Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology: Art and Answerability 9781498582698, 9781498582704, 1498582699

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Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology

Mikhail Bakhtin’s Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology Art and Answerability

Edited by Slav N. Gratchev Howard Mancing

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Excerpts from ART AND ANSWERABILITY: EARLY PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, translation and notes by Vadim Liapunov, Copyright © 1990. By permission of the University of Texas Press Excerpts from THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION: FOUR ESSAYS by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Copyright © 1981. By permission of the University of Texas Press. In Praise of Weakness by Alexandre Jollien, translated by Michael Eskin, published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., New York 2017 reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available LCCN 2018947029 | ISBN 9781498582698 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498582704 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Introductionvii Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing PART I: BAKHTIN’S HERITAGE IN LITERATURE 1 Bakhtin’s Theory of the Novel Howard Mancing

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2 The Art and Answerability of Bakhtin’s Poetics Margarita Marinova

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3 Russian Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books: A Bakhtinian Re-accentuation63 Victor Fet 4 Bakhtin Reading Cervantes: The Birth of the Novel Slav N. Gratchev 5 Bakhtinian Re-Accentuation and the Commemoration of the Third Centenary of Don Quixote at the University of Havana (1905) Ricardo Castells

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6 Bakhtin and the Spanish Picaresque: Between La Pícara Justina and Lunes de Aguas115 Brian M. Phillips 7 Contextualizing Bakhtin’s Intuitive Discoveries: The End of Grotesque Realism and the Reformation Yelena Mazour-Matusevich

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Contents

8 Rejecting a Quixotic End: Kenzaburo Oe’s Bakhtinian Reading of Don Quixote157 Yumi Tanaka 9 Power, Privilege, Testimony: Bakhtin’s Legacy in Discourses of Privilege in I, Rigoberta Menchú and “Pasión de historia” Melissa Garr

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PART II: BAKHTIN’S HERITAGE IN ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY197 10 Acting Philosophy: Bakhtin, Jollien, and the Art of Answerability199 Michael Eskin 11 Quixotic Cinema in the Light of Bakhtin’s Theory Pablo Carvajal

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12 Toward a Philosophy of the Moving Body Dick McCaw

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13 Bakhtin against Dualism: Restoring Humanity to the Subjective Experience255 Steven Mills PART III: BAKHTIN’S HERITAGE IN PSYCHOLOGY

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14 “Live Entering” into the Act: Bakhtin, Kierkegaard, and Simmel on Becoming Intersubjective Greg M. Nielsen

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15 “In Search of Lost Cheekiness”: Bakhtin and Foucault as Neo-Cynics Michael E. Gardiner

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16 The Imagination of a Pluralistic and Dialogic Everyday Experience: Bakhtin with James James Cresswell and Andrés Haye

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Appendix335 Index343 About the Contributors

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Introduction Slav N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing

This volume celebrates hundred years of Bakhtin’s heritage: in September 13 of 1919 in the literary journal Den Iskusstva (The Day of the Art) was published the first work of Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, the work that became his literary manifesto. This book aims to examine the heritage of Mikhail Bakhtin in a variety of disciplines. To achieve this end, we drew upon colleagues from eight different countries across the world—United States, Canada, Spain, Great Britain, France, Russia, Chile, and Japan—in order to bring the widest variety of points of view on the subject. But we also wanted this book to be more than just another collection of essays of literary criticism. For this reason, we invited contributions by scholars from different disciplines—including theater, translation, and psychology—that is, those who have dealt with Bakhtin’s heritage and saw its practical application in their fields. Therefore, some of these chapters are not written in a typical humanist academic, scholarly style. And that is as it should be. Not for the first time, Mikhail Bakhtin will be discussed from the point of view of such a wide range of approaches and methodologies. A primary objective was to articulate the enduring relevance and heritage of the great and varied works of Bakhtin during more than half a century, from the early1920s to the mid-1970s. His work in aesthetics, moral philosophy, linguistics, psychology, carnival, cognition, contextualism, and the history and theory of the novel are present here, as understood by a wide variety of distinguished scholars. In our case, we have chosen to minimize the editors’ voices; we have imposed no strict definition of what we think Bakhtin’s heritage should be on the contributors, but have given them complete freedom to discuss the concept in their own terms, in their own style, and in their own voice.

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Much has been written on Bakhtin, and this book will take another look, from the angle of more than a dozen perspectives, at the heritage of one of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth century, and perhaps open a new critical discourse that may well contribute to reshaping our current understanding of one of the most influential literary figures—Mikhail Bakhtin. Part I is, par excellence, the largest in the book and consists of nine chapters that deal exclusively with Bakhtin’s heritage in literature. In Chapter 1, Howard Mancing observes that in no single place does Mikhail Bakhtin explicitly propose a theory of the novel. As a result, he explains, critics and theorists have found it difficult to understand and describe how Bakhtin theorizes about the novel, and, therefore, they so often misrepresent his works. In his chapter, Mancing sets forth what he understands to be Bakhtin’s theory of the novel: his concept of the novel as a literary genre; his approach to the centuries-long prehistory of the novel; his thesis that the novel emerges in the Renaissance, primarily with the works of Rabelais and Cervantes; the way he distinguishes between romance and novel; his idea of the heteroglossia, dialogism, laughter, parody, double-voicedness, and so forth that characterize the (modern European) novel; the idea of “novelization” of other genres; and, finally, his concept of the role of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel in this scheme. In Chapter 2, Margarita Marinova turns our attention to Bakhtin’s views on poetic language in the context of two rare documents: his notes toward a study of Mayakovksy’s poetics, and the phono-document of his recorded conversations (1973) with Victor Duvakin. Most scholars rightfully argue, on the basis of his famous 1941 essay “Discourse in the Novel,” that Bakhtin sees the richness of poetic language as being derived from the wealth of the trope rather than from the complexity of the dialogic word. According to this interpretation, the poet must remain isolated from his surroundings in order to retain full control over his own vision and ensuing monologic expression. In her chapter, Marinova argues that Bakhtin’s unfinished manuscript about Mayakovsky’s verse, in which he highlights the carnivalesque quality of the Futurist’s writing, the importance of the poet’s singular voice as a conduit for the multiplicity of the collective, and the recalibration of poetic distance, suggests that Bakhtin’s understanding of the characteristics of poetic discourse was much more nuanced and complex than previously assumed. In Chapter 3, Victor Fet introduces us to the world of innumerable translations of Alice in Wonderland that is, in Bakhtinian terms, an inherently diglossic process of re-accentuation. It is also a constantly evolving dialogue of the original text/author with the future languages and cultures. When the original text is itself highly dialogic, a translator faces the challenges stemming from its heteroglossia and polyphony. The author applies the

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Bakhtinian approaches of re-accentuation, dialogue, and poly/di/heteroglossia to a case study of the most translated English literary text in history (over 200 languages!)—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). “What is a use for a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures and conversations?” Lewis Carroll’s imaginary characters (“pictures”) are engaged in complex, polyphonic Bakhtinian dialogues (“conversations”), exploring the limits of identity, memory, knowledge, power, social and gender conventions, and language itself. The author asserts that Alice enjoyed over twenty translations into Bakhtin’s native Russian, starting as early as 1879, and while, as Fet rightfully notes, the Victorian English is frozen, the target languages of translation keep evolving, including children’s argot that also has changed dramatically, creating a temporal heteroglossia. Each generation deploys its own “domestication” (i.e., heteroglossic re-accentuation): wordplay, names, and parodies targeting both children and adults of a particular culture. Although Alice, notes Fet, might become a Russian Sonia or Ania, her adventures follow the game rules set by Lewis Carroll. Chapter 4, written by Slav N. Gratchev, discusses how literary critics often use theory to explain important phenomena observed within literary artifact but have never suggested that the process can go in the opposite direction: the theory can grow and mature out of a certain literary artifact. The author suggests that it is the case of Don Quixote that played a singular role in the process of evolution Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary views and the development of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel. The author is fully aware that it might not be easy to tease out this idea, however, as Rabelais, Dostoevsky, and perhaps others are mentioned much more prominently in Bakhtin’s work, but it is an undeniable fact that Don Quixote appears in his writings on the novel at crucial times and almost certainly played a crucial—perhaps definitive—role in his theory of the novel. This chapter, therefore, will show that at crucial moments, while he was formulating his theories of the novel, Bakhtin turned to and took examples and inspiration from Cervantes’s great novel. In Chapter 5, Ricardo Castells analyzes the Classics Illustrated graphic novel of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1943), one of many works that contradict Cervantes’s claim that he enjoys sole possession of Don Quixote. Mikhail Bakhtin disagrees with Cervantes, claims the author, because he believes that the Manchegan knight exists within the complex forms of speech of the novel of the Second Line, which “makes it possible to re-accentuate the image, to adopt various attitudes toward the argument sounding within the image, to take various positions in this argument and, consequently, to vary the interpretations of the image itself.” The Classics Illustrated Don Quixote was created and published during World War II, a time when popular genres such as movies and comics helped to rally American public opinion and maintain morale on the home front. This re-accentuation of Cervantes’s novel

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not only entertained younger wartime readers—both on the home front and those serving in uniform—but also emphasized the importance of Don Quixote’s armed struggle, so as a popular form of propaganda it can be considered a cultural and artistic success despite its obvious textual inaccuracies. In Chapter 6, Brian Phillips examines, interrogates, and problematizes Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque—the concept that arises frequently throughout the picaresque genre, and especially in Quevedo’s deterministic take on the picaresque lifestyle by continually displaying his protagonist alongside degrading corporeal material or anatomy. He argues that the interrelationship between the social and the bodily aspects that Bakhtinian research has produced provides the opportunity to expand upon the Russian theorist’s well-known literary tropes by investigating the Carnivalesque and the Grotesque as related to the pícaro under a Bio-political lens—the study of social and political power over life. To this end, the author offers a brief analysis of a carnivalesque social manifestation, Salamanca’s festival Lunes de Aguas, compared alongside grotesque displays of La Pícara Justina’s degrading corporeal performances. Since Lunes de Aguas finds itself rooted in the tradition of debates circulating prostitution, and the pícara Justina wields her sexuality as a tool to achieve greater power within the social construct, this chapter’s ultimate goal is to underscore biopolitical control of female space under carnivalesque and grotesque circumstances. This chapter presents, therefore, a brief outline of contemporary picaresque studies displaying Bakhtin’s widespread influence on studies of Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscón and El Lazarillo, Francisco López de Úbeda’s La Pícara Justina, and other pícaros. Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, in Chapter 7, aims to demonstrate the relevance of Bakhtin’s theory concerning the end of grotesque realism, which, according to him, occurred shortly after the publication of Francois Rabelais’s masterpieces. More specifically, the study seeks to respond to Bakhtin’s ideas pertaining to the end of grotesque realism by putting them against historical and theological backgrounds of the sixteenth-century Europe. The chapter’s aim does not, however, consist in applying historical scrutiny to the concept of grotesque realism, which has been done before. Rather, the study, which relies on Bakhtin’s own hints and directions found in Rabelais and His World, argues that the theological assessment of the sixteenth-century aesthetic revolution that Bakhtin describes, in his own idiosyncratic terms, in his book validates several aspects of his theory. The author thoroughly discusses and analyzes a number of Bakhtin’s ingenious insights, which, when placed in concrete context of theological and aesthetic views brought about by sixteenth-century Protestant and Catholic Reformations, acquire new meaning and reveal new depth of his thought. In Chapter 8, Yumi Tanaka shows how the Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe has used Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque in his novels set

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in a peripheral village in the woods, which is associated with his hometown. Bakhtin’s observation of subversive and regenerative aspects of the carnivalesque made Oe realize the literary possibility of his experience and the folklore of his hometown. The author believes that Bakhtin suggested to Oe a way of approaching the universal through novels about a local and marginalized place in Japan in contrast to the West, and the Oe’s novel The Infant of Mournful Countenance deeply follows Don Quixote. In her chapter, Tanaka suggests that the novel’s protagonist imitates Don Quixote but avoids the knight’s repentant end and, instead, demonstrates a hope for regeneration. This ambiguous relationship between the two texts is, argues the author, a result of Oe’s desire to rewrite Don Quixote using carnivalesque aesthetics, that is from a Bakhtinian perspective, and to cover “the relative absence of Cervantes” (Walter L. Reed) in Bakhtin’s theory. Chapter 9, written by Melissa Garr, nicely closes Part I of the book by discussing the current cultural discourse in the West that frequently invokes the concept of privilege—societal power structures that systemically benefit some and oppress others. Privilege, argues the author, is understood to be intersectional in that one can benefit from some systems but not others, such as being a member of a privileged group in race but not gender. Discourses of privilege, continues the author, certainly echo Mikhail Bakhtin’s legacy of examining voices of resistance in cultural artifacts; however, to date, the work that has linked Bakhtin’s discussions of power and discourse to the concepts of privilege and intersectionality has been primarily in the fields of sociology, psychology, and pedagogy, rather than literary criticism. This chapter extends this connection to examinations of discourse and privilege in literary studies. By analyzing works by twentieth-century Latin American authors who are outside privilege groups in race, gender, and sexuality, the study demonstrates that Bakhtin’s discussions of power and discourse in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” and “Discourse in the Novel” clearly converge with and can inform contemporary literary criticism on intersectional hegemonic discourse. Part II consists of four chapters and deals with Bakhtin’s heritage in arts and philosophy. Michael Eskin, in Chapter 10, will engage us with the work of Francophone Alexandre Jollien (born in 1975)—arguably, the most important contemporary Swiss philosopher—through the prism of Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology. The chapter aims to achieve two objectives: first, hermeneutically “unlocking” Jollien’s idiosyncratic form of a biographically inflected “ethics of disability and overcoming” with the help of the interpretive “apparatus” elaborated by Bakhtin, and second, presenting an exemplary instance of the latter’s philosophical anthropology in actu, as it were. Focusing on Jollien’s first book—Éloge de la faiblesse (1999; translated to English

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as In Praise of Weakness in 2017)—in conjunction with Bakhtin’s early works (Art and Answerability, The Philosophy of the Act, Author and Hero) in particular, the author argues that Jollien’s ethics can be said to pointedly instantiate Bakhtin’s major existential-dialogical postulates such as “outsidedness,” “surplus of vision,” “completeness,” “incompleteness,” and “answerability,” to name only a handful. Jollien’s ethics thus demonstrates its ability to work in intimate concert with actual human reality, while at the same time be productively and inventively illuminated by them. Jollien’s philosophical project, argues the author, reveals itself as living “proof,” as it were, of the sheer realism and veracity of Bakhtin’s anthropological insights. Chapter 11, written by Pablo Carvajal, examines a series of quixotic films: the canonical adaptations by Pabst, 1933; Gil, 1947; Kozintsev, 1957; the free versions by Welles, 1992; Ah Gan, 2010; and some superhero parodic films by Stebblings, 2009; Gunn, 2010; and Iñárritu, 2014. The author analyzes those films through the lenses of Bakhtin’s key concepts—the polyphony, heteroglossia, carnivalization, and re-accentuation—to determine in which of these films the essence of Cervantes’s work is best collected. The chapter re-examines some of Bakhtin’s major writings and attempts to analyze how the specific features and characteristics of the novel, including some of its fundamental literary components, have been adapted to the screen with quite different, sometimes striking, results. The chapter shows that the dialogic, polyphonic, and carnival character of the novel is best preserved on those parodic superhero films, while certain classical and more prestigious adaptations appear as monological versions where the work of Cervantes is reduced to its mere romantic interpretation. Dick McCaw, in Chapter 12, demonstrates how many of Bakhtin’s concepts resonate with recent research into embodied cognition, which itself is making an important contribution to how we can understand an actor’s work. The ideas discussed in this chapter are mostly drawn from Bakhtin’s early philosophy where he explores how meaning and value relate to a person’s unique spatial and temporal situation. The author argues that Bakhtin’s theory of morality is based on the nontransferability of our physical situation; that we act and answer with our body; that for Bakhtin the meaning is ineluctably embodied; that he basically rejects a purely theoretical approach—perhaps, a purely “cognitive” approach—that always results in a kind of meaning without meaning. The author further argues that Bakhtin’s early philosophy touches on contemporary debates about and research into embodied intelligence and meaning and that Bakhtin’s insistence on particularity sets forth principles rather than analyzing specifics. A cognitive turn in theater studies,

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suggests the author, has inspired a number of practitioners and academics to draw on embodied cognition to better understand the work of the actor and performer. The chapter is both a critique of Bakhtin’s early ideas about body, space, time, and meaning, which were presented as static rather than dynamic categories, as well as a discussion of how his early philosophy anticipated and is being vindicated by contemporary studies in embodied knowledge. Steven Mills in Chapter 13 argues that scholars have built Bakhtin’s legacy on various schools of thought often based on the Cartesian premises; this approach facilitated the rise of dehumanizing theories and the abstraction of human cognition. This chapter revisits revisits Bakhtin’s works and philosophy and shows that his ideas, in fact, reject dualistic deconstructed perspectives of literature and culture that emerged from Rene Descartes’s mind/body dualism and that paved the way for modern philosophy. The author revisits the Cartesian theories that, he believes, have grown eager to separate mind and its cohort of abilities (thought, reason, perception, consciousness) from the embodied elements that accompany, but are distinct from, intellect. This chapter argues that Bakhtin overturned traditional dualism in literary and cultural studies because it is insufficient to account for the full impact of human productions and interactions. Instead, Bakhtin reformed the thinking subject within a context that accurately stems from embodiment—where mind and body are inseparable, not distinct—to lay a human foundation for engaging thought and subjectivity. Therefore, this study intends to propose a new direction for Bakhtin’s legacy because his ideas restore humanity to the dehumanizing theories of form. Part III of the book is dedicated to Bakhtin’s heritage in psychology. In Chapter 14, Greg M. Nielsen suggests that the simultaneous reading of works of the young Mikhail Bakhtin, Soren Kierkegaard, and George Simmel on subjectivity opens avenues of exploration into key sources and influences well into later works on dialogue and speech genres. The author argues that in both Toward a Philosophy of the Act and “The Author and the Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” the young Bakhtin focuses on the anticipation of rejoinder in the event as key to understanding what he and his colleagues would latter call the dialogical quality of the utterance. According to the author, in these early works, Bakhtin crafts a variety of concepts that establish his phenomenology of intersubjectivity, develops the idea of transgredience around the inner and outer subject and describes the principles of ordering, organizing, and forming the subject and the principles of rendering it. This chapter proposes an immanent reading and elaboration on a selection of these concepts that can be made clearer when read alongside Soren Kierkegaard’s discussion of

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becoming subjective in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments and Georg Simmel’s’ essay on individual law. Chapter 15, written by Michael Gardiner, turns our attention toward the comparative literature on Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Michel Foucault. The chapter suggests that this literature is both modest in extent and relatively dated, and perhaps needs reassessment. The present chapter proposes to bring Bakhtin and Foucault into closer theoretical dialogue by engaging the latter’s use of the ancient Greek notion of parrhēsia in these posthumous texts— a concept usually rendered as “truth-telling” or “fearless speech”—with Bakhtin’s complementary idea of “free and familiar” speech, through which “terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette” are suspended, and genuine dialogue made possible. The author argues that although Bakhtin links this impulse to Medieval and Renaissance carnival culture, he simply follows Foucault in tracing its ancient wellsprings to Greek philosophy, especially Cynicism, a shared inspiration that has been overlooked in the extant literature. The chapter argues that their respective approaches to the Cynic tradition of fearless speech are marked by striking congruences: both valorize Diogenes’s “cynical” laughter and suggest that the comic inversion is not dissimulation or trickery for its own sake but rather integral to truth-telling’s counterpower. The author believes that whereas many earlier comparisons pitted a presumptively anti-humanist Foucault against Bakhtin’s “dialogical” humanism, the new Collège de France materials raise the possibility of more commonalities in their respective projects than has been entertained hitherto—not least because Foucault discusses Bakhtin’s carnivalesque in the final series of these lectures, so that we might better master what Foucault calls the art of “not being governed so much.” Chapter 16, written by James Cresswell and Andrés Haye, closes the book with a critical look at the discipline of psychology, that has often directed its focus toward studying humans as self-contained monads. They argue that in the 1990s, critical psychologists raised concerns with this practice and how it bypassed and trivialized the folk psychology of everyday life. According to the authors, Bakhtin is one of the figures that inspired these critical psychologists to turn to everyday culture and discourse with the aim of understanding how mind is shaped in dialogue. Therefore, in this chapter they discuss how Bakhtin, in his early work on aesthetics and Rabelais’s and Dostoevsky’s poetics, offers a rich view of dialogue that can help us understand everyday phenomena, including unconscious aspects of mind. The challenge they see is that Bakhtin’s view contains an unsolved paradox: drawing on phenomenology while simultaneously denying the self-contained model of the mind entailed therein. Therefore, the chapter suggests that Bakhtin’s theory of culture can be understood in line with the critical discussion on consciousness given earlier by William James who is re-emerging as another inspiring

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figure within contemporary psychology. The chapter explores the contribution of James’s dynamic notion of self that is alternative to phenomenology and divorced from self-contained individualism, as well as its underdeveloped understanding of language, where he connects with Bakhtin. Cresswell and Haye aim to show how James’s pluralistic approach to experience and Bakhtin’s dialogical approach to language Bakhtin complement each other. This is the book that we are pleased now to offer to your attention.

