Bakhtin's Imaginary Utopia Author(s): Lahcen Haddad Reviewed work(s): Source: Cultural Critique, No. 22 (Autumn, 1992), pp.

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Bakhtin's Imaginary Utopia

Lahcen Haddad
I

"return of the repressed" in contemporary critical theory. His work' seems to be the nonchronological marker of a strong resistance to the dogmatic side of the ideology of autoreferentiality and the death of history and the subject. Almost every notion he uses seems related in one way or another to the real, the historical, and the intersubjective: elements which certain forms of structuralism and post-structuralism consider unworthy of serious conceptual thinking-to belong, in other words, to the ash can of history. The sociality of language and the self, the power of the generic (be it the genre of communication, speech genres, or literary genres), the function of ideology and history are only some examples of this almost aggressive return of diachrony in Bakhtin. It is somewhat ironic, then, that Marxists and cultural critics like Fredric Jameson have been calling for just such a re-creation of the utopian and historical moments of literary texts without, however, achieving the same popularity within academia that Bakhtin now enjoys. While there are basic differences between Bakhtin and Jameson, the reason is due more to Bakhtin's politics and style than to differences between their Marxist approaches (if
C1992
by Cultural Critique.0882-4371 (Fall 1992). All rights reserved.

ikhail Bakhtin could be viewed as a genuine agent of a

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we agree that there is such a thing as a Marxist Bakhtin). Bakhtin celebrates and reproduces his concepts at both the formal level of his writings (heterogeneity of materials, repetitions, verbosity) and the level of his biographical relationship to those very works (for example, his refusal to acknowledge publicly his authorship of the disputed texts). In other words, his work succeeds in conveying the ideas of dialogism, heteroglossia, and the carnival even in its formal categories. Unlike Jameson's work, written in an elliptical, "Frenchified" and highly conceptual style-and which therefore negates the very possibility of utopia it calls for on the level of enonce-Bakhtin's work is openly euphoric, triumphant, and utopian. Ranging from the purely formal to the level of production and authorship, as Clark and Holquist have shown, it avoids Jameson's epistemological anxiety through a polyphonic celebration of its themes on all levels. As such, Bakhtin's work is a serious response to deconstructionists like Paul de Man whose main strategy-as can be seen, for example, in Blindness and Insight-consists of gauging a text's concepts against the formal devices whereby those very concepts are articulated. No wonder it has been zealously welcomed in an Anglo-American context where deconstruction has created a sense of both "awakening" and loss. Bakhtin's work has not only contributed to the deconstructive dismantling of the sedimented New Critical ideology of an unproblematic relation between a poetics of paradox and a nonparadoxical criticism2 but has also eased the sense of loss caused by deconstruction; unlike in France, deconstruction arrived in America unmediated. Nothing paved the way for its moment of "truth"-nothing, that is, equivalent to Barthes's unorthodox structuralism or Foucault's foregrounding of the discursive structures of power, both of which seemed to have ensured a smooth passage from the scientism of structuralism to the Derridean rhetoric of skepticism. Yet it seems to me that one way to account for what is certainly a Bakhtinian moment in contemporary literary theory is to see it in relation to Jameson's idea of utopia. Despite their differences, Bakhtin and Jameson share a relentless desire to re-create the text's own suppressed story of its conflict against the homogenizing, centripetal, and symbolic forces that mediate and qualify the very moments of its articulation. Likewise, both of them are

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uncomfortable with the notion of the subject propagated by ego psychology and by bourgeois humanism which emphasizes the paradigm of the individual versus society and relegates experience and history to the relation that obtains from such an imaginary conflict (Morson, "Who Speaks for Bakhtin?" 231). Nor could they be totally at ease with the postmodern schizoid and decentered subject, whose legitimation of the effects of a repressive social reality makes obvious its parochial and micropolitical significance.3Instead, both stress the need for a preindividualistic and collective notion of a historicallysignificant subject. They differ, however, in the way they relate their discourses to this utopian moment of sociality. For Jameson, this moment involves an absent other, a politicaland historicalunconscious. Its scattered textual fragments require a hermeneutics capable both of going beyond the symbolic surfaces of the text and of reconstructing the processes of transformation to which the imaginary moments of plenitude have been subject (Political104-84). Jameson hopes to disrupt the text's apparent monologism and to create an intratextual and unconscious stratum, a moment of face-toface storytelling whose agents of suppression turn out to be the formal devices and categories of the dominant aesthetic ideology. For Bakhtin, however, the moments of utopia are experienced at the very moment of talking, or playing with language. Inasmuch as language is by nature dialogic-that is, every act of speech is also a celebration of heteroglossia-the elements of utopia cease to be utopian and cannot even be suppressed. They become utopian only retrospectively,when reconstituted by monological and fetishizing accounts of language and literature. I will return to the significance of the differences between Bakhtin and Jameson. What I want to stress in the next few pages, however, is how "utopia"in Bakhtin seems to originate in this ability to reap symbolic surfaces and to reconstruct imaginary relations and roles between subject, discourse, and the world. In a way, Bakhtin's work fits well within Jameson's reading of the imaginary as a marker of a utopian, nontemporal and nonperspectival form of textuality ("Imaginary"352-58). But what distinguishes Bakhtin is the ability of his notions and concepts to engage in an endless dialogue both with his contemporaries, the formalists and the Saussureans,and nonchronologically,with the

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postmodernists and the post-structuralists. From this perspective, his discourse is imaginary insofar as it always posits a symbolic other among the practices against which it builds its own set of relations. As such, his discourse seems to have escaped one of the most devastating aporias in Western discourse, namely, the articulation of imaginary and utopian relations in symbolic categories that impede and cancel their historical significance. The vogue surrounding Bakhtin can rightly be attributed to his avoidance of this aporia, which besets even the discourse of such a formidable dialectician as Jameson.

