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Privilege: an approach to structuralist-based theory, Barthes, & Bakhtin (1997)

Chapter 5 Bakhtin: Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics

A. Character, Design and Dialogism

In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984a. First published 1963), a

reworking of his earlier Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (1929), Bakhtin makes the
case that Dostoevsky “is the creator of the polyphonic novel. He created a
fundamentally new novelistic genre” (7). The Russian novelist brings into
developed consciousness a different kind of perception through a different kind of
artistic discourse. Like the theorists previously discussed, Bakhtin works towards
the recognition of a view of language which breaks with traditional conceptions.
Unlike them, he does not look to a meta-discourse of a faraway or future utopia.
For Bakhtin that discourse (or interrelationship of discourses) has taken shape
historically and exists already. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics he aims to
prove this.
Bakhtin notes that critics and ordinary readers alike show a marked tendency
to treat Dostoevsky’s characters as though they are real people. This, he says, is not
misguided since such a tendency “does in fact correspond to a basic structural
feature of Dostoevsky’s works” (6). The novelist’s characters are “free people,
capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and
even of rebelling against him” (7).
How can this be? An author creates his characters and can do what he likes
with them. They are his creatures. One answer to this objection lies in the
language. Bakhtin is neither a Formalist nor a structuralist, but he does make use of
their methods and he does work through attention to linguistic form. We saw
earlier that for Bakhtin individuality is social since it is created through the use of
others’ language. The individual consciousness defines and redefines itself through
the continual process of hearing, internalizing and using others’ discourse, making
it one’s own in each unique utterance. Consciousness is dialogue. If this is so, a
writer may be able to free the language of others existing as dialogues taking place
both in the external world and inside his own head. And this, says Bakhtin, is what
Dostoevsky does.
This is not to say that the creator of the characters has no control. Of course
he does. Bakhtin does not take the view that language and ideology simply create
the meaning of Dostoevsky’s work, outside of or despite his control. Dostoevsky is
the greatest of artists, and the key to that greatness is heightened self-
consciousness, an intense awareness of what he is doing. Instead of the theorist
possessing greater self-consciousness than the artist, for Bakhtin it is the other way
round.
The writer has ends in view. He has a grand design, but it is not the design of
other artists who organize their material according to an individualized conception
of unity (of theme, character, aesthetic beauty, and so on). It is necessary to
understand “Dostoevsky’s fundamental artistic task” (8) in order to begin to grasp
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“the profound organic cohesion, consistency and wholeness of Dostoevsky’s

poetics.” Everything may be constructed through language, but for Bakhtin that
structure is a structure of the world. Hence, “organic cohesion.” Dostoevsky’s task
is not to achieve unity, resolution or any normally conceived aesthetic end. Rather,
it is to cause maximum dialogue. Plot, situation, time and all other artistic means
are used to create circumstances which will provoke the greatest interaction of
language, the most intense dialogization, the greatest freedom of character.
Dialogue cannot be separated from character. It is character. Although
Bakhtin’s terms may sound abstract, and although he apparently deals in
abstractions, he has no time for the primacy of concepts. That, in his eyes, has been
the undoing of many Dostoevsky critics:
Out of the concrete and integral consciousness of the characters (and of the
author himself) they surgically removed ideological theses which they
either arranged in a dynamic dialectical series or juxtaposed to one another
as absolute and irreducible antinomies. The interaction of several unmerged
consciousnesses was replaced by an interrelationship of ideas, thoughts and
attitudes gravitating towards a single consciousness. (9)
That last sentence expresses very concisely my earlier objection to any theory
which privileges concepts: the non-recognition of other consciousnesses, of other
people (as opposed to the play of ideas), results in that gravitation toward the single
consciousness of the theorist himself. Dialectics and antinomies are certainly at
work in Dostoevsky’s writing, but all such “logical links remain within the limits
of individual consciousnesses and do not govern the event-interrelationships
among them.” In short, Dostoevsky himself structures his work in terms of “event-
interrelationships” geared to provoking dialogue between people.
The characters are not representatives of themes, ideas, or anything else. The
reader hears the voices of real people and that is how they are to be taken. For
“Dostoevsky’s world is profoundly personalized. He perceives and represents
every thought as the position of a personality.” Ideas are certainly of crucial
importance to Dostoevsky, but only as “the living voice of an integral person.” The
writer’s job is the positioning of characters, the artistic bringing-together in such a
way that thoughts expressed through voice collide in an artistically provoked
dialogical reality. “Thought, drawn into an event, becomes itself part of the event.”
Dostoevsky’s characters are marked by heightened thought. Thinking matters
to them, and this is why critics are often led to focus on Dostoevsky’s ideas, but as
Bakhtin says, those ideas only take on their peculiar resonance in Dostoevsky’s
work through the “interrelationship of consciousness in the event.” The artist is the
organizer of the events which will maximize this interrelationship. In this sense,
although Bakhtin himself is here concerned with aesthetics, his view of artistic
organization is based on art as action, a quite different perspective from the
structuralist-based theory which sees action as subordinated to the linguistic
constructs of art. Bakhtin is dealing with the aesthetic. Indeed, the whole of the
book is devoted to a consideration of the artistic representation of dialogism. Yet
Bakhtin’s aesthetics, like Dostoevsky’s ideas, are lived events.
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Dostoevsky’s aims
Why do all this? If Bakhtin is right, why should Dostoevsky make his prime
artistic task the freeing of his own characters? Bakhtin says another critic,
Vyacheslav Ivanov, arrived at “a profound and correct definition of Dostoevsky’s
fundamental principle - the affirmation of someone else’s ‘I’ not as an object but as
another subject” (11). Each person exists with the same rights as a subject as I do.
This is the ethical, religious version of the radical belief that all men and women
are equal. It is Christ’s belief in the equal value of each individual in the sight of
God. In Bakhtin’s own time it was also Martin Buber’s belief set out in I and Thou
(1923). Whichever way one looks at it, whether as political radicalism or as New
Testament Christianity, such a worldview entails the denial of privilege. Perhaps,
given what we have seen earlier, it is now for some people the only (if the most
difficult) choice.i
The impetus for Dostoevsky’s writing may come from religion, radicalism, or
both. They may also determine the content of his writing since his characters “must
affirm someone else’s ‘I’ if they are to overcome their ethical solipsism ..... and
transform the other person from a shadow into an authentic reality.” However,
Bakhtin also says this does not in itself account for dialogism and the polyphonic
novel. A monological novel could affirm someone else’s consciousness as the
author’s belief or as a theme in a work. For Bakhtin, the key element is “the form,
as a principle governing literary construction.” Only the form can be objectively
studied, “using empirical material from concrete literary works.”
Two factors seem important to Bakhtin in his refusal to completely accept
“the affirmation of someone else’s ‘I’ ” on Ivanov’s terms. The first is that only
artistic form can provide the particularity to prevent it remaining merely an
“abstract worldview.” Simply, Ivanov may be right, but an abstraction is just that
unless it is given substance by the particularity of form. Hence, formal analysis is
not for Bakhtin a means of moving towards abstraction. Instead, it is the only way
to see life in abstraction. The second factor is objectivity. Bakhtin may not want
lifeless abstraction, but he does specify the need for objectivity, and only the form
which is there before us as a reality can be studied in this way. Objectivity is
shared perception and thought, leading to agreed knowledge which then assumes
authority. Bakhtin is thus looking for two things at the same time, and together they
operate as the governing principles of his formal approach to Dostoevsky: that
which can be shared and that which is particular.
This dual concern is matched by Dostoevsky himself. Bakhtin later quotes
Dostoevsky’s claim that he represents “the man in man,” a rich phrase indicating
his double-focus on the shared and the particular: humanity and the individual in
their interrelationship. For Bakhtin, the objective counters subjectivity, the false
emphasis on individual perception alone; particularity counters abstraction, that
attempted cutting of thought’s link to the human subject whose individual
perception must inform all thinking through its unique meetings with others.
Bakhtin’s study of Dostoevsky is really a study of the human voice. That
voice is always on the threshold between the inner and the outer, the embodied and
the disembodied. It is most particular in its individual humanity and in its infinite
capacity to create unique meaning through tone and verbal gesture. At the same
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time, it is the most objective human element in that it employs the structure of
language and is thus always shared. The two come together in the artistically
decided event.

Problems of approach
It is difficult to speak of Bakhtin’s argument about the polyphonic novel. We
should really say “findings” rather than “argument” since he does not strictly
believe in the development of ideas. Rather, Bakhtin believes that what is to be
known is already there, and it is a question of finding the creative form to bring it
into fuller consciousness. Every creative act “invents nothing, but only reveals
what is already present in the object itself” (65). In the act of making something
known, we recognize its prior existence: being and becoming are the same for
Bakhtin. Even though the future is always open, everything is also already in place
for that future because of the past. It remains for the individual to articulate the
unique form of expression. “Artistic form, correctly understood, does not shape
already prepared and found content, but rather permits content to be found and seen
for the first time” (43). This, I take it, is the authority of art.
Any attempt to explicate Bakhtin’s thinking is almost bound to sacrifice the
peculiar quality of that thought to the monological form of the explication. Yet
Bakhtin himself dares to do this with Dostoevsky. Anyone writing about him has to
respond to that challenge and find a form which will in turn attempt to do some
justice to his work. How to write an objective account (a sharing of knowledge)
while simultaneously maintaining particularity and uniqueness is one formal
challenge facing anyone writing about Bakhtin. Yet the encouragement is given by
the urgent sense that Bakhtin himself has managed this through his own response
to Dostoevsky.
Bakhtin shows what can be done and we have his text before us. The sense of
potentiality, that new meaning can be articulated, is central to the content of
Bakhtin’s work and it is central to his form. He leads through example. For how is
one to write dialogically about dialogism? That is the problem. Through involving
the reader in what is presented as a formal matter, Bakhtin suggests that it can be
solved through the shared individual act.
Strong enough to court failure, Bakhtin can admit that the individual’s
knowledge is not enough. He says of Dostoevsky and also, I think, of himself “a
single person, remaining alone with himself, cannot make ends meet even in the
deepest and most intimate spheres of his own spiritual life, he cannot manage
without another consciousness. One person can never find complete fullness in
himself alone” (177). In a sense this makes Bakhtin one of the most imperfect of
writers, and the very imperfection may be as encouraging as the demonstrated skill
in pushing consciousness to its limits.
Bakhtin divides his treatment of Dostoevsky into five main parts: the
polyphonic novel and its treatment in critical literature (Chapter One); hero and
author (Chapter Two); the idea in Dostoevsky (Chapter Three); genre and plot
(Chapter Four); and discourse in Dostoevsky (Chapter Five). This allows him to
approach Dostoevsky through a variety of perspectives and at the same time to
reiterate his thinking in a number of different ways. For Bakhtin, as indicated
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already, does not develop his case in a straight line. He is a circling, or rather a
spiraling kind of writer. In part this is necessary because, as Caryl Emerson says,
his arguments are so far-reaching that repetition is needed to give the reader the
opportunity to assimilate his thinking. Also, repetition from different angles has the
effect of deepening the subject little by little, of penetrating the subject-matter.

B. The Polyphonic Novel

This is an introduction to Bakhtin’s thinking, nothing more. In the first

chapter, Bakhtin sets out his case for the polyphonic novel. Dostoevsky, he says,
partly achieves polyphony by refusing to give one “field of vision” (18). There is
no master-discourse in the sense of the writer telling the reader what to think of the
characters. Instead, characters are presented “within several fields of vision, each
full and of equal worth.” Character is thus perceived by other characters, and none
of them is in control of the meaning of a work. A Dostoevskian novel is
constructed through “the interaction of several consciousnesses,” and this prevents
the reader objectifying events. We cannot simply look from the outside, since
everything takes place through characters of equal worth. There is no
nonparticipating ‘third person’ ” to provide an objective standpoint, and because of
this the viewer or reader is made into a participant in the novel or story. Hence the
tendency of nearly all criticism to engage in arguments with Dostoevsky’s
characters. There is a basic equality between reader, characters and writer, and this
is the “ultimate” dialogism of Dostoevsky’s writing.

