Review: Bakhtin, the Critics, and Folklore

Reviewed Work(s): The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 by
Jean-Christophe Agnew; Mikhail Bakhtin by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist; The
Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture by Giles Gunn; The Politics and Poetics
of Transgression by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White; Carnival and Theater: Plebeian
Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England by Michael D. Bristol;
Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle by Tzvetan Todorov; The Place of the Stage:
License, Play and Power in Renaissance England by Stephen Mullaney
Review by: Roger D. Abrahams
Source: The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 102, No. 404 (Apr. - Jun., 1989), pp. 202-
206
Published by: American Folklore Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/540685
Accessed: 04-06-2019 04:45 UTC

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REVIEW ESSAY

Bakhtin, the Critics, and Folklore

The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750. By Jean-Christophe

Agnew. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xi + 255, index. $24. 95)
Mikhail Bakhtin. By Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the
Harvard University Press, 1984. Pp. xi + 390, illustrations, index. $25.00; $8. 95 soft cover)
The Culture of Criticism and the Criticism of Culture. By Giles Gunn. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987. Pp. xv + 207, index. $24.95)
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. By Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986. Pp. xi + 202, bibliography, index. $29. 95; $12. 95 soft cover)
Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance
England. By Michael D. Bristol. (New York: Methuen, 1985. Pp. ix + 225, bibliography,
index. $33.00)
Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. By Tzvetan Todorov. (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1984. Theory and History ofLiterature Series, Vol. 13. Pp. 160. $29.50;
$10. 95 soft cover)
The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. By Stephen
Mullaney. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 178, illustrations, index.
$24.95)

ROGER D. ABRAHAMS
University of Pennsylvania

The extraordinary work of the Russian philosopher of language and culture, M. M. Bakhtin,
sets forth theories that resonate to the concerns of folklorists seeking to underscore the emergent
and in-common achievement of traditional performances. The importance ofBakhtin's thought
has been acknowledged for some time by those of our profession who are sociolinguistically
oriented. Bakhtin's oeuvre revolves around his notion of the dialogism. Meaning, in Bakhtin's
world, is not achieved by communicating individuals but contained within the very idea of con-
versation and other interactional ways of speaking.
Such a theory privileges those forms of interaction that call for more than one voice in perfor-
mance. Those forms and occasions in which one speaker subordinates others through some mas-
tery are designated as monologic, regarded as departures from the flow of life. Folklorist Susan
Stewart points up the ideological force ofBakhtin's ideas: "We cannot begin with a model of the
utterance as the spontaneous production of an individual consciousness. Rather the utterance
must be seen as bearing within itself a complex and contradictory set of historical elements." In
Bakhtin's usage dialogue implies that "all speech is reported speech, for all speech carries with it
a history of use and interpretation by which it achieves both identity and difference. It is within
this rather remarkable capacity for making present the past that speech acquires its social mean-
ing" (Stewart 1986:53; emphasis added). This notion is especially important for folklorists. Not