II
It seems, however, more in keeping with the spirit of Bakhtin's dialogism to figure out the historically symbolic other of his discourse and to reconstitute the elements of the dialogues that have shaped his own arguments and concepts. Russian formalism and Saussurean linguistics are most of the time elected as the agents of the symbolic monolithism against which Bakhtinian discourse sets its own heresy of "the meta," as Gary Saul Morson would say ("Heresiarch" 407-27). I do not intend, however, to deal with the conceptual relation, so to speak, between Bakhtin on the one hand and Saussurean linguistics and Russian formalism on the other. Such an account has already been given (Stewart 265-81; Clark and Holquist 86-196 and 212-37). I am more interested in setting Bakhtin's concepts against their immediate dialogic other as an instance of a historical interplay between an imaginary and a symbolic register of concepts. But to avoid the philological projection that such an operation may entail, I will try to break down this dualism by introducing a third concept which could function as a mediator for the recuperation of this contextual situation relevant to our postmodern concerns. In other words, I will construct a triadic structure in which Bakhtin's concepts will be gauged against both their formalist counterparts and in relation to contemporary and postmodern anticoncepts of the imaginary. The master code of this operation will be Jameson's rereading of the Lacanian Real as history ("Imaginary" 384-88). In fact, Bakhtin's concept of "dialogism" should be consid-

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ered in relation to the formalists' notion of "defamiliarization." Both concepts aspire to define the conditions of textuality itself, and both assume a certain diachronic dimension that their seemingly sheer synchronydisrupts. Their difference resides mainly in the degree of their disruption of that very diachronic dimension-the real-upon which they nonetheless depend for their own articulation. Victor Shklovsky'sanalyAs it concerns "defamiliarization," is exemplary. For Shklovsky,Tristram sis of Tristram Shandy Shandy is the "mosttypical novel" of its kind. It is not typical in the sense of being representative of a set of novels or types of narrative writings but in the sense of foregrounding the basic strategies involved in writing any kind of novel ("Sterne's"27-37). The most outstanding element of Sterne's novel is, according to Shklovsky,the way in which the narrator lays bare the device of narrationitself. By capitalizingon every moment in the story, the narrator manages to parody, think about, and explode all the techniques of sequentiality,suspension of disbelief, transparency of language, fitness of subject to discourse. All of these reach a point when they themselves become the point of focus of his narration,when they become, in other words, the actual targets of the act of narration. For example, the narrator uses the topics of the "Noses," Uncle Toby, and his own conception in his mother's womb as pretexts for discourse on what he has done so far, what he will do, and what he cannot possibly do as a narrator.The subject matter itself becomes an arena for dramatizing the narrator's struggle against time, the illusion of temporality itself, the conventionality and the artificialityof all the techniques of narration. The abundant digressions show Tristram'sinability to control discourse in such a way that the reader cannot fail to see the narrator struggling against his own discourse as it slips away from his narrative control. In short, for Shklovsky,Tristram is Shandy about narration the story serves merely as a scaffolding or, rather, as a type itself; of convention which the narrator foregrounds by showing the This baring of the device is inextricablylinked to the notion of defamiliarization,which serves both as a criterion of literariness and as a yardstick for evaluating literary evolution. Tristram impossibility of writing.4

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Shandy underscores its status as a novel and thereby denaturalizes the conventions and the techniques of the tradition of novelistic writing (in the eighteenth century). For Shklovsky, it is as much a dramatization of the conventionality of writing as it is a formal pastiche of the rhetorical and epic techniques of Fielding, Richardson, and Defoe. And as such, it not only draws our attention toward its self-conscious conventionality, but also sharpens our perception-its elements appear to us new, shaken out of their its typicality, which is just another sluggish naturalness-hence word for its literariness. Such a reading is striking in its use of presymbolic elements such as play and self-reflexivity.5 If for Shklovsky the acts and moments of narration become themselves subject to narration and the subject matter becomes an opportunity for foregrounding narrativity per se, then it would not be farfetched to say that Tristram the narrator entertains here a mirror stage relation with his own narration and writing. The self-reflexivity of narration results from the gap between the text, on the one hand, and its pre-texts or "referent," on the other, a gap that the narrator creates through his constant parody of novelistic techniques. As such, it verges on a peculiar kind of narcissism, one that duplicates that imaginary moment of undifferentiated relation between the self and the image of the self that the infant experiences during the mirror stage (Jameson, "Imaginary" 353). The accuracy of this parallel is less important than the historical significance of the literary narcissism under question: namely, the fact that it underlines a fictional moment of utopian and prefigural relation to language, self, and narration, a moment which later aesthetic ideologies of dramatization, point of view, and center of consciousness have relegated to the realm of the unsaid and the repressed (Jameson, Political 151-84). Shklovsky's interpretation of this phenomenon may be different, but it is certain that part of his fascination with Tristram Shandy derives from this almost childlike devotion on the part of Tristram to celebrate "play" for the sake of "play" or, to echo Gadamer, play which plays its players (Gadamer 91-98). In shifting from one position to another, from one subject to another, and from one digression to another-without worrying about the spatiotemporal limitations of narration-Tristram seems less con-