Equality
Dostoevsky’s “small-scale Copernican revolution” (49), the fundamental
artistic change he effects in Western writing, is to give his characters the creative
faculty of the writer. Instead of the writer creating a monological world of ideas,
themes, cognition and so on, each of the characters does this for himself or herself.
They do not make the dialogism; that is the writer’s task. Each of the characters
lives separately; each is an individual. They do not unify. People are different.
There is no growing together, no evolving sense of a “world-spirit” linking people.
“Each novel presents an opposition, which is never canceled out dialectically, of
many consciousnesses, and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit”
(26). Bakhtin is always against merging or total identification of one person with
another. For him it is no answer to the problem of how to treat another as “I.” In
the earlier Towards a Philosophy of the Act (1993), his objection is framed
ethically: identification through empathy tends to finesse personal responsibility
for one’s actsii (and this is the root of my own objection to Barthes’ treatment of
Japan, his merging of the country into poststructuralism).
In Dostoevsky’s social world, planes of reality are not stages in development
but “opposing camps” (27). Contradictoriness is the one essential element of
humanity (Dostoevsky’s Underground Man defines man as a two-legged,
ungrateful animal). This can be seen as spiritual perversity, but it is also social in
that society in Dostoevsky’s time was riven by argument. Dostoevsky was thus
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writing about “an objective fact of the epoch” resulting from the effect of
capitalism on Russia. “The epoch itself made the polyphonic novel possible.”
Dostoevsky’s art is both spiritual and social: “Dostoevsky considers himself a
realist, but not a subjective romantic trapped in the world of his own
consciousness. He solves his new task - ‘portraying all the depths of the human
soul’ - with ‘utter realism,’ that is, he sees these depths outside himself, in the souls
of others” (61). In short, others are others, they cannot be made into facets of my
personality, and everything turns on opposition. But not, we might add, on a
concept of binary opposition. It must always grow from the differences between
people.
The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s way of artistic visualizing was
“coexistence and interaction.” Things happen simultaneously. Space, rather than
time, informs the writer’s artistic perception. Everything must happen at once, in
one time-frame, and this leads “Dostoevsky to dramatize in space, even internal
contradictions and internal stages in the development of a single person” (28).
Dostoevsky’s artistic visualization is thus intensely synchronic, although Bakhtin
does not at this point use this word.
The need to hear different voices at the same time dictates the form of
Dostoevsky’s art. It pushes him to distort normal conceptions of time. Hence his
obsession with speed - “the single means for overcoming time in time” (29) - and
with eternity - “for in eternity, according to Dostoevsky, all is simultaneous,
everything coexists.” Action is always placed in the present, and for this reason it
always appears free. Synchrony is therefore a fundamental way of artistically
ensuring freedom of character.
Dostoevsky is himself imperfect. His “extraordinary artistic capacity for
seeing everything in coexistence and interaction is his greatest strength, but his
greatest weakness as well. It made him deaf and dumb to a great many essential
things; many aspects of reality could not enter his artistic field of vision” (30). Yet
this very imperfection allowed him to concentrate his perception “in the cross-
section of a given moment.” Where other people only saw one thing, Dostoevsky
saw complexity. In the cross-section of a given moment (that is, “now”), “in every
voice he could hear two contending voices.” That is the basis of his art. Opposition
works both within and without since the contending voices are inside the writer’s
head, outside in society, and within each voice he hears.
Synchrony and opposition are the initial artistic factors governing
Dostoevsky’s art in an objective sense, although they lose their significance if
divorced from the individual. A consciousness which is presented in a more normal
historical way is better able to develop in itself and by itself. Dostoevsky seems
unable or unwilling to do this. Instead, he always places a character’s
consciousness “alongside other consciousnesses” (32). The effect of this is to
“prevent the individual consciousness from concentrating on itself and its own
idea.” The artist’s structure acts against a purely individual development.
Consciousness “never gravitates towards itself” but “towards an intense
relationship with another consciousness.” The total concentration on the cross-
section of the moment forces characters to look at others, to speak with them, to
think about them.
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The awareness of others permeates the thinking of each character (because

the artist does not formally give them any other choice). This goes so deep that
even when a character thinks to himself there is the strongly felt sense that his
thought is not individual and isolated but is really an answer to something or
someone else, already existing. Every thought is “felt as a rejoinder in an
unfinalized dialogue.” In this way, thinking is never an isolated activity, and each
thought “lives a tense life on the borders of someone else’s thought, someone else’s
consciousness.” To think in words means to provide an answer to someone else and
thought is thus “inseparable from a person.” From another person. Truth must
therefore be in other people as well as in oneself, and one person’s thinking lives
on the edge of another’s.

C. Hero and Author

Self-consciousness
In speaking of the hero, Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky focuses on “how the
world appears to his hero and how the hero appears to himself” (47), not on how
his hero appears in the world. The crucial element in the presentation of the hero is
self-consciousness. In turning over the creative faculty to his own characters,
Dostoevsky makes them self-conscious. The hero’s thinking about his own
thinking is the subject of his thought. Self-consciousness is not part of a character’s
reality; since the writer has abolished his own field of vision, reality is presented as
an element of each character’s self-consciousness. Because of this, we do not see
who a character is; we see how he is conscious of himself (49). “Self-
consciousness as the artistic dominant in the structure of a character’s image
presupposes a radically new authorial position with regard to the represented
person” (57).
Yet self-consciousness has a terrifying force. It absorbs others and the world
into itself. It is all-devouring. In part this serves to keep the character unfinalized
and free. It lives to deny others the ability to judge oneself, to say the final word
about one’s own “I.” The final word (the truth about oneself) can only be spoken
by the character himself, although even that final word cannot be “finally final”
since as long as the person is conscious the future is always open. His main aim
seems to be to delay that word, whereas the author’s is to provoke it. Author and
character are thus in fundamental opposition.
What can Dostoevsky set against self-consciousness as the artistic dominant
in the construction and operation of character? Bakhtin says “the author can
juxtapose only a single objective world - a world of other consciousnesses with
rights equal to those of the hero” (49-50). This, we may say, is the dialogical drama
of Dostoevsky’s writing. That drama is in a sense highly unrealistic. Or rather, the
realism is of a different kind: it consists of the “verisimilitude of the character’s
own internal discourse about himself” (54). The unreality lies in Dostoevsky’s
artful means of ensuring that dialogism takes place. The normal field of vision
allows for another person as an object and only partly as another person. To
incorporate one person’s discourse about himself (his field of vision) into the field
of vision of another, Dostoevsky has to violate the laws of the real world. He does
this by seeking a “fantastical viewpoint” outside the normal fields of vision. Only
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in this way can people who would not normally recognize each other be brought
together and forced to think about and speak to one another. This is not to say that
such fantastical viewpoints do not exist in the real world.
Truth cannot be neutral to the hero’s self-consciousness. It cannot be an
abstraction existing entirely independently of himself. “The ‘truth’ at which the
hero must and indeed ultimately does arrive through clarifying the events to
himself, can essentially be for Dostoevsky only the truth of the hero’s own
consciousness” (55). Dostoevsky’s heroes try to do two things at the same time:
they try to find the truth about themselves and they furiously fight others’ attempts
to define them. Their lives are a battleground. “They all acutely sense . . . their
capacity . . . to render untrue any externalizing and finalizing definition of them. As
long as a person is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has
not yet uttered his final word” (58). One can only hear the truth about oneself from
others, and in this sense every “I” needs a “you,” but that truth only has non-
finalizing force if it is internalized and freely spoken by the self of itself. This is
what Dostoevsky is pushing his characters towards and it is why self-confession is
of key importance in his writing. It is not enough to say the truth about a person.
Bakhtin says that such “a secondhand truth, becomes a lie” (59), and “Truth is
unjust when it concerns the depths of someone else’s personality” (60). That is why
Dostoevsky had no time for the psychology of his day, and why psychology seems
to have little appeal for Bakhtin as well. The truth must come from the person
himself or from no one. From the outside alone, it is reification, the deadening of
human relations caused, says Bakhtin, by the conditions of capitalism.

The author
Dialogical truth does not speak about a person; it is addressed to him or her.
The writer’s own comments about a character are actually addressed to him
dialogically since this is the only way of taking another person’s discourse
seriously, “approaching it both as a semantic position and as another point of view”
(63-64). Bakhtin calls this an “inner dialogic orientation” and says it is necessary if
the author is to remain in intimate contact with another’s dialogue without either
swallowing it up or trying to dissolve itself in the other’s power to mean. This, I
take it, is what he thinks happens when authors agree completely with their hero or
heroine: they either make the protagonist their mouthpiece or they try to melt
themselves into the character. Bakhtin’s point is again a celebration of difference.
Not only is the character different from the writer and other characters, he is also
different from his own conception of himself. “A man never coincides with
himself” in Bakhtin’s view because he is made up of different voices; he is never
quite what he thinks he is, and again this is a condition of freedom.
If the writer is in opposition to his characters to at least some extent, if he
must be in opposition, it follows that “the author of a polyphonic novel is not
required to renounce himself or his own consciousness” (68). The writer does not
have to bury himself and hide his own views. Bakhtin argues that relativism and
dogmatism have nothing in common with polyphony. Dialogism does not express
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the relativist view that in the eyes of the writer all viewpoints are equal. That would
make dialogue unnecessary, since if your words and mine are equally valid we
have nothing to say to each other. Conversely, dogmatism makes dialogue
impossible because it asserts that only the speaker can be right. “Polyphony as an
artistic method lies in an entirely different plane” (69). Bakhtin presumably means
once more that this is Dostoevsky’s means of provoking the dialogue of opposition
so that his characters may recognize the truth in others for themselves.

D. The Idea

Dostoevsky and Bakhtin are obviously dealing with the largest issues. Thus,
one is driven to use terms such as “worldview” and “mankind.” How can this be
possible and yet at the same time affirm particularity? It is done, says Bakhtin,
through the writer’s and characters’ obsession with ideas. However, this does not
mean ideas in any abstract sense. The ways in which self-consciousness thinks
about itself are the same as the ways in which it thinks about the world. The hero
merges his discourse about himself with his ideological discourse about the world.
The result “is an artistic fusion, so characteristic for Dostoevsky, of personal life
with worldview, of the most intimate experiences with the idea” (78-79).
Dostoevsky’s characters live for ideas, and ideas live in them. According to
Bakhtin, this gives massive power to the self-utterance (since the character is not
only speaking about himself but also about the most profound issues in society)
and at the same time it “strengthens its internal resistance to all sorts of external
finalization.” (The characters are able in their self-consciousness to use powerful
social arguments to prevent others objectifying them.)
Ideas have “the power to mean” and can influence all in society. Yet they can
only do this, says Bakhtin, when self-consciousness is the “artistic dominant.” Self-
consciousness gives the characters their own individual autonomy, their equal
rights with others, and ideas can only attain their power to mean when they are
expressed, when they are felt by individuals in their interrelationship with others.

Idealistic philosophy
Bakhtin makes the contrast with a more traditional way of thinking about
ideas, the “idealistic philosophy” which informs much modern thought (including,
in my opinion, structuralist-based theory, despite professions to the contrary). He
says that idealistic philosophy believes in an essential unity of the consciousness,
in something called “consciousness in general.” From this viewpoint, there are no
individual consciousnesses. Truth is something which applies to all and is not
attached to an individual. The only time individuality is recognized is when
someone is wrong: “only error individualizes” (81). Only one kind of cognitive
interaction is recognized by idealism: one person possesses the truth and instructs
someone who is in error. It is a particular kind of teacher-pupil relationship.
Bakhtin thinks European rationalism is based on this and that it permeates all
spheres of contemporary life. “European utopianism was likewise built on this
monologic principle” (82). This seems to be Bakhtin’s way of saying that
radicalism (including Marxism) works similarly. Why? Because of “its faith in the
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omnipotence of the conviction.” Radicalism assumes that strongly felt beliefs are
rightly all-powerful. It is the belief in the primacy of concepts as justified by
personal conviction.
Idealism in literature is either the confirmation or the repudiation of an idea.
The author stamps his own personality on the ideas he approves of, merging them
into his own seeing and representing consciousness. Dostoevsky’s difference is that
he is “capable of representing someone else’s idea,” not trying to make it his own.
He can preserve its power while keeping his distance from it, “neither confirming
the idea nor merging it with his own expressed ideology.” In his writing, the idea
“becomes the subject of artistic representation and Dostoevsky himself became a
great artist of the idea” (85).
We need to repeat that this is not “idea” in a purely abstract sense.
Dostoevsky’s major characters are each possessed by an idea and this, strange as it
may seem, has a dialogical function. For it makes them “absolutely unselfish.”
They may be interested in their selves, but not in the normally selfish sense: “they
don’t need millions,” says Bakhtin, “they just need to get a thought straight.” That
need to get a thought straight inevitably pushes them towards others. Bakhtin
thinks that ideas have a life and can also die. They can only live when brought into
relationship with the ideas of others. He doesn’t see ideas as belonging to anyone.
No individual has a copyright on them; there are no “permanent resident rights” in
a person’s head. Instead, ideas live between consciousnesses, and an idea is a “live
event” played out dialogically, not something which develops within the mind of
one person. That is why, says Bakhtin, Dostoevsky does not show the
psychological evolution of an idea within a single individual.

Past, present and future

The bringing together of ideas (or “voice-ideas” as Bakhtin sometimes calls
them) is the artistic means of provoking dialogue between characters. These ideas
came from the society around the writer. They also came from the past. And most
surprising of all, they came from the future. “On the plane of the present there
came together and quarreled past, present and future” (90). Dostoevsky took his
characters’ ideas from historically identifiable sources (Bakhtin links
Raskolnikov’s thinking with Max Stirmer, and so on). But he brought together
ideas which never met in real life. By making them quarrel, “he extended, as it
were, these distantly separated ideas by means of a dotted line to the point of their
dialogic intersection. In so doing, he anticipated future dialogic encounters between
ideas which in his time were still dissociated.” (91) In this way, dialogism takes
Dostoevsky beyond his own time into the future. Bakhtin quotes Dostoevsky
himself on the importance of potentiality in his writing: “Reality in its entirety is
not to be exhausted by what is immediately at hand, for an overwhelming part of
this reality is contained in the form of a still latent, unuttered future Word” (90).
 11