Part I

BAKHTIN’S HERITAGE IN LITERATURE

Chapter 1

Bakhtin’s Theory of the Novel Howard Mancing

Mikhail Bakhtin is undoubtedly one of the major theorists of the twentieth century; his writings on aesthetics, moral philosophy, linguistics, discourse, cultural theory, and literary theory are among the most important of our age. His penetrating essays on such themes as answerability, re-accentuation, chronotope, carnival, dialogism, heteroglossia, and polyphony have become an integral part of our thought and have greatly enriched our vocabulary and conceptual repertory. Today it is almost impossible to write seriously about genre theory or the theory of the novel without taking Bakhtin into consideration. So much has been written about Bakhtin and the novel that it should be a relatively simple matter to summarize his theory of the genre. But such is not the case. After gaining a basic familiarity with Bakhtin’s writings about the novel that are scattered throughout his work, together with a general familiarity with Bakhtin scholarship, one comes to the conclusion that most of what has been said about Bakhtin’s “theory of the novel” is imprecise, inconsistent, confused, confusing, misleading, and even sometimes demonstrably wrong. More often than anything else, critics dealing with Bakhtin and the novel simply describe and comment on such Bakhtinian concepts as dialogism, heteroglossia, chronotope, and/or carnival, and make no serious attempt to bring together in a coherent and convincing way what Bakhtin has to say on the subject. Maybe there is a good reason why there exists no reliable statement of what might constitute Bakhtin’s theory of the novel. It could be that Bakhtin wrote much about the novel, but what he wrote does not cohere in any consistent and meaningful way; in other words, perhaps Bakhtin is no more than the author of a lot of theoretical-sounding isolated observations that do not actually add up to a theory. Another possibility is that Bakhtin tried to theorize 3

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repeatedly about the novel, but each attempt was inconsistent with the others and the result is a self-contradictory jumble of isolated comments. One critic who levels this sort of criticism at Bakhtin is Lennard J. Davis. Davis finds Bakhtin’s writings “quite riddled with inconsistencies and unprovable insights.”1 He accuses Bakhtin of being monologic, of using Saussure in a selective way, and of failing to distinguish between literature and life. He says that the Bakhtin/Volosinov models of human communication are superficial, that Bakhtin insists on an either/or distinction between monologic and the dialogic discourse, and that he is an essentialist. According to Davis, Bakhtin can’t seem to distinguish between Menippean satires and novels and, besides, his reasoning is circular as he “leaps over 1,300 years of history in a single page” and “exaggerates” the significance of carnival.2 He finds Bakhtin’s concept of laughter broad and not clearly defined, his categories often only suggestive, too frequently vague and confused. Finally, he says that Bakhtin tried unsuccessfully to “have both a Marxist and a structural formalist in the same boat.”3 Davis badly misreads Bakhtin on virtually every one of these points. Perhaps part of the problem is that Davis is so blinded by the Anglo-American “rise of the novel” theory—that the novel comes into being only in England in the eighteenth century—that he cannot deal with Bakhtin’s compelling readings of medieval and Renaissance literature and culture, nor can he perceive what it might be to work completely outside the paradigms of Saussurean linguistics, structuralism, and Marxism, which is precisely what Bakhtin does. Throughout his entire intellectual life, Bakhtin was opposed in principle to what he called “theoreticism”—reliance on a theory to the detriment of pragmatic, contextual reality. There is in the works of Bakhtin and the Bakhtin circle an unremitting, lifelong critique of three of the major totalizing theories of the day in psychology (Freudianism), aesthetics (Russian formalism), and linguistics (structuralism). Of course, Bakhtin’s writings are never explicitly critical of that greatest of all totalizing theories in economics and politics (Marxism), but, in the contextual reality of the Russia/Soviet Union of Bakhtin’s lifetime, such criticism would have been absolutely impossible. Some of his work, however, and especially the book on Rabelais, can be (and often has been) read as a prolonged critique of Marxism,4 but late in life Bakhtin stated that he never was a Marxist.5 Such a position is most consistent with his anti-theoretical orientation in general. This attitude might explain why he consciously refused to develop the sort of theory we might want. At any rate, it may be that the reason we cannot point confidently either to any text of Bakhtin’s or to any single critical essay about Bakhtin as a good, concise statement of his theory of the novel is because there is no theory of the novel in Bakhtin’s writings. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, admits that he feels “a certain malaise” when considering Bakhtin’s treatment of the novel for, although Bakhtin

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“focused his attention throughout his life” on the novel, he worries that “the concept of the novel is so essential to Bakhtin that it escapes his own rationality.”6 Ultimately Todorov concludes that “[t]he not very coherent, and ultimately irrational, character of Bakhtin’s description of the genre of the novel is a strong indication that this category does not occupy its own place in the system.”7 As Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson note in their critical evaluation of Todorov’s approach: “When Bakhtin does not fit his model, Bakhtin is to blame.”8 It may be that Todorov’s inability to find in Bakhtin a structuralist like himself was at least partly to blame for his frustration here. Perhaps, after all, searching for a theory of the novel in Bakhtin is like tilting at windmills. Importantly, several scholars have explored some of the most significant sources for much of Bakhtin’s writings about the novel. Their work establishes a foundational context for our understanding Bakhtin’s approach to the novel. Particularly noteworthy in this context is the work of Galin Tihanov, who traces the development of Bakhtin’s approach to the novel against the rich background of a long Russian tradition of theorizing about the novel.9 Crucially important for Bakhtin were the famous and influential writings of Georg Lukács, especially, but not only, his famous Theory of the Novel.10 To no small extent, Bakhtin developed his approach to the novel as a response to Lukács’s work. Equally important is Bakhtin’s debt to Friedrich von Schlegel and Herman Cohen.11 In this chapter, I will assume that a reasonably coherent, consistent theory of the novel in Bakhtin can in fact be described. In order to prepare the ground for such a view, I will first illustrate the problems one encounters when reading some of the best scholarship on the subject by examining one of the most important and influential critical statements on Bakhtin and the novel. The general, incomplete, and unconvincing nature of previous critical approaches should be readily apparent. Then I will set forth what I understand to be Bakhtin’s theory of the novel: his concept of the novel as a literary genre; his approach to the prehistory of the novel; his thesis that the novel emerges in the Renaissance, primarily with Cervantes’s Don Quixote; his idea of what the (modern European) novel consists of; and, finally, his concept of the role of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel in this scheme. CRITICAL APPROACHES TO BAKHTIN’S THEORY OF THE NOVEL “To a considerable extent Bakhtin’s reputation in the West rests on his theories of genre and of the novel,” so write Morson and Emerson in their monumental Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, one of the most extensive, sensitive,

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and perceptive books on Bakhtin.12 The entire third section of the book, covering some 200 pages, is titled “Theories of the Novel.” Genre theory, in general, and the concepts of novelistic discourse, the chronotope, and the carnivalesque are discussed at length in this part of their book. A brief introductory summary of the authors’ understanding of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel, in the most specific sense, is presented in a subsection of Chapter 7 titled “Novels and Novelization.” Rather than “a” theory of the novel, write Morson and Emerson, Bakhtin “developed three major theories of the novel and its relation to other genres”:13 a first theory of the novel in terms of discourse, a second theory based on the timespace concept of the chronotope, and yet a third theory grounded in carnival.14 The first of these was the most successful and influential, the second nearly as impressive, and the third, although perhaps the best known, less durable. Dostoevsky is exemplary for the first of these definitions, while Goethe best represents the second, and Rabelais the third.15 Notably absent here is the one writer whose novel is explicitly proclaimed by Bakhtin as the prototype of the genre: Cervantes. As Morson and Emerson note, Bakhtin used the term novel in a variety of ways in different contexts, but in the “broadest sense,” the term refers to “the entire ‘dialogic line’ of European prose. Extending from ancient seriocomic works to the present, this line includes low genres as well as high and seems to incorporate such nonliterary institutions as carnival, parodic rituals, and ‘genres of billingsgate.’”16 In the “narrowest sense,” however, Bakhtin seems to limit the novel to “a highly restricted class; membership demands that all of Bakhtin’s major criteria be satisfied”: “The novel in this sense of the word would seem to begin around 1800 and to include only a portion of the texts often called novels. As far as we can tell, the works of Goethe (or Jane Austen?) would seem to be the first novels in the narrowest sense.”17 This statement conflicts with what Bakhtin wrote in three significant ways: (1) Bakhtin explicitly places the emergence of the novel in the Renaissance and never proposes the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries as a beginning point for the novel; (2) in none of Bakhtin’s surviving writing is it suggested that Goethe’s novels were either among the first or in any way typical of the genre as a whole; and (3) as the Morson and Emerson themselves admit, Bakhtin apparently had not even read (or, at least, never refers to) Jane Austen.18 Morson and Emerson illustrate the problem facing the reader who tries to understand Bakhtin’s theory of the novel by reading his critics. There is no attempt in the Prosaics book to show relationships among Bakhtin’s various writings on the novel. The issue is reformulated in a terminology of the critics, not in Bakhtin’s own words. Conclusions are reached that are demonstrably inconsistent with what Bakhtin wrote. But Morson and Emerson are far from the only ones who have difficulty understanding Bakhtin on this important matter. In addition to Todorov, cited earlier, one need look no further than Simon Dentith, who wants to have

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the worst of two worlds; he agrees with (accepts the approaches of) both Todorov, that Bakhtin’s writings on the novel are not coherent, and Morson and Emerson, that Bakhtin proposed multiple theories of the novel.19 In a passage of the 1963 version of his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin mentions (but does not develop) the concept of “three lines in the development of the European novel.”20 But I understand this to be more of a comment on three sources of novelistic discourse than a rival to his two stylistic lines essay developed in the 1930s (see the section Bakhtin’s Two Stylystic lines). Like many who write on Bakhtin, Morson and Emerson give the impression that Bakhtin is really difficult to understand, perhaps to an extent beyond the reader’s capabilities, and that they need to re-present his work in their own terms (and in their own image) in order to make him accessible. I prefer to think that Bakhtin can stand quite well on his own and that the reader is quite capable of dealing with, and understanding, him directly; there is no need to reformulate his work in simpler terms. It is for this reason that I cite extensively from Bakhtin’s texts in this chapter, rather than attempting to summarize his position in my own words. THE NOVEL AS GENRE One of the major problems in reading Bakhtin on the genre of the novel is that he uses the term in obviously different ways at different times.21 Bakhtin himself recognized this difficulty in one of his late essays when he wrote of his “love for variations and for a diversity of terms for a single phenomenon. The multiplicity of focuses. Bringing distant things closer without indicating the intermediate links.”22 This terminological diversity is obvious when dealing with addressivity, dialogism, double- and multivoicedness and double- and multi-languagedness, heteroglossia, hybridization, heteroglossia, polyglossia, polyphony, and other related and overlapping concepts. But surely the opposite problem—the use of a single term in a multiplicity of senses—is another facet of Bakhtin’s “love for variations.” Since much of the confusion in critical writing about Bakhtin stems from his variations on the theme of the term novel, it would be helpful to outline briefly the most important ways in which Bakhtin uses the term. First, Bakhtin often refers to ancient, medieval, and more modern forms of what we today often call “romance” as kinds of novels. Later, as we will see, he refers to these generally more monologic works as the “First Stylistic Line” of the novel. Second, he regularly refers to the heteroglot works of the “Second Stylistic Line” of the novel as novels. For the most part, Bakhtin here means the modern European novel from the Renaissance to the present. In general, when Bakhtin writes about the novel as genre, this is what he is referring to.

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And finally, Bakhtin often uses the term novel in a loose sense when talking about various genres and works related to, anticipating, making possible, and/ or influencing, the (modern European) novel. Bakhtin largely considers these works and genres part of the previously unappreciated and misunderstood “prehistory” of the novel and, obviously, not part of the genre of the novel itself. If Morson and Emerson’s perception of Goethe or Austen as Bakhtin’s prototypical novelists seems strange and unmotivated, even more so is Todorov’s assertion that “Bakhtin’s favorite examples—those that keep recurring in his writings and allow him to identify the genre specifically—are not works to which the genre of the novel is ordinarily associated (such would be works of Fielding, Balzac, or Tolstoy, authors barely mentioned), but those of Xenophon, and Menippus, Petronius and Apuleius.”23 Todorov does not seem to be able to understand Bakhtin’s classification of these writers as prenovelistic as opposed to genuinely novelistic. In his important essay titled “Epic and Novel,” which was originally titled “The Novel as a Literary Genre,”24 Bakhtin divides literary genres into two groups: the novel and all the rest.25 All the non-novelistic genres, which are also referred to as “high”—that is, for Bakhtin, “the literature of ruling social groups” (DI 4)—or “monologic,” had their origin in antiquity, in an oral culture: “their formation lies outside historically documented observation” (3). The epic, the lyric, and the dramatic genres all were born and developed to completion in a social and historical context in which they were read, declaimed, and performed in public, before an audience. Plato and, especially, Aristotle worked out a complete and still largely valid poetics for these genres, and subsequent ages have elaborated and refined, but not basically changed, these poetics. The high genres have a canon, a history, a “hardened and no longer flexible [generic] skeleton” (3; see also 43). In contrast, the novel comes into being “before our very eyes: the birth and development of the [modern, heteroglot] novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day”; it is the only genre that is “younger than writing and the book: it alone is organically receptive to new forms of mute perception, that is, to reading” (3; see also 379). Exactly what might be meant by “younger than writing and the book” is not obvious, as some form of book has existed for many centuries. But, as we will see later, the book in its modern, printed, form best fits the bill here for a variety of reasons. The novel has no canon, no history; it is “the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted”; the “generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened” (3; see also 39). Newborn in an age when other genres were already fully fixed in their forms, the novel remains “the only developing genre”; it “fights for its own hegemony in literature; whenever it triumphs, the other older genres go into decline” (4). In large part because it is received in a completely different way from other genres—read rather than perceived (seen and heard)—that the poetics

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capable of fully addressing other genres is inadequate when dealing with the novel. This difference is absolutely essential. The mistaken assumption of structuralism and semiotics that all thought or cognition is verbal, that we “read” film, fashion, and faces in the same way as we do literary texts has been widespread in literary theory. The opposite assumption—that reading and perception are two different (if often interrelated) modes of cognition—is the rule in post-Chomskyan linguistics, embodied cognitive psychology, and neuroscience.26 In this, as in so many other matters, Bakhtin is much more consistent with contemporary cognitive science than he is with any other significant literary or linguistic theory of the last forty years. Historically the novel has not received the theoretical attention and respect accorded to other genres. Like a Spanish pícaro, the novel must live by its wits. The novel “gets on poorly with other genres”: The novel parodies other genres . . .; it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating genres. . . . In an era when the novel reigns supreme, almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent “novelized.” (DI 5)

The winner in a Darwinian struggle of the fittest, the novel—the despised outsider and stepchild of genres—ultimately becomes king of the generic jungle: The novel is the only developing genre and therefore it reflects more deeply, more essentially, more sensitively and rapidly, reality itself in the process of its unfolding. Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process. The novel has become the hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world still in the making; it is, after all, the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it. In many respects the novel has anticipated, and continues to anticipate, the future development of literature as a whole. In the process of becoming the dominant genre, the novel sparks the renovation of all other genres, it infects them with its spirit of process and inconclusiveness. It draws them ineluctably into its orbit precisely because this orbit coincides with the basic direction of the development of literature as a whole. In this lies the exceptional importance of the novel, as an object of study for the theory as well as the history of literature. (7)

THE PREHISTORY OF THE NOVEL IN ANTIQUITY AND THE MIDDLE AGES But if the novel has no history and is born in the light of the new day, its characteristic discourse (described in more detail below) has “a lengthy prehistory, going back centuries, even thousands of years” (DI 50). Significantly, for Bakhtin, this prehistory is not in any way a formal one, but one that “was

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formed and matured in the genres of familiar speech found in conversational folk language . . . and also in certain folkloric and low literary genres” (50). The two “most decisive” features of this discourse are laughter and polyglossia (50). The earliest manifestations of laughter are to be found in parody and travesty, often seen in the ancient world in works such as the “literature of erudition,” the satyr play, the “comic” versions of heroes such as Odysseus and Hercules, and the work of mimes (51–61). Polyglossia, the simultaneous presence of and interactions among multiple languages in a single historical and cultural context, is seen in the fact that Roman language and literature functioned specifically “against the background of the Greek language and Greek forms” (61); but Roman literature was from the start actually “characterized by trilingualism,” as lower Italy was the home of its own hybrid culture and literary forms (63). The multi-languaged Orient also had contact with the Greco-Roman world and thus contributed to the contact and interanimation among languages, cultures, and literatures (64). The medieval literature of laughter, an important manifestation of the folkloric-popular culture of carnival and in the entire tradition of the grotesque, includes parodies such as the Cyprian Feasts and other types of parodia sacra, novellas, Mardi Gras, soties, farces, and so forth, all of which “paved the way for a new literary and linguistic consciousness, as well as for the great Renaissance novel” (71; see also 21–23); it was a holiday laughter, evident especially at Easter and Christmas, and in school festivals (72–74). The contact and interanimation between Latin and the vernacular languages of the medieval period provided the context for polyglossia (75–79). Bakhtin’s “Prehistory” essay (41–83) is not very specific about the works he considers critical to the novel’s prehistory, but in the long “Chronotope” essay (84–242), he discusses in more detail many early prenovelistic authors and works. The “Concluding Remarks” (243–258) to this essay should be considered as a completely separate piece by Bakhtin. Written in 1973, more than three decades after the original essay, it is more than just a conclusion to an unfinished work; rather, it is a mature reflection on some of the concerns in the original essay (which was complete as it stood) plus a subtle meditation on such issues as the image of the author and the interpretive role of the reader. The failure to make clear the separate role of this essay in the English translation (only in a footnote on p. 258 is it indicated that it was written much later) results in the misleading impression that it is an integral part of the 1937–1938 essay. It is the “Prehistory” essay, as much as in any other place, that Bakhtin’s use of the word novel is confusing, for he applies it to works that clearly are not novels by the definition he provides in other locations. In this essay—which, pace Morson and Emerson, is not by any stretch of the imagination a full “theory of the novel” based on the chronotope—it

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is possible to make some clear distinctions between ancient and medieval romances and prenovelistic forms in contrast to forms of the modern novel. Space does not allow for a lengthy consideration of the various works and authors Bakhtin considers in his essay; rather, I will merely list many of them with the briefest of comments. The prototype of the novel in ancient times is the Greek romance (also called the Sophist novel), as exemplified by Heliodorus’s Ethiopian History (86–110). This fully developed and finished “high” genre is clearly and specifically not included in any way as part of what Bakhtin refers to as the novel that is born in the modern era. Subsequent examples of the genre are the medieval French and German chivalric verse romances, the Spanish Renaissance prose romance of chivalry (Amadís de Gaula), and the German Baroque novel (106–108). Also largely, at least tangentially, included in this generic line are the “visionary” poetic narratives of Lorris’s and Meung’s Roman de la Rose, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Dante’s Divina Commedia (155–158). The best example of the ancient prenovelistic (in the modern sense) text is Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, what Bakhtin calls the Roman “adventure novel of everyday life” (111–129). Critical here are features of fully modern novels, such as parody, the folkloric roots, and the hero as “third person” in the sense of being privy, as servant, to the everyday activities of others (124–125). Subsequent modern novelistic works in a line of direct descent from this genre are the picaresque novel: Lazarillo de Tormes, Lesage’s Gil Blas, and Defoe’s Moll Flanders (124–125); novels featuring adventurers and parvenus: Sorel’s Francion, Scarron’s Roman comique, Defoe’s Colonel Jack, and Marivaux’s Paysan parvenu (125–126); the realistic novels of Stendhal and Balzac, Dickens, and Thackeray (126–127), and others. The great figures of the rogue, clown, and fool, as seen in the medieval fabliaux and Schwänke, for example, anticipate and influence Rabelais, the Spanish picaresque novel, Cervantes, Quevedo, Grimmelshausen, Sorel, Lesage, Fielding, Swift, and others (158–167). And, finally, the rich folkloric tradition of laughter and carnival, as seen in multiple literary genres and cultural manifestations, have their culmination in the novels of Rabelais (236–242). It is precisely this complex and diverse heritage of the popular-festive tradition of carnival that formed an integral part of ancient and, especially, medieval literature and culture, a tradition that reaches its fullest flowering in Rabelais, that Bakhtin explores in detail in Rabelais and His World (see also the long sections on Rabelais in DI 167–224 and 236–242). The third major type of ancient pre-novel that Bakhtin considers is the biographical novel (130–146), but, although the category is subdivided in various ways, Bakhtin admits that much of the novelistic element in the texts he discusses is fragmentary and that there is no real prototypical example of

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the (ill-defined) genre. Even with these problems, however, Bakhtin insists that ancient biography and autobiography exercised “enormous influence on the development of similar forms in European literature, as well as on the development of the novel” (146). In a similar way, varieties of the idyll lead to variously mixed modern works from Rousseau to Mann (224–236). But it is in the revised version of the book on Dostoevsky that Bakhtin makes what may be his major statement about the prehistory of the novel. The English translation of this book almost completely blurs the distinction between the original 1929 version of Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art and the 1963 rewritten version titled Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. The few brief and general editorial comments and inclusion of three passages eliminated (but with no indication as to the location of the cuts) from the 1929 version in an appendix are not sufficient. The major, but by no means the only, difference between the two books is to be found in Chapter 4, where a brief and marginal chapter in the early version is transformed into a long and central chapter, with a different emphasis, in the revised version. Even more than in the case of the “Concluding Remarks” to the “Chronotope” essay discussed above, the impression one receives from reading the English translation of the book on Dostoevsky as it is presented tends to result in a serious distortion of Bakhtin’s work. The presentation of the translation of the Dostoevsky book is unfortunate, as it would have been a fairly simple matter (e.g., by the use of different fonts or in a series of notes) to make clear which parts of the book pertained only to the 1929 version, which to 1963, and which to both.27 Here Bakhtin discusses the “serio-comical” genres (PDP 106–122), especially the Socratic dialogue and the Menippean satire, that were the primary vehicles of preservation and transmission of the carnival sense of the world so crucial, for Bakhtin, to the creation of the modern novel. The Socratic dialogue (by Plato, Xenophon, and others whose works are now lost) consistently stresses the dialogic nature of truth and the relationship between the idea and the person who speaks it (109–112; see also DI 24–26). Even more influential is the Menippean satire, whose prototype is found in the works of Lucian, and which prominently includes Petronius’s Satyricon, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, and Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae. The menippea are characterized by encyclopedic inclusiveness, irreverence, a mix of realism and fantasy, a flexibility that can incorporated within it a large variety of other genres, and a multiplicity of styles and tones (112–122; see also DI 26–28). These works were a major formative influence on such Renaissance writers as Rabelais, Erasmus, Cervantes, Quevedo, and Grimmelshausen (136). R. Bracht Branham makes a subtle and persuasive case (largely in Bakhtinian terms) for distinguishing between Greek romance and Roman novel (Petronius and Apuleius), thus placing the emergence of the novel in ancient Rome rather than the European Renaissance. Bakhtin clearly sees

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differences between Greek adventure romance and the Roman works under consideration, but explicitly differentiates both from the more modern novel. One important problem with the positing of a beginning for the novelistic genre in first-century Rome is the enormous gap of some fourteen or fifteen centuries between these works and the next novels.28 In addition to, or alongside and informing, the serio-comical genres, was carnival (122–137, 156–160). Carnival is the “pageant without footlights” (122), the second life of the people in opposition to official culture, the laughing, ambivalent, parodying celebration of the body and of birth and death (129–130). Here Rabelais stands absolutely alone as the writer whose work is most informed by carnival. Cervantes is a (fairly distant) second in this respect (131), but Don Quixote is described as “one of the greatest and at the same time most carnivalistic novels of world literature” (128). Throughout the centuries during which the “high” poetic genres were being shaped and perfected by the conservative, monologic, authoritarian, centripetal forces of culture and language, the novel “was being historically shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces” (273). While poetry was consolidated on the highest levels, on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all “languages” and dialects; there developed the literature of the fabliaux and Schwänke of street songs, folksayings, anecdotes, where there was no language-center at all, where there was to be found a lively play with the “languages” of poets, scholars, monks, knights and others, where all “languages” were masks and where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face. (273; see also 371)

The voices of this parodic, dialogized, heteroglossia were to become the laughing, ambivalent voices of the novel. The importance of laughter for Bakhtin cannot be emphasized sufficiently. It is the irreverent laughter of carnival and literary parody that counter the authoritarian seriousness, sentimentality, pathos, and monologism of high (“official”) culture and literary genres, and that make inevitable the novel’s oppositional stance. Greatness without laughter is, for Bakhtin, almost inconceivable: “Everything that is truly great must include an element of laughter. Otherwise it becomes threatening, terrible, or pompous; in any case, it is limited. Laughter lifts the barrier and clears the path” (SG 135). Perhaps the reason why Bakhtin never (or rarely) mentions novelists such as Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, and Henry James is the nearly complete absence of real laughter (as opposed to a subtler, more refined, humor and irony) in their works. But even Bakhtin must make exceptions: the somber novels of Dostoevsky, among the greatest ever written for Bakhtin, are not characterized by laughter.