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 Review Essay 203

only does Bakhtin invite us to rethink the hierarchy of traditional forms by bringing dialogical
genres to the fore; he shows that even those genres which seem to be monologic contain the many
voices of the past whenever they invoke traditions. Indeed, perhaps "making present the past"
may prove to be the best definition of tradition in practice for performance-centered folklorists.
This would apply particularly strongly in those cases in which performers themselves reference
the past within their own performances.
The first of Bakhtin's work that came to critical notice was Rabelais and His World (1968), and
this book remains the one most immediately useful to folklorists. It is a direct commentary on
the folk festivities of Carnival, which Bakhtin discusses in relation to Rabelais' use of such tra-
ditions in Gargantua & Pantagruel. Alternative and confrontative voices, Bakhtin argues, are em-
powered in the opening up that occurs at the marketplace, both through the process of bargaining
and through other contentious, stylized, and dramatized displays that accompany buying and
selling at high pitch. The pre-Lenten Carnival develops upon these marketplace practices to the
point of grotesquerie.
In European languages, including Russian, the distinction between folk and popular culture is
not commonly made. Helen Iswoldsky, the translator of Bakhtin's work into English, renders
the word narodna (the people) as folk. The result of her bold stroke is that we are encouraged to
look at folklore not only from the fireside and the village but from the vantage of the crossroad
and the market stalls, treating rural and urban populations alike. Bakhtin leans heavily on the
term snechnovaja narodnaja kul'tura: laughing, parodic, even insolent common culture, as a way
of breaking down the distinction between peasant and other members of the general populace.
Two books cover Bakhtin's oeuvre: the first is by Todorov-a translation of that important
French critic's introduction to the meaning and importance of dialogism; and the second is by
Clark and Holquist. Holquist, more than anyone else, has been responsible for bringing Bakhtin
to the notice of English and American critics; Todorov has served a similar role for Bakhtin and
a number of other Eastern European theoreticians in France.
The Bakhtinian breakthrough occurs at the point where the observer of cultural performances
is directed to occasions that have a number of centers of activity, each of which may employ
distinctive codes, styles, and methods of amplification and hypertrophization. Carnival, in
Bakhtin's thinking, is the model occasion for the open and intense involvement of the populace
in festivities. This pre-Lenten celebration transvalues the landscape and makes an assault upon
everyday notions of order and hierarchy. Carnival, as Bakhtin describes it, is Janus-headed, look-
ing to the past in drawing on devices of traditional festival vocabulary, but also looking to the
present and future in elaborating on the interactional style of the face-to-face market. As Clark
and Holquist gloss the event: "Unlike ritual, carnival is not organized by a separate caste of spe-
cialists who create it according to their exclusive dictates, whether religious or aesthetic." And
then Bakhtin himself: "Carnival is not spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone
participates because its very idea embraces all people" (Clark and Holquist, p. 300). Bakhtin,
here, is not describing the actual practices of Carnival in a particular time and place; rather Gar-
gantua & Pantagruel provides him with his text of a hymn to the spirit of Carnival.
By situating the argument at the Rabelaisian moment, Bakhtin seems to argue that, in this
pure form, Carnival no longer exists, and is a part of the world that has been lost in the devel-
opment of modernity. But as many ethnographers have noticed, this is hardly the case. In Europe
and elsewhere, this pre-Lenten event is still practiced, and its set of impulses is still very much
with us. In fact, the interest in Bakhtin's work in this area arises as much from what it tells us
about postmodern culture as about the Renaissance.
Carnivalization' has become a way of foregrounding politically or socially subversive motives
for a number of critics, including Stallybrass and White, Bristol, and Agnew, whether in litera-

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204 Journal of American Folklore (102, 1989)