Form-shaping ideology: means and ends

Dostoevsky is an artist of ideology (and by this Bakhtin means of ideas).
Those ideas belong to people. Because they are possessed by ideas to an
extraordinary extent, the most generalized worldviews are combined with
individual uniqueness and the utmost particularity. Self-consciousness (the fact that
a character is more aware of himself or herself than any outside person can be)
renders finalizing analysis by another person impossible. Normal ideology is built
upon two things, says Bakhtin: “the separate thought, and a unified world of
objects giving rise to a system of thoughts” (93). In the usual ideological approach,
separate thoughts are either true or untrue, they are “no-man’s thoughts” which are
faithful to the referential world and united in a systemic unity of a referential order.
A thought gravitates towards a system, which is put together out of separate
thoughts.
However, Dostoevsky’s artistic visualization is not systemic but form-
shaping. The “ultimate indivisible unit” is not the separate thought (which can be
combined with other separate thoughts into a system) but the person. That person is
not some isolated abstraction. She is not a concept. Rather, she or he always exists
“positionally,” interrelated to others by his or her position in space and time.
Bakhtin calls this “the integral position of a personality,” with which referential
meaning is fused. Dostoevsky thinks not in terms of separate thoughts but in
“integral positions.” Therefore, the linking up of thoughts is not the development of
a system of ideas: it is the linking up of personalities. If this is so, truth can only be
produced (Bakhtin would also say “found”) by more than one person. Truth does
not belong to the individual.
Dostoevsky “thought not in thoughts but in points of view, consciousnesses,
voices.” And, “in Dostoevsky, two thoughts are already two people, for there are
no thoughts belonging to no one and every thought represents an entire person.”
The writer does not move, then, from idea to idea. He moves from human
orientation to human orientation.
What does Dostoevsky want? Is the dialogism produced by the collision of
orientations sufficient in itself (a collision which can express agreement as well as
opposition), or is there something more? Bakhtin thinks that Dostoevsky is
artistically set on provoking the maximum dialogue between different human
orientations in order to find “the highest and most authoritative orientation.” The
desire “to get a thought straight” compels the writer, characters and readers to test
each other in “a quest for truth, not as the deduction of one’s own consciousness ...
but rather in the ideal authoritative image of another human being” (98). He wants
to find the truth, not in himself or in his own convictions, but “in a voice not the
author’s own.” It is the seeking for someone else’s authority that can be freely
accepted by the individual. At the root of this is the problem facing the theorists
discussed in this book, and indeed all those who set a premium on self-
consciousness (the hallmark of modern and postmodern thinking). The problem is
solipsism. Self-consciousness may well be the defining activity of nineteenth and
twentieth century thought, the mind being aware of itself. But the terrible price, in
the West at any rate, has been the accompanying sense that only the mind can be
sure of its own existence (and we could add in Baudrillardian fashion that the
 12

individualistic obsession with the material world is the frantic effort to escape from
this sense, which only succeeds in confirming it more intensely). Bakhtin sees
idealistic philosophy, the organizing of perception under the control of a central,
all-judging “I,” as one of the most powerful modern forms of solipsism. Much of
the theory considered earlier is trying to deal with just this problem, although my
own objections have been based on the individual theorists’ compromising denial
of their own “integral positions.” At its most basic, they claim authority for
themselves while denying authority in order to appear radical. Bakhtin, who has
more claim than most to be against any form of privilege, has the power to say that
another may possess authority over oneself. The proviso is that it must be sought
and freely accepted. Most structuralist-based theory focuses on the ways in which
authority is imposed through ideology for the benefit of capitalism. Its problem, of
course, is why anyone would bother to accept the authority of theory if authority is
only presented as falsely imposed from outside. Theory has to account for its own
authority, a need which is often felt and often finessed but remains urgent
throughout this century because it is the counter to the solipsism engendered by
self-consciousness.
Bakhtin is well aware he may be wrong. In the end, he says, one may have to
choose between the ideal image of another person and the ideal of truth (as
opposed to error). In his notebook, Dostoevsky disagrees with Kavelin’s thesis
“that morality is an agreement with internal convictions.” That, says Dostoevsky, is
merely honesty. “Christ was mistaken - it’s been proved! A scorching feeling tells
me: better that I remain with a mistake, with Christ, than with you” (97). Bakhtin
says that the image of the ideal human being, or the image of Christ, represents for
Dostoevsky the resolution of the ideological quest. If the image is in error, then so
be it: “He prefers to remain with the mistake but with Christ, that is, without truth
in the theoretical sense of the word, without truth-as-formula, truth-as-proposition”
(98). Bakhtin’s sympathies lie with Dostoevsky. In the compelling quest for truth,
truth is not finally everything.
In Bakhtin’s opinion, “Dostoevsky overcame solipsism.” He did this by
refusing to reserve idealistic consciousness for himself and by conferring it on
others, his characters. The problem then is no longer the relationship of a single
cognizant and judging “I” to the world. We may add that only art can show this to
be possible, and this may be its function for Bakhtin, the reason why, as a
philosopher, he chooses to consider literature In our real lives we are in the same
position as Dostoevsky’s characters. Only art can provide the form for “stepping
outside” whilst maintaining the sense of “inside” (Science can do the stepping
outside very convincingly but has much difficulty with the inside unless it also
admits art) and that is why Dostoevsky’s “form-shaping ideology” is so important
to Bakhtin. In the meantime there is the new artistic problem of the
interrelationship of all these cognizant and judging ‘I’s’ with one another (99-100).

E. Genre and Carnival

In Chapter Four, Bakhtin makes his biggest change of perspective. He wants

to consider Dostoevsky’s polyphonism “from the viewpoint of a history of genres,
 13

that is, to shift the question onto the plane of historical poetics” (105). It may be
that he is aware the first three chapters could lead the reader to an over-
individualized view of Dostoevsky. The reader may be tempted to see
Dostoevsky’s originality as the product of genius alone. Also, in line with his
commitment to everything already existing (and always becoming), Bakhtin wants
to strengthen polyphony by showing it is not a one-off artistic triumph which can
be admired and ignored. At any rate, the result is a powerful reinterpretation of
Western literary tradition. In order to promote the polyphonic novel, Bakhtin
refocuses the history of literary genres, thereby begetting a major Western
academic sub-industry now devoted to redefining, developing or refuting his
writings.
“A genre is always the same and yet not the same, always old and new
simultaneously.” It is “a representative of creative memory in the process of
literary development. Precisely for this reason genre is capable of guaranteeing the
unity and uninterrupted continuity of this development” (106). In this way, genre is
the external authority of a collective truth. As such, it exists in its own right, but
only lives as it is used by the individual writer. Again, the objective and the
particular are interfused.

Carnival
Allowing for many transitional forms, Bakhtin says that “the novelistic genre
has three fundamental roots: the epic, the rhetorical, and the carnivalistic” (109).
The carnivalistic leads to Dostoevsky, and in this long, highly detailed chapter
Bakhtin focuses on carnival, which is also the subject of Rabelais and his World
(1984b), his great treatise on laughter and nightmare (submitted as an academic
thesis in 1940 but not published in Russia until 1965). “Carnival” is one of
Bakhtin’s gifts to academic culture, accepted with pleasure by many, with
reservations by others, and refused by some.iii Fundamentally, Bakhtin wants to
prove that dialogism has always existed within Western culture, albeit in a less
consciously developed form than in Dostoevsky. He does this so convincingly that
the map of Western genres has had to be redrawn.
Carnival’s origins pre-date literature and in itself it is not a literary
phenomenon. Bakhtin calls it “syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort” (Bakhtin,
1984a: 122). In Carnival, normal life is turned upside down, on its head, or inside
out. The Japanese “matsuri” is presumably one version. For a set time, in ritualistic
fashion, “misrule” is the order of the day. We said earlier that Bakhtin identifies the
basic human forces as order and disorder. Carnival is the cultural manifestation of
that disorder and is in part Bakhtin’s way of proving it has played a crucial and
positive long-standing role in Western societies.
At least until the Renaissance, large parts of each year were given over to
Carnival, a form of social expression which has permeated the roots of Western
action, thinking and speech. Humour is given full license, death is laughed at, God
is profaned, beauty is made macabre, and all forms of authority are mockingly
overturned in play. When life is turned inside out, everyone is a participant in an
experience “played out in the form of life” (124). As such, carnival is visceral
rather than abstract, a form of direct expression. It comes “from below,” bodily and
 14

socially. In the time of carnival, social hierarchies are abolished and “a free and
familiar attitude” prevails between people.
The most important carnival ritual is the mock decrowning of the king, an
enactment of the futility of authority. This, says Bakhtin, is “the very core of the
carnival sense of the world - the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and
renewal.” Many critics have seen Bakhtin as celebrating anarchy (a revolutionary
promotion of decrowning). Yet anarchy in itself is not his point, as other critics
have noted. Rather, “crowning and decrowning are inseparable, they are dualistic
and pass one into the other; in any absolute dissociation they would completely
lose their carnivalistic sense” (125). The emphasis is on the coexistence of order
and disorder, the one actively informing the other. He adds that “all the images of
carnival are dualistic; they unite within themselves both poles of change and crisis:
birth and death (the image of pregnant death), blessing and curse (benedictory
carnival curses . . . ), praise and abuse, . . . stupidity and wisdom” (126). Carnival
relativizes by insisting on duality at the expense of single truths. In this way its
impulse is dialogical, and the tendency towards dialogism is in the lifeblood of
Western culture from the very beginning.
The image of crowning and decrowning expresses the sense that everything
has its double. Seriousness can be laughed at, and all laughter has its serious side.
For this reason, carnival laughter is always deeply ambivalent, and this
ambivalence is the prime means of relativizing value and truth. In part, this
laughter lives through Western culture as parody, for “parodying is the creation of
a decrowning double. . . . Everything has its parody, that is, its laughing aspect, for
everything is reborn and renewed through death” (127).

The Socratic dialogue

If carnival is direct, unmediated experience, it has also been interrelated with
literature through the “serio-comical” genres. One such genre is the Socratic
dialogue of classical antiquity. Socrates (469-399 BC) wrote nothing, but his
immensely influential thinking comes to us through the early writings of Plato
(427-347 BC). The roots of Western thinking about the world, in the philosophical
sense of logically examining the nature of thought and belief, are in large measure
located in the work of these men. Bakhtin, himself originally trained as a classical
scholar, seems intent on reinterpreting Socrates by distinguishing him from Plato,
or at least from the Kantian version of Plato which had come to dominate much
European philosophy by the Nineteenth Century. In doing this, he may hope to see
ancient Greek thought from a different perspective. If successful, this would
change the later interpretations of that thought which form the basis of Western
reasoning. Bakhtin’s intentions are therefore radical in the original sense of
pursuing thorough reform from the roots.
According to Richard Kraut, Plato uses Socrates’ thinking to develop his own
philosophy. Specifically, in the Phaedo he “decisively posits the existence of the
abstract objects that he often called ‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’ ” (Audi, 1995: 621). Kraut
warns us that “Ideas” should be used with caution, “since these objects are not
creations of a mind, but exist independently of thought.” They are “eternal,
changeless, and incorporeal,” and the only way to come to some knowledge of
 15

them is through thought. This is the classic and most influential formulation of the
centrality and independence of ideas in human life, and when we speak about the
primacy of concepts in structuralist-based theory we are really referring to a way of
thinking with more than two thousand years of history behind and within it.
Bakhtin shifts the perspective from ideas to activity, and from content to form
(notwithstanding that Plato also calls Ideas “Forms”) by re-emphasizing the
functional role of the Socratic dialogue. In doing so, he intends to dialogize
Western philosophical thought “from the inside” by locating Socrates within
Platonism. The effect can only be to relativize Western intellectual thought, just as
he argues that carnival relativizes Western social life.
Socratic dialogue works, according to Bakhtin, to provoke and penetrate
thought, not to reach substantive conclusions about the nature of reality or belief. It
does this through the two formal devices of syncrisis and anacrisis. “Syncrisis was
understood as the juxtaposition of various points of view on a specific subject. . . .
Anacrisis was understood as a means for eliciting and provoking the words of
one’s interlocutor, forcing him to express his opinion and express it thoroughly”
(Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Such devices “dialogize thought, they carry it into the open,
turn it into a rejoinder, attach it to dialogic intercourse among people.” Above all,
the form of the Socratic dialogue actively expresses the sense that “Truth is not
born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between
people collectively searching for the truth.” Again, for Bakhtin it must come back
to people, always in their interrelationship with each other. He says that in the
Socratic dialogue “the idea is organically combined with the image of a person, its
carrier (Socrates and other essential participants in the dialogue).”
So, within the Western mainstream of Platonism, with its belief in ideas
constituting their own reality, there is at work a powerful force for dialogism which
in fact pre-dates Platonism itself and on which Platonic thinking is based. Bakhtin
says that Socrates’ “dialogic means of seeking truth is counterposed to official
monologism, which pretends to possess a ready-made truth” (110). He does not
mention the relativizing dangers of dialogism in doing this, although they may be
implicit throughout Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Socrates was put to death by
the Athenian state for refusing to recognize the gods of the city, for introducing
other, new divinities, and for corrupting Greek youth with his thinking (Audi,
1995: 749).
In itself, the Socratic dialogue retains abstractly rhetorical characteristics, but
these are lost when the genre is later carnivalized. Bakhtin pays some attention to
its later developments and also shows how the devices of anacrisis and syncrisis
operate throughout Western literature up to and including Dostoevsky. The result is
a convincing sense that thought is culturally not simply the logical building-up of
single meaning but the active process of finding meaning through the thinking of
other people.