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Bakhtin perceives this enormous multitude of cultural and literary activities, minuscule as some of them were in and of themselves, as part of a huge background or context that almost took on a life of its own, in its totality a kind of novel writ large across the centuries: this extra-generic or inter-generic world is internally unified and even appears as its own kind of totality. Each separate element in it—parodic dialogue, scenes from everyday life, bucolic humor, etc.—is presented as if it were a fragment of some kind of unified whole. I imagine this whole to be something like an immense novel, multi-generic, multi-styled, mercilessly critical, soberly mocking, reflecting in all its fullness the heteroglossia and multiple voices of a given culture, people and epoch. (DI 59–60)

Everything that is characteristic of the novel as we know it today had long ago been in existence; all that was needed was the right set of circumstances for it to emerge fully formed at the right time and in the right place. THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOVEL IN THE RENAISSANCE For Bakhtin, the Renaissance represents a once-occurrent milestone in human history. Fairly consistently in Bakhtin’s writings, the Renaissance is more or less equal to the sixteenth century, but sometimes he extends it back into the fourteenth century as far as Boccaccio (1313?–75) and forward into the seventeenth century as far as Grimmelshausen (1625?–76). This period is characterized by a conceptual break with the Middle Ages in some ways, but in other ways, it is also the culmination of medieval tradition. The spirit of carnival—a popular-festive, grotesque-realistic, spirit—formed the foundations of medieval folk culture, making possible a “second life” in opposition to the official culture of the age.29 Carnival is ambivalent, anti-hierarchic, parodic, and laughing, freeing the people from the oppression of the serious, dogmatic, authoritarian realities of official culture (RW 96; PDP 128–130). Although most prominently manifest during periods of official carnival celebrations, this folk culture was a fundamental characteristic of everyday life in the Middle Ages. Its primary base was the marketplace, where people daily mingled and spoke freely in a language not sanctioned by the church, where the material bodily principle (and especially the bodily lower stratum) had its most elaborate expression. Carnival sustained the masses for centuries and reached a high point in the Renaissance where Rabelais gave it definitive expression in Pantagruel and Gargantua. For Bakhtin, Rabelais stands alone

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as absolutely unrivaled with his uncompromising vision of a laughing and festive carnivalesque world: Rabelais’ nonconformity was carried to a much greater extent than that of Shakespeare or Cervantes, who merely disobeyed the narrow classical canons. Rabelais’ images have a certain undestroyable nonofficial nature. No dogma, no authoritarianism, no narrow-minded seriousness can coexist with Rabelaisian images; these images are opposed to all that is finished and polished, to all pomposity, to every ready-made solution in the sphere of thought and world outlook. (RW 2–3; see also 58, 275–276, 474)

The spirit represented by carnival begins to decline precipitously in the seventeenth century and this decline continues in subsequent ages, making the Renaissance both the high point of achievement and the beginning of the end for this phenomenon. Most importantly, however, the Renaissance is the period when a series of fundamental breaks with the past take place. First of all, there is a major change in the way the world itself was perceived. In the ancient and medieval view, the “entire world” was “visible and cognized, embodied and real, . . . a small and detached patch of terrestrial space and an equally small and severed segment of real time. Everything else vanished in the fog, became mixed up and interwoven with other worlds—separate, ideal, fantastic, and utopian worlds” (SG 43). In the Renaissance, however, the basically local world is replaced for the first time with a more fleshed-out view of the “entire world” that “began to condense into a real and compact whole. The earth became firmly rounded out, and it occupied a particular position in the real space of the universe. And the earth itself began to acquire a geographical definition (still far from complete) and a historical interpretation (even less complete)” (43). For Bakhtin, this paradigm shift in cosmology is represented by the move from a “Ptolemaic” to a “Galilean” worldview (see below). The Middle Ages was dominated by vertical imagery and metaphors. In Dante, and in the pre-Renaissance period in general, the world is arranged along a vertical axis, with all movement either up toward heaven or down toward hell (DI 156–158; RW 363–364, 401–402). But in the Renaissance all this shifts: In the sixteenth century the hierarchical world of the Middle Ages was crumbling. The narrow, vertical, extratemporal model of the world, with its absolute top and bottom, its system of ascents and descents, was in the process of reconstruction. A new model was being constructed in which the leading role was transferred to the horizontal lines, to the movement forward in real space and in

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historic time. Philosophy, scientific knowledge, human practice and art, as well as literature, all worked on this new model. (RW 403; see also 363–365)

A second, but obviously related, way in which the Renaissance represents a clear break with the Middle Ages can be seen in Bakhtin’s concept of speech diversity: “that intense interanimation of languages that took place during the Renaissance, during that shifting away from an ideological language (Latin) and the move of European peoples toward the critical monoglossia characteristic of modern times” (DI 68). The importance of this process cannot be overstated for Bakhtin, for wherever “languages and cultures interanimated each other, language became something entirely different, its very nature changed: in place of a single, unitary sealed-off Ptolemaic world of language, there appeared the open Galilean world of many languages, mutually animating each other” (65; see also 367, 415; and RW 465, 470–471). The Renaissance also was the time when there was an important new temporal orientation. The high literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages was always oriented toward the past: “Contemporary reality as such does not figure in as an available object of representation in any of the high genres of classical antiquity and the Middle Ages” (18). “In general, the world of high literature in the classical era was a world projected into the past”; and consequently, “all high genres of the classical era, that is, its entire high literature, are structured in the zone of the distanced image, a zone outside any possible contact with the present in all its openendedness” (19). But in the Renaissance this orientation changed toward a “unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present)” (7; see also RW 435–436): The absence of a temporal perspective in ancient society assured that this process of reorientation toward a real future could not complete itself; after all, there was no real concept of a future. Such a reorientation occurred for the first time during the Renaissance. In that era, the present (that is, a reality that was contemporaneous) for the first time began to sense itself not only as an incomplete continuation of the past but as something like a new and heroic beginning. To reinterpret reality on the level of the contemporary present now meant not only to degrade, but to raise reality into a new and heroic sphere. It was in the Renaissance that the present first began to feel with great clarity and awareness an incomparably closer proximity and kinship to the future than to the past. (40)

And it is specifically this unfinalizability, this openendedness, that is characteristic of the novel as a genre: “The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present; this is what keeps the genre from congealing. The novelist is drawn toward everything that is not yet completed” (27). The hero of a novel lives, according to Bakhtin, in “the zone of contact with an inconclusive present (and consequently with the future)”

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(37). From the very beginning, the (modern, heteroglot) novel “developed as a genre that had at its core a new way of conceptualizing time”; the novel “was structured not in the distanced image of the absolute past but in the zone of direct contact with inconclusive present-day reality” (39). It is clear that the conditions which in the Bakhtinian view make the novel possible all come together for the first time in the Renaissance: philosophy (complete worldview, horizontal orientation in space and time, openended present), language (speech diversity, Galilean world of languages, polyglossia), and culture (laughter, carnival). Add to this the fact that the printing press made the book in the modern sense possible for the first time, and the appearance of the novel becomes almost inevitable: “And there arrived on the scene, at last, the great Renaissance novel—the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes. It is precisely in these two works that the novelistic word . . . revealed its full potential and began to play such a titanic role in the formulation of a new literary and linguistic consciousness” (80; see also 71). The words “at last” make clear that up to this point all was preparation for the novel’s appearance, its prehistory, and that, finally, we can see the culmination of the centuries-long tradition described in the previous section. When Bakhtin writes that the great Renaissance novels of Rabelais and Cervantes emerge, this should not be taken to mean that he is saying these are the only two novels of the period or that outside of them novelistic discourse does not exist. Certainly Fernando de Rojas’s erotic novel in dialogue La Celestina (1499) and the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) in Spain are fictions characterized by heteroglossia, carnival, and the other novelistic features Bakhtin describes. Certainly there is an exciting and noteworthy degree of these novelistic features in writers from other genres, such as Ariosto in Italy and Shakespeare in England. Important to the process taking place here is the way in which the culture of folk laughter penetrates the more serious (the “high”) genres, a process that is completed in the Renaissance (RW 96–97). Thus, I understand Bakhtin to mean that Rabelais and Cervantes write the best examples of novelistic prose during a time when all of European literature (all of European culture) is being novelized. It is a matter of degree and not one of binary opposites. In order to understand Bakhtin’s idea of what it meant for the novel to “arrive on the scene,” it is necessary to take a step back and look at an important earlier statement about the nature of the novel. In The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, published under the name of P. N. Medvedev, Bakhtin expresses an uncompromising criticism of such formalist principles as the concepts of “poetic language” and the “transrational word,” the importance of “material” and “device,” and the processes of “defamiliarizing” and “laying bare” of the devices of construction.30 The book published under Medvedev’s name is one of the “disputed texts” so debated by Bakhtin scholars. I will take

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no stance on the degree of direct authorship of these books and essays by Bakhtin, but I will make two assumptions: (1) that everything in the Freudianism (Voloshinov, 1927), Formal Method (Medvedev, 1928), Philosophy of Language (Voloshinov, 1929), and Dostoevsky (Bakhtin, 1929) books was talked out in detail in the endless nights of strong tea, cigarettes, and heated discussion in the Bakhtin Circle, and (2) that Bakhtin was the strongest intellect and most powerful personality of that group. These assumptions suggest the conclusion that everything in these books not in direct contradiction to what Bakhtin has written elsewhere (such as much overt Marxist and semiotic theory) can be attributed to him, at least in spirit if not necessarily verbatim. One of the strongest criticisms leveled at the aesthetic theory of the Russian Formalist school is that it makes no allowance for creativity or invention. Rather, for formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum, and Boris Tomashevsky, a literary work consists of an assembly of already existing heroes, plots, themes, motifs, and devices. Any given text is exactly the sum of its parts, and it is the task of the critic to expose its devices, to lay bare the processes of assembly, and thus elucidate the text. Much of Bakhtin’s criticism of Russian Formalism is first seen in his “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” one of Bakhtin’s earliest essays, written in 1924.31 The continuity between this important essay and The Formal Method, published under Medvedev’s name, can be considered an argument for Bakhtin’s direct involvement in the writing of the disputed texts. In two essays titled “The Construction of the Story and Novel” and “How Don Quixote Is Made,” Shklovsky discusses this process with reference to the form and structure of Don Quixote.32 Arguing that the collections of novellas were chronologically and conceptually prior to the novel, Shklovsky concludes that “in the history of the novel both the framing device and the device of stringing together developed toward the tighter and tighter inclusion of previously dispersed material into the body of the novel” (cited in FM 136) and that this process explains both the genesis and structure of Don Quixote. Bakhtin dissents, arguing that Shklovsky “ignores the organic nature of the novel”: “It will be clear to any open-minded reader that the unity of Don Quixote is not achieved through the devices of stringing together and framing. If we ignore these devices and the motivation for the introduction of material, the impression of the inner unity of this novel’s world remains with us” (136). Rather, what the novel does is something radically different; the novel is “a new, qualitative aspect of the thematic conceptualization of reality, an aspect connected with the new, qualitative construction of the genre reality of the work” (137). Surprisingly, Rachel Schmidt finds the parallels between the understandings of Shklovsky and Bakhtin “so numerous and striking that they make one wonder whether the latter, either consciously or unconsciously, based his interpretation of Cervantes’s novel on that of the former.”33

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What is suggested here, I believe, is a concept that is in some ways essential to Bakhtin’s concept of the novel: the idea of emergence: “An emergent property of the whole is one that could not be deduced either from the properties of the parts studied in isolation, or from the properties of parts that could be predicted to come into play as a result of interactions between the parts; not because it is difficult to do so in practice, but because it is impossible to do so in principle.”34 Emergence is a term that today is widely used in the physical sciences to explain the sudden coming into existence of something that could not have been anticipated by an examination of its constituent parts. A simple, often-cited, example of emergence is water. How would it have been possible to know in advance that two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, both gases, when combined in a certain way, would produce a molecule of water, a liquid? Emergence is simply another way of saying that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Things emerge, synergistically, coincidentally, accidentally, all the time; emergence is a fact of life: life itself emerged, language emerges in human beings, patterns emerge from chaos, the mind emerges from the brain. I do not, however, want to make too much of this use of the word emergence in the scientific sense. The word Bakhtin uses is stanovlenie, which means “to grow” or “to become”; it is a word commonly used in Russian to translate the German werden, “to become.” (The modern German Emergenz, perhaps reflecting the English emergence, was not in the German vocabulary available to Bakhtin.) Significantly, Goethe, one of Bakhtin’s touchstone writers, did use the word werden in much the same sense that emergence is used today.35 For Bakhtin the novel is not “constructed” of discrete elements, something that “rises” in eighteenth-century in England, something that “develops” from the older narrative form of either the epic, the medieval romance, or short fictions, nor is it adequately conceived in any of the other metaphors traditionally used to describe the birth, development, and/or nature of what we call the novel. Rather, Bakhtin suggests, it is something that “emerges”: “The novel emerged and matured when intense activization of external and internal polyglossia was at the peak of its activity; this is its native element. The novel could therefore assume leadership in the process of developing and renewing literature in its linguistic and stylistic dimension” (DI 12; emphasis added). This concept of emergence is not to be confused with Bakhtin’s extensive comments on the “emergence” of character in certain types of novel, especially the Bildungsroman (SG 19–25). Formally, or functionally, the process is the same, but in the case at hand it is the genre itself that emerges under certain unique cultural conditions, while in the Bildungsroman, or novel of education, it is a certain kind of character of the hero that comes into being. Elsewhere Bakhtin also writes of “the emergence of a new novel-type in the eighteenth century” (DI 9), beginning with Fielding’s Tom Jones. Note that

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for Bakhtin this is only a “new novel-type” and not a new genre known as the novel. And, as indicated above, the time when “intense activization of external and internal polyglossia was at the peak of its activity” was, specifically and uniquely, the Renaissance (see also DI 11). Thus, it is clear that in Bakhtin’s scheme the novel in the fullest sense of the modern novel suddenly comes into existence in the Renaissance, with Rabelais and Cervantes as its principal (but not only) representatives. It is interesting to compare David R. Olson’s comments about the impact of the Renaissance with Bakhtin’s: The conceptual changes that ushered in modernity, that is those changes that occurred between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, may be seen as a matter of learning to read in a new way. It was a matter of moving away from reading between the lines to reading what was on the lines—giving increased importance to the information explicitly represented in the text. New ways of reading gave rise to new ways of writing texts and both gave rise to new ways of thinking about the world and about the mind.36

But it is important to stress that if the novel’s emergence is (relatively) sudden, it is by no means unmotivated, illogical, or capricious. The ground had to be prepared throughout the centuries of the prehistory of the genre; for Bakhtin, this is a necessary characteristic of great works of literature: “the artwork extends it roots into the distant past. Great literary works are prepared for by centuries, and in the epoch of their creation it is merely a matter of picking the fruit that is ripe after a lengthy and complex process of maturation” (SG 4). BAKHTIN’S TWO STYLISTIC LINES The final section of “Discourse in the Novel,” the essay-within-an-essay titled “The Two Stylistic Lines of Development in the European Novel” (DI 366– 422), is at the heart of Bakhtin’s concept of the history and nature of the modern European novel. Morson and Emerson speculate that this concluding—and crucial—section of “Discourse in the Novel” might, like the “Concluding Remarks” of the “Chronotope” essay, have been written in Bakhtin’s last years.37 If so, the view of the novel as exemplified by Don Quixote presented here gains even more weight in Bakhtin’s thought, and casts a new light on our understanding of his intellectual development. Unfortunately, Morson and Emerson do not provide any evidence for suspecting a late date of composition for this part of the text, nor do they state what, if any, steps they might have taken to verify this important hypothesis.

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The two stylistic lines Bakhtin describes here represent not two distinct and mutually exclusive categories (400) but two poles on the continuum that is long prose fiction. Located at one end of the continuum is the First Stylistic Line, fiction characterized by “the fact that it knows only a single language and a single style . . .; heteroglossia remains outside the novel,” while at the other end we find the Second Stylistic Line, “to which belong the greatest representatives of the novel as a genre,” fiction that “incorporates heteroglossia into a novel’s composition, exploiting it to orchestrate its own meaning and frequently resisting altogether any unmediated and pure authorial discourse” (375). It is here that we have the fullest development of the two types of novel that we tend to have in mind when we make the distinction between romance and novel, though Bakhtin does not here employ these terms, nor is the equivalence exact. In some passages of the 1963 revised version of PDP (118, 124, 270, 302), Bakhtin also refers to the “dialogic line” of the novel, or of literature in general, and it is clear that this term is basically a synonym for what he here calls the Second Stylistic Line. This novel-romance distinction is traditionally ignored or blurred by some classicists who write of the Greek and Roman novel. The most explicit recent move in this direction is that of Margaret Anne Doody in her book The True Story of the Novel, where she opens her first chapter by affirming that “Romance and the Novel are one. The separation between them is part of a problem, not part of a solution.”38 This is the only possible position one who defends the legitimacy of the concept of novel in pre-Renaissance times can assume. It is, however, clearly a minority position, one that is at odds not only with Bakhtin’s nuanced distinctions but also with the majority of theorists and practitioners of the novel throughout history. R. Bracht Branham’s critique of Doody’s dismissal of the romance-novel distinction is to the point: Doody takes this position to its logical conclusion by simply declaring that the distinction between novels and romances has outlived its usefulness (For whom?) without actually explaining why we are better off ignoring a distinction critics from Clara Reeves to Northrop Frye evidently have felt needed to be made—not to mention the fact that readers, reviewers, and publishers employ the same distinction routinely. Literary history needs finer distinctions, not fewer categories.39

Heteroglossia, the key term in the distinction between these two lines of development and one of Bakhtin’s signature concepts, refers to the following fact: At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological groups in the

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present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “languages” of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying “languages.” . . . [A]ll languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings and values. (DI 291–292)

When it enters the novel, heteroglossia is “another’s speech in another’s language” (342; emphasis in the original). Heteroglossia is clearly related to other key Bakhtinian concepts as centripetal and centrifugal forces in language, context, dialogism, double- and multivoicedness and double- and multi-languagedness, Galilean linguistic consciousness, hybridization, polyglossia, polyphony, speech diversity, and others, in subtle, intricate ways that are essential to a complete understanding of its significance (and the significance of Bakhtin’s work in general). But it is clearly far beyond the limits of this chapter to elaborate these relationships in any substantive way. Bakhtin uses the term “Sophistic” (or “Sophist”) to identify the novels of the First Line, works “characterized by sharp and relentless stylization of all its material, that is, by a monologic—abstractly idealized—consistency of style” (372; see also 65). The term “Sophistic” specifically means the Greek romance: for Bakhtin the term “adventure novel of ordeal” includes “all the so-called ‘Greek’ or ‘Sophist’ novels written between the second and sixth centuries a.d.” (86; see also 106, 134, 372–373, 388, 391). Thus the First Line of the novel finds “a sufficiently full and finished expression” (375) centuries before the Second Line comes into existence. This ancient and traditional tendency in the novel is later exemplified in the medieval prose and verse narratives, Renaissance chivalric (especially) and pastoral fiction, and the Baroque novel. For Bakhtin, the Spanish romance of chivalry Amadís de Gaula is the prototype of medieval romance that he calls the First Line. Amadís is mentioned nine times in Bakhtin’s discussion of the First Line, far more than any other work. Though the treatment is superficial, and Amadís is cited as representative of the prose chivalric romance in general, Bakhtin implicitly here sets up Amadís as the (postancient) prototype of this line of the novel in opposition to Don Quixote, the prototype of the Second Line (see below). Thus, though probably not intentionally and certainly not explicitly, two major Spanish works stand metonymically for Bakhtin’s two trends in the novel. And the distinction is a fundamental one, for, as E. C. Riley has insisted, Cervantes could not have written Don Quixote unless he had a clear sense of a difference between novel and romance.40 Perhaps the fact that Amadís was Don Quixote’s favorite reading and is cited in Cervantes’s novel more than any other romance had some influence on Bakhtin’s thesis here.

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It is in these more monologic, monostylistic works, heteroglossia per se remains outside the bounds of the text, influencing only indirectly (though often substantially) the novelistic discourse, which strives to maintain the purity of a more appropriately “literary” language (DI 381). The First Line may have established the earliest standard for long prose fiction, but it is not the model that maintained its hegemony. With the emergence of another kind of fiction in the Renaissance, the trajectory of the First Line headed downward and has continued in that direction ever since. But the Second Line (the novel) did not replace the First Line (romance); from the very beginning, romance and novel have been read simultaneously, each informing and influencing the other. In fact, it seems certain that even today there are more readers of romances than of novels (think: Harry Potter). It is the Second Line which incorporates the feeling of a horizontal worldview, a modern sense of a “whole world,” and a Galilean concept of language; it inherits and internalizes the approach of the serio-comical genres, is imbued with the spirit of carnival, is heteroglot to its core. The works that make up the Second Line emerge during the Renaissance, and are the true representatives of the new and unique genre called the novel. Unfortunately, Bakhtin himself blurs the issue, for a problem in understanding Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is to be found in his comments on Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. As a medieval verse romance, it would seem to fall chronologically, formally, and thematically into the prehistory of the novel. But it is precisely when discussing the two stylistic lines that Bakhtin affirms that [t]he classic chivalric romance in verse actually lies on the boundary between epic and novel, but it clearly tends more toward the novel’s pole. The most profound and perfected models of this genre, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, are already authentic novels. Wolfram’s Parzival can no longer be considered a pure example of the First Line of novelistic development. It is the first German novel to be profoundly and fundamentally double-voiced.” (377).

This opinion is echoed later when Parzival is again called “a great example of the novel of the Second Line” (400). No matter how one reads it, these affirmations are in direct and irreconcilable contradiction with his general position on the Renaissance emergence of the Second Stylistic Line of the novel. In spite of Bakhtin’s stubborn insistence here, and while fully acknowledging the stylistic and thematic excellence of Parzival, I think the majority of readers would not place it in the category of the modern novel. A similar, though far less substantial or important, problem is seen in Bakhtin’s comment that Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (fourth century b.c.) “is a novel, in the most basic sense of the word” (29). Bakhtin is not always a model of conceptual consistency.

