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way." It is important to note that Bakhtin identifies the direct narrative of the author, rather than dialogue between characters, as the primary location of this conflict.

The carnivalesque becomes a set of image-borne strategies for destabilising the official worldview. In a recently published article

written for inclusion in the Soviet Literaturnaia entsiklopediia (Literary Encyclopaedia) in 1940, Bakhtin defines the

satirical attitude as the 'image-borne negation' of contemporary actuality as inadequacy, which contains within itself a positive

moment in which an improved actuality is affirmed. This affirmed actuality is the historical necessity implicit in contemporary

actuality and which is implied by the grotesque image. The grotesque, argues Bakhtin, 'discloses the potentiality of an entirely

different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads man out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the

indisputable and stable' (Rabelais p.48). The grotesque image of the body, as an image which reveals incomplete metamorphosis no

longer represents itself, it represents what Hegel called the 'universal dialectic of life'.

Menippean Dialogue: Carnival, Misbehaved Children, and Other Horrors.
To the continuing technical and epistemic interests of the forgoing
dialogues an emancipatory interest may be added. When the first voice resists
the changing status of the second voice, conflict and a deterioration of
their relationship are ever present dangers. Levinson (1978) and Handel
(1990) have described the breakdown in mentoring relationships among adults
resulting from a questioning by the apprentice either of the mentor's source
of authority (questioning the authority itself) or of the mentor's capacity
to continue to interpret authority to the apprentice (the mentor's hypocrisy).
Similarly, an adolescent's conflict with parents or adults in general may
be of either of these two sorts. Either parents may seen as hypocritical,
not in fact living up to their own standards, or, on the other hand, as
(mis)guided by false standards. Questioning of the second voice may be
associated with, resulting from, or leading to, the rejection of the third
voice. One common consequence or symptom of this is one form or other of
relativism in which all potential authorities are questioned, as a mark
of an intellectual coming of age. The second voice now may turn from the
skeptical but basically sincere questioning of the Socratic dialogue to
the mocking and cynical questioning of what we will call the Menippean
dialogue after the Menippean satire (Bakhtin, 1984a,b) considered and associated
closely with the notion of carnival. 

The route from the Socratic dialogue to the Menippean is fairly direct.
Indeed, in his writings on the Socratic dialogues, Bakhtin emphasized the
already satirical and unofficial aspects of Socrates. The Socratic dialogue
introduces perplexity and so is on the way to becoming a war machine and
Socrates himself, a nomad (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) or an undisciplined
child (Misgeld and Jardine, 1989). There is always more than a mere suggestion
of suspicion of the third voice in Socrates' querulousness and Bakhtin
(1984b) very much stressed the hint of carnival in the Socratic dialogue.
The Socratic dialogue is a kind of "discursive game" (Lyotard, 1984) that
escapes the relatively tidy systematization of the Magistral dialogue.
For Bakhtin the Socratic dialogue challenges the centripetal forces of
the Magistral dialogue with its own centrifugal forces. As the Socratic
dialogue evolves into a Menippean dialogue the linear, logistic function
of the Magistral dialogue, merely disrupted by the Socratic dialogue, is
thoroughly displaced by a discursive Borgesian "garden of forking paths"
(Weissert, 1991) in the Menippean. Ultimately, the third voice may be mocked,
authority turned on its head, flags burned, and leaders burned in effigy
(at least). Voices multiply and become inverted, high and low change places
in a full-fledged carnival. Both Bakhtin (1984a,b), and Frye (1957), emphasize
the comedic, carnivalistic features of the Menippean genre, but it is a
hard humor with an ever present threat of violence. As Kristeva (1980)
notes, " the laughter of the carnival is not simply parodic, it is no more
comic than tragic, it is both at once, one might say it is serious"
(p. 66). The unruly class, the disenfranchised mob, and the raucous demonstration
in which a politician's bad faith is parodied, are all threatening enough
to those speaking in the first voice. 

F. Bakhtin on Carnival

1. "Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it,
and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the
people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.
During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the
laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special
condition of the entire world, of the world's revival and renewal, in
which all take part. Such is the essence of carnival, vividly felt by
all its participants." (7)

2. "The suspension of all hierarchical precedence . . . created
during carnival time a special type of communication impossible in
everyday life. This led to the creation of special forms of marketplace
speech and gesture, frank and free, permitting no distance between
those who came in contact with each other and liberating [them] from
norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times." (10)

Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans.
Hélène Iswolsky (1968; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, Midland Book, 1984), 7, 10.

3. "Most politically thoughtful commentators wonder, like [Terry]
Eagleton, whether the 'licensed release' of carnival is not simply a
form of social control of the low by the high and therefore serves the
interests of the very official culture that it apparently opposes."