The menippea
Bakhtin also focuses on another influential serio-comical genre from classical
antiquity, the Menippean satire. This, he says, is “one of the main carriers and
channels for the carnival sense of the world in literature, and remains so to the
 16

present day” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 113). By definition, the menippea is multi-styled and
multi-voiced. Bakhtin sets it against and within the “official” genres of the epic, the
tragedy, high rhetoric and the lyric and, as with carnival, he is arguing that
transformation comes from below and within rather than being imposed from
above and without. The life of a society is a whole life, not just the moulding of
culture by one section, the elite (in this case the aristocracy). The menippea is
characterized by “an extraordinary freedom of plot and philosophical invention”
(114). It creates extraordinary situations in order to provoke and test a
philosophical idea or a truth embodied in the image of a man, a seeker after truth.
Formally, it combines the fantastic, the symbolic and the mystical with “slum
naturalism” (115). High and low are made simultaneous, resulting in “a capacity to
contemplate the world on the broadest possible scale.” Its experimental
fantasticality distinguishes it from ancient epic and tragedy, radically changing the
point of view from which life is observed, or changing the scale of observation.
Rabelais, Swift and the Voltaire of Micromégas are cited as later exponents of the
menippea, and we could add that Barthes’ presentation of Japan (and of the West
through Japan) has menippean elements.
The menippea delights in unusual angles and unusual states of mind. Here
there is insanity, split personality, strange dreams, passions pursued into madness,
suicides, scandals, eccentricity, inappropriate speeches and behaviour, and
violations of etiquette (116-117). Further, the menippea mixes genres deliberately.
Its artistic ideology is form-shaping. It absorbs other genres into itself, particularly
the diatribe and the soliloquy, both genres which are themselves marked by “an
internal dialogicality of their approach to human life and human thought” (120).
The soliloquy, for instance, is the discovery of “one’s own self,” not through
passive self-observation but through dialogically questioning oneself, thereby
relativizing it and “destroying that naive wholeness of one’s notions about the self
that lies at the heart of the lyric, epic and tragic image of man” (120).
In his examination of menippea and carnival, Bakhtin ranges across a great
variety of themes, genres, texts and writers. He has to do this if he is to prove their
substantive vitality within Western culture. A random list, by no means
comprehensive but serving to show something of his range, includes the following:
Christian texts, particularly the Gospels and the Acts; Attic comedy; medieval
genres such as debates, panegyrics, arguments, morality plays, miracle plays,
mystery plays and parodic gospel readings; philosophical fairy tales; romantic
dream-lyrics; realistic novels; adventure stories of all kinds, including fantastic
journeys; farcical street comedies; the masquerade; utopian novels; diaries of
contemporary life; the symposium; dialogues with gods, between doubles, and on
the threshold of heaven or hell; descriptions of “joyful hell”; Christian dialogic
syncrises; dialogues of the dead; evocations of the final life of consciousness;
descriptions of life after death, of crisis dreams, of dreams as another possible life,
of gambling in the nether world; dialogues between God and the Devil; the theme
of absolute indifference to the world; treatments of wise fools and tragic clowns;
writers such as Lucian, Cervantes, Goethe, Dante, Rabelais, Grimmelhausen,
Erasmus, Quevodo, Boileau, Cyrano de Bergerac, Diderot, Voltaire, Swift, Gogol,
Edgar Allan Poe, Eugène Sue, Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Pushkin.
 17

Desublimation
The menippea employs a multi-leveled and multi-voiced approach which
relativizes single beliefs in the wholeness of either an idea or a person. As with
carnival and the Socratic dialogue, Bakhtin is introducing terms and genres to
counterpose the more officially accepted notions of cultural history. He is also
giving formal substance to disorder and is attempting to prove its value in Western
culture.
One historically important view of art has been that its prime function is to
sublimate human desires and the perception of the world through its form. In our
own lives we witness and participate in love, hate, sex, death and birth. Art gives
form, a shape which makes sense of this and much else. We use narrative, for
example, to impress the form of sense upon experience. The artistic shape may
console, excite, give a feeling of social cohesion to us, or perform a variety of other
functions, depending on us, our particular society and the genre which is being
used. The one constant factor is that art sublimates through its form.
Bakhtin introduces desublimation into art, that which resists artistic unity
while coexisting with it. There is that which can be given unity and that which
can’t, and Bakhtin has found a way, through carnival and the menippea, to identify
disorder as a living force within Western art. In short, there is desublimation as
well as sublimation in art, a will to disorder as well as to order. And the value of
disorder is precisely its destruction of fixed meaning, its relativizing effect. The
making sense of our lives depends for its own life on the simultaneous awareness
that our lives don’t make sense. Carnival, particularly the menippea, imbues
Western art with life.
That disordering operates, not just within particular works, but between them.
It is both form-shaping and genre-shaping. From the later part of the Seventeenth
Century onwards, carnival gradually played a less direct role in the lives of
European peoples (presumably as an emergent capitalism insisted increasingly on
the disciplining of work-forces, particularly in terms of regular working hours), and
as this happened so it moved with greater force into literature, which became
intensely carnivalized from this time on. Carnivalization “assisted in the
destruction of all barriers between genres, between self-enclosed systems of
thought, between various styles, etc.; it destroyed any attempt on the part of genres
and styles to isolate themselves or ignore one another” (134-135). In part, this
created the conditions for the development of the dominant modern literary form,
the novel, whose only real definition is that it mixes genres. As such, it becomes in
the hands of a writer such as Dostoevsky the fully conscious artistic form for
dialogism.
However, form-shaping visualization is also only made possible by historical
circumstances. In Bakhtin’s eyes carnivalization had such force in modern
European literature because it “proved remarkably productive as a means for
capturing in art the developing relationships under capitalism” (166) at a time when
previous forms of life and belief were being shattered by new economic
circumstances. Old relationships are made impossible, and people are forced into
 18

new interrelationships. Like Socrates, capitalism brings together people and ideas
(167), and the real world makes the polyphonic novel possible. In the same way,
the menippea originally “arose from its epoch” (119), which was also a time of
great change and fragmentation as Western culture prepared itself for Christianity.
In this way, Bakhtin links the dialogical impulse in carnival and the menippea with
particular times of fundamental change in the West (the emergence of Christianity
from classical antiquity, the “blossoming” of Christianity in the Middle Ages, the
Renaissance, and the epoch of Capitalism).

The individual and collective life of genre

Bakhtin sees genre as dynamic. This, as mentioned earlier, is because it is the
formal expression of collective knowledge and the means of transmission of
collective authority. For him, literature of all kinds has a life of authority across the
centuries and into the future. As such, it is implicitly opposed to state authority and
to the notion of the state as the sole repository of cultural value. Bakhtin may be
intensely and typically Russian in his philosophical attitude (George Kline refers to
Russian thinkers in general as criticizing key Western philosophical formulations
for failing to take into account the wholeness of the human being [Audi, 1995:
704]), but his views are destructive of the Russian Communist notion that only
government expresses the collective will of the people. Bakhtin has taken Marxist
ideas of collectivity and transformed them into something both cultural and
personal. One wonders how he survived.
Bakhtin believes that genre lives through its individual use, which constantly
changes its form and affirms its collective authority by freely drawing upon it.
Each genre has its own rules and its own internal logic, so no writer is ever
completely free to do what he or she wants if the genre is to be recognizably
preserved. Yet the writer himself has to assent to that authority. It is impersonal in
the sense that the writer is working with tradition, not with a censor or some other
personalized dictator at his back. And he is allowed to, indeed he must, change
genre in his own way. Carnival and the menippea are particularly conducive to this
in that change is their inherent operating principle; it is what they are about and it is
what they do.
Of course, we may ask how a writer can possess the knowledge to make such
a use of sources and contacts as Bakhtin claims for Dostoevsky. He could not have
known everything that Bakhtin knows about his sources, even the little sketched
here, because Dostoevsky was a writer of fiction and journalism rather than a
scholar. Bakhtin partly answers this by showing what Dostoevsky was aware of
and how he uses a range of known influences in his own particular ways. But he
also thinks that genre is not simply transmitted and reworked through direct and
full knowledge of particular sources: “A genre possesses its own organic logic
which can to a certain extent be understood and creatively assimilated on the basis
of a few generic models, even fragments” (157). The artist can draw out what is
implicit in the form and its language, linking up across the centuries with other
practitioners of the same genre. This extends the claim made earlier that each word
has its own history, and when we use language we are giving life to the past in the
present. It may also be analogous to the view that, as genres develop, they
 19

condense their previous formulations, and the artist working in the present deals
with shorthand forms of the past. When a new form is generated, the first works (of
the sonata in music, or of the symphony, for example) have to “spell out” the new
form very explicitly in terms of its formal rules, otherwise it may not be
understood. As the genre becomes established, the rules can be toned down,
understated or played with creatively; shorthand references to previous uses of the
form show both artists’ and listeners’ awareness of the creative use of tradition.
Later artists inherit the shorthand references and a body of artistic knowledge is
built up on fragments, each of which condenses the past and depends for its life on
the artist in the present feeling and accepting its collective authority and its
particular formal logic.
“Dostoevsky linked up with the chain of a given generic tradition at that point
where it passed through his own time. . . . Speaking somewhat paradoxically, one
could say that it was not Dostoevsky’s subjective memory, but the objective
memory of the very genre in which he worked, that preserved the peculiar features
of the ancient menippea” (121). Bakhtin says that of course Dostoevsky did not
proceed directly and consciously from the ancient menippea. To do so would have
resulted in stylization, and “in no sense was Dostoevsky a stylizer of ancient
genres.” Rather, the writer is able to draw upon the collective memory made
objective in the form of the genre. And this is possible through feeling for the
language, not just through maximum consciousness or abstraction. In this sense,
the writer must also be able to muffle his own consciousness in order to listen to
others, to think creatively in forms, to work through collective memory.
Bakhtin stresses that carnivalization is not an imposed schema but a form of
artistic visualization working through genre. And the genres which it affects are
particularly conducive, not just to finding the truth of form in the past but also to
creating meaning and looking to the future. It is “a peculiar sort of heuristic
principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen things” (166). It
does this, as we said, by relativizing all that is stable, and through this Dostoevsky
is able to understandingly penetrate human relationships. The power and the basic
principle of Dostoevsky’s art derives from a carnival vision of the world in its
widest and most particular senses:
Everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite. Love lives on
the very border of hate, knows and understands it, and hate lives on the
border of love and also understands it. . . . Faith lives on the very border of
atheism, sees itself there and understands it, and atheism lives on the border
of faith and understands it. Loftiness and nobility live on the border of
degradation and vulgarity, . . . love for neighbours upon a thirst for self-
destruction. . . . Purity and chastity understand vice and sensuality. (176)
At its most profound, carnival, the creative and collective sense of living
disorder throughout and within Western culture, gives Dostoevsky the freedom to
bring together “all things that are disunified and distant” “at a single spatial and
temporal ‘point’ ” (177). It makes the polyphonic novel possible and helps
Dostoevsky overcome solipsism.
 20

F. Discourse

Metalinguistics and linguistics

If carnival is the closest Bakhtin comes to speaking of a “world spirit,” genre
anchors it, preventing the drift towards a spiritualized version of the unspiritual, or
towards the abstraction of concepts about particularity. It is also the bridge to the
culminating chapter on discourse, a part of the book which, along with related
work in Discourse in the Novel (in Bakhtin, 1981), has been as influential as the
writings on carnival.
Bakhtin begins Chapter Five by defining a new field of study,
“metalinguistics,” and by distinguishing it from linguistics. With Saussure
apparently in mind, he is careful not to attack structural linguistics, as Voloshinov
does for example in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929). Although
his work is very much closer in spirit and content to Voloshinov than it is to
Saussure, Bakhtin’s attitude (at least when writing under his own name) is more
accommodating, perhaps because his thinking in terms of form may be as much a
creative transformation of structuralism as his thinking in terms of belief is of
Marxism. There is a parallel to be drawn between Saussure’s conception of langue
and parole and Bakhtin’s distinction between monologism and carnival. The
parallel is anything but exact, and Bakhtin is quite different in the ways in which he
relates the one to the other, but it is still there. Bakhtin certainly drew a measure of
fundamental inspiration from Saussure (and as we shall see later the form of
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is based on an acknowledged reworking of
certain key Saussurean terms). It may also to some extent account for the affinity
that structuralist-based theorists from the 1960s and 1970s felt for Bakhtin. He, too,
deals in oppositions, although he parts company with structuralism by then
concentrating on the ways in which both sides of an opposition coexist and inform
each other.
Linguistics and metalinguistics study the same phenomenon: language, or
“the word.” They should complement each other, and metalinguistics starts where
linguistics stops. “Dialogic relationships (including the dialogic relationships of a
speaker to his own discourse) are the subject of metalinguistics” (182). Linguistics
does not allow for dialogic relationships because it cannot study “whole
utterances.” Instead, it treats language as the object of study and can only view “the
word” as elements in a system of language. Linguistics can recognize “dialogic
speech,” but only on the level of language and not in terms of the “relationships
between rejoinders in a dialogue” (183). Dialogic relationships are extralinguistic
and at the same time inseparable from “the realm of discourse.” The logic of
linguistics is geared to establishing language as “a common ground,” which in part
makes dialogism possible. However, dialogism itself cannot be reduced either to
“logical relationships” or to “relationships oriented semantically toward their
referential object.” Bakhtin gives the example of two statements: “life is good,”
and “life is not good.” Their logical relationship is that one is the negation of the
other. They could be combined in a logically dialectical utterance of thesis and
antithesis, but a dialogic relationship only begins when the two statements (which
 21

could as well be linguistically identical as different) “are separated into two

different utterances by two different subjects.” The relationship between the
subjects makes the dialogical relationship through the language and in Bakhtin’s
view this cannot be completely expressed in purely logical terms, even though
“logical relationships or relationships oriented toward a referential object” are
necessary (184). In short, referential language and the logic of linguistics are
indispensable, but they are only a beginning.
Discourse, by which Bakhtin means utterances, always needs an author, “a
creator of the given utterance whose position it expresses.” Dialogic relationships
are possible when the utterance (which may be as small as an individual word) can
be heard as “someone else’s voice,” “not as the impersonal word of language.”
Those relationships are not necessarily limited to language itself. They “are also
possible among different intelligent phenomena, provided that these phenomena
are expressed in some semiotic material” (184-185). Bakhtin thus allows for
semiotics, although he says his metalinguistics will concern itself with dialogic
relationships conducted through language.
One particular stimulus for Bakhtin’s formulation of metalinguistics seems to
come from (or is given its point by) the recognition that, although Dostoevsky’s
characters are highly individualized, they do not differ appreciably in terms of their
language. He refers to the charge made by Tolstoy and others that there is very
little “speech characterization” in Dostoevsky. “It might even seem that the heroes
of Dostoevsky’s novels all speak one and the same language, namely the language
of their author” (182). This, at any rate, is how it would be seen by anyone
approaching Dostoevsky from linguistics. “But the fact is that language
differentiation and the clear-cut ‘speech characterizations’ of characters have the
greatest artistic significance precisely in the creation of objectified and finalized
images of people. The more objectified a character, the more sharply his speech
physiognomy stands out.”
The insight is profound. We certainly hear the voices of those with whom we
are most closely interrelated, and the sound has its unique quality, but the closer we
are the less it is possible to objectify it, to present it from the outside. What matters
is the activity of the interrelationship itself, not being able to identify the speech
mannerisms of those to whom you are closest (which is not to say that you are
unaware of those mannerisms).
It follows that Bakhtin’s interest is not in those elements of language which
are concerned with purely objective representation - objective in the sense of solely
making the subject into an object of study. Speech characterization, linguistics,
rhetoric, style and any kind of formal device (and we may remember Shklovsky)
fall into this category. However, the proviso needs to be made that any of
Dostoevsky’s characters in their self-consciousness may concern themselves with
the means of objectifying others and of resisting that objectification of themselves.
The Underground Man, for example, is both a monster and a victim of rhetorical
manipulation.
Purely linguistic criteria determine the presence of specific language styles.
However, Bakhtin’s concern “is the dialogic angle at which these styles and
dialects are juxtaposed or counterposed in the work” (182). And that “dialogic
 22

angle” is beyond linguistics. Bakhtin identifies a group of artistic speech

phenomena which draw attention to it: stylization, parody, dialogue and ‘skaz’ ( a
Russian form of narration that imitates individual oral narration). Like ordinary
discourse, they are directed toward the “referential object of speech” (185). Yet at
the same time they are also directed “toward another’s discourse, toward someone
else’s speech.” The existence of such double-directed discourses makes it
necessary, says Bakhtin, to formulate a new principle for classifying them. This is
especially important since neither stylistics nor semantics nor lexicology can
account for them. He then sets about defining the principle through classification.
Like the Formalists and the structuralists, Bakhtin knows classification to be
fundamental to perception.