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cerned with foregrounding the techniques of narration (that comes later as an effect of this nonteleological play) than with celebrating what Jameson would call "aesthetic transitivism." Jameson describes this phenomenon as "that pre-individualistic, pre-mimetic, pre-point of view stage in the aesthetic organization which is generally designated as play, whose essence lies in the frequent shifts of the subject from one fixed position to another, in a kind of optional multiplicity of insertions of the subjects into relatively fixed Symbolic order" ("Imaginary" 354). This notion, which is equivalent to that of self-reflexivity in literary theory, differs considerably from the New Critical and structuralist notion of self-referentiality insofar as it entertains an almost iconic relation with the socially nondifferentiated play of genuinely historical moments of utopia.6 Even at the level of reception, the imaginary is made obvious through the visual mode presupposed in the notion of "defamiliarization." For Shklovsky and the other formalists, the baring of the device dramatized in novels like TristramShandycreates a kind of perceptual defamiliarization, some sort of deautomatization (Holquist's word for ostranenie) which gives back to things their freshness and their singularity. Defamiliarization can also be instrumental in creating the sense of recognition necessary to connect the inner self with the outer world. As such, defamiliarization works according to the same paradigm of specularity as the imaginary self at the moment "in which the child demonstrably recognizes his/her own image in the mirror" ("Imaginary" 353). The point of all this is not to find accurate parallels for the psychoanalytical moments of the imaginary in the Russian formalists' theorizing. Psychoanalysis is used here asymptotically, as a way of approximating the formalists' moment of utopia and not as a value system or as a source of truth. Psychoanalysis provides a narrative in relation to which we can construct the story of "texts" at the stage prior to their conceptualization within the theoretical framework of the Russian formalists. Such a reconstruction can be instrumental in showing what happens to the story as such (as content) in Shklovsky's analysis of TristramShandy. The narrative forms a temporal fantasy which provides an imaginary way out of the alienation that the otherness of defamiliarized things creates for the reader. Psychoanalytically, narrative has a fundamental

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function "in the attempts of the subject to reintegrate his/her alienated image" ("Imaginary" 353). Yet it is striking that for Shklovsky a narrative serves as a mere pretext, the source of raw material for the more important operations of foregrounding, baring, and defamiliarizing. In other words, narrativeis subordinated to the play of discourse, to its struggle against the conventionality and artificialityof narration. In short, discourse has a symbolic relation to the narrative: the elements of the story themselves (at least in Shklovsky'sanalysis) cannot be articulatedunless mediated by the discourse which subverts their teleological temporality. The elements of subversion are important here, since Shklovsky is arguing not for the commonplace notion of the impossibilityof an enonceoutside the act of enunciation but for the more symbolicallysignificantidea of enonceas existing solely for the sake of displaying the act of discourse itself. This notion of "a nonteleological discourse" is further enforced by the predominance of metalinguisticoperations whereby everything is subordinated to the act of exposing conventionality. Defamiliarization itself presupposes a mimetic dimension, as when subject matter is held as an arena for dramatizing the narrator'sstruggle against time and the illusion of temporality.These metalinguistic and metanarrative elements make up master figures which not only disrupt teleological narration but abrogate the possibility of utopia through an exclusive concern for the effects of language transformationson perception. If the Russianformalistsystem, with its metaphysicalconcern for isolating "literariness," its origins in the paradigm of Kanhas tian aesthetics, "Bakhtin's system," write Clark and Holquist, "never loses sight of the nitty-grittyof everyday life with all the awkwardness,confusion, and pain peculiar to the hic et nunc, but also with all the joy that only the immediacy of the here and now can bring" (348). This sense of immediacy is not an ideological concern per se, but emerges as a response to the relentless power of dialogism to subvert the categorical and the conceptual in the name of the purely experiential. Experience is not understood here in the sense ego psychology gives it, as wholesome and edifying. It is the sum total of an entire set of interminable and indefinite perspectival shifts and mutations. The Dostoievskian