ture or in gatherings of people such as riots, marches, or charivari. These authors are drawn in
some dimension to Bakhtin's notion because it is exotic and critically fashionable. (Imprimatur
has been conferred by the Parisian powers, Julia Kristeva as well as Todorov.) But Bakhtin has
more to offer to them than simply a new way of discussing the playful motives embodied in
festive forms. Rather, the carnivalizing motive becomes a new way to think about old texts. In
the books by Bristol, Stallybrass and White, and Agnew (and Mullaney, to a lesser extent), car-
nivalization becomes a perspective useful in rethinking the productions of the Renaissance thea-
ter, especially in England.
The theater of that time served as a gathering point for the variety of "hawkers and walkers"
of the period. Not that these types had not previously existed, but during the time of the Tudors
they became objects of interest to the authorities and the general public. We are left with a num-
ber of documents that detail the different kinds of"vagrants," for example, reports of the "poor
laws," which listed the categories of transients, from peddlers and wandering scholars, to various
unlicensed players, beggars and rat-catchers, all called together as "vagabonds." Public life had
never been so rich before, and looking back, does not ever seem to have been again; everything,
including jail, hangings, the insane asylum at Bedlam, provided occasions for public gathering
and gaping, even celebrating. And they all drew upon essentially the same audience as the pop-
ular playhouses in Elizabethan London.
In London the areas across the river, the Liberties, acted as a magnet both for the denizens of
the road and for those who wished to interact with them. As Stephen Mullaney has put it, "The
journey across the Thames was a short but considerable one: a passage into a domain of cultural
license," he continues, "a field of ambivalent cultures and marginal pastimes lodged ... on the
margins of order and community" (Mullaney, p. 35). 2
The literature on the London outskirts-on the theaters, bull-baiting rings, especially on St.
Bartholemew's Fair-encourages literary historians of a new social stripe, including Mullaney,
to draw on Bakhtin's theory as a way of rethinking the Shakespeare canon, and to reassess the
significance of Ben Jonson.
The books by Agnew, Stallybrass and White, and Bristol-and to a lesser degree, Mullaney-
all are concerned with the relationship between the Renaissance theater, the marketplace, and the
festive inversions discussed by Bakhtin under the notion of carnivalized culture. Each draws on
the inversive potential of carnivalization as a way of rethinking the ways in which literature op-
erates within specific social contexts. Each attempts to take some characteristic of early modern
life and discern how the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater may be better understood in light of
the licensing of theatrical presentations.
Michael Bristol's work is concerned with how carnivalesque motives of misrule, burlesque,
grotesquerie, and other styles of inversion are taken from countryside amusements of the time
and from observed market and fair practices, and employed in Shakespeare's and Jonson's plays.
The book involves a series of small perceptions, rendered in a manner that does not invite any
critical synthesis. While it gives appropriate reference not only to Bakhtin but to Van Gennep
and Victor Turner on the ritual process, and to Caillois, Bateson, and Geertz on play in culture,
it never delves far nor deep. As a result, it makes a fine introduction to the subject of theater and
carnival motives, but does not have the explanatory power of Agnew, of Stallybrass and White
and of Stephen Mullaney.
Agnew's work is a richer achievement. It should be read by anyone interested in the operations
of metaphor within specific cultural settings, as well as by those who are concerned with the
antagonism between the party of playful illusion and display and the Puritans in the Old World
and New.
Agnew explores the deep relationship between the themes of commercialism and theatricality
in the first two centuries of the modern age. Bakhtin's hint that marketplace grotesquerie is sim-

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 Review Essay 205

ply one kind of illusionary technique is taken up and explored. Quite appropriately, Agnew sees
the distrust of the hard salesman as related to the distrust of professional players as such figures
emerged in theatrical companies. He traces the interrelationship of the Puritan reaction against
the theater and the bourgeois retreat from the activity of face-to-face trading.
Agnew's argument presumes the primacy of the marketplace in fostering both the terms of
display-making and the attitudes regarding the theater. Surely both theater and marketplace de-
veloped out of the same sociocultural matrix; for, as Agnew himself recognizes, both traders and
illusionist entertainers are found at archaic marketplaces wherever they develop. This might be
regarded as caviling were it not that he falls into this kind of historical misreading in a number
of places in his argument. For instance, he makes the common error that the reaction against the
theater is a Puritan phenomenon. Rather, the ban on theater seems to have been one aspect of an
attempt by town authorities (of whatever theological persuasion) in guild-ruled London to main-
tain control over the dramatized political and social motives (Heinemann 1980:200-236).
Agnew argues that the point of departure in the development of modern notions of self-pre-
sentation and representation was the development of manuals of manners for the gentleman. He
focuses strongly on the work ofTommasio Campanella. Campanella's systematic explication of
manners created an image of social life that encouraged the ultimate creative act, that of artfully
controlled self-construction: "a model of the self as a placeless and Protean entity-a liminal
being always on the verge of becoming something or someone else" (Agnew, pp. 94-95). Ag-
new is clearly drawn to human protean capabilities; he borrows the vocabulary of invention,
symbolic inversion, and cultural liberation effectively. The book itself teems with ideas. Ifit is
also overargued and often wrongheaded, it is never uninteresting.
Points of transition fascinate the cultural historian, and are called "moments." This is com-
monly accompanied by the employment of a crisis terminology employed to underscore the his-
torical dramatic turn. This style of thought leads to attempts to designate the time and the place
in which the big changeover occurred. But the book by Stallybrass and White is altogether more
satisfactory dealing with such an issue. As they put it in their coda: "We have tried to move away
from any simple before/after model" recognizing in so doing "that most attempts to map out
historically shifting conceptions ... have succumbed, at some point, to an idealist or idealizing
moment of apocalypse or nostalgia" surrounding a sense ofloss (Stallybrass and White, p. 195).
Specifically, the work focuses on fairs and festivals, drawing on Bakhtinian notions of carni-
valization, but situating them in specific epochs and places. Thus, the process of cultural
transgression that Bakhtin locates at the marketplace is subjected to a test and found wanting in
certain particulars. Recognizing the pervasive character of licentious behavior in markets, and by
extension at fairs and festivals, they nonetheless notice that these activities are also rule-regulated
(albeit by alternative, situation-specific rules) and set up highly specifiable patterns of expecta-
tion.
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression is concerned with how transgressive activities operate
within a specifiable expressive system (a poetics) and a set of power or status relations (a politics).
The rhetorical strategy of the book is a simple one: to suggest that transgressive events are more
complex and more interesting than Bakhtin and his followers have suggested. Markets and fairs,
they remind us, are not only traditional activities that contain "folk" impulses by which the
agents of official order are confronted, but also are a means by which new and more powerful
orders are introduced into community life. Indeed, these new orders are those commercial ones
that most undermine the traditional world view of the village and even the town. As they have
it, "fairs were as much an agent of transformation as of 'popular tradition,' since they brought
together the exotic and the familiar, the village and the townsman, the professional performer
and the bourgeois observer" (Stallybrass and White, p. 36).