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of
Transgression (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986),
13

Bakhtin on Double-Voicedness

Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a
Prosaics (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990),
147.

2. "Alongside direct and unmediated object-oriented
discourse—naming, informing, expressing, representing . . . we
can also observe represented or objectified discourse . . . [such as]
the direct speech of characters." (186)

3. "Direct referentially oriented discourse recognizes only itself and
its object." (187)

4. "Stylization forces another person's referential (artistically
referential) intention to serve its new purposes, that is, its new
intentions." (189)

5. "The situation is different with parody. Here, as in stylization,
the author again speaks in someone else's discourse, but in contrast to
stylization parody introduces into that discourse a semantic intention
that is directly opposed to the original one. The second voice, once
having made its home in the other's discourse, clashes hostilely with
its primordial host and forces him [or her] to serve directly opposing
aims." (193)

6. "In a hidden polemic . . . , a polemical blow is struck at the
other's discourse on the same theme, at the other's statement about the
same object. A word, directed toward its referential object, clashes
with another's word within the very object itself." (195)

7. "In hidden polemic and in dialogue, on the contrary, the other's
words actively influence the author's speech, forcing it to alter
itself accordingly under their influence and initiative." (197)

8. "When parody senses a fundamental resistence, a certain strength
and depth to the parodied words of the other, the parody becomes
complicated by tones of hidden polemic. Such parody already has a
difference sound to it. The parodied discourse rings out more actively,
exerts a counterforce against the author's intentions." (198)

Mikhail [M.] Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and
trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 186-87, 189, 193,
195, 197-98.

10. "The mastery of Signifyin(g) creates homo rhetoricus
Africanus, allowing—through the manipulation of these classic
black figures of Signification—the black person to move freely
between two discursive universes [white and black]."

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Signifying Monkey, A Theory of
African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), 75

We are treated to a long list of themes and tones supposedly belonging to the Menippean satire: comic elements, fantasy, symbolism, adventures, philosophical

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debate, moral experimentation, scandalous scenes, oxymoric combinations, topical references, etc. (152-8) buttressed by an almost as inclusive roster of authors. At the same time the Menippean satire is supposed to combine with the carnivalesque which Bakhtin uses again so loosely that he speaks of the Socratic dialogue (which had no connection with a folk festivity) (176) or even the scene in the Gospels of the crowning of Jesus Christ as King of Jews as "carnivalesque" (181). The carnivalesque is found in almost any author: in Cervantes' "Don Quixote," called "one of the most carnivalesque novels of world literature" (171), in Rabelais, Scarron, Le Sage, Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, Goethe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. A. Poe and others. Bakhtin finally claims that Balzac, George Sand and Hugo "had a profounder carnivalesque attitude toward the world" (213). He seems not to remember that Dostoevsky called "Don Quixote" "the saddest of all books" which can bring man to despair and excites not laughter but tears. ¹¹

The Eucharist imagery helps in that it calls to mind another death that was purportedly for the common good. Christians hold that Christ's death greatly benefited them. By picturing the deaths of Alyona Ivanovna and Semyon Zaharovitch as being sacramental, Dostoevsky forces out the next logical questions of the idea: if the old pawn broker's death and the demise of Marmeladov are beneficial, and Christ's death was beneficial, what is the difference? Isn't Raskolnikov even "righteous" in his killing? Isn't Katerina Ivanovna "holier" because of her happiness? Dostoevsky leaves these questions unanswered. The use of blood as initiation also supports what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the "carnivalization" of the novel (Bloom 135). Bakhtin uses this term to compare the plot and setting of Crime and Punishment to the carnivals held in Medieval Europe. These festivals were times when normal social order did not apply. One could find all manner of absurd situations and people. Bakhtin supports the idea that Dostoevsky's novels often exude the air of one of these carnivals. The images Dostoevsky uses create many of the absurdities Bakhtin writes about. Through the Eucharist image, Alyona Ivanovna's blood becomes an absurd parody of Christ's blood. A drunken man's love for his prostitute daughter points the way to redemption for a depraved murderer. Anything goes at a carnival, when disorder is king. Dostoevsky is willing to make comparisons and allusions in a carnival setting that wouldn't be allowed under normal circumstances. The deification aspect of the Eucharist, which imparts the nature of the subject whose blood is shed to the partaker of the blood, also creates absurdities. Raskolnikov, through initiation by blood, becomes things that he is not. Thus the impoverished law student becomes, in spirit, a greedy pawnbroker. A young intellectual takes an old, drunken buffoon's place in a suffering family. These absurd situations are typical of what is meant by "carnivalization".