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hero, for example, is not conceived in relation to some kind of master code of typicalityor metaphysicalcategory of analogy, but is constituted out of the freedom of dialogic play that strips action of its temporality and makes of it an indeterminate and constant shift of spatialpositions. For Bakhtin, the author'sattitude toward "the hero in Dostoevsky'spolyphonic novel is a fully realized and consistent one that affirms the indepenthoroughly dialogic position, dence, internal freedom, and infinalizabilityand indeterminacy of the hero" (Problems 63). follows the sense of incompleteness that the Indeterminacy Dostoievskian hero necessarily experiences as a result of his/her being conceived strictly in terms of the dialogic positions of the novel. This amounts to saying that the Dostoievskianhero experiences otherness not, as in Shklovsky'sreading of Tristram Shandy, in relation to the paradigm of a typicaldebunker or antihero, but as "transhistorically" sheer strife, opposition, and dialogue in which he (mostly a male hero) can change positions easily and almost without constraints. This brings to mind the child's first experience of otherness as a correlate to the aggressivityresulting from the gap between self and other at the moment of self-rec353-56). The psyognition in the mirror (Jameson, "Imaginary" here underlines the metonymic free play of choanalyticalparallel positions, which is not, as in Shklovsky'sanalysis,subordinated to a metalinguistic or metaphorical (and hence symbolic) agent of foregrounding and defamiliarization. For Bakhtin, Dostoevskymanages to preserve this imaginary dimension only because he takes dialogue to be the prototypical realm where metonymic life is miniaturized. "The great diwholeof life itself, life alogue," he says, "isorganized as an enclosed on the threshold" This threshold works like a (Problems 63). poised bar which separates dialogic life from its other-be it monologism, metalinguisticcodes, or discourse itself. Unlike Shklovsky's analysis, where the diegetic elements are totally subordinated to the full play of discourse, for Bakhtin the dialogic stance requires that the story elements, in the form of characters' discourse, should be given their full perspectivalforce: "Onlya dialogic and participatoryorientation takes an other person's discourse seriously, and is capable of approaching it both as a semantic position and as an other point of view"(Problems But the idea of point 64).

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of view here contrasts with the Jamesian "center of consciousness," a metanarrative filter which reduces the dialogic situation to the perspective of the main character. For Bakhtin, point of view refers both to the polysemy of action and the otherness of discourse. But unlike modern theories of point of view, this otherness forms no obstacle to any putative idea of unity of effect; on the contrary, it is the sine qua non condition of the dialogic. In other words, once a character's point of view is introduced from within a dialogic stance, it loses its totalizing position in relation to the other characters' discourse and action; it ceases as an absolute truth because "it is introduced without fail in the dialogic field of vision of all the other major heroes of the novel" (Problems73). I will come back to the question of point of view later. What I want to emphasize here is the fact that a novel can be more or less dialogic depending on the degree of presence that the dialogic situation is allowed. What I mean by presence is a sense of immediacy, of the here and now of the dialogic situation. In other words, discourse should be understood here in the manner of actual dialogues where everything is structured around the pragmatic situation of dyadic give-and-take. As Bakhtin says, "everything must make itself felt as discourseaboutsomeoneactuallypresent, as the word of a second and not a third person" (Problems64). The dyadic element is significant here: it represents the only structure capable of approximating the undifferentiated reproduction of self and image, of point of view and nonsymbolic otherness, necessary for any genuine dialogic situation. The absent third element, which Bakhtin rightly objects to, not only makes discourse only superficially dialogic but reduces the proximal immediacy of the dialogic to the status of the mediatory denotation of absence. The triadic structure would jeopardize the imaginary utopia of the dialogic, because it introduces the other as absence, as name not as presence. If we keep in mind that the third element is already the Lacanian Name-of-the-Father as both language (as mediation) and law, we can understand Bakhtin's concern about the appropriateness of the triadic structure to his utopian project. Even authorial discourse itself is denied the symbolic thirdness in relation to the characters' voices and ideas, for "the object of authorial aspirations is certainly not the sum-total of ideas in itself, as something neutral and identical with itself" (Problems265).

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Examples of what we may now call the imaginary character of dialogism abound in Bakhtin's writings. They all denote the persistent refusal to subjugate novelistic language to any kind of symbolic or monologic "meta" of discourse. To commit oneself to any hierarchy of discourse would mean to forsake the question that, for Clark and Holquist, "fuels Bakhtin's whole enterprise," namely, "what makes differences different?" (9). To abandon difference not only means to fall into the realm of the symbolic but to relinquish the very condition of dialogism, heteroglossia, and polyphony. Difference is important for our purpose, since it can be said that both Bakhtin's and the formalists' (especially Shklovsky's) writings show a deep concern for the question of difference in its relation to discourse, literature as system, and the self/other dichotomy. They differ radically, however, in the way they deal with such a question. In its Derridean sense, "difference/differance" is the word for what Barbara Johnson calls the "lag inherent in any signifying act," namely, the fact that the differential nature of language or any semiotic system- since it is made up of relational and not essential elements-defeats its attempt at unity of meanis the very agent of subversion of laning. "Differance," then, guage's "illusion of the self-presence of meaning" inasmuch as it shows that this very illusion is "produced by the repression of the differential structures from which they spring" (Johnson ix). In addition to this act of subversion, "diff6rance" denotes a constant deferral of meaning. This reluctance to link signification to referential presence betrays a curious celebration of the very desire that informs Western metaphysics; it is still desire, but its object is no longer presence itself but the desire for it. Once denied its metaphysical goal, this form of desire yields a constant slippage down the chain of signifiers, whose relentless interplay and substitution reproduces, albeit in an asymptotic manner, the very reduplication of self and image of the imaginary. Shklovsky's "difference" is of a different order. It has the advantage of being historical, of isolating the moments of defamiliarization as oppositions of the old and the new and of the usual and the unusual, caught up in the simultaneity of one and the same act of discourse. But simultaneity is emphasized not for itself but as the moment when a term both mediates and super-

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sedes the other. "Difference" for Shklovsky would not be a term for the subversion of the hierarchical and the symbolic but the condition for the working of such an order. In short, what we may call Shklovsky's notion of "defamiliarization-as-difference" is symbolic from an imaginary point of view: it builds imaginary oppositions only as pretexts for producing moments where the terms of those oppositions could be related hierarchically. Bakhtin's dialogism is just the opposite of defamiliarization: it is imaginary from the symbolic point of view. Such monolithic elements as monologism and centripetal forces make up the other against which Bakhtin constructs his theory of language and literature. The latter not only forestall the possibility of utopia but celebrate the very metaphysics of presence against which dialogism and heteroglossia should be set, not as metaconcepts but as that, instead of opposing the agents of anticoncepts-elements create realms of imaginary practice out of symbolic presence, their sheer monolithic quality.