Defining discourses
“The first type of discourse” is “direct and unmediated object-oriented
discourse.” It gives information, expresses and represents in a straightforward
fashion, and is meant to be understood in this way (186). It recognizes only itself
and its object, and its aim is to be as adequate as possible in its referential
accounting (187). We may think, for example, of Barthes’ reportage of Japan.
The second type is “represented or objectified discourse.” It has direct
referential meaning but exists at a certain distance from the author’s speech. The
“direct speech of characters” is the most common example (186). An author tells
you what someone is saying: that speech is important for what it’s telling you about
its referential object and for what it is telling you about the character who is saying
it. When this second type appears, there are thus two kinds of utterance taking
place: the character’s (or hero’s) discourse and the author’s. But the author is
primarily using the character’s discourse to tell the reader things about the hero, it
is being used as “an object of authorial understanding, and not from the point of
view of its own referential intention” (187). So, the hero’s discourse is subsumed
by the author’s, which remains in control and is directed towards its own referential
meaning. Characters speak but their discourse is contained by the author’s and the
direct speech of the author has “ultimate semantic authority.” We are meant to
believe the author, not the character. The first and second types of discourse are
alike in that each is directed exclusively toward its object, the difference being that
objective discourse is at the same time the object of someone else’s intention, the
author’s. As such, “these are single-voiced discourses.”
The first and second types of discourse are both monological, and the
monological context can only be changed by the “coming together of two
utterances equally and directly oriented toward a referential object” (188). This
equality creates dialogical “intersection.” It doesn’t matter whether the two voices
confirm, supplement or contradict each other (Bakhtin is not working on simple
binary opposition), for the deciding point is that two discourses are given equal
weight. Two such discourses on the same theme, once they are brought together,
“must inevitably orient themselves to one another” (189). This could be looked
upon as Bakhtin’s creatively different equivalent of the effect of literariness in
structuralism. According to Jakobson, literary signification becomes its own point
of reference and moves away from direct reference to the external world. In
 23

Bakhtin, direct reference to the object of signification continues to take place, but it
is possible for this to coexist with a change of orientation in the discourse. The
crucial difference is that this change does not make art self-referential. It does the
opposite in that art becomes the means of referring self to others.
The change can come when an author makes use of someone else’s discourse
for his own purposes by inserting it into his own writing. Hence parody, for
example, and stylization. This is the third type of discourse. In stylization, the
writer takes over someone else’s discourse without merging his own voice into it.
You know it is someone else’s discourse, not the writer’s. Bakhtin speaks of “a
slight shadow of objectification.” The difference between what is being copied (the
object of stylization) and the stylized result makes that result conditional. For
example, I write a poem which is a close copy of a five-hundred-year-old lyric
poem. Yet my way of doing this makes the reader aware that she is reading
something different from the original. That awareness is caused by stylization, my
means of letting you know that my own voice is not quite the same as the
original’s. My use of the original is therefore conditional. If I identify completely
with the original, the result is an imitation, “a complete merging of voices” (190),
and there is no sense of the conditional. It becomes single-voiced discourse of the
first type. Of course, says Bakhtin, there can also be very subtle transitions from
one to the other and back again.
Having established that there is a third type of discourse, which is double-
voiced, Bakhtin considers different kinds of examples (skaz, narration from the
first person, and parody). Parody uses another’s discourse in order to make fun of
it, but the other’s voice (in terms of having its own semantic intention) is heard
more strongly than in stylization. No fusion of the two voices is possible because
of the writer’s basic antagonism to the other voice (although this may coexist with
love). Because of this, if the level of artistic objectification is reduced the writing
tends to disintegrate into two separate discourses of the first type. Very roughly,
Bakhtin calls stylization and parody the first and second varieties respectively of
the third type of discourse (the double-voiced kind).
All types of discourse inform everyday speech, “which is full of other
people’s words: with some of them we completely merge our own voice, forgetting
whose they are; others, which we take as authoritative, we use to reinforce our own
words; still others, finally, we populate with our own aspirations, alien or hostile to
them” (195). However, this does not say everything, for there is a third variety of
the third type of discourse which is distinguished from the other kinds by being
more active. This third variety is the focus of Bakhtin’s attention.
The third, active variety of double-voiced discourse takes one form as
“hidden polemic.” In this, the writer is doing two things at the same time. He is
using discourse in the straightforward sense of referring to its object, and he is
simultaneously conducting an argument with someone else, someone who is not
actually present but against whose implied words the writer is reacting. Much of
my own writing here has taken exactly this form, conducting hidden polemics, with
Barthes and Terry Eagleton in particular. The sense of the other person’s voice
dictates the actual form of the discourse, which would be quite different if the
writer weren’t arguing against someone else while also straightforwardly directing
 24

his language toward its referential object. Because of this, there is a clash within
the language, you can feel the presence of someone else’s point of view and “this
begins to influence authorial discourse from within” (196).
Bakhtin also calls hidden polemic “internally polemical discourse,” and he
says it is extremely widespread in both everyday speech and in literature. It is “the
word with a sideward glance at someone else’s hostile word,” and he thinks it is
evident to a lesser or greater extent in every literary style. Indeed, it widens out
from polemic to any kind of sideward glance at someone else’s word. It can itself
become “style-shaping” (197) in that internal polemic often informs the
development as “a hidden anti-stylization of someone else’s style.” The very effort
involved in trying to avoid someone else’s style influences the style which is
produced (196).
The sideward glance does not have to be polemical: it can be an intense
awareness of what someone else has said or written, but without the antagonism of
hidden polemic. The way I speak to a friend can be shaped by my sense of what he
or she has said before, or by what I feel she is likely to say. I do not have to
literally glance sideways as I am speaking: my words do it for me, and they contain
the sense of someone else’s voice to which my own words are a rejoinder. So, the
sideward glance could be called the second form of active, double-voiced
discourse. A third form is a rejoinder to any real, already existing dialogue which
absorbs the other’s replies and reworks them (Bakhtin is enigmatic about this). A
fourth form, which Bakhtin says is especially important and is quite different from
hidden polemic, is “hidden dialogicality.” Here, we are given a dialogue in which
“the statements of the second speaker are omitted, but in such a way that the
general sense is not at all violated” (197). We sense throughout the other side of the
conversation, the invisible presence of a second speaker, another voice. This, says
Bakhtin, is Dostoevsky at his most profound, and he gives an example from Poor
Folk (1846), showing that an utterance can be read as a discourse and a counter-
discourse merged “into a single utterance issuing from a single mouth” (209).
Bakhtin thinks that all the important self-utterances of Dostoevsky’s later heroes
are condensed dialogues, “since all of them arose, as it were, out of two merged
rejoinders” (210).
There are thus three main types of discourse. The first two are monological,
one being direct, unmediated discourse and the other objectified discourse. The
third type is double-voiced and has three main varieties: stylization, parody and the
active variety (which Bakhtin also calls “reflected discourse of another”). My
account only shows the main lines of what Bakhtin says is already a simplified
schema. The active variety has four main forms: hidden polemic, any discourse
with a sideward glance, a rejoinder to an actual dialogue, and hidden dialogue.
Bakhtin also speaks about the effect of the degree of the author’s objectification on
each of these classifications (that is, the writer can vary the distance between
himself and the discourse).
Bakhtin admits his classification is “somewhat abstract” (199), but he
presumably feels obliged to provide it in order to show objectively that dialogism
can be identified and is central to language. He stresses that interrelationships
“with another person’s discourse in a concrete living context are of a dynamic and
 25

not a static character: the interrelationship of voices in discourse may change

drastically, unidirectional words may turn into vari-directional ones, internal
dialogization may become stronger or weaker, a passive type may be activized, and
so forth.” He argues that contemporary stylistics is based on the first type of
discourse alone, “on the direct referentially oriented discourse of the author” (200),
and says it ignores “the internally dialogic relationships between one word and the
same word in someone else’s context” (201). He also believes that any prose writer
must orient himself in a world full of other people’s words and that we ourselves
very subtly do the same in our everyday language. In this sense, we are all artists.
“All those verbal sideways glances, reservations, loopholes, hints, thrusts do not
slip past our ear, are not foreign to our own lips.” This, I take it, is fundamental to
Bakhtin’s “prosaics” (Morson and Emerson’s term), as opposed to conventional
poetics. Instead of turning life into art through aestheticization, in the manner of
structuralist-based theory, Bakhtin proceeds from the finding that art is interfused
with human life from the very beginning. Directly two people speak (or two voices
sound inside one person’s head), dialogism comes into play. The difference
between this and the great art of a writer such as Dostoevsky is not a difference in
kind. Rather, the great writer intensifies, arranges, angles and brings greater self-
consciousness to bear on already existing artistic activities. For Bakhtin, art is
human action through form. That action includes thought.

The epoch
Again, Bakhtin brings his argument back to “the epoch,” the particular
historical time and place. We can only speak as members of “a speaking collective”
(202). No word is neutral and we can never find a word uninhabited by other
people’s voices. When I want to use a word, it always enters my context from
another, and those contexts inform the ways in which I can use the word. One
simple example would be choosing a name for a child: every possible name is
already laden with meanings from other contexts. Even if I decide to coin a new,
“uninhabited” name, it will still be related to the contexts of others. Through
similarities of sound or spelling it will feel rich, strong, sensitive, exotic, no-
nonsense, or whatever. This is the basis of discourse, the continual orientation of
words among other words and of one’s perception among others’ perceptions.
Every epoch has its own special sense of discourse, and so does every social
trend within each epoch. What can be said in one way at one time cannot be said in
the same way at another time. Bakhtin distinguishes between historical situations
which permit or do not permit “the ultimate semantic authority of the creator to be
expressed without mediation in direct, unrefracted, unconditional authorial
discourse.” He entertains the possibility of historical situations in which the first
type of discourse (direct, unmediated and object-oriented) would be the main form
of expression. In such situations the individual would have “ultimate semantic
authority” for what he said: his language would not show him to be looking
verbally at other people all the time and reworking their language with a different
inflection. Instead, he would be his own “author.” Bakhtin seems to think that
epochs in which the individual has such semantic authority (or in which the main
 26

cultural emphasis is put on it) may be possible but do not exist in modern times.
That authority has gone and since we cannot simply pronounce the ultimate word
or truth about ourselves we must find it elsewhere (even as we may also try to
avoid it). This reworks in terms of discourse his earlier arguments about authority
and extends them from seeking an ideal in another person in the manner of
Dostoevsky, or finding authority in genre, to the everyday seeking and use of
authority in dialogical language.
If, in our historical situation, the first type of discourse does not give us
access to the unmediated truth about ourselves, then “every thought, feeling,
experience must be refracted through the medium of someone else’s discourse,
someone else’s style, someone else’s manner, with which it cannot immediately be
merged without reservation, without distance, without refraction” (202). We are
driven to others’ language (which includes style and manner), but we do not take it
over by immediately merging it into our own language; we do not just mimic
others. As always, Bakhtin treats merging and identification with great reservation.
Instead, there is distance and refraction (a word more commonly used to speak of
the deflection of light in air, water, or glass as it enters obliquely from a medium of
different density). If the medium of refraction is stabilized and authoritative in a
given epoch, discourse will tend to be conventionalized. Bakhtin refuses to give
examples, but presumably he means epochs in which culture is centred on and
dominated by Church or State. In such a situation, each way of producing discourse
would be angled by authority and would obey authority’s rules. Monks, for
example, might have set patterns of discourse which should be followed as exactly
as possible in order to enact their obedience to religious authority. Those patterns
would be thoroughly conventionalized - there would be set ways of speaking,
looking, behaving towards others, even of speaking to oneself. In Performances,
Greg Dening describes the conventionalized ways in which the devotions of
Ignatius Loyola are geared to informing the innermost thoughts of the devotee
(Dening, 1996: 12-16).
“Cultured discourse is discourse refracted through an authoritative and
stabilized medium” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 203). Bakhtin also says that if there is no such
medium, then double-voiced discourse will dominate. This is Bakhtin at his most
opaque. What is he saying or suggesting about Russia at the time of writing?
Contemporary Russia could have been a prime site for an authoritative medium and
therefore for cultured discourse. At first glance this looks complimentary, but we
already know that Bakhtin favours dialogism, and now he has said the conditions
for its growth only exist when there is no authoritative medium of refraction. The
example given is late classicism, but, perhaps more to the point, capitalism
provides the right conditions, not Communism. If so, Bakhtin is on very dangerous
ground. He is reaching the conclusion of his argument and has come near to saying
it is not possible to find authority in the State. Double-voiced discourse, dialogism,
means actively seeking authority in the language of others and as such is
fundamentally opposed to the authoritative mediums established by a totalitarian
state. No wonder he says, “This is not the place for an examination of these
problems in depth. Let us return to Dostoevsky” (203).
 27

The point, which seems harmless enough in today’s context, is not harmless
in Bakhtin’s situation: dialogically, we work through the authority of the language
of other people, but it is based upon individual acceptance and reworking of that
authority, not upon the external imposition of convention. Even in today’s context,
that is more serious in its implications than may appear at first sight.
Bakhtin has by now essentially presented his case, and he shifts the focus to a
detailed consideration of Dostoevsky which will give particularized meaning to the
previous schema. The emphasis in this consideration will be on the overwhelming
need to creatively find authority in others’ language and on the power of dialogism.
In effect there is a change of gear as Bakhtin shows through example what cannot
be said explicitly, partly for political and ideological reasons and partly because
only form can say what Bakhtin wants to say. We have to attend to Bakhtin’s own
form as well as to Dostoevsky’s. His way of getting around and answering
Communism (and incidentally of providing an alternative to structuralist-based
theory, if we care to join the dotted lines) is through the dialogical form of his own
writing.