Blood even serves to initiate the carnival atmosphere. As was stated previously, blood seems to send Raskolnikov into a drunken state. From then on the novel is filled with drunks, including Marmeladov, Razumihin, and others. Porfiry comes in from out of town and begins investigating the murders. His presence in the novel is owed entirely to blood. He is in every way the picture of a carnival jester. He laughs at almost everything he says. He jokes with Raskolnikov over very serious matters. He plays psychological games with the killer in order to force a confession. The carnival atmosphere of the novel, together with the idea of the double, serves major constructive purposes for the theme of the novel. They are greatly aided by the idea of initiation by blood. Many major events in the plot are brought about through initiation by blood. Most important, however, is the powerful imagery that initiation by blood gives. It conveys ideas, questions, and themes that are in fact central to the purpose of Crime and Punishment.

This second initiation is sustained by the slow and painful death of Katerina Ivanovna. Katerina's blood initiates Raskolnikov into a more specific kind of suffering. It is the suffering of the poor and destitute. She is not killed quickly as Marmeladov is. She is slowly eaten away by consumption, a malady often caused by living in poverty. Her blood comes gradually through her "terrible, hollow coughs" (Dostoevsky 152). She suffers more severely than anyone in the novel does. The religious character in the novel see this as something holy. When she showed him the blood she had coughed up, the priests reaction was that he "bowed his head and said nothing" (Dostoevsky 152), showing her blood great reverence. Sonia sacrifices her body to provide for Katerina Ivanovna. Her bloody suffering is a holy thing in the novel. The Orthodox faith sees the Eucharist as something that sustains the spiritual life of the believer (Clendenin 29). In the same way Katerina Ivanovna's blood seems to sustain Rodya down the path of suffering. Each time he comes into contact with her, he is moved to sacrifice for her family. The first time he meets her, when he brings Semyon Zaharovitch home drunk, he leaves them money. When Marmeladov dies Rodion provides for the funeral. Katerina's blood compels him to give to the poor. Using the Eucharist symbolism gives Dostoevsky a powerful image that would have resonated with his readers. They would have been intimately familiar with the idea of blood as initiation. The idea of the deaths leading to Raskolnikov partaking of different natures would have been easily understood and would have done much to help convey Dostoevsky's ideas to his audience. In addition to this, the imagery does a great deal to support his other thematic concepts. These concepts in turn support the overall message of the novel.

First, the Eucharist imagery supports the major theme of the novel, which, as the title reveals, is crime and punishment. In Christian doctrine the crucifixion of Christ is a punishment for the transgressions of the world. The Eucharist is made possible by this atoning death. The Eucharist also pictures the shedding of Christ's blood. The sacramental symbolism in the novel supports the idea that wrongdoing deserves punishment. Ultimately Raskolnikov's crimes do bring about consequences. Taken together, the Eucharist images form a "Dostoevskian double" (Bloom 49). Dostoevsky often had images, characters, or settings deliberately parallel one another within the same work. This would serve to show the logical conclusions of an idea (Bloom 49). Another example of a "Dostoevskian double" in Crime and Punishment is the juxtaposition of Sonia and Dounia in Part 1. Dounia's proposed marriage to Luzhin is an ideological precursor to Sonia's prostitution. The first initiation by blood, the old woman's murder, makes Raskolnikov guilty of bloodshed. Raskolnikov tries to excuse this guilt by saying that Alyona Ivanovna's death was good for society. She is a "louse" and keeps others from attaining their goals. This idea, taken another step further, says that Marmeladov's death is a good thing. Katerina Ivanovna even says this. If he hadn't died she would have been "sousing and rinsing till daybreak" (Dostoevsky 151). His death has decreased her suffering and she is therefore justified at being happy about it. Here is the "Dostevskian double".

Mikhail Bakhtin originally introduced the idea of the polyphonic novel in his book The Problems of Dostoevsky's Art. Later, this book was republished and expanded as Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Bakhtin described the polyphonic novel as one in which many different voices can be heard, and each voice represents a different view of the truth. In his book, Pro and Contra: Notes on Dostoevsky, Viktor Shklovsky summed up Bakhtin's conception of the polyphonic novel by saying:

In Dostoevsky, the voices have equal right; they are not refuted. There is, in his dialogues, no Socrates who leads the argument to his own conclusion. The dialogue does not end. The argument is explicated in his novels by virtue of the fact that there is no (single) conclusion which he would be able to validate artistically. (13)