III
The radical nature of Bakhtin's imaginary utopia becomes obvious when related to the Saussurean dichotomy of langue/parole. In fact such a dichotomy clearly exemplifies the kind of metalinguistic bias of Shklovsky's poetics. It is clear in Saussure that the distinction between langue and parole serves only as a valuative paradigm whereby what presents itself as orderly and systematic (langue) is open to study and knowledge, and what appears as idiosyncratic and disorganized (parole) is unknowable and therefore needed merely to underline the value of the former. Because it is unable to be self-defined and self-evident, a deconstruction of this dichotomy would show how one term needs the other in order to fill in the gap. Jean Pecheux has shown that parole constitutes the nadir of Saussurean theory insofar as it serves only as the nonconceptual other, as a nebulous entity upon which and against which the concept of langue is conceived. It is "the very type of anti-concept, i.e., a pure ideological excipient 'complementing' in its evidentness the concept of langue, i.e., a stop-gap, a plug to close the 'gap'

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opened up by the scientific definition of langueas systematicityin operation" (qtd. in Bennett 11). Parolebecomes therefore not so much a full-fledged concept as the name of some kind of disorderly entity that stands as the imaginary other of langue.It serves less to describe a phenomenon than to constitute a prop for the concept of langue as system and an outlet from its asphyxiating constitutes systematicity.For Pecheux the dichotomyparole/langue an ideological closure in which each term relies on the other for its "existence, intelligibility, and functioning" (qtd. in Bennett 11). Tony Bennett has explored the implicationsof such an ideological closure:
Parolerequires langueas the system against which it manifests itself as a creative departure. Langue,in turn, requires parole as the creativitythat prevents the total closure of the system of rules that comprises it. By means of this circular exchange, languepreserves its own status as a closed system yet prevents a total closure of that system. It does so by opening itself up through paroleto the impact of a residue of determinations not given with langueitself, but which operate on it by way of speaking subjects and their concrete situation. In this way, simply by pointing to it, Saussure'stheory accounts for that for which it cannot account, namely, the full range and variability of language in use. (11)

Langueand parolestand to each other in a plenitude where each side finds its sense and continuity while it retains autonomy vis-a-visthe other. This autonomy could not be possible without that closure in which each term relies on the other to give meaning to its existence. In short, the two forms of the dichotomy find in each other the suppressed-the unsaid-side of the moment of their conceptualization.Parole serves as an imaginary outlet for the ideological deadlock of langue by providing a continuum which makes up for its positivistic antihistoricity. In relation to parole, langue functions as a surrogate bad/good object (in the psychoanalytical sense) against which it projects its own suppressed desire for symbolicsignificance. In other words, the plenitude of the langue/parole dichotomy does not involve a horizontal relation between its terms; insofar as each term always requires the other to function and to be intelligible, the relation remains

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vertical no matter what perspective is taken, either that of parole or that of langue. However, from the purely linguistic point of view (what Bakhtin would call objectivistpoint of view), langueis deemed the only knowable element of this language dichotomy. Linguists hold it to be the only accessibleelement of the dichotomy because it is open to classification,categorization,and experimentation. In general, it partakes of the order of the objective and the factual; langueis to paroleas science is to ideology, or the social and the public are to the individual and the idiosyncratic.This means that languestands for the signifier of the lack of order in parole;insofar as parolefunctions as the unconscious-the repressed-of Saussurean linguistics, langueremains the agent and the Superego of
this repression. Bakhtin tries to reintroduce the workings of this repressed.7 Against the objectivism of Saussure, Bakhtin contends that language is at the same time public and individual, social and idiosyncratic. To speak of langue and parole appears to be a mere projection of the sociological dichotomy of individual and society on linguistic phenomena. What is required is not a reversal of the hierarchy of Saussurean terms, but a strategy whereby both the sheer objectivism of langue and the ineffable subjectivism of parole can be transcended and shown to be partaking of the same phenomenon. An example of such a strategy transpires in Bakhtin's analysis of "free indirect discourse." Being a peculiar linguistic phenomenon where both the language of the self and of the other coalesce, "free indirect discourse" epitomizes the working of all linguistic phenomena (Volosinov, Marxism 115-59). Free indirect discourse (along with point of view) has been a slippery phenomenon for both subjectivist and objectivist views of language, because it stands itself as evidence against the validity of their exclusivist approach to language. It also questions the validity of distinguishing langue from parole because it goes against the categorizing tendency of the former (it has no grammatical rules) and goes beyond the sheer subjectivism of the latter (it mixes the language of the self and the other). It would be interesting to see how Bakhtin would deal with such a phenomenon (free indirect discourse and point of view), not from a linguistic point of view, but in relation to the workings