Solipsism and creating the “other”

In The Double (1861), Dostoevsky dialogically dismantles an individual
consciousness, to both horrifying and hilarious effect. The protagonist, Golyadkin,
splits - he becomes two people, or rather, the voices of two people. Alienated from
the world, he seeks in his intense self-consciousness to substitute for that world by
producing another self which speaks to him as “the other.” The discourse of “the
other,” the double, interjects dialogically with Golyadkin’s own discourse,
gradually asserting its mastery over him by taking over his discourse and
reaccenting it. Yet of course it is Golyadkin himself who is producing this other
discourse. He seeks, as it were, to create “the other” for himself in order to evade
the genuinely other (the voices of real people who are truly outside himself): “the
dialogue allows him to substitute his own voice for the voice of another person”
(213). It is a kind of ventriloquism in which the voice of the puppet masters the
puppet-master, and “the novel tells the story of Golyadkin’s desire to do without
the other’s consciousness, to do without recognition by another, his desire to avoid
the other and assert his own self, and what resulted from this” (215).
The second voice, the double tormenting Golyadkin through parodying his
language, is so powerful that it gradually merges with the voice of the narrator of
the novel and Golyadkin has two similar voices besides his own ringing mockingly
in his ears. The field of action is that of a single self-consciousness, and within it
authority “has been seized by the other’s discourse” (219). So “the other” takes
over Golyadkin; authority comes from outside himself, from his “I for the other”
(in Bakhtin’s terminology) rather his “I for myself.” Yet, because Dostoevsky has
formally chosen to limit the field of vision to Golyadkin’s individual
consciousness, the “I for the other” can only be fictitious. Golyadkin’s own
consciousness produces a nightmare of solipsism.
Notes from Underground (1864) intensifies the nightmare by heightening the
self-awareness of the protagonist while retaining the single field of vision. The
Underground Man perpetually anticipates another’s response and “there is not a
 28

single monologic word” (229). But such anticipation “is marked by one peculiar
structural trait: it tends toward a vicious circle.” The Underground Man is driven
by the need to retain the final word for himself. Only in this way can he assert his
independence from others and his indifference to their evaluation. His greatest fear
is that others might think he is asking for forgiveness and is thus submitting to their
judgement. So, he continually anticipates the other’s response in order to be able to
deny it before the other person can judge him to be needing someone else. Yet,
says Bakhtin, this very need to anticipate, to dialogize, catches the Underground
Man by demonstrating to the other and to himself his dependence on someone else.
He fears the other might think he fears his or her opinion, and the very fear
conveys his dependence on another’s consciousness by revealing “his own inability
to be at peace with his own definition of self” (229).
The Underground Man is therefore trapped, and he knows this since he
knows everything we have already said. He is trapped in an “internal polemic with
another, and with himself, an endless dialogue where one reply begets another,
which begets a third, and so on to infinity, and all of this without any forward
motion” (230). We may well be reminded of Barthes’ comments in Empire of Signs
on “that internal recitation which constitutes our person” (Barthes, 1970b: 75). He
speaks of “the proliferation of secondary thoughts (the thought of thought), or what
might be called the infinite supplement of supernumerary signifieds.” In his view
the way to break “the vicious infinity of language” is through “jamming,”
suspending language through erasing “the reign of the Codes.” The value of the
haiku is that it does this by abolishing secondary thought.
In Barthes’ view, thinking is an internal monologue and haiku offer the way
to control language by erasing the activity of self-consciousness (the thought of
thought). In a sense he does look outside himself, to others (or at least to the
language of others), in that he finds an answer of a kind in Japanese poetry. Our
reservation may be that he then subsumes Japanese art within his self-
consciousness through submitting it to the dual activity of identification (with
poststructuralism) and rhetorical manipulation (it is all “made up” and serves the
“self-fashioning” of the writer).
Barthes’ situation may be analogous to that of the Underground Man despite
the seeming difference that Barthes aims at a denial of personality, whereas self
and others are the focus of the Underground Man’s dialogical consciousness: both
turn the world into the product of their own consciousness even as they are driven
to look outside. The Underground Man does not have any choice, since he is
Dostoevsky’s fictional construction and the writer has made his particular
nightmare of solipsism inescapable by formally limiting the field of vision to the
single consciousness. Perhaps Barthes and those influenced by him would say this
is the only field of vision possible. More probably they would argue that
poststructuralism makes one aware in one’s self-consciousness of the multiplicity
of fields of vision and therefore one is freed; or the whole issue is irrelevant
because the stable idea of the unified self was only a bourgeois construct in the first
place. My point is that such avowed plurality of vision in practice gravitates
inevitably toward a single consciousness (that of the theorist) as long as he sees
Barthes’ “internal recitation” monologically. If the self is seen from the first as
 29

being constituted of more than one consciousness (and more than one voice), the
Underground Man’s existential nightmare may at least be recognized; but then,
“existential” is a word Barthes is committed to denying in his need to escape from
the shadow of Jean-Paul Sartre. In short, Barthes’ poststructuralist Heaven is the
Underground Man’s Hell of solipsism.

Out of Hell
According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky does find a way out of that Hell (into a real
world which is not necessarily a nicer place) by introducing multiple fields of
vision in his great novels - Crime and Punishment (1865-1866), The Idiot (1869),
The Possessed (1871), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). However, it remains
unlikely whether any structuralist-based theorist would be prepared to follow him.
Bakhtin provides detailed and compelling analyses of these novels. The
commentary here is limited to part of his consideration of The Brothers
Karamazov. Simply and profoundly, Dostoevsky brings a number of
consciousnesses into play. The field of vision of each character may be similar to
that of the Underground Man, but now there are others through whom authority
and the word may be found. Again, we have to stress that the finding may be
simultaneously shunned. Any theorist influenced by structuralism might well say
that the introduction of multiple fields of vision is itself an artistic construct and
cannot show there really are others outside the single field of vision of an
individual person. Logically this is right (since solipsism, like the existence of
Father Christmas, cannot be disproved), but Bakhtin takes the apparently simple
view that of course other people exist and art can show this by artful means. We
either accept this or we do not. Better, maybe, to remain, however mistakenly, with
the ideal image of another person, with Christ, than with logical truth, truth as
formula.
Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky’s heroes “know everything from the very
outset” (247). However, “sometimes they conceal from themselves what they in
fact already know and see.” The simplest expression of this is in dualistic thinking,
whereby “one of the thoughts is obvious, determining the content of speech; the
other is hidden, but nevertheless determines the structuring of speech, casting its
shadow upon it.” Duality of thought can therefore be expressed through content
and form: two voices speaking simultaneously at different levels of consciousness.
The voice hidden in the form of Ivan Karamazov’s speech is his desire for the
death of his father (who has been murdered by another character, Smerdyakov).
Ivan himself has overtly rejected the world: his discourse is “addressed to God as
the guilty party responsible for the world order” (248). Ivan sees and feels the
suffering in the world, knows it is unfair, and refuses to accept the God who could
permit such suffering.
Dostoevsky works upon a “principle of voice combination” (254):
Two characters are always introduced by Dostoevsky in such a way that each
of them is intimately linked with the internal voice of the other...... In their
dialogue, therefore, the rejoinders of the one touch and even partially
coincide with the rejoinders of the other’s interior dialogue. A deep essential
bond or partial coincidence between the borrowed words of one hero and the
 30

internal and secret discourse of another hero - this is the indispensable

element in all Dostoevsky’s crucial dialogues. (254-255)
Bakhtin has therefore identified Dostoevsky’s dialogical operating principle. Each
character is divided and is made up of two opposing voices, one apparent and the
other more or less hidden. The link with others is made by the hidden voice
coinciding to at least some extent with one of the voices of another character (who
is in turn divided). We are both different from and yet the same as other people.
Alyosha, Ivan’s brother, has the capacity to dialogically penetrate Ivan’s
innermost, most hidden voice, and he can face him with the knowledge of what he
has been telling and simultaneously hiding from himself: “ ‘It wasn’t you who
killed father,’ ..... ‘I know I didn’t. Are you raving?’ said Ivan ..... ‘No, Ivan.
You’ve told yourself several times that you are the murderer.’ ” (255) Ivan’s
response to hearing his own secret words on someone else’s lips is to hate Alyosha.
Alyosha himself knows this, just as he knows the dialogical battle being fought
within Ivan. But he has to speak, says Bakhtin, because he knows his value for Ivan
is that of another person. Or rather, “Alyosha’s word must make itself useful
precisely as the word of another.” (256) He may serve to break the vicious circle of
solipsism that may drive Ivan into a self-accusation of murder. In a sense, Alyosha
performs a carnivalistic function. He is the good angel speaking in Ivan’s ear. The
bad angel on the other side is the Devil with whom Ivan converses. Alyosha and
the Devil identically repeat Ivan’s own words, imparting to them “diametrically
opposed accents. One intensifies one side of his internal dialogue, the other
another” (256).
The real murderer is Smerdyakov, the half-brother of Ivan and Alyosha. Yet
in a deeper sense Ivan is not mistaken, and the truth he is seeking and avoiding is
dialogical: it is made between people, one of them Ivan and the other Smerdyakov.
Ivan’s speech at the beginning of the novel expresses his half-hidden wish for their
father’s death. That innermost discourse coincides with Smerdyakov, or with part
of his consciousness, and the link is made. Ivan’s hidden voice is co-opted by
Smerdyakov, who proceeds to act upon it: “Through Smerdyakov, Ivan’s internal
rejoinder is transformed from a desire into a deed” (259). Bakhtin says that Ivan
wants his father murdered on the condition that he himself remains both externally
and internally uninvolved. Externally, in terms of content, he is saying, “ I don’t
want my father’s murder. If it happens, it will be against my will.” Internally, in
terms of form (which permeates the structure, tone and gesture of his discourse), he
is secretly saying, “I want the murder, but I want it to take place against my will so
that I am internally uninvolved and therefore innocent.” If there were only one field
of vision, this would be a solipsistic Hell but it would not necessarily result in
murder. However, the existence of other people, and of the operating principle of
sameness and difference, makes real action possible (through Dostoevsky’s artful
means, of course). So, the art of language is action and words have power when the
world is seen dialogically. Hence, also, the previous comments on Dostoevsky
finding a way out of solipsism into a real world which is not necessarily a nicer
place.
All Dostoevsky’s major heroes speak “with a loophole,” which is “the
retention for oneself of the possibility for altering the ultimate, final meaning of
 31

one’s own words” (233). This loophole “accompanies the word like a shadow.” It
means, for example that a character makes a confession about himself, but as he
does so he is “taking into account internally the responsive, contrary evaluation of
oneself made by another.” Condemning himself, the hero leaves himself with a
loophole in case the other person agrees with the condemnation. The “fictive
ultimate word” created by the loophole gives it an unclosed tone, which makes the
hero ambiguous even to himself. Even when he is trying to speak the truth about
himself, he has to leave that truth open, often through the ironic inflection of his
language.
The loophole in Ivan’s second rejoinder to himself is when, desiring his
father’s death, he also wants to be internally uninvolved in it so as to remain
innocent. This may make him unfinalizable (the active function of the loophole),
and that may protect him from objectification by others and even by himself, but in
a dialogism based on sameness and difference it also allows another to translate
one’s hidden voice in their own way. That is what Smerdyakov does. The sameness
with Ivan permits Smerdyakov to understand Ivan’s hidden voice. The difference
from Ivan lets Smerdyakov turn the wish into deed and commit the murder.
Smerdyakov does not see the loophole on Ivan’s terms. From Ivan’s standpoint, it
is a kind of philosophical escape-hatch to free the self from answerability.
Presented within a single field of vision, he might be similar to the Underground
Man. Yet, colliding with another consciousness, another person, another voice,
Ivan finds in the most horrific way that he is linked with the real world (which
Alyosha wants him to understand also contains people who love him).
Smerdyakov simply thinks Ivan is a very clever man who wants their father
dead without being implicated in the murder himself. He sees Ivan as “integral and
undivided” (259), and when he hears Ivan’s first voice (the one saying he does not
want his father’s death) he thinks this is just part of Ivan’s cleverness in freeing
himself from responsibility. Alyosha, however, knows the first voice to be serious
and addresses himself to it, even though he is also aware of the second. He sees his
brother dialogically. Bakhtin says that Smerdyakov’s dialogues with Ivan before
the murder are “a conversation between Smerdyakov’s open and conscious will
(encoded in hints) and Ivan’s hidden will (hidden even from himself), taking place,
as it were, without the participation of Ivan’s open and conscious will” (259).
Smerdyakov confidently directs his hints and equivocations at Ivan’s second voice,
to which Ivan’s first voice answers. That first voice is actually direct and serious,
but since Ivan’s consciousness is divided it also contains hidden rejoinders from his
second voice. These are picked up by Smerdyakov (who perceives others
monologically) as expressing the real Ivan and he consequently understands the
first voice as allegorically saying the opposite of what Ivan really means. Thus, in
murdering their father Smerdyakov is absolutely sure he is doing Ivan’s will. And,
in that he has allowed his own discourse to be reinflected and reinterpreted by
Smerdyakov (and his will to be at least partly mastered by the other man), Ivan is
complicit in parricide.
Such a summary only focuses on part of Bakhtin’s analysis of The Brothers
Karamazov. It also says nothing about his discussion of other major Dostoevsky
novels. Through that discussion, Bakhtin justifies his conclusion that “Everywhere
 32