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206 Journal of American Folklore (102, 1989)

Stallybrass and White provide a set of case studies of historically situated systems in which
transgressive activity occurs. While they will satisfy neither the ethnographer nor the historian
because of the limited data brought to bear on each case, they offer arguments sufficiently sugges-
tive to convince me that the book is as important a work for folklorists to contend with as the
Bakhtin work itself. (In fact, the work more recently published by Mullaney provides greater
depth in addressing specific historical problems.)
Stallybrass and White put forward, with Bakhtin, a vision of human interaction that places
cultural scenes and events and other kinds of recurrent exchanges at the center of the critical gaze.
While Bakhtin values most highly those forms of interaction that highlight the contest of voices,
he encourages us to understand them in relation to those other, more "monologic" forms in
which alternative voices are subordinated to the single focused performance. He is primarily in-
terested in genres, not as literary forms but as any kind of structured and prepared-for activity
that invites participation: "a horizon of expectations" into which stride those who share a set of
understandings and practices that make up a culture. Carnival becomes the genre of genres, in
this view, because all others are subject to imitation and resuscitation in the license of this yearly
moment.
The protean character of the concept of carnivalization is becoming clear, then, in these im-
portant books on theater and the questions of authority. The range of uses for this idea is dem-
onstrated by Giles Gunn, who takes up these Bakhtinian concerns in an artful fashion, employing
them as a way of rethinking the very idea of the humanities in the contemporary American cul-
tural politics. As he notes, Bakhtin approaches forms and structures for the life (that is, the en-
terprise in common) within the genres and "not the life for the form or structure of it" (Gunn,
p. 140). This view sees life itself as being an ongoing accomplishment; cultural performances,
especially in the production of literary texts, enter into the calculus of culture by bringing the
generic structures oflife to the level of consciousness. From this perspective, to perform and to
celebrate is to live life most fully and richly-a vision to which most folklorists will subscribe.
This tide of work on Bakhtin's notion of carnivalization provides folklorists concerned with pub-
lic display activities a fine point of entry into the cultural critique of modernity.

Notes
1LaCapra (1983) provides a pointed survey of the notion of carnivalization.
2 Mullaney's discussion is important for folklorists, as he takes up collection-making during this period,
including the writing of popular books of proverbs (pp. 63-79, esp. p. 74).

References Cited

Bakhtin, M. M. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helen Iswoldsky, Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Heinemann, Margot. 1980. Puritanism and Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
LaCapra, Dominick. 1983. Bakhtin, Marxism, and the Carnivalesque. In Rethinking Intellectual
History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Pp. 191-224. New York: Academic Press.
Stewart, Susan. 1986. Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics. In Bakhtin, Essays and
Dialogues on his Work, ed. Gary Saul Morson, pp. 41-57. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.

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