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of such agents of utopia as heteroglossia and hybridization-especially within the context of novelistic discourse. As we have seen, for Bakhtin, the essence of the novel resides in its multivocality, its stylistic variation, and its dialogism. These characteristics result from its protean ability to include within its "generic domain" a variety of compositional and stylistic units and devices, namely, "authorial narration," "stylization of everyday narration," extra"stylization of semi-literary genres", the "form ... of... of the "speech of characartistic ... speech," and the stylization ters" (Dialogic 262). It is, however, in relation to the stylization of characters' speech that free indirect discourse (FID) and point of view come on stage. FID and point of view are, according to Bakhtin, essential to the novel because they not only make possible this process of stylization of characters' speech (transmission of a character's inner speech and its regulation through authorial parodying, debunking, or questioning), but also because they shed light on the functioning of hybridization, refraction, and dialogization-on novelistic discourse in general. Their importance lies in the various functions (compositional, stylistic, sociolinguistic, political, philosophico-historical) that Bakhtin assigns to them in his essay on discourse in the novel (Dialogic 259-422). On the level of composition, FID and point of view allow the novelist to create a background of voices (including his own) against which his voice is heard full of nuances and already mediated. This process of mediation creates shades of meanings in the characters' transmitted speech as well: as a hybrid form, FID qualifies and colors the characters' inner speech by bringing to it "a second authorial accent (ironic, irritated and so on)" (Dialogic 278). On the stylistic level, FID and point of view represent the best examples of the process of the stratification of language (the represented characters' resistance to centripetal forces and the creation of a space, a "character zone" which would qualify the "authorial context"); this process allows the novel to incorporate heteroglossia within its structure. Sociolinguistically, this implies that point of view and FID show (metaphorically at least) the conflict between centripetal (authorial voice as a regulating and unifying element) and centrifugal forces (the characters' disorderly speech) at its best. If the internal politics of style, including

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point of view and FID, are dependent on "external politics" (relationship to an alien discourse), then FID and point of view dramatize not only the internal conflict of novelistic discourse, as is apparent in stratification and authorial regulation, but also highlight the sociolinguistic politics of language-the conflict between the forces of order and unity and the forces of difference and otherness. This seems to be the logical implication of Bakhtin's politics of style, despite the fact that he gives an explicit "centripetal-forces-oriented" reading to FID: how it shows that order in the form of authorial discourse is wrought upon the "disorderly ... flow of characters' . . . speech" (Dialogic 319). However, on the semantico-logical level, FID becomes less centripetal-force-oriented. Bakhtin holds that, unlike reported speech which forces a certain form of logicality and a certain form of causality (through mechanical alternation of statement and repartee) on dialogue, FID "preserves [the] expressivity, [fluidity, and] inexhaustibility" of the characters' inner speech (Dialogic 319). It therefore holds the mirror up to what Bakhtin calls the autocriticism of discourse, referring to how it questions its sense of mediation and how it is able to reflect reality and to reproduce its illusory logicality. Antilogical and "nonunifying," it could serve as a historic yardstick for measuring the degree of "novelness" that results from its deprivileging of languages and authoritative discourse. FID and point of view, therefore, occupy a central position in Bakhtin's definition of the novel. Most of the key notions in his theory of the novel-dialogism, heteroglossia, hybridization, stylization, stratification-depend in one way or another on FID and point of view or on similar devices. They not only help the novel come to itself, but it seems that they embody novelistic consciousness par excellence. Bakhtin's conception of FID as an "organic merging" (Dialogic 319) of authorial and characters' speech should not be understood in a Hegelian sense but in the sense ofJameson's hybrid concept of a Utopian/Imaginary moment. But even so this would not be totally unproblematical, since Bakhtin posits authorial discourse as the ultimate arbiter in the Babel of novelistic voices (Dialogic 319). While politically this position may imply the election of centripetal forces to the role of universal arbiter, stylisti-

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cally it can be seen to reproduce the realistic problematic of novelistic discourse as a hierarchy of discourses subordinated to the
authorial voice as metalanguage-as metasignifier.8 Bakhtin is no less ambiguous on the question of the relation between FID, subject, and history. Of course, these are local "miscarriages" and could in no way problematize the utopian character of Bakhtin's theory of language and literature. But it would be interesting to use these problems to test the historical validity of Bakhtin's utopia, especially in relation to FID and point of view. While such a project exceeds the scope of this article, a comparison of Bakhtin's utopia as related to FID and point of view with Jameson's would at least give an idea of how historically imaginary his utopia can be. At the level of the relationship between FID, subject, and history, Jameson's intervention becomes significant, but for the opposite purpose, namely to show that point of view and FID constitute the nadir of novelistic decay and historical reification (Political 103-84). Jameson deals with FID and point of view only in absentia,as the future or historically possible fate of what he sees as praiseworthy in the romance and in the novel. For Jameson, the novel, in its truly realistic version of romance, enjoys both a
"heterogeneity in ... materials" (104) and a sense of unsystema-

ticity in its representational and narrative techniques. In Scott, Balzac, and Dreiser, the "multiple temporality" which results from the "heterogeneity of historical perspective" (104) liberates their texts from the confinements of genre, temporal consistency, and unity of perception. This reproduction of a prereification textual possibility leads to a re-creation of a utopian moment in history, a celebration of some sort of imaginary stage as embodied in the magical world of romance. The heterogenous elements of Balzacian realism, of popular culture, and of oral tales stand therefore as betrayed fragments of a significant master narrative, ship of infant to mother" (142). In short, the essence of the novel does not lie in any alleged Hegelian organic totality but in its ability to reproduce a lost harmony through the reunification of "heterogenous narrative paradigms" (144). So, like Bakhtin, Jameson praises heterogeneity, but gives it
which "reenact the oral stage, its anxieties .... and its appeasement ..., the more passive and symbiotic relationreawakening