a specific sum total of ideas, thoughts and words is passed through several
unmerged voices, sounding differently in each” (265). We have done no more than
hint here at Bakhtin’s exposition of “the dialogic nature of the word.” Yet perhaps
some ground has been cleared for a fuller appreciation of Bakhtin’s famous
comment that “the main object of his [Dostoevsky’s] representation is the word
itself, and especially the fully signifying word. Dostoevsky’s works are a word
about a word addressed to a word” (266). That last sentence is sometimes taken to
mean that only language matters to Bakhtin from first to last, that his central
concern must be with the constructedness of meaning, and that the “word about a
word addressed to a word” allows ever greater abstraction. In fact, it is as much
about fact. Dialogical fact.
Bakhtin has shown that in his great novels Dostoevsky moves beyond the
aestheticized meaning of the Underground Man (and, I would argue, of
structuralist-based theory). The world of those novels is fictionally real. Dialogism
and the seeking of authority in others’ words are necessary, real and dangerous.
Instead of art taking over life, or art demonstrating that life can only be seen as
artistic, life plus art, fused in the interrelatedly human event, equals dialogism and
the polyphonic novel. Since life and art become inseparableiv (and in becoming
reveal that they always were inseparable) the new terms are necessary. We have
moved into a different epoch, that of dialogism. The new epoch rises out of and
will outlast capitalism, according to Bakhtin. That remains to be seen. But if he is
right, or if he is to be right, the activity of seeing and responding is such that we are
participants since an active truth is not neutral.

Bakhtin’s own dialogism

Bakhtin has identified and argued for the power and necessity of dialogism
and the polyphonic novel. But how does one write about dialogism without
reducing it to monological explication? There is a risk of being left with a handful
of concepts and literary devices to play with. The answer is partly, of course, in the
coexisting objectivity and particularity noted earlier as fundamental to Bakhtin’s
approach. These insist above all on form, and we may well ask what role Bakhtin’s
own form plays in making the case for dialogism. That is, we cannot simply speak
of the content of his writing.
His translator and editor, Caryl Emerson, says that Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics is “a conversation in progress,” Bakhtin’s “dialogue about dialogue”
(xxxix). She believes he “modeled his syntax on the utterance and not the
sentence” (xxxiv), which partly results in his often heavily philosophical language
sounding as though someone is speaking with someone else, with us, expecting at
any moment to be interrupted. He writes responsively, and this informs every
aspect of his language and style. Bakhtin’s utterances are shaped, above all else, by
his sensitivity to authority in discourse: “who is speaking, when, how, to whom,
through how many intermediaries - and how these levels of authority are
represented in hybrid constructions” (xxxvi). Emerson adds that Bakhtin’s prose
“is often a fabric of such hybrids. In one sentence he will represent direct speech,
 33

indirect speech, quasi-direct speech, his own voice interwoven with the voices and
arguments of his opponents and fellow-travelers.” Bakhtin calls all this “voice
interference,” and its importance lies in the relativizing effect of the
interrelationship between authorities in any one utterance (and also between
utterances). Just as in basic grammar a subordinate clause modifies a main clause
in a specific way, so Bakhtin creates a fabric of relativizing clauses that enact the
living dialogue of argument through finding, using and reworking authority. But
the reworking does not simply express Bakhtin’s commanding view. Like
Dostoevsky, he is continually setting views and authorities against each other.
Emerson says that “an utterance responds both to others without, and others
embedded within itself.”
Emerson’s comments reveal very sharply some of the ways in which
Bakhtin’s prose enacts his themes. He does what he is talking about. To some
extent this brings him formally very close to his view of Dostoevsky’s own form,
and Emerson notes the stylistic and structural similarity between Bakhtin and
Dostoevsky as Bakhtin sees him. Yet she also says, emphasizing our own previous
commentary, “One of Bakhtin’s major premises ..... might be called the vitality of
nonequivalence” (xxxii). Difference liberates, according to Emerson, making
events and dialogic meaning possible: “Bakhtin was not sympathetic to the
ultimate fusion or erasing of differences.” Bakhtin’s wariness about identification
has been well attested, so how is he different from Dostoevsky? How does he build
that difference into his own writing and how does he resist merging with a writer
he admires so much? Unless that resistance is formally there, Bakhtin’s own
dialogism can only be partial at best.
A fundamental operating principle of Dostoevsky’s polyphony was noted
earlier: sameness and difference. In the simplest version two voices coexist
dualistically within one person. One of those voices may determine the content, the
other the form. The first is more open, the second more hidden. One of the voices
of another person coincides, at least in part, with the hidden discourse of the first
person. The two people are the same and vitally different. Bakhtin cannot be
Dostoevsky any more than Ivan can be Smerdyakov or Alyosha. His double can be
Golyadkin, but that is Golyadkin’s madness.
Bakhtin’s content, his explication of dialogism and polyphony, makes an
equivalence or partial coincidence with the form of Dostoevsky’s writing. Bakhtin
speaks explicitly about Dostoevsky’s half-hidden formal discourse, and he is close
enough to the novelist for many later critics to think he is right. Hence the impetus
given to dialogism in the Western academic world. However, Bakhtin leaves
Dostoevsky’s content relatively untouched, at least in terms of overt commentary.
He analyses Dostoevsky’s form in great detail, but he largely leaves the content (in
the form of quotations) to speak for itself. We thus hear Bakhtin addressing one
level of discourse in Dostoevsky while tacitly allowing the other to speak for itself.
And Dostoevsky’s content, as presented to us without comment by Bakhtin, is very
different. Emerson says that “a competent reader” of Bakhtin must be able to hear
“a dialogue where no voice is done the ‘slightest violence’ ” (xxxvii). This is true
of Bakhtin, but it does not apply to Dostoevsky, in whose writings characters and
voices do the most terrible things to others and to themselves. If we once consider
 34

the content of Dostoevsky’s writing, we enter a world of madness and murder,

famously characterized by the most intense sadism and masochism.
Bakhtin is not wrong about Dostoevsky. He is right, absolutely right, and he
makes a wonderful case for his being one of the very greatest of writers. But he is
also different, and by addressing form while presenting and letting the content
speak for itself he silently asserts nonequivalence. Does Bakhtin know what he is
doing? Perhaps the most appropriate but apparently evasive answer is to say he
thinks dialogically, not psychologically. If Bakhtin were working solely through
sameness with Dostoevsky, through attempted identification, the lure of matching
content with content would be irresistible. If he did not want the slightest violence
done to any voice by Dostoevsky, he would have to repress the sadism and the
masochism in terms of Dostoevsky’s content and concentrate on redemption
scenes. This would strain credibility but it would be all of a monological piece.
Bakhtin certainly does include redemption scenes (or attempts at
redemption), but this is not where the emphasis of the selected quotations generally
falls. This can be quickly shown by reference to Chapter Five. In the various
quotations from Dostoevsky, Makar Devushkin’s agonizing social alienation in
Poor Folk is featured (with Devushkin picturing himself as a rat), Golyadkin is
humiliated by his double (himself) and by the narrator (becoming himself),
Gretchen’s consciousness in The Adolescent is filled with the devil’s song
(although there is a climactic rising to Heaven), and the Underground Man has to
live with the refusal of others to recognize him as a human being. The
Underground Man self-consciously contemplates his hatred of his own face, his
degrading dreams of literary glory, and his abuse of the girl to whom he is
confessing. Raskolnikov’s masochistic self-ridicule in Crime and Punishment is
intensified by his self-aware hurting of others (“If I were not a louse, should I have
come to you?”), and there are excerpts from Stavrogin’s terrifying, hate-filled
“confession” in The Possessed. Alyosha’s denial of Ivan’s guilt may be aimed at
eventual redemption but evokes immediate hatred. Porfiry Petrovich’s dialogical
penetration of Raskolnikov is geared to exposing his guilt as a murderer, and the
“mysterious visitor” returns at night (in The Brothers Karamazov) to kill Father
Zosima.
Redemption is immanent in much of the discourse because it is always
immanent to some degree in Dostoevsky, but the emphasis in Bakhtin’s selection
falls primarily on the violence that characters do to others and to themselves.
Presenting such content-discourse while generally attempting to avoid answering it
in terms of his own discourse on content (concentrating instead on explicating the
form-discourse) dialogically penetrates and answers Dostoevsky’s half-hidden,
inner voice (the form) while leaving the outer (the content) intact.
This is tact at its most profound, the attempt to understand Dostoevsky while
refusing to do violence to his unique voice. Bakhtin can speak to Dostoevsky while
also trying to let him speak for himself. Such tact avoids making the kind of
judgement in terms of content that I made earlier when I spoke of Ivan being
complicit in his father’s murder. That may be true, and I made the objectifying
judgement in order to stress the power of dialogism and the link between thought
and action, but it is nevertheless a finalizing truth, which in Bakhtin’s view
 35

becomes a lie in being spoken about someone else’s personality. Only Ivan can say
the truth about himself, and that is in part what The Brothers Karamazov enacts. In
the same way, only Dostoevsky can say the truth about his own writing.
Alyosha addresses Ivan’s hidden voice in order to make him aware of another
person’s awareness. He also wants Ivan to know that he takes his first voice
seriously (as Smerdyakov doesn’t) and that he believes the first voice can “win.”
Perhaps Bakhtin’s function somewhat resembles Alyosha’s while reversing the
polarity of the voices. He addresses the half-hidden voice of the form, which he
wants to “win” against the voice of the content. He must also take the voice of the
content seriously, not trying to play down or modify its cruelty, but showing it as it
is. One consequence of trying to let Dostoevsky speak for himself is that we, too,
are faced with Dostoevsky’s and his characters’ extreme difficulties in realizing the
voice of the form. As opposed to the formal discourse, the content conveys pain,
and by actively permitting it to speak for itself Bakhtin establishes someone else’s
factual voice in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Hence my previous remark that
Bakhtin’s closing comments on dialogism are also about fact. There is the fact of
that which cannot be sublimated by art but which still exists within, actively
shaping art through resistance (Carnival). There is the fact of action (art and life in
the interrelatedly human event). There is the fact of another’s voice within one’s
own discourse (Dostoevsky within Bakhtin’s book). Everything may be structured,
but that does not tell us everything. The world is not just “made up.”
In one sense Bakhtin is addressing Dostoevsky. It does not matter to him that
the writer is dead, since the Word carrying and expressing dialogical meaning
operates through people in past, present and future. He and Dostoevsky are also
addressing the reader. Because he, too, is a reader of Dostoevsky, the book acts as
a guide: how to read a reading of Dostoevsky’s reading of both literature (other
readings) and the world. Reading is part of the action of dialogism. Bakhtin
examines Dostoevsky’s new form and responds by finding another new form to
express both the similarity and the difference between himself and Dostoevsky.
The reader should do the same if he or she is to address others dialogically.
We spoke of Bakhtin’s reading (the active address expressing his response) as
his content-discourse coinciding with Dostoevsky’s form-discourse, interacting
dialogically with Dostoevsky’s own content. This is not to say that each reading
must follow the same path. That would reduce dialogism to set devices, which may
be important in themselves for maintaining objectivity and resisting subjectivity,
but which cannot be applied mechanically without turning the dialogical into
monologism. With sameness and difference as the very simple and flexible
operating principles, the reader would need to shape his or her own way of reading,
finding and using others’ authority. We may well be doing this anyway.
Dialogism protects itself. Self-consciousness may be its modern driving
force, but through the interplay of consciousnesses the individual self-
consciousness may be freed from its stultifying tendency toward self-obsession.
Like all tact, Bakhtin’s freeing of Dostoevsky’s content is oblique. His selection of
quotations from Dostoevsky is determined by his address to the writer’s form: he
chooses them because they illuminate that address. The content can look after
itself, it’s not exactly Bakhtin’s business, and the notable feature of the quotations
 36