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As Bakhtin states elsewhere, “the modern European novel” can basically be equated to “the novel since the seventeenth century” (67). The “first powerful novel-form of the Second Line [is] the picaresque adventure novel”: This novel’s hero and his discourse can be understood in all its uniqueness only against the background of the high chivalric novel of trial, extraliterary rhetorical genres (biographical, confessional, sermon genres and others), and against the later background of the Baroque novel. The radical novelty and conceptual depth of the picaresque novel’s hero (and the discourse peculiar to him) can be outlined with the necessary clarity only against this background. . . . A radically new tone is given here to discourse about human beings, a tone alien to any pathos-charged seriousness. (406)

The picaresque novel of Renaissance and Baroque Spain—the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1599, 1604), Francisco de Quevedo’s Buscón (1626), and several others41—was not a genre known first-hand by Bakhtin, who seems not to have read any of them and who often cites the late and derivative Gil Blas (1715, 24–35) by Lesage as this subgenre’s prototype. The picaresque was, however, together with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, decisive in the history of the novel. As Walter L. Reed has shown in his Exemplary History of the Novel, it can legitimately be considered as one of the two foundations for all of modern European fiction.42 Just as Bakhtin cites the Spanish Amadís de Gaula as the prototype for the First Stylistic Line, his mention here of the Spanish picaresque and Don Quixote as prototypes for the Second Line implicitly aligns him with the majority of Hispanic scholars in placing the birth, rise, and/or emergence of the modern novel in Renaissance Spain, and places him in direct opposition to the nearly unanimous opinion of the entire Anglo-American critical tradition classically articulated by Ian Watt, that relegates the Spanish works to mere (comic, episodic, satiric, lesser) precursors of the glorious “rise” of the novel in eighteenth-century England.43 But it was, as stated earlier, above all, Rabelais and Cervantes in whose works emerge the most important examples of the new genre, the heteroglot, dialogic, modern European novel. In his discussion of the two lines of development of the novel, however, it is clearly Cervantes alone who represents the trend that becomes the modern novel. In the fifty-six pages of the “Two Stylistic Lines” essay, Cervantes and Don Quixote are mentioned and discussed in some detail no fewer than nineteen times, while Rabelais’s novels are mentioned only briefly three times. No other author or work is cited nearly as often as Cervantes in this segment of Bakhtin’s writings that is most crucial for an understanding of his theory of the novel. In a seminal essay on Bakhtin and Cervantes, Reed is made uncomfortable by what he considers to be the fact of Cervantes’s “inconspicuousness” in Bakhtin’s theoretical writings on the novel; Cervantes, Reed asserts, is mentioned only on about twelve

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of the approximately 1,200 pages of Bakhtin’s oeuvre.44 In fact, however, Cervantes is considerably more prominent in Bakhtin than Reed would have it. Except for those authors to whom Bakhtin devoted whole books—Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and Goethe (much of which is lost)—no writer is more prominent, both in quantity and quality of reference, in Bakhtin’s writings than Cervantes. Only the Russian writers Tolstoy, Pushkin, and Gogol appear about as frequently as Cervantes in Bakhtin, but none of them has anywhere near the same significance as Cervantes in Bakhtin’s scheme of things. Clark and Holquist write that Dante ranks with Dostoevsky, Rabelais, and Goethe in “Bakhtin’s private pantheon,”45 and Graham Pechey claims that Dante “is the principal ‘heroic’ potentiality in all of his writing. . . . Bakhtin, I contend, learns more from Dante than from anyone else,” also ranking Dante with Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky as Bakhtin’s “four major heroes.”46 But, I think, the author of the Divine Comedy is a relatively minor figure in Bakhtin, ranking closer to Apuleius, Petronius, Sterne, and Jean Paul than to Cervantes or Tolstoy. Pechey, by the way, never mentions Cervantes in his book. Earlier in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin, in an unequivocal statement that can apply only to one work and specifically does not include Rabelais, makes his opinion of Cervantes explicit, stating that “the classic and purest model of the novel as genre [is] Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which realizes in itself, in extraordinary depth and breadth, all the artistic possibilities of heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic discourse” (DI 324). On another occasion, and presumably with reference to the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes, Bakhtin discusses works characterized by “complexly dialogized hybrids” and comments that “[t]he great novels of the Renaissance were such hybrids, although stylistically there were monoglot” (82). Bakhtin is at best only partially correct here. Certainly Pantagruel and Gargantua are relatively more monoglot than Don Quixote, and Bakhtin’s statement may reflect the fact that he read Rabelais in the original French but most probably read Cervantes in either German or Russian translation.47 The monologizing and homogenizing of Cervantes’s language in translations of Don Quixote has frequently been commented on in Cervantine scholarship. In another passage of the same tenor, Bakhtin refers to “the great exemplars of the novel of the Second Line—such as, for example, Don Quixote. In these great seminal works the novelistic genre becomes what it really is, it unfolds in its fullest potential” (409). And it is no surprise that in another context Bakhtin quotes approvingly Dostoevsky’s famous opinion on Don Quixote: There is nothing in the world more profound and powerful than this work. It is the ultimate and greatest word yet uttered by human thought, it is the most bitter irony that a man could express, and if the world should end and people

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were asked there, somewhere, “Well, did you understand your life on earth and what conclusions have you drawn from it?” a person could silently point to Don Quixote: “Here is my conclusion about life, can you judge me for it?” (PDP 128)

In fact, when it comes to pointing to these “great seminal works the novelistic genre,” Bakhtin can apparently only think of one example. Nowhere in any of his works does Bakhtin make any statement even remotely comparable to the ones cited here about the primacy (conceptual or chronological) of any other example of the novel. There is no legitimate way to read Bakhtin in such a way as to conclude that anything other than Don Quixote stands at the forefront, in every way, of the novelistic genre. Certainly neither Goethe nor Jane Austen is a factor for Bakhtin in the emergence of the novel as a genre. It is surprising that even some of the best Hispanic scholars who write on Don Quixote and Bakhtin have failed to see this fact. James A. Parr, for example, basing himself on his reading of Bakhtin, argues that Don Quixote is a Menippean satire and not a novel at all.48 And Rachel Schmidt concludes that “According to Bakhtin’s history of the novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha occupies an intermediate position between the so-called First Line of novelistic development and the Second.”49 In this, Schmidt is in agreement with the thesis of Edwin Williamson, that Don Quixote occupies the middle ground between romance and novel.50 Just about every theme, technique, or stylistic device characteristic of the novel is, for Bakhtin, exemplified by Cervantes’s practice in Don Quixote. When Bakhtin considers the “encyclopedic comprehensiveness” of the novels of the Second Line, he comments that “[i]t is enough to mention Don Quixote, so rich in inserted genres” (DI 410–411). When calling attention to the imperative to “represent all the social and ideological voices of its era,” Bakhtin adds that “this imperative is in fact immanent to the conception of the novel motivating the creative development of the most important major modern novel types, beginning with Don Quixote” (411). For Bakhtin the “auto-criticism of discourse is one of the primary distinguishing features of the novel as a genre. . . . Already in Don Quixote we have a literary, novelistic discourse being tested by life, by reality” (412). There are two types of such testing: (1) “the critique and trial of literary discourse around the hero . . . Don Quixote and Madame Bovary are the best-known examples”; and (2) “an author who is in the process of writing a novel . . . as the real author of the given work . . . Thus as early as Don Quixote we already have elements of a novel about a novel” (413). Midway between the two extremes of testing literary discourse, “that is, somewhere between literary parody and ‘romantic irony,’ stands Don Quixote, with its

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profound but cunningly balanced dialogism of parodying discourse” (413). There can be no doubt but that for Bakhtin Don Quixote represents what the novel is better than anything else, that Don Quixote is the (one and only true) prototype for novelistic discourse. It is the model provided by the Second Line that forms the basis of the modern novel. Although elements of both lines can be found in all fiction of the last four centuries, by the nineteenth century, the distinctive features of the Second line become the basic constitutive features for the novelistic genre as a whole. It was in the Second Line that novelistic discourse developed all its specific stylistic potential, unique to it alone. The Second Line opened up once and for all the possibilities embedded in the novel as a genre; in the novel became what it in fact is. (414)

The picture of the novel that we derive from Bakhtin, then, is something like Figure 1.1. The First Stylistic Line (essentially the romance) begins in antiquity with the Greek adventure novel and remains the primary, virtually the only, type of lengthy fiction practiced for centuries. In the Renaissance, because of the convergence of the factors described above, the heteroglot novel of the Second Stylistic Line (essentially the modern European novel) emerges with the Spanish picaresque, Rabelais, and Cervantes. This Second Line becomes dominant, as the First Line becomes ever less significant, so that in our era the novel as a genre is, in effect, the novel of the Second Line. In their chapter on “The Theory of the Novel,” Clark and Holquist sketch a fairly similar outline in a few brief pages;51 however, the majority of this chapter is devoted to a discussion of the chronotope. In effect, Clark and Holquist reduce the number of theories of the novel proposed by Bakhtin from Morson and Emerson’s three to two, a step in the right direction, at least.52

Figure 1.1  Bakhtin’s two stylistic lines of the novel.

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THE NOVEL Bakhtin identifies “three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres”: (1) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images, namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness. (DI 11)

These “organically interrelated” characteristics of the genre all reflect “a very specific rupture in the history of European civilization: its emergence from a socially isolated and culturally deaf semipatriarchal society, and its entrance into international and interlingual contacts and relationships” (11). Although comparable ruptures took place during antiquity, especially the Hellenic age, and again in the late eighteenth century (5), it was the rupture of the Renaissance (described above) that was decisive in the emergence of the novel. For Bakhtin, “[t]he novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice”; it “can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (261–262). Above all, a novel is “[a] system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other” (47; see also 262, 416); “[t]o a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of ‘languages,’ styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language” (49). By definition, for Bakhtin, a novel (i.e., of the Second Stylistic Line; not a romance) cannot consist of a work in which there is a single voice, tone, point of view, ideology, or consciousness. What distinguishes the novel from all other genres is heteroglossia, the interanimation of different languages, the representation of multiple consciousnesses—in a word, dialogism. No set of formal or stylistic characteristics can ever be sufficient to define—to shackle or limit—the novel; its discourse is infinitely flexible, protean. A novel may be shorter or longer; it may be told from the point of view of any character or from that of an omniscient author/narrator; it may contain more or less dialogue among characters; it may be more or less realistic, fantastic, or self-conscious; it may concentrate on a single hero or on multitudes—it may, in short, be virtually anything at all. Importantly, it is only the novel that, largely because of its size, may embed or contain within it any other kind of text, such as letters, poetry, drama, essay, or short fiction. Try to imagine an entire novel (even one of modest size, say, 50,000 words) embedded within a letter, a lyric poem, or a drama, for instance. But one thing is necessary: “The fundamental

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condition, that which makes a novel a novel, that which is responsible for its stylistic uniqueness, is the speaking person and his discourse” (332). For Bakhtin, “[t]he novel is the expression of a Galilean perception of language, one that denies the absolutism of a single and unitary language—that is, that refuses to acknowledge its own language as the sole verbal and semantic center of the ideological world” (366). Like the world in which we live (and unlike the absolute past of the world of the epic), the novel is a place where unique human beings, each with their own consciousness, ideology, point of view, language, and voice, and each within their unique personal, historical, cultural, and geographic context, exist, meet, speak, and interact. The novel deals constantly with life itself: “Discourse in the novel is structured on an uninterrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life” (383); “[t]he language of the novel is structured in uninterrupted dialogic interaction with the languages that surround it” (399). Because the novel is the genre that is defined by such a worldview, by dialogism, it stands as the prototype of literature in general in the modern (i.e., postmedieval) world: modern world = dialogism = novel (see the passage from DI 7 quoted above at the end of the section above on “The Novel as Genre”). It is for this reason that Bakhtin can write of the “novelization” of other genres; he might just as legitimately have written of the “modernization” or “dialogization” of literature. It is not that the novel is an imperialistic genre, as Morson and Emerson write when they charge Bakhtin, in the long and fruitful period stretching from the 1930s to the early 1950s, with the promotion of “a radical ‘novelistic imperialism’” and with “ecstatic if somewhat imprecise thinking” which leads to “overdramatized accounts of literary history.”53 Bakhtin does not say that the novel colonizes and dominates other genres; nor does he unfairly denigrate other genres in order to promote the glory of his own favorite genre. Rather, he argues that the novel is the genre that by definition represents what literature becomes in the modern world: From the very beginning the novel was made of different clay than the other already completed genres; it is a different breed, and with it and in it is born the future of all literature. Once it came into being, it could never be merely one genre among others, and it could not erect rules for interrelating with others in peaceful and harmonious co-existence. In the presence of the novel, all other genres somehow have a different resonance. (DI 39; see also PDP 270)

Once the novel redefines our concept of what literature is and can be, all other genres can partake, to a greater or lesser degree, of the same qualities, and this is why the novel is the privileged genre in the modern age. The novel is the genre that explores the path and sets the standard for other genres as they,

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too, emerge from a Ptolemaic linguistic orientation and increasingly assume a Galilean orientation. Other genres become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the “novelistic” layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of selfparody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving, contemporary reality (the openended present). All these phenomena are explained by the transposition of other genres into this new and peculiar zone for structuring artistic models (a zone of contact with the present in all its openendedness), a zone that was first appropriated by the novel. (6–7)

Probably the best example of such novelization is the transformation in drama at about the same time as the emergence of the novel. The plays of dramatists like Lope de Vega, William Shakespeare, and Pierre Corneille are inconceivable in the pre-novelistic context of even a century earlier. An important concept in Bakhtin is that of the novelistic image, particularly the image the reader creates of the novelistic hero. In great novels of the Second Stylistic Line, “authentic double-voiced novelistic images fully ripen, now profoundly differentiated from poetic symbols, and become the unique thing they ultimately are” (409). Because of the novel’s unfinalizability, these great polysemic images can be constantly re-accentuated: “Every age re-accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re-accentuation” (421). The process of re-accentuation is one that has “great and seminal importance for the history of literature” (422).54 Bakhtin ends his essay on “Discourse in the Novel” by stressing this point (and it is no accident that the last novelistic character cited in this, the most significant of Bakhtin’s statements on the novel, is Don Quixote): In any objective stylistic study of novels from distant epochs it is necessary to take this process continually into consideration, and to rigorously coordinate the style under consideration with the background of heteroglossia, appropriate to the era, that dialogizes it. When this is done, the list of all subsequent re-accentuations of images in a given novel—say, the image of Don Quixote—takes on an enormous heuristic significance, deepening and broadening our artistic and ideological understanding of them. For, we repeat, great novelistic images continue to grow and develop even after the moment of their creation; they are capable of being creatively transformed in different eras, far distant from the day and hour of their original birth. (422)

The re-accentuation of novelistic images is an important aspect of what Bakhtin considers the life of works of art in great time: “Works break through

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the boundaries of their own time, they live in centuries, that is, in great time and frequently (with great works, always) their lives there are more intense and fuller than are their lives within their own time” (SG 4). THE POLYPHONIC NOVEL Bakhtin credits Dostoevsky with the creation of “a completely new type of artistic thinking . . . a new artistic model of the world”; “a fundamentally new novelistic genre”; “a fundamentally new form for visualizing a human being in art”; “a new generic variety of the novel” (PDP 3, 7, 58, 270; emphasis on the word new added in each case). This new form is the polyphonic novel, a novel in which the author’s word has no privilege, where each character’s voice, worldview, and consciousness receives equal representation in its own terms: “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels” (6; emphasis in the original). A polyphonic novel is not one in which the reader is subtly (or not so subtly) predisposed by the authorcreator’s own values to reach certain conclusions, but, implicitly, a novel in which the reader’s own unique creative and sympathetic understanding is the only way of dealing with the discourse. The polyphonic novel is new in the sense that it continues “the ‘dialogic line’ [i.e., the Second Stylistic Line] in the development of European artistic prose” (270). For Bakhtin, this seems to represent a decisive innovation in the history of the genre, an ultimate step in the path traced by speech diversity, polyglossia, heteroglossia, and dialogism. In earlier literature, there were aspects, or approximations, of polyphony in carnivalized and dialogized literature, but true polyphony, in the sense that it is seen in Dostoevsky’s novels, simply did not exist. Bakhtin takes the term polyphony from music, where it is an interweaving of multiple independent voices. It is not harmony, a blending of complementary voices, but a number of simultaneous, individual melodies: “the ultimate destiny of polyphony was to allow each voice complete freedom of movement. Diverse combinations of sounds would inevitably result.”55 This is exactly the effect Bakhtin proposes that Dostoevsky was attempting to achieve in his novels. In Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Grimmelshausen, and others, there are “elements, embryonic rudiments, early buddings of polyphony” (33; see also 44 n 4, 178), but no more than that. And Bakhtin is basically right in this assertion. Rabelais’s exuberant carnivalistic excess is too explicitly satiric and monotone to resemble Dostoevsky’s polyphony. Cervantes comes much closer, perhaps closer than anyone before the nineteenth century, but still reveals a certain tendency toward aphoristic discourse (95–96) and still maintains a degree of (admittedly ambiguous) authorial privilege. The very medium in

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which Shakespeare writes—drama—is, for Bakhtin, by definition, inherently monologic (17, 34; see also DI 266) and therefore far less capable of being polyphonic. And Grimmelshausen is far behind the others on this list. Bakhtin does not say, or even imply, as some have concluded, that for him Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel is necessarily superior to any other sort of novel. In all the citations in the first paragraph of this section Bakhtin calls Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novel new, not better; and his comments on early and partial manifestations of polyphony in Shakespeare and others make it clear that even this newness is more a matter of degree than an absolute quality. Don Quixote could hardly stand as Bakhtin’s prototype of the novel as a genre if Dostoevsky’s works represented the supreme articulation or formulation of the genre. No one form, style, or worldview can ever be the standard for the novel. Since the novel is constantly in development, and since it is by definition infinitely flexible and unfinalizable, no one manifestation of it can ever be “the best.” The polyphonic novel is at most the outer limit to which the characteristics of novelistic discourse can be taken: “we are dealing here with an ultimate dialogicity, that is, a dialogicity of the ultimate whole” (18). But, as is always the case in Bakhtin, everything is a matter of degree, not of simplistic binary alternatives. Furthermore, Bakhtin is fully aware that nothing comes without a cost. If Dostoevsky takes dialogicity to a relatively new level, it is at the expense of other equally valid aspects of the novel. In Dostoevsky’s novels there is “no evolution, no growth in general” (26), because he conceives his world “primarily in terms of space, not time” (28). This places Dostoevsky in almost direct opposition to another of Bakhtin’s most beloved authors, Goethe, whose ability to “see time” was perhaps his greatest gift (SG 25–42). In sum, “Dostoevsky’s 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). For Bakhtin, “In a human being there is always something that only he himself can reveal, in a free act of self-consciousness and discourse, something that does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition” (58; emphasis in the original), Dostoevsky’s characters always reveal themselves in their own voice, in their own words, and never in the author’s totalizing discourse. The risk inherent in this strategy is that it can limit the “excess” or “surplus” of “seeing” that other characters and/or the author may have, the “transgredience” or “outsideness” so essential in Bakhtin’s approach to aesthetics (see AA 12–27, 81–89, 103–104, 134–135, 166, 282; PDP 70–73, 250–251, 299). In other words, Bakhtin’s own theories of perception, knowledge of self and others, authorhero relationships, and his concept of aesthetics, all implicitly call into question the sufficiency of the self-articulation so essential to a polyphonic novel.

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CONCLUSION So, it would seem that Bakhtin does, after all, have a consistent and coherent theory of the novel that we can, with some difficulty, assemble and understand. For Bakhtin, the novel (as opposed to the romance) is a unique genre, different in every way from all other literary genres. Before the novel as a genre comes into being, there is a centuries-long tradition of literature—particularly such serio-comical genres as the Socratic dialogue and the Menippean satire—and culture—especially the folkloric tradition of carnival and laughter—that keep alive and transmit many of the characteristics that will inform the genre. The novel then emerges in the historical, cultural, technological, and linguistic conditions of the European Renaissance and is best exemplified by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which serves as the prototype for the genre. The novel as a genre is characterized by heteroglossia, dialogism, laughter, parody, doublevoicedness, and a host of related concepts, which, in turn, begin to influence all other genres, “novelizing” them to some greater or lesser degree. Finally, Dostoevsky combines these features characteristic of the novel in general into a body of works characterized by polyphony, the presence of multiple, unique ideas, voices, and consciousnesses. The novel, from Cervantes, through Dostoevsky, and into our present age, is the most protean, flexible, adaptable of genres; it is the prototypical expression of modern literature.56 NOTES 1. Lennard J. Davis, “The Monologic Imagination: M. M. Bakhtin and the Nature of Assertion,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 23 (1990): 29. 2. Ibid., 39. 3. Ibid., 43. 4. See, for example, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984): 295–320. 5. See Sergey Bocharov, “Conversations with Bakhtin,” PMLA 109 (1994): 1016; and Nicholas Rzhevsky, “Kozhinov on Bakhtin,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 433. 6. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, translated by Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984): 85–86. 7. Ibid., 90. 8. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990): 5. 9. Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). 10. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, translated by Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971; original in 1920).