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a less essentialist and a more historical interpretation. Hence, his extremely different interpretation of the role that FID and point of view came to play in the history of textual production. While authorial telling helps preserve the proxemic context ("face-toface") of oral narration and dialogue (a phenomenon Bakhtin holds to be characteristic of any type of discourse), point of view and FID stand out as the symbolic agents of the repression of this sociotextual praxis. Therefore, historically, FID and point of view came as responses to the imperatives of a sociohistorical "reality principle" embodied in the rationalism of bourgeois humanism. No wonder-they are related to the individual, a recent construct according to Foucault; they not only reify language by making it exclusively related to a monadic subject, but they also reproduce the speech of a historical construct in such a way that it appears objectively real and transhistorically "true." Even when they are referentially "true" they are no less reifying insofar as they lead to a "compartmentalization" of the psychological. As a consequence, desire, which represents a driving force in romance and early realism, as manifested in utopian wish fulfillment, becomes with point of view and FID a merely privatized, apolitical, and purely subjective matter. Pure figurality, in the form of point of view and FID, supersedes the heterogeneity of what Jameson calls the "magical landscape." The process of reification and repression of the process of production, in the name of Flaubertian objectivity and Jamesian "showing," dealt an unfortunately mortal blow to the textual conjuncture of desire, "decentered subject," and "open history" in Balzac-a conjuncture which favors change and revels in utopia as a pre-Symbolic stage of historical wish fulfillment. All in all, the negative effects of point of view and FID-the privatization of desire, the institutionalization of centeredness and reification, and the abolition of utopia as a source of libidinal and social praxis-have dehistoricized wish fulfillment, utopia, and nostalgia (desire in general). This act has led to an endless process of "desire to desire"-a reification even of the act of desire which is itself a wish resulting from a fundamental deprivation and separation from the imaginary world of the "corpsmorcele." These are in general the broad lines ofJameson's conception of utopia in relation to point of view and FID. This is not to say

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that Bakhtin fits only uncomfortably or does not fit at all in a Jamesonian pigeonhole. It is true that Jameson's theory of the novel looks much more historically and politically self-conscious. His politics of FID are antiessentialist and less rhetorical than Bakhtin's. Yet, unlike Bakhtin's theory of FID and heteroglossia, his history of the novel does not do justice to the political significance of certain characteristics of what he calls "high realism." For example, Jameson pays lip service to the positive effect of FID and point of view in Flaubert, namely what Barthes calls "style" (Barthes 13), without modifying his basic condemnation of Flaubertian realism. In fact, style, in its Barthesian sense, implies the possibility of a political qualification of the ideology of depersonalization. As a thickness (Barthes calls it a "fraicheur") between history and language, style foregrounds the corporeality of authorship and dramatizes the process of craftsmanship involved in the act of writing. In it, we feel the process of production that the aesthetics of scenic showing suppresses; it creates, in Bakhtinian terms, a zone for the writer as a craftsman. It could, therefore, stand in sharp contrast to the depersonalization process at the narrative level and thereby dramatize the very conflict that Jameson sees as the very basis of novelistic praxis, namely that between the imaginary and the symbolic, between utopia and rationality, between centeredness and "decenteredness." Style is a loophole in Jameson's theory of the novel. It is only in Bakhtin that one finds a theory of style as both individual ("character zone" and "authorial accent") and social (every discourse is informed by a sense of otherness). FID as a peculiar characteristic of style (in its Flaubertian sense of effect of craftsmanship) works according to Bakhtin as an effective agent of the struggle of centrifugal forces against the linguistic sedimentation that Jameson deplores in high realism. As Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist note in their glossary to The Dialogic Imagination, "quasi-direct speech is a threshold phenomenon, where authorial and character intentions are combined in a single intentional hybrid. Measuring the relative strength of these competing intentions is a major task of novel stylistics" (433). Of course, one has to historicize this phenomenon by showing how in certain texts of high realism this takes the form of a dramatization of the dehumanization process that goes hand in hand with the process of

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reification (as in Zola), whereas in others (James, for example) it takes the form of a writing where the Flaubertian aesthetics is stripped of its fundamentally significant politics of style. This historical conception of style in relation to utopia is missing in both Jameson's categorical rejection of FID as a dominant category of the aesthetic ideology of high modernism and Bakhtin's unqualified elevation of FID to an essence of novelistic writing.