Bakhtin's notion of the polyphonic novel is born both out of The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, as well as Dostoevsky's other works. Both novels contain so many instances of what Bakhtin would have referred to as polyphonic that it is impossible to say that one is more 'polyphonic' than the other. One of the many examples is the scene in chapter five of book three in Crime and Punishment when Raskolnikov, Porfiry, Razumikhin, and Zamyotov are discussing the ideas in Raskolnikov's article about the "superman." In this scene multiple voices can be heard, some conflicting, in reference to Raskolnikov's article. Bakhtin also comments on the variety of voices that express Ivan Karamazov's idea that " everything is permissible" as long as the soul is not immortal. Throughout his book, Bakhtin stresses that Dostoevsky's ability to incorporate these multiple voices in his writings is what makes his writing truly unique and ingenious. Bakhtin comments specifically on both The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment by saying:

Both of these ideas (Raskolnikov's and Ivan Karamazov's) reflect other ideas, just as in painting a certain color, because of the reflections of the surrounding colors, loses its abstract purity, but in return begins to live a truly colorful life. If one were to withdraw these ideas from the dialogical sphere of their lives and give them a monologically completed theoretical form, what cachetic and easily-refuted ideological constructions would result! (80)

Since Bakhtin's study on the polyphonic novel focuses mainly on The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment, to conclude that the notion was born equally from both novels would be logical.

Bakhtin also comments on the sources of the several voices that appear in Dostoevsky's writing by saying,

As an artist Dostoevsky did not create his ideas in the same way that philosophers and scholars create theirs- he created living images of the ideas which he found, detected, or sometimes divined in reality itself, i.e. images of already living ideas, ideas already existing as idea-forces." (81)

For instance, the prototypes of Raskolnikov's ideas came from Max Sterner's "Der Einzige und sein Eigentum," as well as ideas from Napolean III's Histoire de Jules Cesar (Bakhtin, 81) whereas many of the prototypes for the voices in The Brothers Karamazov were influenced by Dostoevsky's personal life. The voice of Father Zosima is likely to have been influenced by the monk that Dostoevsky visited upon the death of his child, Alyosha (" Life With Anna," 28). Also, while in prison, Dostoevsky met a man who had been wrongly imprisoned for parricide. Most likely the prototype for Dmitry came from this man ("Convict and Exile," 22). It is evident that Dostoevsky drew from many different aspects of life for the many voices that appear in his novels.

The themes that are present in Crime and Punishment reappear in The Brothers Karamazov, despite the fourteen-year gap between when the two novels were published. Often these themes, which include murder, the power of money, and the suffering of children, as well as the use of polyphony, may be connected with Dostoevsky's own life. Both novels are permeated by events similar to those that took place during Dostoevsky's life, as well by his own feelings and social critique of those events. Despite the fact that the two novels contain different stories, there are many similarities and a resonance between them, because they both grow out of a core of powerful questions and themes that Dostoevsky was preoccupied with throughout his career.

In the course of "Dialogic Idea," Bakhtin mentions a pair of
passages from Crime and Punishment. In the first passage, which
appears in Part One, chapter four, the novel's central character,
a poor student named Raskolnikov, responds to a letter that he's
just received from his mother. From the letter Raskolnikov has
learned that his sister is now engaged to marry a prosperous man
named Luzhin. Raskolnikov suspects that his sister (her name is
Dunia) is marrying Luzhin for his money--and he concludes that
Dunia is actually "selling herself" to Luzhin so she can provide
for the rest of her family.

In addition to this passage, Bakhtin considers a dialogue
from later in the novel--Part Three, chapter four to be exact.
In this passage, Raskolnikov and some other men debate the ideas
advanced in an essay that Raskolnikov has recently published.
Among these men is a policeman, Porfiry, who has good reason to
suspect that Raskolnikov has recently committed a brutal murder.
(These suspicions are correct, of course. After all, it is
Dostoevsky.)

To help you place the Dostoevsky passages in the larger
context of the novel, I'll put a copy of the Cliff Notes for
Crime and Punishment on our reserve shelf. Look over the plot
summary on pages ten and eleven, and also consider the summaries
of the chapters from which our passages are taken. For those
summaries, see pages 18 and 38.

As you consider the passages from Crime and Punishment,
try to imagine why they exerted such a powerful hold on Bakhtin.
Do the passages help to illustrate or clarify his ideas about the
"dialogic" character of language? Do they help to explain why he
thinks that Dostoevsky was an "artist of the idea"? Do they show
you why Dostoevsky's treatment of ideas might seem to differ from
that of almost any other novelist?

Context, Utterance, Dialogue

• Twentieth Century Interpretations of Crime and Punishment: A Collection of Critical Essays. by Robert Louis Jackson
• 
  Balzac and Dostoevsky. by Leonid Grossman, Lena Karpov
• 
  Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. by Mikhail Bakhtin, R. W. Rotsel

Author(s) of Review: Edward Wasiolek

Slavic Review,
Vol. 34,
No. 2 (Jun., 1975),

pp. 436-438
doi:10.2307/2495240
This article consists of 3 page(s).