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11. See Rachel Schmidt, Forms of Modernity: “Don Quixote” and Modern Theories of the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Schlegel (47–81), Lukács (82–119), and Cohen (120–161); see also Sofie Kluge, Honest Entertainment, Transcendental Jest: Six Essays on “Don Quijote” and Novelistic Theory, translated by Gaye Kynoch (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2017): Schlegel (39–107) and Lukács (108–143). 12. Morson and Emerson 271. 13. Ibid., 300. 14. Ibid., 300–301. 15. Ibid., 433. 16. Ibid., 302. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 332. 19. Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995); Todorov (41, 49, 58), Morson and Emerson (41, 58, 84–85). 20. M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson; introduction by Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 109. Future citations referenced in the text and abbreviated as “PDP.” 21. For perceptive and helpful comments on the problem of the definition of terms in Bakhtin, see Bernhard F. Scholz, “Bakhtin’s Concept of Chronotope: The Kantian Connection,” in The Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics, edited by David Shepherd (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1998): 142–144. 22. M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; translated by Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986): 155. Future citations referenced in the text and abbreviated as “SG.” 23. Todorov, 85. 24. Tihanov, 148. 25. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist; translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981): 3–40. Future citations referenced in the text and abbreviated as “DI.” 26. See, for example, James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979) and Allan Paivio, Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). I have attempted to explore the difference between literature (e.g., the novel) and all visual media in “See the Play, Read the Book,” in Cognition and Performance, edited by F. Elizabeth Hart and Bruce McConachie (London: Routledge, 2006). 27. For a partial description of and commentary on many of the most important changes Bakhtin made in his revision, see Morson and Emerson (84–86, 95, 250, 257, 267, 271, 456–460). I am indebted to Michael Britton, who made a careful comparison of the two Russian texts of Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky books, for my understanding of the differences between them. 28. R. Bracht Branham, “Inventing the Novel,” in Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines, edited by Amy Mandelker (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,

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1995) and “A Truer Story of the Novel?” in Bakhtin and the Classics, edited by R. Bracht Branham (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002). 29. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984): 5–12. Future citations referenced in the text and abbreviated as “RW.” 30. M. M. Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, translated by Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Future citations referenced in the text and abbreviated as “FM.” 31. This essay is included in M. M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov; translated and with notes by Vadim Liapunov; supplement translated by Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990): 257–318. Future citations referenced in the text and abbreviated as “AA.” 32. These two essays are available in English as Chapters 3 and 4 in Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, translated by Benjamin Sher; introduction by Gerald L. Bruns (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990). 33. Schmidt, 262. 34. Marcus Jacobson, Foundations of Neuroscience (New York: Plenum Press, 1993): 119. 35. According to my colleague Herb Rowland, who has been most helpful in clarifying the relationships among these terms, “the word [werden], as a scientific term, is so burdened with literary encrustations—Goethe thought man and nature are continuous with each other—and negative associations stemming from Goethe’s (often unjustly) discredited scientific work that no modern scientist who wants to be taken seriously by mainstream science would dare use it, thought he might well appreciate it in the privacy of his library and thoughts.” 36. David R. Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): 143. 37. Morson and Emerson, 490n17. 38. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996): 15. 39. Branham, “A Truer Story,” 163. 40. E. C. Riley, “Cervantes: A Question of Genre,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of P. E. Russell, edited by F. W. Hodcroft et al. (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1981) and “‘Romance’ y novela en Cervantes,” in Cervantes: Su obra y su mundo. Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes, edited by Manuel Criado de Val (Madrid: Edi-6, 1981). 41. The precise nature of the picaresque novel and its canon have been subjects of intense critical debate among Hispanists. For an introduction to the issues and positions involved in this debate, see Howard Mancing, “The Protean Picaresque,” in The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement, edited by Giancarlo Maiorino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). On Bakhtin’s lack of first-hand knowledge of Spanish literature, see Howard Mancing, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes,” in Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes para el siglo XXI: Studies in

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Honor of Edward Dudley, edited by Francisco La Rubia Prado (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000). 42. Walter L. Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and J. A. G. Ardila, La novela picaresca en Europa, 1554–1753 (Madrid: Visor Libros, 2009). 43. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). 44. Walter L. Reed, “The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin’s Poetics,” Cervantes 7.2 (1987): 29. 45. Clark and Holquist, 295. 46. Graham Pechey, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World (London: Routledge, 2007): 2–3. 47. See Mancing, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature.” 48. James A. Parr, “Don Quixote”: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1988): 108–124. 49. Schmidt, 259. 50. Edwin Williamson, The Halfway-House of Fiction: Don Quixote and Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 51. Clark and Holquist, 290–294. 52. Lynne Pearce, Reading Dialogics (London: Edward Arnold, 1994) also outlines very briefly a scenario basically similar to the one traced here; see 60–72, especially 60–61. 53. Morson and Emerson, 301. 54. See the recent collection of essays on the theme of the re-accentuation of the novelistic image of Don Quixote: Slav Gratchev and Howard Mancing, eds., Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017). 55. Robert Jourdain, Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination (New York: Avon Books, 1997): 91. I owe my understanding of the concept of polyphony to discussions with my colleague David Flory, an exemplary musician and literary scholar. 56. I would like to thank my colleagues and good friends Charles Ganelin, Steven Pierson, Isabel Jaén-Portillo, Julien Simon, and G. R. Thompson for their criticism and helpful suggestions after reading earlier versions of this chapter. My good friend, colleague, and co-editor of this volume Slav Gratchev has been especially helpful and encouraging. I would also like to recognize the contributions of the late Virgil Lokke, whose encouragement and example were crucial to my own understanding of Bakhtin. As I have developed my ideas on the subject of this chapter over the years since about 2000, I have given several formal and informal presentations, and I would like to thank all those who made comments and/or asked questions that helped me develop my thoughts. I especially want to recognize Charles Ross for his challenging comments on one of the early occasions. Zina Breschinsky’s careful reading of the manuscript has helped me better understand the relationships between the original Russian texts and the English translations. In 2009, I published an abbreviated version of this essay: “Don Quixote and Bakhtin’s Two Stylistic Lines of the Novel,”

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in Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg, edited by Thomas Lathrop (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta). I am thankful to have this opportunity to offer my full development of the subject.

WORKS CITED Ardila, J. A. G. La novela picaresca en Europa, 1554–1753. Madrid: Visor Libros, 2009. Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson. Intro. Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. ———. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ———. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Trans. and notes Vadim Liapunov. Supplement trans. Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Bakhtin, M. M., and P. N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Bocharov, Sergey. “Conversations with Bakhtin.” PMLA 109.5 (1994): 1009–1024. Branham, R. Bracht. “Inventing the Novel.” In Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines. Ed. Amy Mandelker. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995. 79–87. ———. “A Truer Story of the Novel?” In Bakhtin and the Classics. Ed. R. Bracht Branham. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. 161–186. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984. Davis, Lennard J. “The Monologic Imagination: M. M. Bakhtin and the Nature of Assertion.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 23.1 (1990): 29–44. Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Gratchev, Slav N., and Howard Mancing, eds. Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Jacobson, Marcus. Foundations of Neuroscience. New York: Plenum Press, 1993. Jourdain, Robert. Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy: How Music Captures Our Imagination. New York: Avon Books, 1997.

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Kluge, Sofie. Honest Entertainment, Transcendental Jest: Six Essays on “Don Quijote” and Novelistic Theory. Trans. Gaye Kynoch. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2017. Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Mancing, Howard. “The Protean Picaresque.” In The Picaresque: Tradition and Displacement. Ed. Giancarlo Maiorino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 273–291. ———. “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes.” In Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes para el siglo XXI: Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley. Ed. Francisco La Rubia Prado. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000. 141–162. ———. “See the Play, Read the Book.” In Cognition and Performance. Ed. F. Elizabeth Hart and Bruce McConachie. London: Routledge, 2006. 189–206. ———. “Don Quixote and Bakhtin’s Two Stylistic Lines of the Novel.” In Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg. Ed. Thomas Lathrop. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Olson, David R. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Paivio, Allan. Mental Representations: A Dual Coding Approach. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Parr, James A. “Don Quixote”: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 1988. Pearce, Lynne. Reading Dialogics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Pechey, Graham. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World. London: Routledge, 2007. Reed, Walter L. An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. ———. “The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin’s Poetics.” Cervantes 7.2 (1987): 29–37. Riley, E. C. “Cervantes: A Question of Genre.” In Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Honor of P. E. Russell. Ed. F. W. Hodcroft et al. Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature (1981): 69–85. ———. “‘Romance’ y novela en Cervantes.” In Cervantes: Su obra y su mundo. Actas del I Congreso Internacional sobre Cervantes. Ed. Manuel Criado de Val. Madrid: Edi-6, 1981. 5–13. Rzhevsky, Nicholas. “Kozhinov on Bakhtin.” New Literary History 25.2 (1994): 429–444. Schmidt, Rachel. Forms of Modernity: “Don Quixote” and Modern Theories of the Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Intro. Gerald L. Bruns. Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990.

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Scholz, Bernhard F. “Bakhtin’s Concept of Chronotope: The Kantian Connection.” In The Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics. Ed. David Shepherd. Amsterdam: Harwood (1998): 141–172. Tihanov, Galin. The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Todorov, Tzvetan. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Trans. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Williamson, Edwin. The Halfway-House of Fiction: Don Quixote and Arthurian Romance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Chapter 2

The Art and Answerability of Bakhtin’s Poetics Margarita Marinova

Mikhail Bakhtin is celebrated—justly so—as one of the major theoreticians of novelistic discourse. The importance and fecundity of his famous studies on the history and language of the novel remain uncontested and continue to inspire literary scholars to this day. His views on poetry, on the other hand, have received much less attention; when discussed at all, they are usually seen as a minor, even perfunctory footnote to an otherwise brilliant lifelong critical engagement with the ethics and aesthetics of prosaic expression. A closer inspection of little known documents from Bakhtin’s archives, however, suggests that we might have to reassess our understanding of his position on poetic language, and give it the serious attention it deserves. One such entry point into Bakhtin’s ideas about poetry is provided by his critical explorations of the work of his famous contemporary, Vladimir Mayakovsky. While aesthetically foreign to Mikhail Mikhailovich’s personal sensibilities, the renowned Futurist clearly fascinated him enough to warrant repeated meditations on the quality and significance of the poet’s creative output. According to existing biographical and scholarly evidence, Bakhtin turned to Maykovsky’s verse three times during the span of his career: first, in the 1920s, then again in the early 1940s, and, finally, in the early 1970s. In a private lecture given either during 1926 or 1927, Mikhail Mikhailovich demonstrates little enthusiasm for the “important representative of Futurism,” but he also admits that Mayakovsky and the other Futurist poets did manage to overcome some of the limitations of the classical Russian poetic tradition—a feat they were able to accomplish because of their decision to embrace the “speech of the urban lower classes” and “street jargon,”1 which allowed for significant prosodic innovations. The lecture introduces, although doesn’t really dwell on, certain ideas about carnivalesque practices that were to be developed fully two decades later in Rabelais and His World. 41

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For example, Bakhtin notes that the “main theme of Mayakovsky’s poetry is the celebration of the dynamic life at the bottom, where nothing remains constant.”2 He draws attention to the ambivalence of the language of the lowest strata, which is linked to “bestiality, physical imperfections, stupidity, drunkenness, gluttony, defecation.”3 The foundations for his lifelong obsession with artistic practices that rebel against existing rules seem to be already in place here. Just a couple of years later, in 1929, Bakhtin would explore them at some length in the first version of his studies of Dostoevsky’s novels, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creation).4 He revisits some of the same ideas again in the 1940s, when he begins to jot down his thoughts in preparation for writing a publishable essay, which he probably hoped would help him emerge from the state-imposed obscurity he found himself in following his internal exile sentence. The result is an unfinished study of Mayakovsky’s poetics—a unique topic in Bakhtin’s overall oeuvre—that once again underscores the carnivalesque quality of Mayakovsky’s poetry as both content (the obsession with life on the street) and form (Bakhtin highlights puns and word play as a method of versification, able to “bring together unrelated events,” and thus “break down the existing hierarchy”).5 Finally, some thirty years later, Bakhtin reconsiders his opinion of Mayakovsky as a man and a poet in his interviews with Viktor Duvakin—a younger literary scholar, who, after being fired from the Moscow University for publicly supporting politically suspect writers, had devoted himself to recording the unfiltered reminiscences of the few surviving prominent Russian intellectuals from the beginning of the twentieth century. In those little known in the West taped conversations from February/March of 1973, Bakhtin openly acknowledges that the spirit of the carnival permeates much of Mayakovsky’s poetry, and also muses on the value and characteristics of poetic language as such in connection with several famous Russian poets, including Pushkin, Fet, Blok, Ivanov, and Khlebnikov. In this chapter, I will use evidence from the last two of the above-mentioned documents to reveal aspects of Bakhtin’s ideas about poetic discourse, which stand in sharp contrast to his published pronouncements on the difference between poetry and novelistic language. Most scholars argue, on the basis of “Discourse in the Novel,” that Bakhtin saw the richness of poetic language as being derived from the aesthetic possibilities embedded in the trope rather than the complexity of the dialogic word. According to this interpretation, the poet has to remain isolated from his surroundings in order to retain full control over his own vision and ensuing monologic expression.6 Bakhtin’s unfinished manuscript about Mayakovsky’s verse, “About Mayakovsky,”7 in which he highlights the presence of carnival in the Futurist’s writing, the importance of the poet’s singular voice as a conduit for the multiplicity of

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the collective, and the recalibration of poetic distance as it accompanies the process of poetic “familiarization,” as well as the memories and opinions he shares in the interviews with Duvakin, suggests that Bakhtin’s understanding of the characteristics of poetic discourse was much more nuanced and complex than previously assumed. Although I would not go as far as Michael Eskin, as to claim that “poetry—and not novelistic discourse—can be thrown into relief as the ethically and sociopolitically exemplary mode of speech in Bakhtin’s writings,”8 I will continue the line of recently emerged critique of the presumed primacy of novelistic discourse in Bakhtin’s legacy, and offer a new reading of his position on creative language as an aesthetic and ethical engagement with reality that assigns equal value to poetic and prosaic (novelistic) expression. “DISCOURSE IN POETRY AND DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL” The unsustainability of the binary opposition at the heart of any attempt to claim supremacy for the dialogic word in the novel was first noted by Paul de Man in his essay “Dialogue and Dialogism.”9 In his deconstructive reading of Bakhtin’s ideas as presented in “Discourse in the Novel,” de Man draws attention to three points emerging from Bakhtin’s insistence on attributing dialogic qualities to novelistic discourse at the expense of poetic language (represented by the trope), which turn out to collapse the original premise on its head. If, first of all, “for Bakhtin, the trope is an intentional structure directed toward an object, and as such, a pure episteme and not a fact of language,” then that “in fact excludes tropes from literary discourse, poetic as well as prosaic”; second, if we agree “that the opposition between trope as objectdirected and dialogism as social-oriented discourse sets up a binary opposition between object and society,” then that would lead to a dangerous reification; and third, “as the analysis of dialogical refraction develops, Bakhtin has to reintroduce the categorical foundations of a precritical phenomenalism in which there is no room for exotopy, for otherness, in any shape or degree.”10 The last claim carries the biggest consequences as it effectively undermines Bakhtin’s central premise—alterity as a necessary prerequisite for proper dialogism in literature—and thus questions the very underpinnings of Bakhtin’s thought. Mathew Roberts’s response to de Man’s critique in “Poetics Hermeneutics Dialogics: Bakhtin and Paul de Man”11 extends the deconstructive gesture that “begins in the space between the ‘monologic’ trope of poetry and the ‘dialogic’ discourse of the novel,” in order to conclude that the very

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“opposition of trope and dialogism is itself highly emblematic of the confrontation between deManian and Bakhtinean textual models.”12 Still, Roberts asserts, de Man’s misunderstanding of Bakhtin’s novel/poetry dichotomy offered in “Discourse in the Novel” is very instructive, as it correctly points to lacunae in the Russian critic’s textual models, which in the 1970s would lead to Bakhtin’s retrieval of “poetic discourse from its exile” in the monologic realm, following his belated realization that “no aesthetically creative discourse can do without the ‘other logic’ of extralocality.”13 Actually, this recognition of the dialogic potential of poetry comes to Bakhtin quite a bit earlier, in his other writings from the 1920s. In his study of Dostoevsky’s novels, first published in 1929, Bakhtin already admits that “here [in poetry], too, works are possible which do not reduce their entire verbal material to one common denominator.”14 As “Heine’s, Barbier’s, partially Nekrasov’s and others’ ‘prosaic’ lyric poetry” demonstrates, verses can certainly stage polyphony, examples of which, although “rare in the nineteenth century,” are numerous in the twentieth, as it is then that “a radical prosaicization of lyric poetry occurs.”15 At first, it may appear that these ideas are openly refuted in “Discourse in the Novel,” but a closer look suggests they are still there, hidden underneath Bakhtin’s formalist impulse to posit a binary opposition between the discussed two major genres. Other critics, notably Hirschkop and Eskin, have already noted that Bakhtin’s “metalinguistic distinction between poetry and novelistic discourse testifies to a sociopolitical and functional rather than an essentializing approach to the generic varieties of literary discourse.”16 By acknowledging the possibility of polyphonic poetry, Bakhtin recognizes the “fundamentally dialogic constitution of poetry as a linguistic product and takes into account the historical facticity of poetry which does not reduce its ‘verbal material to a common denominator.’”17 If we accept that Bakhtin’s differentiation between poetry and prose is the product of what he might have seen as a matter of formal necessity, rather than inherent generic incompatibility, it becomes easier to note the continuity in Bakhtin’s thought as far as artistic language (be it poetic or novelistic) is concerned, even in such texts as “Discourse in the Novel.”18 Written in 1934–1935 (but not published until 1973), while Bakhtin was in exile in Kazakhstan, the essay devotes a separate section to “Discourse in Poetry and Discourse in the Novel.” The poetic image for Bakhtin exists in two forms: as a general concept and as “narrowly conceived” (image as trope). In general, “a dialogized image can occur in all the poetic genres as well. Even in the lyric (to be sure, without setting the tone).”19 The “narrowly conceived” poetic image is the one in which all activity is “completely exhausted by the play between the word (with all its aspects) and the object (with all its aspects),” marked by “virginal fullness and inexhaustibility.”20 The problem with the latter understanding of

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the poetic image (word) is that in practice it can never escape the inherent dialogism of language: The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse. . . . Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation with the alien word that occurs in the object. Concrete historical human discourse does not have this privilege: it can deviate from such inter-orientation only on a conditional basis and only to a certain degree.21

Since the poet is no “mythical Adam” (regardless of how much some poets would like that to be the case), it is hard to sustain the claim that poetic discourse is actually able to “deviate” from the pre-given dialogic state of the language. Bakhtin struggles with the attempt to posit poetic discourse as qualitatively different from novelistic discourse. His claim that “the historicity, the social determination and specificity of one’s own language is alien to poetic style” is followed in the very next paragraph with the idea that the poet’s “relationship to his own language (in greater or lesser degree) could never be foreign to a historically existent poet,” though presumably admitting that all-pervasive heteroglossia would end up destroying poetic style as such, “transporting it into a prosaic key” and thus “turning the poet into a writer of prose.”22 Unfortunately, the feared hybridization of genres (the prosification of poetry) is perhaps unavoidable (though Bakhtin is at pains to convince us—and possibly himself as well—that poetic and prosaic language can be kept apart), which may be the reason why later in the same essay Bakhtin resorts to discussing the relevance of novelistic heteroglossia to poetic works such as Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (a novel in verse, according to Puhskin’s own subtitle). When a poetic symbol is infected with a foreign accent (say, through ironic utterances), Bakhtin submits, it will undergo a dramatic transformation: it’ll become a “double-voiced word” functioning “on the plane of prose.”23 The main vehicle for this process of novelization of poetic language in the chosen example turns out to be the interaction between the “level of Lensky’s lyrics themselves” and that of Pushkin’s speech, or, to put it differently, the clash between the author’s and the hero’s viewpoint. Bakhtin concludes: “The whole of this heteroglossia orchestrates the intentions of the author and is responsible for the authentically novelistic style of this work.”24 It’s not particularly hard to notice how the above notions could easily apply to many (if not all) poetic texts, and one doesn’t have to be a deconstructive critic in order to agree that the originally posited dichotomy between prose and poetry does collapse on itself by the end of the essay.

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Bakhtin never returns to this early attempt at constructing a binary genre opposition in any of his other writing. Instead, when he tackles the question of poetic discourse in other venues, he offers a much more complex understanding of how the poetic work functions in practice, and what its full potential might be. Morson and Emerson raise the same point in their discussion of Bakhtin’s earlier essay, “Toward a Philosophy of the Act,”25 which, they find, displays “no special hostility to lyric poetry.”26 It is significant that here, again, Bakhtin chooses to illustrate his thoughts about the interaction between ethics and aesthetics in art with a lyric poem, rather than a novel, and not just any poem, but Pushkin’s famous love elegy “Parting,” dedicated to his deceased beloved Amalia Riznivch. Love and love only is “capable of being aesthetically productive,”27 according to the young Bakhtin, so it makes perfect sense that his example would focus on the intrinsic powers of poetic language to capture and convey the importance of the author-artist’s “objective love of a concrete human being.”28 The “aesthetic subiectum’s” (the author’s) “unique place in Being” and his outsidedness (vne-nakhodimost) enable the process of proper empathizing with the hero and the heroine, and thus engender the very act of aesthetic creation. The poem’s brilliant accomplishment is that it successfully highlights different emotional-volitional events, which interpenetrate and even briefly unite without ever relinquishing their difference: “the contexts remain valuatively distinct, i.e., they do not fuse together.”29 The aesthetic subiectum is able to keep the diverse “contexts of values” apart even as his aesthetic vision encompasses them and bestows a particular rhythm upon their life flow. All the “spatial, the temporal, the logical, the valuative moments” are subordinated to a concrete center of values, and are “rendered meaningful” and “localized through it and within it.”30 The act of aesthetic seeing thus acquires profound ethical ramifications: This is a world of unique others who issue or proceed from within themselves and a world of Being that is valuatively correlated with them. These others are found by me; I myself, the one and only I, issuing from within myself— I am fundamentally situated outside the architectonic. I partake in it only as a contemplator, but contemplation is the active, effective situatedness of the contemplator outside the object contemplated. The aesthetically contemplated uniqueness of a human being is, in its very principle, not my own uniqueness. Aesthetic activity is a participation of a special, objectified kind; from within an aesthetic architectonic there is no way out into the world of the performer of the deeds, for he is located outside the field of objectified aesthetic seeing.31

Aesthetic activity as a form of participation in Being requires the author to become wholly responsible for himself, to sign his work in full consciousness of what that entails. Bakhtin’s decision to present his philosophy of the aesthetic act in connection with poetic language in particular underscores

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(1) the importance he attributed to poetic discourse as the example par excellence of artistic activity as such; and (2) his unwillingness, in his earliest surviving philosophical writing, to separate in any artificial, formal manner poetic discourse from discourse in the novel. Aesthetic expression is a unique act of positing one’s relationship to others in the world, and that applies equally to poetry and prose. In art, as in life, ethics and aesthetics must be bound together if we can hope to achieve meaning of any kind. In this context, Bakhtin’s brief sojourn into a self-imposed (and ultimately unsuccessful) formalism in his treatment of poetry in “Discourse in the Novel” should be viewed as an uncharacteristic aberration from an otherwise rather consistent, lifelong critical appreciation of the nature of poetic language. And while Bakhtin never undertook the task of presenting a history and a theory of poetic discourse in the same way he developed his views on the novel in both published and unpublished studies during his life time, he left us enough clues as to what a Bakhtinean “poetics” might have looked like in his draft for the essay on Mayakovsky, and his Dialogues with Duvakin,32 both of which I will discuss at some length next. “ON MAYAKOVSKY” As already mentioned, Bakhtin considered writing an article about Mayakovsky’s art in the early 1940s, at a time when, following the completion of his exile sentence in Kazakhstan, he was able to spend a few years living in Moscow before being forced to leave for the provinces again. He had devoted the previous years to thinking and writing about the novel, as evidenced by such works as “Slovo v romane”  (Discourse in the Novel; 1934–1935), “Iz predystorii romannogo slova”  (From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse; 1940), “Epos i roman” (Epic and Novel; 1941), and “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane” (Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel; 1937–1938). Between 1936 and 1938 he had worked on a book about the subgenre of Bildungsroman and its place in the history of realism, but that manuscript was lost when the publishing house, which was supposed to print it, was destroyed33 in the early days of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. During the same period, he also completed his doctoral dissertation on Rabelais, and defended it at the Gor´kii Institute of World Literature in 1940. That study would later be published in 1965 as Rabelais and His World to great acclaim, and would solidify Bakhtin’s reputation as a theorist of the novel. Amid all this flurry of activity connected with novelistic discourse, Bakhtin continued to follow significant publications by contemporary Russian and world poets (he discusses many of them with Duvakin), and even took the time to write down his thoughts about

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the versification of arguably the most famous of poets of the era: Vladimir Mayakovsky. Since the essay he hoped to publish was still in the initial writing stages, its exposition often consists of enigmatic brief statements, clearly meant as placeholders, a shorthand for an idea that Bakhtin intended to develop more fully at a later time. Although largely underdeveloped, the notes do contain many interesting concepts, which highlight important transpositions of some of Bakhtin’s larger theoretical concerns to the topic at hand, and thus continue to erode the very possibility of a clear boundary between poetry and prose. The manuscript begins with a list of topics Bakhtin intends to turn his attention to and flesh out later: “The choice of language (the street). The problem of tonality (all available tonalities are false and impossible). The problem of the new solemnity, the new pathos and monumentality. The problem of things [objects]. The elements of street language, its accents and makeup. The role of yelling.”34 Bakhtin’s initial preoccupation, then, is with the specificities of Futurist language; however, it is not “poetic language” in the abstract (the “virginal” language of poetic discourse as an idealization) that interests him, but the concretized, historically bound expression of certain “truths” about the times: In certain epochs, the amount of the ridiculous in the world (the wondrous and the monstrous, the clichés and the nonsensical, the disembodied comic forms, comic pathos, comic solemnity, the no-longer fearful fear, etc.) grows exponentially; all known, fully formed, secure, sacred traditions become void of serious significance, previously emotionally-packed forms turn shameful and are left suspended in the air during the search for new forms.35