IV
To conclude, this reading does not aim at showing an essential Bakhtin. Neither is it just another possible reading, which could only add to the confusion that marks the reception of Bakhtin. What I hope I have succeeded in doing is to show the reasons for the unqualified fascination with the work of Bakhtin. The utopian side of his work not only makes us aware of the aberrations of the ahistoricist and esoteric tendency of critical theory from New Criticism to deconstruction, but also foregrounds (and paves the way for the return of) those practices that have been suppressed. Moreover, to speak of the imaginary character of Bakhtin's work is only a way of underlining its difference from a critical practice too much embedded in a rhetoric which, on the content level, disparages the metaphysics of truth associated with the moment of realism; yet, on the discursive level, it reproduces the same hierarchical classification that the realist text posits, by stressing the importance of such agents of the Symbolic as metalanguage, discourse (as opposed to story), and langue. That there is such a discrepancy between Bakhtin and Anglo-American critical theory shows the historical, and hence the limited, character of these metaconcepts. Bakhtin's utopian anticoncepts serve both to explode the monolithic quality of their symbolic counterparts and provide an opportunity for achieving an epistemology of coherence between premises and discourse that seems wanting in most contemporary critical theory. As we have seen, this does not mean that Bakhtin's work is without its problems, but since he is less of a system builder than a detective of the topographical ramifications of discourse, these problems have no aporetic character and remain confined to their respec-

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tive local elements. They are even markers of the absence of the absolutismof the systematictheories of literature-an absolutism that only leads to the antihistoricismthat Bakhtin'swork seems to argue against. Notes
I would like to thank Matei Calinescu, Brian Caraher, Herbert Marks, Randy Rutsky, and Andy Stein for their advice and their suggestions, which have helped me greatly in improving both the style and the content of this paper. 1. By the work of Bakhtin, I mean the work of the members of what is now called the Circle of Bakhtin, which, besides M. M. Bakhtin, includes P. N. Medvedev and V. N. VoloSinov. 2. On the aporetic character of the New Critics' aesthetic ideology, see Joel C. Weinsheimer, "The Heresy of Metaphrase." 3. While this is evident in Jameson, it is only implicit in Bakhtin's Freudianism. As Caryl Emerson notes, "the 'ideological motif of Freudianism' is an emphasis on sex and age, common motifs, Bakhtin claims, in eras of crisis and decline (especially 'human nature' in the form of biological drives) and is seen as all powerful and history is seen as impotent" (250). 4. On "defamiliarization" as a theoretical concept, see Victor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique." 5. The word symbolicis used here in the sense that Jameson gives it in his reading of Lacan's notion of "Symbolic Order": "An attempt to create mediations between libidinal analysis and the linguistic categories, to provide, in other words, a transcoding scheme which allows us to speak of both within a common conceptual framework." From an oedipal point of view, it is "the transformation of an Imaginary relationship to that particular imago which is the physical parent into the new and menacing abstraction of the paternal role as the possessor of the mother and the place of the Law" ("Imaginary" 359). 6. I do not mean here some kind of anthropological primitivism. See in this context Gadamer's account of Huizinga's study of play in primitive societies in Truth and Method. 7. An account of Bakhtin's linguistics goes beyond the stated purpose of this paper. Full accounts can be found in the 1983 special issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to Bakhtin. 8. For the idea of realism as a hierarchy of discourses regulated by and subordinated to an unreflexive authorial discourse, see Colin MacCabe, "Realism and the Cinema." For a critique of MacCabe, see my Cultural Studiesand the Questionsof Reading and Spectatorship(forthcoming).

Works Cited
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Michael Holquist. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

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Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of . Problemsof Dostoevsky's Minnesota P, 1984. Barthes, Roland. Degre zero de l'criture. Paris: Seuil, 1957. Bennett, Tony. "Texts, Readers and Reading Formations." Bulletin of the Midwest MLA 16 (1983): 3-17. Clark, Katrina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoricof Contemporary Criticism. 2nd ed. rev. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. Emerson, Caryl. "Outer World and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, and the Internalization of Language." CriticalInquiry 10 (1983): 245-64. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. and ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming. New York: Seabury, 1975. Haddad, Lahcen. Cultural Studies and the Questions of Reading and Spectatorship (forthcoming). Jameson, Fredric. "Imaginary and the Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of Subject." Literatureand Psychoanalysis,The Question of Reading: Otherwise.Ed. Shoshana Felman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. 338-95. The Political Unconscious:Narrative as a SociallySymbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982. Johnson, Barbara. Translator's Introduction. Dissemination.By Jacques Derrida. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. i-xxxiii. MacCabe, Colin. "Realism and the Cinema." Screen 15 (1974): 33-57. Morson, Gary Saul. "The Heresiarch of Meta." PTL: A Journal for Descriptive Poetics and Theoryof Literature. 3 (1979): 407-27. "Who Speaks for Bakhtin?: A Dialogic Introduction." Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 225-43. Four Essays. Ed. Shklovsky, Victor. "Art as Technique." Russian FormalistCriticism: and trans. Lee T. Lemon and MarionJ. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 3-24. "Sterne's TristramShandy: Stylistic Commentary." Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. 25-57. Stewart, Stewart. "Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics." Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 265-81. VoloSinov, V. N. Freudianism: A Critical Sketch. Trans. I. R. Titunik. Ed. I. R. Titunik and Neal H. Bruss. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Marxism and the Philosophyof Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973. Weinsheimer, Joel C. "The Heresy of Metaphrase." Criticism:A Quarterlyfor Literatureand the Arts 4 (1982): 309-26.