is that, although pain is central, they have not been chosen as the most intense
examples of the violence that one person can do to another (in that there are scenes
of much greater pain, if one is looking for them). Instead, Bakhtin’s principle for
selection is his formal concern with one character’s dialogical understanding of
another. The pain is not inessential to that selection, but it arises as it were
obliquely. While we are concentrating on one discourse, another will look after
itself if the dialogical situation has been properly set up.
Bakhtin is therefore freed from the overruling control of self-consciousness:
he owes it to Dostoevsky and to himself to bring maximum awareness to bear on
his consideration of the writer’s form, but beyond that it is out of his control, and
the dialogism allows for that. Indeed, it encourages it. Of course, it is still possible
to claim Bakhtin has such hyper-self-consciousness that he has deliberately
formulated everything in this way; in other words, he is a kind of Underground
Man of dialogism. Yet there are no indications of this in the text, and Bakhtin
seems happy to end Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics on a triumphant note quite
at odds with much of the content of Dostoevsky’s writing. More likely, Bakhtin is
aware that he no more coincides with himself than does Dostoevsky or his heroes.
Like Dostoevsky, he may deliberately set up a collision of sameness and
difference, but after that dialogism follows its own internal logic, the logic of its
form, which Bakhtin both expresses and is expressed by.
The saving grace may be that, while we are able to entertain different
meanings simultaneously, our consciousness is such that only one level of meaning
can be illuminated with maximum sharpness for us at any given point in the act of
response, the rejoinder. Thus, for example, we may be focusing on the content of
our speech while the form (including tone, gesture, facial movement, etc.) is to
some extent conducting a different dialogue. We may have greater or lesser
awareness of that discourse, but we cannot give it equal weight or bring it fully
under our control because of the simultaneous concentration on content. To control
form completely, we would need complete control over ourselves, and Bakhtin for
one does not believe this to be possible in capitalist societies. So, he concentrates
on Dostoevsky’s form and the content slips in to speak for itself.
The oblique awareness of another, and the tact entailed in letting another
speak, may be reminiscent of Barthes’ view in Empire of Signs that the haiku is
open to meaning in an absent-minded kind of way (Barthes, 1970b: 69). Both
Barthes and Bakhtin seem aware that the angle of perception may be all-important
to understanding. The difference between them, however, is Bakhtin’s tacit, formal
enabling of Dostoevsky to continue to speak for himself, which contrasts with
Barthes’ identification of the haiku with poststructuralism so that the haiku ends by
speaking for him rather than for itself. Barthes sets the haiku’s “distracted”
meaning in opposition to the Western penetration of meaning (which begs the
question of how he came to recognize this other kind of meaning unless it already
existed in some form in the West), whereas Bakhtin may suggest that the one opens
onto the other.
The content/form distinction is only one way to approach the question of
different and similar discourses. Another possibility would be to adapt
structuralism, and Bakhtin himself does this by employing Saussure’s distinction
 37

between the synchronic and the diachronic. In practice, this is mainly formal and,
to both oddly satisfying and dissatisfying effect, it involves using one form to
address another which is both the same and yet different. Bakhtin insists from the
first chapter onwards on certain fundamental categories in Dostoevsky’s artistic
visualization: coexistence, interaction, simultaneity, “the cross-section of a given
moment.” In short, extreme synchrony. Bakhtin’s formally organized approach to
Dostoevsky looks somewhat similar. Chapters are organized around formal topics
interrelating synchronically with each other as opposed, for example, to a
straightforward consideration of the temporal development of the artist. When
Caryl Emerson speaks of “some similarity between the style and structure of
Bakhtin’s writing, and his perception of the style of his favorite novelists”
(xxxviii), she is thinking of a coincidence based a lack of formal unity: Bakhtin’s
fragmenting of texts and his lack of analysis of individual novels as finished
wholes. Donald Fanger is quoted as saying that although Bakhtin “refers frequently
to the fates of individual characters,” he “seems to deny these any controlling
meaning.” All of this arises, I think, from a concern with the synchronic which
matches or speaks in a similar formal voice to Dostoevsky. However, within the
overall synchronic form and approach to individual novels and characters a deeper
diachronic structure (or number of structures) is at work and is quite different to
Bakhtin’s account of Dostoevsky’s own form.
It becomes apparent that Bakhtin’s thinking is shot through with the
diachronic, with time. He is a man who cannot say anything without finding
himself propelled backwards in time and then having to work his way towards the
present. Sometimes this is fairly straightforward and academically conventional: In
Chapter One he surveys the Russian critics of Dostoevsky, more or less temporally
building up a sense of the increasing understanding of the writer’s dialogism. Also,
although many references to Dostoevsky’s later work are brought in early on, it is
fairly clear that Bakhtin is saving up the detailed analysis of Dostoevsky’s great
novels for the last part of the book and is working temporally towards them.
Overtly, the synchronic dominates Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, but
whatever Bakhtin touches upon involves reference to histories or sub-histories of
the particular facet of the synchronic he is dealing with. Partly, of course, this is the
life of the Word and it is the life of Bakhtin’s book, the sense that to make present
meaning one must continually reinterpret the past. Hence the liberating feeling of
potentiality conveyed to many readers, although others may object to the open-
endedness of Bakhtin’s thinking. At times he seems liable to attempt a history of
eternity. Certainly, if one wants substantive conclusions one should not look to
Bakhtin since his temporal way of thinking serves to deny that one can simply
arrive at answers.
The diachronic tendency comes to a head in Chapter Four. Bakhtin’s
consideration of the serio-comical involves histories of the Socratic dialogue, the
Menippean satire, sub-histories of the soliloquy, the symposium and utopian works
of antiquity, a history of Carnival, and interrelated sub-histories of the menippea
and Christianity, the menippea and the Middle Ages, and the menippea and the
Renaissance. Bakhtin moves forward to particular works by Dostoevsky but then
gives histories of Dostoevsky’s generic sources: Dostoevsky and Ancient Christian
 38

Literature, the menippea and later literature. This takes him forward once more to
Dostoevsky’s works, only to return to the generic sources of important themes in
Dostoevsky’s writing. He comes forward yet again to Dostoevsky, which then
entails temporal accounts of carnivalization in the Renaissance, the Eighteenth
Century, the nineteenth century novel, and Romanticism. This links with further
references to Dostoevsky’s fiction and by the end of the chapter Bakhtin is fairly
bouncing between past and present.
Chapter Four cannot be reduced to a plan. Rather, Bakhtin seems to give
himself freely to the diachronic whenever it relates to his synchronic concerns.
Why does he do this even more intensely than usual? For once, he tells the reader,
instead of following his customary practice of leaving us to work it out for
ourselves:
The aim of our entire work has been to explore the inimitable uniqueness of
Dostoevsky’s poetics, “to show the Dostoevsky in Dostoevsky.” But if such a
synchronic task [Bakhtin’s italics] is properly resolved, then it should help us
feel out and trace Dostoevsky’s generic tradition back to its sources in
antiquity. We have tried to do just that in the present chapter, although, to be
sure, in a somewhat general and almost schematic form. We believe our
diachronic analysis conforms the results of the synchronic one. Or more
precisely, the results of both analyses mutually verify and confirm one
another. (177-178)
Bakhtin has thus knowingly utilized Saussure to accomplish something
extraordinary: a kind of fragmented and glancingly diachronic history of the
synchronic. Instead of setting the one against the other, he has proceeded in the
belief that the diachronic can confirm the synchronic, thereby transforming the
whole basis of structuralism. And the impetus for this creativity is given by
Bakhtin’s sense of Dostoevsky, his wish to show the writer’s uniqueness. In this
way, structuralism becomes a vehicle for particularity.
If we consider Bakhtin’s transformation of structuralism dialogically, we can
see how Dostoevsky’s particularity is linked with history. We said earlier that
Bakhtin sees Dostoevsky’s synchronic vision as his greatest strength and his
greatest weakness (1984a: 30), an imperfection which allowed him to concentrate
his perception “in the cross-section of a given moment.” The conventional
academic way of responding to that insight into Dostoevsky’s ambivalent greatness
would be to examine the nature of the writer’s failings in detail. Yet on Bakhtin’s
terms that would be to finalize Dostoevsky unforgivably by showing that he is in
error. Also, the only way to “show the Dostoevsky in Dostoevsky” is to actively
address him, not to merely write about him. Bakhtin’s diachronic discourse is his
address to Dostoevsky. Instead of telling the reader where Dostoevsky went wrong,
Bakhtin faces the writer with a history or histories of the synchronic intended to
show that it needs to be seen temporally.
The point of such a form of address may derive from a belief that only a
diachronic discourse can answer the pain of Dostoevsky’s writing. The novelist’s
obsession with the synchronic leaves the writer and his characters open to the
peculiar sufferings of self-consciousness. The way out may be the recognition of
others, but Dostoevsky may be in danger of sacrificing himself to his own
 39

characters, and the recognition of others in time might provide the sense of others’
authority through which the writer might find himself. Bakhtin provides the history
of the authorities which made it possible for Dostoevsky to realize the polyphonic
novel: his obsession with the synchronic, instead of isolating him, is seen to link
him with others through several thousand years of art. Bakhtin has attempted to
identify and confirm the life of Dostoevsky’s authority.
Such a diachronic form of address seems to me another example of Bakhtin’s
massive tact, helping to make sense of and for Dostoevsky without violating or
criticizing his own voice, and it has parallels once more with Alyosha’s chosen role
in relation to Ivan Karamazov. However, it also causes certain problems of its own.
By considering the diachronic, but not within Dostoevsky’s work, Bakhtin refrains
from interfering with Dostoevsky and creatively supplements what he sees as the
writer’s weakness. Yet this particular attempt at dialogism, based I think on love,
depends absolutely on Dostoevsky’s only being synchronic in his writing. And this
is not the case. Bakhtin partly allows the novelist to escape from normal temporal
constraints by introducing “carnival time” and its variant, “threshold time,” but, as
Gabor Bezeczky illuminatingly notes, Dostoevsky’s characters do exist
chronologically (Bezeczky, 1994). That is, they are subject to and develop through
time. Furthermore, Bakhtin himself recognizes this at certain points when
considering Dostoevsky’s treatment of his characters. He then seems to suppress
the recognition. Indeed, he has to suppress it if he is to pursue his dialogical form
of address. The result, as Bezeczky says, is that the reader stumbles between two
views of characterization in Dostoevsky’s novels, one based on pure synchrony and
the other allowing for the diachronic. Bakhtin’s inward dialogical address to the
writer may work very well and is stunning in its loving originality, but the outward
dialogical address to the reader is blurred because the schema imposed by the
inward address cannot overtly permit diachrony within Dostoevsky’s writing.
One point to be made is that dialogism is no easy answer, and good intentions
don not necessarily save it from incoherence. A foolproof method is not on offer. A
second point is that dialogism may always be messy and therefore unpleasing to
those schooled in demanding maximum aesthetic satisfaction. Bakhtin is above all
a teacher, and he always writes from that standpoint. However, teaching can
involve two very different attitudes (with many transitions and much overlapping).
One is the direct and privileged explication of the speaker’s views. The other is the
use of privilege to address others in the knowledge that they receive and adapt the
discourse in a myriad of ways, and the response changes the address even as it is
being made. But the nature of teaching is such that the teacher is nearly always
aiming his words at and responding to a number of people at the same time, and
even the best and most dialogical of teachers cannot find the form to satisfy all of
those people.
The form of Bakhtin’s approach to Dostoevsky may to a certain extent mar
his address to the reader. Yet we may admire and learn from his address to
Dostoevsky, just as we may learn from his mistakes in speaking to us. A good
teacher, such as Bakhtin, may be instructive for us in his failings. One result of the
blurred dialogical address may be to drive us back to Dostoevsky to see how he
himself actually relates the diachronic to the synchronic. In other words, Bakhtin
 40

unwittingly pushes the reader to establish a direct relationship with Dostoevsky

through revealing to us that we cannot rely on Bakhtin alone. There is creativity in
his very weaknesses, which are themselves inevitable because of the central
importance of human relationships in his thinking.
For Bakhtin himself, the partial messiness of dialogism may be the driving
force behind his writing. He has to go back and try again, and as he responds to the
sense of relative failure he shapes new forms of dialogism. All his work revolves
around a few key concerns, but each work finds a new form and a new kind of
creativity. The specific problems of using time in the dialogical address may in part
account for the extensive changes in the Dostoevsky book between 1929 and 1963,
and they may also result in the form and thinking of another of his greatest works,
“Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (1981: 84-258).

End-notes
i
Jonathan Rée outlines some salient difficulties in “Selflessness.” (1997, London Review of Books,
8 May, 16-19) He claims the basis of our traditions of moral education is the assumption that we
start our lives absorbed in a selfishness which is then transformed into social benevolence through
the mechanisms of sympathy and calculated advantage. A healthy self-love becomes love for others.
One problem, as Rée notes, is that many people may not have much self-love in the first place, so
loving their neighbours as themselves “would be bad news indeed.” In other words, they may find
great difficulty even making it to the moral starting-line of the race to learn to care for others.
Perhaps the great worth of Bakhtin’s “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (in Art and
Answerability, 1990: 4-256) is the writer’s sustained attempt to promote self-love, in part by
denying and providing alternatives to both the classic mechanisms and to the classic account of
moral development.
ii
“Pure empathizing as such is impossible. If I actually lost myself in the other (instead of two
participants there would be one - an impoverishment of Being), i.e., if I ceased to be unique, then
this moment of my not-being could never become a moment of my consciousness ..... it would
simply not exist for me ..... Passive empathizing, being-possessed, losing oneself - these have
nothing in common with the answerable act/deed of self-abstracting or self-renunciation.” (Bakhtin,
1993: 16) He distinguishes between passive and aesthetic empathizing. In the latter, one empathizes
with another person and at the same time objectifies the act. This kind of aestheticization, in which I
empathize “into the participant of an event is not yet the attainment of a full comprehension of the
event.” The truth of the interrelationship between two people can only be grasped in the unique
event “which encompasses both of us equally.” This make aesthetic unity impossible: “It is only
from within that act as my answerable deed that there can be a way out into the unity of Being.”
(17-18) For Bakhtin, both passive and aesthetic empathy seem to be ways of trying to evade
answerability.
iii
Among the many writings on Carnival, particular reference should be made to P. Stalleybrass and
A. White, 1986, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London, Methuen. A controversial
article which links Carnival directly to Stalinist Terror is Mikhail Ryklin, 1990, “Bodies of Terror:
Theses Toward a Logic of Violence,” New Literary History, 24.1: 51-74 (1993).
iv
This is not to claim a privileged status for those who present their actions as artistic and therefore
superior to common morality: “the man who throws a bomb is an artist,” says Chesterton’s Lucian
Gregory in The Man Who Was Thursday. It is to claim that art is fundamental to everyday life. This
presents its own problems. Lennard J. Davis explores some of the implications of Bakhtin’s belief
 41

that the highest art and actual living are interfused. See Davis, 1990, “The Monologic Imagination:
M.M.Bakhtin and the Nature of Assertion,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 23.1: 29-44.

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