Bakhtin looks for the predecessors of Mayakovsky’s style (much like he does in his work on the prehistory of the novel) in the classical world of Roman satire, and in the literature surrounding such rituals as saturnalias, triumphs, and funerals.36 He acknowledges that each epoch’s literature “orients itself towards its audience,” which means that it must “at the same time orient itself in time” (eta orientatsia sochetaetsia s orientatsiei vo vremeni). The stylistic responsiveness to the times in Mayakovsky’s case leads to a recalibration of the poet’s position to the surrounding world, and a new sense of what deserves to be incorporated into poetic language: for example, if, in the past, it was the sward and the sun that entered lyric verse as powerful aesthetic images, now it’s the revolver’s and the light bulb’s turn to be used in the same way. The poet’s main task, therefore, becomes the “heroization of the present moment.”37 Bakhtin is quick to acknowledge himself the difficulty of the charge. All attempts to “unite the present with the past, depict it in the attire of the heroic past, raise it to the past of our fathers and grandfathers, to our

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‘grandfathers’ famed standing’ (the Tale of Igor’s Campaign)”38 have not succeeded in the past because of the paradox at the heart of this endeavor: such heroization must necessarily erase all specificity from the present moment, and thus render it nonexistent. To escape this predicament, Bakhtin suggests the poet turn instead to the heroization of the future, and proceeds to laud Mayakovsky’s success in accomplishing that task. His greatest achievement is his ability to see the future “objectively” (an “utopian, distant, normative-idealistic future” would never do)—something that can only happen when there is a “radical, irreversible break” with the past brought about not by an individual propensity toward anarchism, but by real, “objectively-historical” societal forces.39 The Russian Futurists lead by Khlebnikov were the first to recognize the future’s proper value to mankind, celebrate its inevitable victory, and successfully link it to the past. Bakhtin deems the first stage in this process to be the necessary and complete separation from the past’s enduring influences on the present (the vulgarity, philistinism of the bourgeoisie), which is possible through the act of refocusing the artist’s vision on the street and its people. Mikhail Mikhailovich plans to develop the last point by considering Mayakovsky’s relationship to time, to language (his linguistic choices), to his preferred tonality and rhythm, to his audience, and to the present moment,40 and compare them to Walt Whitman’s earlier (presumably unsuccessful) attempts at the heroization of the present. The rest of the manuscript touches upon all of those ideas in a somewhat disorganized manner, giving precedence to aspects of the Futurist’s writing that interest the critic the most. Mayakovsky’s special strength, Bakhtin argues, is his ability to orient his word toward that of his audience, and always remain familiar (familiarnyi) to his addressee no matter how grand or monumental his overall goals might be. In fact, it’s the ever-present sense of intimacy with the surrounding world that enables the triumph of the poet’s vision. From his earliest poems, Mayakovsky deliberately seeks to uncover the “cosmic dimensions of the familiar,” which naturally leads to the aggrandizement of the self (as body and soul). Such self-enlargement is not particularly original (it’s already present in the ancient grotesque), but now the erasure of all interpersonal borders becomes motivated by a desire to merge with and become an embodiment of a certain class (hence the “nameless mass socialist art”).41 This new state of being in the world (as a member of a class) requires new linguistic expressions, and thus the rhetoric of the scream (krik) is born. For the first time ever in literary history, the street cry is elevated to the “monumental scream-slogan,”42 which ensures that Mayakovsky’s language remains grounded in “a prosaic double-voicedness,” rather than actually “rise to ‘poetic monologism.’” One of the most important historical tasks at present, Bakhtin contends, is the “destruction of the sharp divide” between

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poetry and prose, without obliterating their specificity. That is the proper path to artistic innovation: Past eras poeticized prose (Symbolism). In Mayakovsky we find the prosification of poetry (from the perspective of basic poetic lexicology his verse is peppered with “prosaicisms” [prozaismy]. He novelizes poetry. (Connections with the history of the novel.) This gives birth to a new specificity of poetic language (rhythmic peculiarities, stanza divisions, new rhyme and stanza, etc.).43

If, in “Discourse in the Novel,” as we recall, Bakhtin fretted about the possibility of such cross-pollination between poetry and prose, here he openly admits to its creative potential, and even celebrates it. Next, Mikhail Mikhailovich turns his attention to the “new specificity of poetic language” as an expression of the poet’s uniquely modern sense of self. There is a progression in Mayakovsky’s art, from “Mayakovsky to centuries” (Mayakovsky vekam) to the anonymous achievement of “At the top of my voice” (Vo ves’ golos), from the desire to speak for the masses, to the complete dissolution of the poet’s voice into the voices of the street. The new poet-genius (previously fully aware of his exceptionality—see, for example, the work of such Modernists as Bryusov and Balmont44—and unwilling to surrender his position of superiority) embeds himself among the masses, and speaks for and to them (rather than from a position of privilege to an audience of selected few). This new poet feels alone among his peers, but he is also—paradoxically—alone among the street crowds, as the collective has not found its own voice and must rely upon the bard to represent its feelings and thoughts.45 The demands of the masses physically transform the poet’s body not just by enlarging it to cosmic dimensions, but also by rendering it grotesque. The subsequent carnivalization of the poetic self is accomplished either through the merging of his body with various objects46 or through the metonymic fragmentation of the body, which then makes an appearance only as a stomach, ears, legs, and so on.47 As in traditional folkloric practices, here, too, the wholeness and uniqueness of the classical human body are destroyed and replaced by the grotesque body of the lowest classes.48 The echoes of Rabelais and His World are clearly audible in this section, which, again, suggests that Bakhtin saw carnival as equally at home in poetry and prose.49 The artistic and ethical obligations for the poet and the prose writer appear strikingly similar as well. From the author’s perspective, the new type of complex subjectivity is just as unfinalizable50 in poetry as it is in novelistic discourse, and necessitates a recalibration of distances: centuries and masses require to be viewed from a different vantage point, “either up close or at a great distance.”51 The poet

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must choose his distance (in terms of both time and space) from the world he wants to recreate, and decide how quickly and how often he’d change positions, and accordingly gauge the scale (in time and space) of his artistic delineations. Traditionally, in “bourgeois realism,” the intermediate vantage point dominates aesthetic expression, and the distance between the author and his subject matter narrows even further when, in its fight with romanticism, realism shrinks its viewpoint even more, in order to focus on the smallest possible unit.52 This funneling of vision is accompanied by a “philistine distrust and hatred towards everything larger than life, whose enormity defies existing norms (the big person, big ideas, big events).”53 These are the kind of tendencies and tradition that the Futurists had to fight and subvert in their writing. Bakhtin does not pass the opportunity to equate their struggles with those of his favorite representative of novelistique discourse, François Rabelais, who also had to combat the eschatological thought and catastrophic pessimism of his times, in his efforts to replace them with his revolutionary vision of cataclysmic events as positive opportunities for personal and societal change and rejuvenation. Any true artist must therefore both understand his place in the larger trajectory of the creative tradition he happens to belong to and be brave enough to overcome the peculiar constraints his own times place upon his vision. Mayakovsky’s essay “How Verses Are Made” testifies that he understood the demands of his own historical moment perfectly and successfully allocated a new “visible, image-driven, historical space for his artistic creation.”54 The poet finds one such space in the image of Lenin’s mausoleum from the famous 1928 epic poem “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin”: “An infinite chasm in just four steps, a break from slavery and a hundred generations . . . A break and an end—that’s the grave and Lenin, beyond them: the commune wherever you look.” It is within that space that Lenin himself emerges: “And from there, looking back at those days, you see Lenin, his face appears to you first. He is the brilliant divide between the thousands of years of slavery and the coming centuries of the commune.” In Lenin’s image, Bakhtin contends, we discover a “completely new combination of time and space, a new chronotope”:55 the “four steps and the brilliant divide are simultaneously space and time-oriented, clearly realistic and fantastic all at once; the secret here lies in the indivisibility of the fusion, in the maximum saturation of the space with time.”56 Next, Bakhtin plans to outline the stages in the artistic search for historical space, which he imagines as a progression from “Mennipean satire, to Dante, to Shakespeare, to Voltaire’s ‘Micromegas,’ etc.”57 The list, though not complete, or elaborated on in any way, still reveals the facility of transition from prose to poetry in Bakhtin’s critical thought, which is consistent with the idea that to him generic distinctions were far less significant than the continued exploration

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of the nature and goals of aesthetic creation as such. This claim is further substantiated by Bakhtin’s decision to compare Maykovsky’s artistic choices to those of Tolstoy, a novelist, whose style relied upon “alternating individual scenes and summations-generalizations.” Not only does it seem completely fair to Bakhtin to place the two authors side by side in his analysis, but he actually gives Mayakovsky the upper hand in the implied artistic contest: the poet is the one able to achieve a new chronotope in which “the generalization and the individual scene are merged together and depicted from the same view point, from the same distance.”58 So where does this superior craftsman, the poet, find his new vantage point? The answer to this question brings us back to the topics of tonality, audience, and the true nature of the surrounding world. In the new, greatly enlarged world of Mayakovsky’s art, the author relates to his audience the same way he relates to the masses that populate his writing—he is one of them, and feels very much at home in the historical march to a victorious future: “This is why,” Bakhtin claims, “the ode is doublevoiced, and its monumentality feels intimate.” The familiarity of the present moment is also transferred to the past, so that the historical distance between the two is completely destroyed, and “the hero of our times (without quotation marks)”59 can be made to feel equally at home in both the present and the past. Both author and hero experience themselves as “larger than life,” but that enormity of being is not “static, eternal, unchangeable.” It is the kind of greatness that is grounded in historicity and caught in the process of “becoming, growing.”60 The preoccupation with the big picture necessitates new image-making devices that encompass human groups rather than just individuals; the goal in aesthetic activity then becomes the creation of precisely that: “a picture of, rather than a map of the world.”61 Unlike maps, which delineate clear borders between different entities and position the poet squarely outside of the world he surveys in his art, pictures register the interconnectedness of subjects and objects, and demand full participation in the life they’ve captured: “Man’s relationship to objects changes: the world and things in it are not seen from without, but from within, man is not in the world but with the world, he lives and moves with it (the world).”62 What we have as a result, is a new, strictly materialist relationship to the larger, cosmic scale of the interconnected existence of everything (people and things). The allure of greatness (understood as a grand scale or viewpoint, but also as positioning oneself within what Bakhtin much later would call “great time”63) is clear, but what, then, would happen to the figure of the author himself? How can he exist with the world, dissolve his boundaries within it, yet still produce art? Besides obviously challenging the very possibility of the existence of an ideal poet-sovereign fully in control of his (monologic) word, the notes raise larger questions about the new ethical responsibilities of the author faced with a completely reconfigured sense of self in the emerging new order.

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At the very end of the manuscript Bakhtin turns briefly to this topic in a section, which promises to concern itself with the poet’s “soul.” Bakhtin first considers the ramifications of choosing to hold on to one’s traditional sense of subjecthood: if the author decides to “preserve his insular individuality he can only be a subiectum of limited vision, and confront singular finalized objects. He cannot connect properly to the events of “great life, scattered around in time and space; he has no place in the world of greatness. From the grotesque to the monumental. In ‘coarse’ [grubaia] history, where the old battles the new, such a lyric soul can only take the side of the finalized and worn-out old.”64 While it’s clear that Bakhtin does not approve of this artistic choice, he does not offer any ideas about how the alternative would allow for the retention of personal moral responsibility, and not simply permit the author to find an alibi in being with the masses and the “great” world.65 Mikhail Mikhailovich abandoned his notes at precisely this moment, never to return to them again. We will never know if he couldn’t find a way to solve the conundrum he set up for himself in this critical attempt to reassess the value of aesthetic activity in the Soviet state or if he simply thought the conclusion was so obvious that it didn’t need to be spelled out at that stage. Bakhtin’s thoughts about Mayakovsky’s verse and poetry in general, expressed in the draft, are obviously very much in flux, and at times even self-contradictory, but even so, they offer an instructive look into his creative process and the inner workings of his mind. His ideas about Mayakovsky’s art, and poetry in general, kept evolving, as we saw in the earlier discussion of Bakhtin’s other writing from the 1920s and 1940s. In his interviews with Viktor Duvakin from 1973 (just two years before his death), Bakhtin returns to this topic one last time. The context for his pronouncements is very different in this instance: he is not giving a public lecture or preparing a study for prospective publication; instead, he is engaged in a private conversation with a fellow literary scholar, interested in his honest, unfiltered opinions about leading Russian poets of his recent past and immediate present. BAKHTIN’S DIALOGUES WITH DUVAKIN Interestingly enough, inadvertently Mayakovsky (who had been long dead by that time) played a decisive role in the meeting between Bakhtin and Duvakin. After losing his job teaching Russian literature at the Moscow State University for speaking up in defense of Andrey Sinyavksy66 (the young writer persecuted for publishing anti-Soviet fiction abroad under the pseudonym of Abram Terz), Duvakin, a passionate Mayakovsky fan and a serious scholar of Russian Modernist poetry, decided to collect the living memories of people who once knew the poet personally in order to create an oral history of his

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times and art. The task amounted to a race against the clock—so many of the (surviving few) intellectuals Duvakin wanted to record were very old and likely to die in the nearest future. Luckily for us, Bakhtin was still around (he had been allowed to return to Moscow shortly before, and was finally enjoying some much deserved fame and consideration) and was willing to speak about his past. Over the span of six recording sessions, and many cups of strong tea, the two men chat about life before and during Stalin’s purges, university education before and after the Revolution, and virtually all important intellectuals from the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of whom Bakhtin happened to know quite well. Naturally, Mayakovsky’s name comes up often during those eighteen hours of frank conversations. Mikhail Mikhailovich had no qualms sharing his thoughts about the poet’s personality and work as both he and Duvakin fully realized that the tapes would not see the light of day for many years to come.67 Bakhtin acknowledges that at first he did not like Mayakovsky at all. His aesthetic and political predilections were very different from Bakhtin’s (Mikhail Mikhailovich preferred the Symbolists—his favorite poet was Vyacheslav Ivanov—and did not support the revolutions of 1917), and his flashy appearance left a negative impression on the reticent young philosopher. Their first encounter happened either in 1920 or in 1921 at the office of Valery Bryusov, who served as Chair of the Literary Department at the People’s Commissariat of Education at the time: We were waiting for Bryusov, but he never came. Other people kept coming in with questions and requests for Kuzko in his official capacity. One of them was a very tall man. I immediately realized it was Mayakovsky: I had seen his picture, may be even seen him somewhere before. He was dressed very fashionably, at a time when most had pretty bad clothes. He was wearing a flared coat. That was very trendy back then. In general, his clothes looked all new, fashionable, and it was clear he was very aware of that himself, that he was dressed like a dandy. (He smiles.) But a real dandy doesn’t show any awareness of his attire. Instead, Mayakovsky seemed fully aware and proud of his flared coat, his trendy clothes, his whole statue . . . In short, I didn’t like him.68

A little later in the same conversation (Dialogue 3), Bakhtin is willing to admit that Mayakovsky’s clothes are an integral part of his overall carnivalesque nature, but he can’t quite as easily forgive the self-centered behavior he observed during that initial meeting: Kuzko then gave him the newest issue (it had just come out) of, if I remember correctly, the journal of LITO69, a special edition. Journals were hard to come by at the time . . . Anyways, some of Mayakovsky’s verse was published there. So he grabbed the journal, and immediately tried to find his own poems. It was

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clear he savored them, savored the fact that he saw them in print. A published author! It left a very bad impression on me. I should say that such behavior is quite normal, but I expected more of Mayakovsky, who was, after all, a man of the carnival, and was therefore supposed to be above such things, and should not have cared about his costume or whether his poems were published or not. Instead, I saw the opposite: like any small-minded person, he was thrilled to see his work in print, even though he was already famous and widely published. Just like in that short story by Chekhov, about the clerk who fell under a horse, and then was so happy to read about his own accident in the paper. So yes, I didn’t like that about him.70

However, when Bakhtin had the chance to see Mayakovsky perform his poetry in public, he was struck very favorably by the poet’s demeanor, and the quality of his performance and verse: “I liked him on the stage. He behaved very modestly. His reading was brilliant! Brilliant! He didn’t gesticulate much. Others said he gesticulated too much. That’s not true.”71 Bakhtin tells Duvakin that he read everything by Mayakovsky available to him in print, and especially liked the poem “War and Peace,” even though “there were also, of course, fake, fabricated, inauthentic lines there. To the very end he couldn’t get rid of that falsity, deliberateness, even in ‘At the top of my voice.’”72 Still, Mayakovsky was able to create a completely knew poetic language by making it “intonation-based,” and introducing a “new tonality, which he brought as close to declamation as possible, the type of declamation that is familiar, populist—the way the orators of the French Commune used to speak, almost like a scream . . . Somehow he was able to transform that scream into poetry.”73 Just like in “About Mayakovsky,” here, too, Bakhtin connects all positive aspects of Mayakovsky’s poetics, all his exciting innovations (the forceful declamation, the employment of advertisements, the intimacy shared by the poet and the masses as both heroes in and audiences for the aesthetic event) to the carnival, which his interlocutor also notices and comments on right away. Ultimately, though, the carnivalesque qualities of Mayakovsky’s art are not enough to warrant a glowing final assessment of his artistic output as a whole. Bakhtin cannot forgive him for turning a blind eye to the reality of life under a repressive regime so unambiguously glorified in his verse: “He must have understood what was happening all around, he must have. He must have known that you can’t accept everything unconditionally.”74 Mikhail Mikhailovich exclaims when Duvakin broaches the subject again in their fourth conversation. The poet must never abandon his moral responsibility, even when caught in the torrents of the joyful, life-affirming carnivalesque destruction of traditional norms of existence. Bakhtin’s position at the end of his life is remarkably consistent with that first expressed in his earliest philosophical essay, “Towards a Philosophy of the Act”: Art must be ethical

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in order to be true. The “fakeness” he hears in Mayakovsky’s voice stems precisely from the fact that despite his insistence on the inherent “greatness” of the authorial self, the poet still abdicates his moral responsibility when he overlooks ideologically unfavorable aspects of reality. This is where, Bakhtin believes, we must look for an explanation for Mayakovsky’s suicide: at the end, the poet had to be honest with himself, acknowledge the tragedy underpinning the superficially victorious, delirious happiness of the Soviet Revolution, and face the truth of his existence. But while Mayakovsky’s choice to take his own life under the circumstances does restore his moral statue as a person, it does not erase the problems marring some of his poetry. Duvakin tries to push hard against Bakhtin’s rather negative evaluation of his favorite Soviet poet, but his defense of the sincerity of Mayakovsky’s verse does not sound very convincing. Duvakin’s attempt to protect Mayakovsky’s right to focus only on the positive changes brought about by the Revolution quickly evolves into a more general discussion of whether or not there can exist purely “happy poetry” (vesiolaia poezia), which does not register the existence of death and ethical responsibility. Bakhtin is adamant about it: “Happy, you say . . . Well, poetry can never be just “happy.” It just can’t. There’s always in it something that we can call ‘the cold tear.’”75 Poetry embraces life, but not like sheep; no, it welcomes it fully understanding that life must also include Death, and that there’s no end to the end. That’s very important. “Respice finem,” as the Romans used to say. “Respect the end,” “consider the end.” “The end crowns the work,” as we say in Russia. So that element is always present. In that sense all poetry is like that, and all music.76

Bakhtin once again quickly moves away from the discussion of poetry’s specificities in order to consider art as a whole. There’s nothing so special about poetic language always striving to register the tragic undercurrents of human existence: “all the arts, as far as we know, are always connected with the memory of our ancestors, the dead, the grave, with mourning, etc. Because we have to fortify the living . . . But what’s living doesn’t need to be immortalized, celebrated while still alive.”77 It would be a mistake, though, to interpret art’s obsession with death as “decadence.” Bakhtin does not like the term, and sees it as completely useless in the context of Russian letters (and possibly literature in general): “I should tell you that as a theorist, a literary historian, I don’t accept this term. It was singled out, and advanced by some petty poets, mediocre artists, who understood the word ‘decadence’ to mean a certain posture, a particular style, which they found to be very advantageous, interesting, etc.”78 Mikhail Mikhailovich’s resistance to the term goes back to his insistence that all art must be honest, answerable. Any artistic trend that exhibits traces of pretense

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does not deserve serious critical consideration. Even Baudelaire, the so-called father of French Decadence, is guilty of “a certain element of affectation,”79 which lowers the quality of his writing. In Russia, it was the second-rate poets (people like Gippius, Merezhkovsky, or Dobrolyubov) who embraced this poetic style. The giants of artistic expression, on the other hand—genuine artists like Blok and Chekhov—not only denounced it publicly, but also privately struggled to rid themselves of any traces of such a macabre, falsely hopeless outlook on human existence.80 True to his lifelong passion for celebrating authors who strove to overcome boundaries of any kind—interpersonal, generic, and the like—in his last interviews Bakhtin shares his enthusiasm for artists whose brilliant creations (poetry, prose, music, or paintings) do not comply with their audience’s expectations, and cannot be contained by strict theoretical frameworks. His love and profound respect for the likes of Alexander Blok, Marina Tsvetaeva, Fyodor Sologub, Boris Pasternak, Kazimir Malevich, and Maria Yudina are palpable, and tell us a lot about what he valued in his fellow members of the Russian intelligentsia the most: their willingness and ability to create art honestly, freely, and responsibly regardless of societal pressures. This is one of the main themes that run through all of Bakhtin’s philosophical and critical writing from Art and Answerability to his conversations with Duvakin, whether the particular topic of discussion happens to be poetry or not. His poetics, then, just like his studies of novelistic discourse, should be viewed as a master class in ethics for all of us—authors, heroes, and readers—who are brave enough to participate in the dialogic, self-revelatory encounter with art. NOTES 1. Bakhtin, Sobranie 438. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. 2. Sobranie, 439. 3. Ibid. 4. The book was revised and expanded significantly for its second publication in 1963 as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated and edited by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 5. Sobranie, 439. 6. See, for example, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Eds. Rethinking Bakhtin. Extensions and Challenges (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), esp. p. 53. 7. “Notes Towards an Article about Mayakovsky” [O Mayakovskom] was first published by V. V. Kozhinov in Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop #2 (Vitebsk, 1995), 124–134. It was reprinted in M.M. Bakhtin. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. T. 5. (Moskva: Russkie Slovari, 1996), 50–62.

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8. Michael Eskin, “Bakhtin on Poetry.” Poetics Today, 21(2), (Summer 2000): 382. 9. In Morson and Emerson, Rethinking Bakhtin. Extensions and Challenges, 105–114. 10. In Morson and Emerson, 112. 11. Ibid., 115–134. 12. Ibid., 115. 13. Ibid., 134. 14. Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva-poetiki Dostoevskogo [Problems of Dostoevsky’s art/poetics], edited by O. V. Garun (Kiev: Next, 1994 [1929/63]), 415. 15. Bakhtin, Problemy, 415. 16. Ken Hirschkop, “Dialogism as a Challenge to Literary Criticism,” in Discontinuous Discourses in Modern Russian Literature, edited by C. Kelly, M. Makin, and D. Shepherd (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). 17. In Eskin, 383. 18. In Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Trans. by Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 259–422. 19. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 278. 20. Ibid. 21. “Discourse,” 279; emphasis in original. 22. “Discourse,” 285. 23. Ibid., 328–329. 24. Ibid., 329. 25. “K filosofii postupka” is the first of Bakhtin’s sustained works, written some time during the period 1919–1921. It was first published in Russia in the yearbook of the Scientific Council of Philosophical and Social Problems of Science and Technology in 1986: Filosofia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki: Ezhegodnik 1984–85 (Moskva: Nauka, 1986), 82–138. Here I refer to the English translation by Vadim Liapunov: M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). 26. In Morson and Emerson, Rethinking Bakhtin, 6. 27. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 64. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 68. 30. Ibid., 72. 31. Ibid., 73; emphases in the original. 32. The English text of Bakhtin’s Dialogues with Duvakin, in my translation, is in press at this time. Here I will be referencing the published Russian transcript of the conversations, which came out as M.M. Bakhtin: Besedy s V. D. Duvakinym. Ed. by S. G. Bocharov, V. Radzishevskii, V. F. Teider, V. V. Kozhinov (Moskva: Soglasie, 2002). In-text citations of this text will appear as Besedy. All translations are mine. 33. A big portion of the manuscript did survive the war despite the fact that allegedly Bakhtin used the paper to make cigarettes during the wartime paper shortage. It still awaits proper publication, translation, and critical attention. 34. Bakhtin, Sobranie, 50.

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35. Ibid., 50–51. 36. While at first glance it might appear strange that Bakhtin is linking the history of the comic form to the rituals of human burials, we should note that in other of his works immediately preceding the period of writing this essay (e.g., his dissertation on Rabelais and Iz predystorii romannogo slova [From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse]) he highlights the importance of laughter in Roman funeral practices. 37. Ibid., 51. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 51–52. 40. Ibid., 52. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 53. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 54. 46. Later in the essay, Bakhtin will discuss Mayakovsky’s ability to become one with various objects: for example, a steam engine whose scream is rendered as that of the poet himself, whose body has merged with that of the inanimate object in order to create a new living, breathing, screeching humano-mechanical entity (Sobranie 66). 47. Ibid., 54. 48. Ibid., 56. 49. As a side note, we must acknowledge that what we see here is quite interesting from a purely theoretical standpoint as well. Bakhtin’s borrowing of Marxist terminology goes beyond the superficial explanation that he simply wanted to make sure his article gets published in the socialist press. He co-opts the Marxist language for his own purposes, merges it with his own ideas, and thus, perhaps, accomplishes the ultimate goal: the carnivalization of the currently dominant ideological discourse. 50. It is unfinalizable because it does not coincide with either the individual, finalized human body, or the separate, concrete object both of which can only exist in the “small world of the house chamber” (v komnatnom mirke), where they are perceived from an “intermediate” (sredniaia) position (Sobranie 55). 51. Bakhtin, Sobranie, 56. 52. Ibid., 57. 53. Ibid., 58. 54. Ibid., emphases in the original. 55. Ibid., emphases in the original. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 56. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 57. 60. Ibid., 59. 61. Ibid., 66, emphases in original. 62. Ibid., 67. 63. See M. Bakhtin. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 170.

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64. Ibid., 68. 65. In the lecture on Mayakovsky, Bakhtin claimed that Mayakovsky’s art developed “Nietzshe’s theme of the lack of [moral] responsibility” (Sobranie 453), so this question does not have an easy or a definitive answer. 66. Sinyavsky was one of Duvakin’s favorite students, and a good friend. When, during the Sinyavsky–Daniel show trial of 1965, Duvakin was summoned to testify with the expectation that he would condemn the author’s politically suspect activities, he actually chose to defend Sinyavsky’s actions and speak positively about his art. Such dissident behavior could not be condoned, and Duvakin was immediately fired from his job. 67. They were right about that. The recordings collected dust on the shelves of Moscow State University’s library archives until the 1990s, when they were finally transcribed and serialized in the Russian journal Chelovek, before being published in a book form in 1996. For a brief overview of the reception of the interviews in Russian and the West, see Caryl Emerson, The First Hundred years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), Chapter 1, “The Russians Reclaim Bakhtin, 1975 to the Jubilee,” esp. pp. 31–35. 68. M.M. Bakhtin: Besedy s V. D. Duvakinym, 144. 69. LITO (literaturnoe otdelenie) was a literary journal issued by the Bolsheviks. 70. M.M. Bakhtin: Besedy s V. D. Duvakinym, 144–145. 71. Ibid., 146. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 148. 74. Ibid., 187. 75. Ibid., 188. 76. Ibid., 184. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 179. 79. Ibid., 181. 80. Ibid., 180.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, M. M. Art and Answerability. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Trans. by Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. by Michael Holquist. Trans. by Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. ———. “K filosofii postupka.” In Filosofia i sotsiologiia nauki i tekhniki: Ezhegodnik 1984–85. Moskva: Nauka, 1986: 82–138. ———. M.M. Bakhtin: Besedy s V. D. Duvakinym. Ed. by S. G. Bocharov, V. Rdzishevskii, V. F. Teider and V. V. Kozhinov. Moskva: Soglasie, 2002. ———. “O Mayakovskom” Dialog. Karnival. Khronotop #2 (Vitebsk, 1995), 124–134.

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———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. and Ed. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. Problemy tvorchestva-poetiki Dostoevskogo [Problems of Dostoevsky’s art/ poetics]. Ed. by O. V. Garun, Kiev: Next, 1994 [1929/63]. ———. Rabelais and His World. Trans. by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. ———. Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. T. 5. Moskva: Russkie Slovari, 1996. ———. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ———. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Eskin, Michael. “Bakhtin on Poetry.” Poetics Today, 21(2), (Summer 2000): 379–391. Hirschkop, Ken. “Dialogism as a Challenge to Literary Criticism.” In Discontinuous Discourses in Modern Russian Literature. Ed. by C. Kelly, M. Makin and D. Shepherd. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson, Eds. Rethinking Bakhtin. Extensions and Challenges. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989.

Chapter 3

Russian Translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Books A Bakhtinian Re-accentuation Victor Fet

Dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the Russian translations of both Alice books by Nina Demurova (1967).

TRANSLATION AS A DIGLOSSIC RE-ACCENTUATION Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AAIW; 1865) has been translated to almost 200 languages and dialects.1 A considerable scholarship exists devoted to the approaches toward the Carrollian translation. In 2015, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the book, a three-volume collection of bibliography and scholarly papers has been published, titled Alice in a World of Wonderlands.2 Less than a year after AAIW first appeared in print (1865), Lewis Carroll (Charles L. Dodgson) wrote to his publisher, Macmillan: “Friends here seem to think that the book is untranslatable in either French or German, the puns and songs being chief obstacles.”3 Indeed any translator of the Alice books faces inevitable difficulties in “translating the untranslatable,” first of all its numerous puns and parodies. Thus an attempted translation immediately becomes a Bakhtinian re-accentuation, an exercise (more or less extensive and skilled) in transferring the original English text and its characters to a novel soil of a different language and culture. Mikhail Bakhtin did not study translation in detail but a recent review4 indicates that he assigned an important role to polyglossia, the coexistence of different languages, maintaining that “language first becomes aware of itself through contact with other languages.”5 Using another Bakhtinian term, the translation effort is inherently diglossic (i.e., embraces two languages, the original and the target), and often gravitates toward the target language and culture, replacing or even obscuring the original text. A good example is the replacement 63

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of the protagonist’s English name Alice with Ania by Nabokov (1923),6 in a text which is nevertheless highly regarded by many as a good translation. In the case of Lewis Carroll’s playful texts, at least two conflicting approaches are possible. One (a minimal re-accentuation) is to remain as true to the original as possible. This produces an “academic” text, often at the expense of losing the author’s humor or even meaning. Another approach (a considerable reaccentuation bordering on adaptation) is more playful and includes a tactful replacement of the text’s specific elements (names, speech features, puns, parodies, etc.) by their linguistic and cultural equivalents. The latter approach was favored by Lewis Carroll himself, who in his note to the first German AAIW translation (by Antonie Zimmermann in 18697) praised the translator in the following words: “The author wishes to express his indebtedness to the translator, who has replaced certain occasional parodies of English childhood poetry—understandably unfamiliar to German children—by comparable parodies of well-known German poems. Similarly, certain untranslatable English puns have been replaced by suitable material which the book owes solely to the adroitedness of the translator” (transl. from German by W. Weaver). Using examples based on Don Quixote, a recent review of Bakhtinian re-accentuation distinguishes this particular phenomenon from rewriting, parody, and adaptation.8 In translation, the boundaries of re-accentuation are set by the translator’s desire to remain within the framework and spirit of the original text through avoiding an overly strong re-accentuation. These boundaries are often overstepped, producing a conscious parody, a free retelling, or a simplified adaptation. Indeed Carroll himself, in adapting AAIW into a Nursery Alice “for children from nil to five,” went well beyond the boundaries we would expect from a translation to another language. My goal in this chapter is to trace a number of various re-accentuation devices employed over the span of 140 years in translating Lewis Carroll to Russian. I further focus on early translations of the Alice books, published from 1879 to 1924; seven translations of AAIW and one of Through the Looking-Glass (TTLG).9,10 These texts belong to the time when domestication (“Russification”) was quite common among Russian translators, providing more opportunities for re-accentuation. I will address several issues through the facets of Bakhtin’s “optic,” which has not been previously applied to Carroll translations. Specifically, I discuss the examples of re-accentuation as a diglossic shift from English to Russian, within a highly dialogic context of the Alice books. This process very often includes a Bakhtinian heteroglossia being re-accentuated into another language. RE-ACCENTUATION DEVICES In Russian translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, we can trace several types of devices used to re-accentuate the text, its characters, and its content.

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Often addressed as “domestication” (in our case, Russification), these devices enhance the original text in various ways, with diverse goals. Translators attempt to re-accentuate (render, replace, augment) the text elements ranging from a single name or one-word pun to a complex narrative fragment. In doing so, translators create neologisms and introduce other language novelties that can be interpreted as elements of what Bakhtin called heteroglossia (raznorechie). Re-accentuated Character Names Starting with the protagonist’s name, Alice, we encounter an inevitable re-accentuation. This English name is traditionally rendered in Russian as Алиса (Alisa, pronounced “uh-lee-suh”), thus considerably differing phonetically; an exact equivalent would be Элис (“Élis”). This tradition results in many phonetic incongruences in names, such as the Russian Гамлет with a hard “g” (“Gamlet,” pronounced “gum-let”), Prince of Denmark. Interestingly, translations to other languages could enjoy phonetics much closer to the original such as Eelis (in the Yakut language; choice by Iraida Popova, in press.) Still, this re-accentuation is minor compared to some translators’ decision to change the name into a completely different, Russian one. This was done by the first AAIW translator in 1879 where Alice became Sonia (not a random choice since it indicates the action taking place in a dream, son) —a nonequivalent, heteroglossic (Russian) replacement of the English name. In two more cases, quite independently, Alice became Ania (Granström, 1908;11 Nabokov, 192312). It has been suggested that one of the reasons Nabokov changed Alice to Ania in the first place might have been that the Empress Alexandra of Russia (born Princess Alix of Hesse) was commonly known as Alice (“Alisa”), a very foreign name to a Russian ear. Nina Demurova wrote, “It may be that Nabokov wanted to avoid the name of the unfortunate woman who was murdered by the Bolsheviks in Ekaterinburg on the night of 16–17 July 1918.”13 We encounter two more girls’ names as Nabokov’s Ania (diminutive of Anna) tries to distinguish herself from both Ada and Asia. Ada is present in Carroll’s text but Asia substitutes for Carroll’s Mabel. (The name Ася “Asia” in Russian is not a homophone of “Asia” as a geographic term, which is Азия “Aziia.”) Natalia Vid14 suggested that Nabokov replaced Mabel with Asia “emphasizing Alice’s doubt about her identity by establishing sound similarity between the names”: Ania–Ada–Asia. In my view, Nabokov offers a re-accentuation employing an additional word game, namely, a sequence of a Doublets game invented by Carroll himself in 1877; Nabokov called the game Word Golf. The permutation is possible since each of these three names has three Cyrillic letters (Ада-Ася-Аня “ADA–ASIa–ANIa”).

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А missing Word Golf link in Russian can be only Адя “Adia,” a rare but possible abbreviation of also rare Adelle (known from Pushkin’s poems) or Adelaida: Ada–(Adia)–Asia–Ania.15 Adelaida is the full name of Nabokov’s eponymous heroine in Ada (1969) and of one of three Yepanchin daughters in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.16 Asia is not a full name, but rather an abbreviation of Anastasia (equally commonly abbreviated as Nastia); Asia was the family name of Anastasia Tsvetaeva, Marina’s sister. There is a “Princess Asia Ratmirova” in Lidiia Charskaia’s Volshebnaia skazka (A Magic Tale; 1915). The most famous Anastasia in 1923 was the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, murdered in 1918 along with her siblings and parents. The most famous Asia in Russian literature is Turgenev’s eponymous young heroine (Asia, 1858) who, in fact, also happens to be an Ania! Turgenev’s narrator (“N.N.”) says: “her name was properly Anna; but Gagin [her brother–V.F.] always called her Asia, and I shall allow myself that privilege.” Asia is a very unusual diminutive of Anna. It was also used, clearly under the influence of the novel, by Anna Alekseevna (Asia) Turgeneva (1890–1966). She was a second cousin twice removed of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev and the first wife of the poet Andrei Bely. Ania says: “Ia naverno znaiu, chto ia ne Ada . . . ia ubezhdena takzhe, chto ia i ne Asia, potomu chto ia znaiu vsiakuiu vsiachinu, ona-zhe–akh, ona tak malo znaet!” (I’m sure I’m not Ada . . . and I’m sure I can’t be Asia, for I know all sorts of things but she–oh, she knows so little!). Indeed, if only Asias and Adas of Turgenev’s (i.e., Carroll’s) time knew what would their granddaugher Ania have to go through before she lands in Berlin in 1923! Re-accentuated, Heteroglossic Character’s Name The name Shaltay-Boltay was first applied to Humpty-Dumpty by Samuil Marshak in 1923 in his Russian translation of the Humpty-Dumpty nursery rhyme; Shaltay-Boltay is one of the main characters in TTLG, and Marshak’s translation was adopted by Nina Demurova in both versions of her translation of this book (1967, 1978).17,18 It is an enigmatic name, which is only vaguely recognizable as belonging to the Russian language: boltay (a form of boltat’) means both “to babble” and “to shake.” It can reflect the egg nature of the character since a derived word boltun’а means “an omelette.” Shaltay has no Russian translation. The expression shaltay-boltay (or shaltay-baltay) exists in Russian dictionaries; it first appeared in literature in 1856, originally meaning a special artificial slang (of the Kuban Cossacks) used to communicate with the Adygs (non-Russian natives of the North Caucasus).19 In the North Caucasus, the expression came to mean “foreign speech.” In Siberian and Orenburg dialects, according to the Dahl dictionary, it means “babble, empty

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talk.” It was used in this meaning in some Russian classical literature before 1923, for example, in the stories by Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky (in the latter, it is used by a non-Russian Muslim ethnic characters). In Velimir Khlebnikov’s long poem Tiran bez T (1922), the expression shaltay-boltay is used by a Persian character also meaning “empty talk.” This type of paired, rhymed words was specifically noted by the famous linguist Roman Jacobson in the commentary to his 1921 article about Khlebnikov; Jacobson listed shaltay-baltay among others.20 Therefore, the name Shaltay-Boltay, which includes a potent rhyme and reduplication common to the Turkisms in Russian, presents a heteroglossic element that assists in re-accentuation. The choice of the name was possibly affected by a Turkic-influenced Russian dialect of the North Caucasus (Ekaterinodar, Kuban), where Marshak lived in the early 1920s. Re-accentuated Toponyms Vladimir Ashkenazi will be remembered by a single Russian word that he coined. Zazerkal’e, translatable as Transmirroria, assigns a potent toponym to Carroll’s chess-world country behind the looking glass. Ashkenazi published the first Russian translation of TTLG under the pen name “V. Azov” in 1924;21 he emigrated to Paris in 1926. The word is modeled on the traditional Russian toponyms, which imply that the geographic area in question is located “on the other side.” The boundary could be a mountain range (Zakavkaz’e; Transcaucasia), a river (Zavolzh’e; Trans-Volga), or a lake (Zabaikal’e; Transbaikalia), all well-known and widely used toponyms. Azov’s great neologism is firmly rooted today in Russian. Both Anna Akhmatova and Ariadna Efron (daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva) compared their life in the USSR with the world of Zazerkal’e. Since Carroll does not have a name for his imaginary country in the book, Zazerkal’e is a result of more than a translation: it is a re-accentuation. Note that Wonderland of the first Alice book (AAIW) is also not a self-name of its underground kingdom. The word appears in the book only after Alice wakes up, and is never used within her dream. Indeed the first version Carroll wrote (its handwritten manuscript exists, illustrated by the author) was called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. Wonderland is usually translated into Russian as strana chudes, “a Land of Wonders” or “a Land of Miracles.” There is, however, a subtle re-accentuating difference between a “Wonderland” and a “Land of Wonders,” not immediately obvious to the Anglophone readers. Russian “chudo” is a synonym of English “wonder” or “marvel” but has a strong positive and religious connotation of a “miracle”; “chudotvorets” (Wonderworker) is the epithet of St. Nicholas, the most revered Russian Orthodox saint. A similar situation exists in Romance languages where

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“wonderland” of the title is traditionally translated as Pays de Merveilles, Paese della Meraviglie, and the like, derived from the Latinate root for “miracle.” I commented elsewhere on this etymology.22 Re-accentuated Character Surok (marmot, a masculine noun) was first introduced in 1879, in an anonymous AAIW translation, probably by Ekaterina Boratynskaya.23 Marmots (or woodchucks, genus Marmota) are much larger in size (50–70 cm) than dormice. They are found in southern European Russian grasslands. There is a common saying spit, kak surok (sleeps like a marmot), which perfectly fits the Mad Tea-Party’s sleepy animal. A marmot also replaced the Dormouse in two other early Russian translations (Granström, 1908; Rozhdestvenskaya, 1908–1909)24 as well as in the first German translation (by Zimmermann, 1869, as Das Murmelthier),25 which was supervised by Carroll himself. An additional cultural reference familiar to a Russian child of the 1880–1900s is the Beethoven’s famous song Marmotte (1805), based on Goethe’s lyrics (1774), “Ich komme schon durch manches Land avecque la marmotte”) and highly popular in Russia. The song was commonly played by wandering organ players or “savoyards.” It was, and remains, a standard piece in children’s music lessons. Re-accentuated, Heteroglossic Speech Pattern Heteroglossia was originally defined by Bakhtin as presence of elements of another language or dialect creating linguistic diversity. A classic example given by Bakhtin26 was of a Russian peasant praying to God in Church Slavonic rather than in modern Russian, which he speaks to his family. In the first Russian translation of AAIW (1879),27 the Frog Lackey, instead of saying simply “I will sit here . . . for days and days,” says “i nyne i zavtra i vo veki vekov” (today, and tomorrow, and unto ages and ages). This is a slightly modified Orthodox Christian formula “i nyne i prisno i vo veki vekov” (today, and forever and unto ages and ages; Lat. “et nunc et semper et saecula saeculorum”; Gr. “εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων”). The formula if found in many prayers, the shortest being a 16-word Trisviatoe (Holy Trinity Prayer): “Slava Otsu i Synu i Sviatomu Dukhu i nyne i prisno i vo veki vekov. Aminʹ” (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit today, and forever, and for ages and ages). Trisviatoe must be read in the beginning of every service, at home or at church. It is the most common Orthodox prayer, which corresponds to Gloria Patri (the Glory Be) also known as the Lesser Doxology. (In the Anglican version, the words “saecula saeculorum” were translated in the sixteenth century as “world without end.”)

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Sonia (as Alice is called in this version) refers to the Frog-Footman on the same page as to a low-class servant—whose education would be limited to a Sunday school. It was common in the 1870s’ Russia to hear low-class people’s speech peppered by liturgical formulae. The translator intentionally makes the Frog-Footman to sound even more pompous than in Carroll’s text, which in Russian is easily achieved by using a heteroglossic Church Slavonic formula. The Footman is also illiterate: the character incorrectly uses nineteenthcentury Russian zavtra (tomorrow) instead of Church Slavonic prisno (forever). This incomplete heteroglossia was easily detected by a child reading the text in 1879, since this child would have been taught how to say the Holy Trinity Prayer correctly. The Bible translation from the Church Slavonic into modern Russian was a hot issue in 1879: the first full translation was not published until 1876. Re-accentuated Culture-Specific Narrative Many playful translators choose to re-accentuate the “dry” history lecture by Carroll’s Mouse supplanting Carroll’s history of William the Conqueror and his Normans. In 1923, Vladimir Nabokov (Sirin) in his “gleeful raid on the toys and tags of a Russian nursery,”28 carefully led his Ania/Alice and her readers across abysses separating tongues and cultures. In the “dry lecture” on medieval Russian history, Nabokov’s Mouse explains how “after Monomakh’s death, Kiev passed not to his brothers but to his sons, and became therefore a family property of Monomakhovichs. . . . While they lived in friendship, their power in Kiev was strong; but when their relationships worsened . . . , the Ol’govich princes rose against them, and took Kiev by force more than once . . . But the Monomakhovichs, in their turn . . . .” This text was taken by Nabokov verbatim from a famous textbook of Russian history (St. Petersburg, 1909–1910) by Sergei Platonov (1860–1933).29 S. F. Platonov, a prominent historian, in 1930 was arrested and accused of plotting with Germany for “restoration to the Russian throne of his former student, Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich.” Platonov was exiled to Samara and he died there. For those children who read Nabokov’s translation in 1923, the textbook words about Kievan struggles were not at all dry; they bore a fresh echo of Russian civil war, at the same time pictured by Mikhail Bulgakov in his White Guard (1924). This prominent re-accentuating approach has been central for many other Russian AAIW translators (see also below). Re-accentuated Gender Surprisingly, a character’s gender is often an issue in Russian translations where re-accentuation is forced by the Russian grammar. For many

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languages, including the original English, this problem does not exist. Elifёrova30 discussed in detail gender-specific changes in Russian translations of the Alice books. She noticed that a number of characters that are clearly male in gender (e.g., the Mouse, the Caterpillar, the Dormouse, the Mock Turtle) appear in Russian translations as females due to grammar: in Russian, just like in German or Latin, all nouns have grammatical gender. An animal character in folklore can be either male or female; however, there is a gender assignment bias due to vocabulary limitations. For many animals, Russian has words designating male/female (cat: kot/koshka; goat: koziol/koza, etc.) At the same time, Russian lacks specific words for a male mouse or a turtle; for this reason, a male Mouse or Dormouse will be impossible to retain as such. Some translators chose to change the gender while others changed the animal itself. In the case of the Dormouse, several Russian translations have a masculine Surok (Marmot; see above) which replaced the Dormouse (which must be feminine to follow the grammatical gender). In Carroll’s AAIW, the Caterpillar is clearly a male (smoking hookah and addressed by Alice as Sir). However, in many Russian translations, the Caterpillar is an incongruous female—addressed as a Madam. (Alas, I myself grew under the impression that a Victorian female smoking hookah is a part of Carrollian nonsense.) The Russian Gusentisa is clearly a feminine noun (just as is a butterfly, babochka, that it becomes). An ungainly alternative for some translators was to render the Caterpillar as a Worm (Cherviak), a masculine noun. However, in modern Russian, “a worm” usually means an earthworm or a parasitic worm, and only a very zoologically ignorant child would call a caterpillar by this ugly word. More trouble was caused by re-accentuating Mock Turtle, clearly a male character in AAIW. The Russian cherepakha (turtle or tortoise) is feminine and does not have a male-specific word. In many translations, the gender is changed. This assignment considerably changes the tone and setting of Wonderland scenes, from underwater school (clearly a Victorian boys’ school with all its pranks) to Lobster Cadrille dancing. Since Gryphon remains a male, his dancing with Mock Turtle in Russian version becomes a male-andfemale dance, which clearly was not intended by Carroll. Re-accentuated Phonetic Puns A phonetic pun is arguably the least translatable linguistic element, thus requiring a complete re-accentuation (domestication, replacement). Demurova discussed in detail her approaches to the Russian translation of the AAIW and TTLG.31, 32 Another recent analysis of Russian translation of the AAIW’s Mouse’s Tale (Tail) has been recently published by Per Ambrosiani.33

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When in Chapter VI of AAIW Alice tells the Cheshire Cat that the Duchess’s baby turned into a pig, the Cat asks “Did you say pig or fig?” Here, of course, “fig” is just a nonsensical word rhyming with “pig.” It is a sheer game element, which, however, has to follow very strict rules of re-accentuation. We understand that Carroll would have wanted us to find a word in another language that rhymes with, and sounds very similar to, the word designating a pig. It is not a given, however, that the needed word would even exist in the target language. Most Russian translators had to use word porosёnok (a piglet; a Russian svin’a, a pig, is an adult animal), and there are not many words that can be confused with its required genitive form, porosёnka. Demurova has gusёnka (a gosling), which is not a very good phonetic match. One of the most recent translators, Dmitri Yermolovich,34 found a reasonable krysёnka (a baby rat). The best choice probably was found by Boris Zakhoder,35 karasёnka (a baby crucian carp), although this playful word is made up; the standard word is karas’ (a crucian carp). Other languages might present an even better match. In advising on translations of AAIW to minority Turkic languages of Russia, I came across good choices that were not possible in Russian. For the Shor language, the translator Liubov’ Arbacakova chose a pair șoșqanaq/șoșqançaq (a piglet/a little worm).36 An increase in word’s length to three syllables, in my opinion, improves the single-letter phonetic pun strictly within the rules set by Lewis Carroll himself. A phonetic closeness of suska bala (a piglet) and siskan bala (a baby mouse) in the Bashkir language was a natural choice by the translator Güzӓl Sitdykova.37 In all the mentioned cases, the translators were able to re-accentuate Carroll’s completely nonsensical choice (a fig) into an edible object (a rat, a mouse, or a fish) that attracts the Cheshire Cat’s natural interest. The 1879 Russian translator cleverly noted that the word prisiazhnye (the jurors) invites a wonderful phonetic pun (a Carrollian one-letter difference!) with pristiazhnye (side horses), that is, the two horses on the sides of the middle horse of a traditional Russian troika. Sonia confuses unfamiliar prisiazhnye with pristiazhnye, and then repeats the incorrect word s samodovolʹstviem (with a feeling of self-importance) several times, thinking that few girls of her age would know the meaning of this word. The translator’s clear irony is that a trial by jury was then a great novelty in Russia: it was introduced by Alexander II in 1864, but it would survive for only a halfcentury. The expression gospoda prisiazhnye zasedateli (gentlemen of the jury) was mocked as already outdated by a trickster hero, Ostap Bender in Il’f and Petrov’s Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (Twelve Chairs; 1928)—ten years after the Bolsheviks did away with the fair judiciary system. For decades, trial by jury was so alien to Soviet language that Boris Zakhoder, in his accomplished AAIW retelling (1971–1972), independently tried the same pun in reverse; his

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clever Alice knows the old-fashioned term for the jurors. Zakhoder tells his readers: “Do not confuse jurors (prisiazhnye) with side horses (pristiazhnye), and you will have as much reason to be proud of yourself as Alice. Even more: both are found these days much less often than a hundred years ago.” This Aesopian humor, unnoticed by censors, is very bitter: It was during that time (the 1970s) that Soviet judges handed down sentences to political dissidents.38 Another interesting, also truly Carrollian, re-accentuation was achieved by the first 1879 AAIW translator who employed a pun involving the Russian words khvorostʹ (illness) and khvorost (firewood). This added pun applies to three treacle-well girls from the Dormouse’s tale (Chapter VII): khvorostʹ . . . khvorostom vybivali (the illness . . . was beaten out with firewood). The pun, as perceived today, is based on a one-letter (the terminal soft sign, ь) and one-sound difference between khvorostʹ and khvorost. However, before the 1918 orthographic reform, the latter word was written with a terminal hard sign (ъ), and thus for Sonia’s readers, the visual difference between the two words was, in fact, even less than one letter (ъ versus ь). The inherent distinction between these two “accessory letters” (neither soft nor hard sign possess their own sound) is well known to any Russian child as he/she learns to read. Re-accentuated Units, Numbers, and Illustrations The modern Russian tradition in translating nonmetric English units of distance, length, weight, and the like requires retaining miles, feet, and pounds— albeit utterly unfamiliar to a Russian reader who was raised since 1918 in a metric milieu of kilometers, meters, and kilograms. Introducing metric units into the Alice books today seems very incongruous but some translators chose to do so for clarity, thus a three-inch Caterpillar is re-accentuated into an eight-centimeter one. The old Russian translators had another choice—to render English units to old nonmetric Russian ones that are obsolete today—versts for miles, arshins for feet, funts for pounds, and so on. In choosing these units, a few errors have been made, likely unintended. For example, the 1879 translator makes her Sonia to estimate the distance to the center of the Earth as 4,000 versts. This is a clear error automatically resulting in an unintended re-accentuation. A verst (Russ. versta) equaled 1.0668 km (0.6629 miles); thus 4,000 versts is only 2,651 miles. The radius of Earth being 3,959 miles, Carroll’s Alice is, in fact, rather precise when she says 4,000 miles. However, Sonia is off by 33 percent since the translator did not adjust the number to fit real geography. Not only Carroll’s text, but even its classical illustrations by John Tenniel—which Carroll carefully supervised—have been occasionally, and intentionally, re-accentuated in translation. His Hatter has a tag on his tall hat, which reads “In this style 10/6” (10 shillings 6 pence). In the 1879 Russian

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translation, the price was Russified as “50 kopecks.” It appears to be the cleverly calculated price of a toy hat, while Tenniel’s iconic “10/6” in 1865 would be a real hat price, with a buying power of about US$60 today. The book itself was expensive, at 75 kopecks (0.75 ruble); it was correctly called “greatly overpriced” by one of the irate reviewers. An average worker’s monthly salary at that time was 20 to 30 rubles; a pound of meat was 20 kopecks. Of course, illustrating the Carrollian texts—and their translations—forms an enormously diverse and extensive re-accentuation tradition in itself. When the first Russian 1879 AAIW translation was reprinted in 2017 with my new commentary,39 we asked Byron W. Sewell to modify some of the classical Tenniel pictures to fit the text. In this translation, Sonia (Alice) does not hold her flamingo when she is approached by the Duchess; instead, she left her crane (which replaces flamingo) behind but kept the hedgehog, carrying it in her headscarf. Accordingly, the Duchess is afraid of the prickly hedgehog, not of a biting flamingo. Hundreds of great illustrators, from John Tenniel to Byron W. Sewell, have labored for 150 years on re-accentuation of Lewis Carroll—discussion of which is well beyond the scope of this chapter. HOW TO RE-ACCENTUATE PARODY POETRY: FROM PUSHKIN TO “A HOUSE THAT ZHUK BUILT” Nowhere is Lewis Carroll’s playful writing more visible than in his trademark parody poetry—easily recognizable nonsense versions of didactic, boring, or just very familiar texts every Victorian child (and adult) knew. Alas, today even in England not all of those are easily recognizable: only “Twinkle, twinkle little bat” probably needs no explanation. One of the principles of re-accentuation favored by Lewis Carroll himself was to “replace certain occasional parodies of English childhood poetry” by comparable parodies of well-known target-language poems. A considerable scholarship exists on this subject. Alexander Pushkin, whose poems Russian children always learned in school, served as a perfect target for parodies. Already the 1879 AAIW translator forces her Sonia to recite “Kiska khitraiia ne znaet . . . ”: A sly pussycat has not Any care, any labour, It is not busy eating A long-tailed critter.

This first parody poem that replaces Carroll’s “How Doth the Little Crocodile” refers to a standard text learned by all Russian schoolchildren, the lines

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from Pushkin’s long poem Тsygany (The Gypsies, 1824): “Ptichka Bozhiia ne znaet . . . ” God’s little bird has not Any care, any labour, It is not busy building A long-lasting nest

The parody is rendered in a childish verse but with a considerable skill in poetic parody. The translator re-accentuates the phonetics of the original Pushkin’s lines with a truly Carrollian precision (dolgovechnago gnezda [a long-lasting nest] / dlinnokhvostago zverka [a long-tailed critter]). The same popular lines by Pushkin was used by several other AAIW translators:40 Granström in 1908; Allegro (Poliksena Solovyova) in 1909; V. Sirin (Vladimir Nabokov) in 1923; and D’Aktil’ (pen name of Anatoly Frenkel’), also in 1923. The replacement of another classical Carrollian poem, “’Tis the Voice of the Lobster,” in the 1879 translation is rich in school references as well as freewheeling surrealism: Once, gathered into a circle, Roosters were telling fortunes, They placed over the gate A hood they took off their foot

The readers would immediately recognize this nonsensical quatrain as a parody of the first four lines of Vasilii Zhukovsky’s famous romantic ballad Svetlana (1813): Once, on the twelfth day of Christmas Maidens were telling fortunes, They threw over the gate A shoe they took off their foot

This is a description of maidens’ mid-winter ritual of sviatochnye gadaniia, divination for a bridegroom on the kreshchenskii vecherok, the Epiphany Eve (Sviatki is a twelve-day-period between Christmas and the Epiphany). Zhukovsky’s ballad was immensely popular and became a folk song; it also readdressed a reader to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. There, “Svetlana” provides an epigraph to Canto 5 (“Never know these frightful dreams, You, O my Svetlana!”), which features the most famous maiden’s nightmare in Russian literature (son Tatiany; Tatiana’s Dream). A rooster-headed creature is one of the monsters in this Boschian dream (5: XVI: “She sees . . . at a table monsters are seated in a circle: one horned and dog-faced; another with a rooster’s

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head”; transl. by V. Nabokov). In Sonia, Pat also becomes a rooster named Pet’ka. Generally, a rooster is an important Russian folkloric figure related to solar magic; its triple crowing repels the evil forces. Thus, the translator connects Sonia’s peculiar dream to Tatyana’s nightmare. Nabokov, in his commentary to Eugene Onegin, called Zhukovsky’s ballad a “masterpiece” and suggested that it could have been a source of Pushkin’s highly original “Onegin stanza.” The translator of 1879—most likely Ekaterina Boratynskaia, the first teacher of Boris Pasternak41—thus re-accentuates Carroll’s parody through Zhukovsky and Pushkin. Allegro (translation of 1909)42 replaced Father William with an original parody of Pushkin’s long poem Poltava (1828), with Peter the Great as a large bolete mushroom, or Boletus edulis. The imagery in its turn is folkloric, and based on a Russian fairytale “War of the Mushrooms.” Poliksena Solovyova (1867–1924) who published under the pen name Allegro was not a professional translator, but an accomplished poet. She ran a wonderful biweekly children’s journal, Tropinka (A Little Path; 1906–1912), read mostly by the children of St. Petersburg’s literary and artistic elite. The journal, where Allegro’s translation was serialized in 1909, became an “unofficial organ” of the Symbolist movement. It published such great Silver Age figures as Alexander Blok, Konstantin Balmont, Alexei Remizov, Zinaida Gippius, and Dmitri Merezhkovsky. Allegro’s AAIW translation was accompanied by a large article by the prominent critic Zinaida Vengerova, who was the first in Russia to write about Lewis Carroll and his work. Another parody by Allegro was based on a Russian song “Vechernii zvon” (The Evening Bell), which was the Mock Turtle’s famous song, rendered as “Vechernii sup” (Soup of the Evening), itself a parody of “Star of The Evening.” Interestingly, this highly popular Russian song (lyrics by Ivan Kozlov, 1828, music by Alexander Alyabyev) was itself originally adopted from English. It was based on Thomas Moore’s poem “Those Evening Bells” (1818), subtitled “Air: The Bells of St. Petersburg.” Here, we observe a culturally complex diglossic re-accentuation: in her Russian replacement of an English parody, Allegro parodied a Russian song which was itself adopted from English. Decades later, the same template song (which remains popular!) was parodied by Dina Orlovskaya for the first AAIW version published by Demurova (1967).43 Orlovskaya invented a whimsical “Vechernii slon” (The Evening Elephant). For another replacement, she wrote a parody of Samuil Marshak’s Russian translation of the English nursery rhyme “A house that Jack built” (Dom, kotoryi postroil Dzhek), which starts with a phonetically very close line, “Dom, kotoryi postroil zhuk” (A house that a beetle built). However, both of these nice parodies were not used in the “academic” Demurova’s AAIW translation of 1978, which adopted a different approach.44 Olga

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Sedakova, another brilliant poet, translated Carroll’s parodies closely to the English text—and also translated the parodied English poems, which were supplied in the commentary. In such a case, re-accentuation becomes minimal, and is limited to language but not to content. An ingenious and entertaining replacement for the Mouse’s lecture discussed above, using a piece of parody poetry, was found by Matilda Granström (translation of 1908).45 Her Mouse recites the beginning (ten lines) of Vasily Zhukovsky’s poem “Voina myshei i liagushek” (The War of Mice and Frogs; 1831). This is a Russian version of the famed Batrachomyomachia (Greek, Βατραχομυομαχία), or “The Battle of Frogs and Mice,” an ancient mock epic (304 lines), and a parody of the Iliad. It is thought to be of Hellenistic origin (ca. AD 300). Batrachomyomachia was first translated in full to Russian in 1772; Zhukovsky’s translation remained unfinished. The Iliad was just translated to Russian by Nikolai Gnedich in 1826; note that Zhukovsky himself later translated The Odyssey (1849). Employing this ancient parody, well known to the Russian schoolchildren of the 1900s, is quite fitting for the Carroll’s text, in which both mice and frogs are featured prominently. RE-ACCENTUATION AS AN EVOLVING CULTURAL DIALOGUE The very first paragraph of AAIW says: “What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” A conversation—a dialogue—is central to any Bakhtinian study, and the two Alice books are highly dialogic texts with an enormous influence. The dialogue extends to the audience. For the past 150 years, English culture and language have lived and evolved in a constant dialogue with Carroll’s fairytales. The lore has it that the Bible, Shakespeare, and Lewis Carroll are among the most quoted English sources (although I doubt anyone had made, or can make, a comparative tally). In a translation, as a diglossic effort in re-accentuation develops, additional layers of the dialogue emerge. The Carrollian characters rendered in Russian often change names and identity. Re-accentuation of the same literary text, theoretically, never stops: its future cultural interpretations are endless, including those beyond literature (illustrations, theater, film, music, pop culture, etc.)—immediately obvious in the case of the Alice books. There is no chance that these texts will be forgotten soon. Since we interpret a translation to another language as a sort of Bakhtinian diglossic re-accentuation, the very possibility of multiple translations into the same language provides an opportunity to compare diglossic re-accentuations by different translators over a large time span. While the English original is “frozen” and does not change, the target language of the translation evolves.

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A translator usually does not work from a clean slate. He or she would likely be well aware of the versions of their predecessors, and may intentionally make different choices while searching for a better or an innovative re-accentuation. They can also intentionally borrow the choices of the former translators to maintain continuity or express their respect. Thus a complex dialogue also exists between the translators of different epochs, often visible only to a very devoted reader. As a reader—who usually has some English to appreciate the original—plunges him- or herself into the intricacy of translation, and he or she also becomes a part of the ongoing dialogue, an essential part of diglossic re-accentuation. Every translator works within the limits the language of his or her own epoch even when trying to stay within neutral vocabulary and not to “modernize” the language of the translation unnecessarily. The “classical” Russian translations, from Sonia to Nina Demurova’s, span almost 90 years (1879 to 1967); more appeared within the last decades. Over this time, the Russian language has undergone dramatic changes, and it is instructive to trace many changes that were expressed—not always consciously—during the re-accentuations of the Carrollian text. Parker46 noted that the AAIW characters in some Soviet-time translations sound vulgar. I can partially agree; my special study of almost forty Russian translations of The Hunting of the Snark, published elsewhere,47 confirms the unfortunate trend. In many of these, boundaries of re-accentuation are overstepped toward a parody, and in a number of cases, this parody has nothing to do with the original, but rather reflects translators’ desire to paint over Lewis Carroll’s canvas, presenting their own profane slang as “an eccentric aura” of the famous English author. I would rather call it a travesty; alas, a scholarly study must account for these attempts, and one might even find a weird interest in this kind of re-accentuation. A translator does not have to be a scholar, but if he or she is, the readers and the culture further benefit from learning about their experiences in reaccentuation. Concluding on a personal note, it was not just the translation itself, but the scholarly commentary by Nina Demurova48 about her 1960s’ work on the Alice texts that triggered my own interest to Lewis Carroll in the early 1970s and resulted in a bold youthful attempt to translate The Hunting of the Snark49—a surrealist poem that had waited for 100 years to be reaccentuated in Russian. Many of the re-accentuation devices discussed above, possibly unthinkable in translations of “serious” prose or poetry, work well for the rules of the game set by Lewis Carroll himself. Therefore, we observe complex Bakhtinian dialogues between the author, the translator(s), and the readers, spanning over 140 years—as the target language and its culture evolves.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Above all, I am grateful to Nina Demurova who has brought Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books to my generation in Russia in her brilliant re-accentuations, enhanced by charming poetry of Samuil Marshak, Dina Orlovskaya, and Olga Sedakova. I thank everyone who encouraged my studies over the years and supported this work, including but not limited to: Nina Alovert, Mark Burstein, Sergei Camyshan, Michael Everson, Nikolai Formozov, August and Clare Imholtz, Sergei Krupodёr, Sergei Kurii, Jon Lindseth, Margarita Marinova, Alexander Marshak, Yuri Marusik, Kirill Mikhailov, Irina Mishina, Chris Morgan, Andrei Moskotelʹnikov, Byron and Victoria Sewell, Alexei Speransky, and Vladimir Uspensky. I thank many new Carrollian translators to rare languages for the fascinating experience in advisory editing, especially Liubovʹ Arbacakova (Shor language), Maria Çertykova (Khakas), Aida Egemberdieva (Kyrgyz), Iraida Popova (Yakut), Viktor Shapoval (North Russian Romani), Güzӓl Sitdykova (Bashkir), and Evgenii Tsypanov (Komi-Zyrian). Slav Gratchev kindly invited me to contribute to this volume and advised on the Bakhtinian issues. I am grateful to Galina Fet for her support.

NOTES 1. Selwyn Goodacre, “The Real Flood of Translations”, In Аlice in a World of Wonderlands, Vol. 1, Essays, ed. Jon Lindseth and Allan Tannenbaum (New Castle: Оak Knoll Press, 2015), 99. 2. Jon Lindseth and Allan Tannenbaum (eds.), Аlice in a World of Wonderlands, Vols. 1–3 (New Castle: Оak Knoll Press, 2015). 3. Warren Weaver, Alice in Many Tongues. The Translations of Alice in Wonderland (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 52. 4. Karine Zbinden, “The Bakhtin Circle and Translation,” The Yearbook of English Studies 36(2006), no. 1: 157–167. 5. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 61–65. 6. [Lewis Carroll] L[‘iuis] Karrol’, “Ania v stranie chudes’’ [Ania in Wonderland]. Translated by V. Sirin [V. V. Nabokov]. (Berlin: Gamaiun, 1923) (in Russian). 7. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Abenteuer im Wunderland. Uebersetzt von Antonie Zimmermann (London: Macmillan, 1869), iv (in German). 8. Tatevik Gyulamiryan, “On Re-accentuation, Adaptation, and Imitation of Don Quixote,” in Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero, ed. Slav N. Gratchev & Howard Mancing (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017), 11–22.

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9. Nina M. Demurova, “Alice speaks Russian: The Russian translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass,” Harvard Library Bulletin 5 (1994–1995), no. 4, 11–29. 10. August A. Imholtz, Jr. and Clare Imholtz, “Alice goes to Russia,” Slavic & East European Information Resources 15(2014), 150–160. 11. [Lewis Carroll] L[‘iuis] Karrol’, “Prikliucheniia Ani v mire chudes” [Ania’s Adventures in a World of Wonders]. Translated by M.D. Granström (St. Petersburg: É. A. Granström, 1908) (in Russian), 29. 12. Carroll, “Ania v stranie chudes”. 13. Demurova, “Alice speaks Russian”, 15. 14. Natalia Vid, “Domesticated Translation: The Case of Nabokov’s Translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Nabokov Online Journal 2(2008). 15. Victor Fet, “Beheading First: On Nabokov’s Translation of Lewis Carroll,” The Nabokovian 63(2009), 62–63. 16. Victor Fet and Slav N. Gratchev, “Another Adelaida: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in Nabokov’s Ada,” The Nabokovian 74(2015), 6. 17. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Kérroll, Prikliucheniia Alisy v strane chudes. Alisa v Zazerkal’e [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by N. M. Demurova. (Sofia: Izdatel’stvo literatury na inostrannykh iazykakh, 1967) (in Russian). 18. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Kérroll, Prikliucheniia Alisy v Strane chudes. Skvoz’ zerkalo i chto tam uvidela Alisa, ili Alisa v Zazerkal’e [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There]. Translated by N. M. Demurova. (Moscow: Nauka, 1978) (in Russian). 19. V. P. Chalov, “Iz nabliudenii nad nekotorymi sibirsko-kubanskimi frazeologicheskimi sootvetstviiami,” in Issledovanie leksiki i frazeologii govorov Sibiri, ed. L. G. Samotik et al., (Krasnoyarsk: Krasnoyarskii pedagogicheskii institut, 1984), 81–82. 20. Roman Jakobson, Raboty po poetike (Moscow; Progress, 1987), 315. 21. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Karroll, Alisa v Zazerkal’i [Alice in Transmirroria]. Translated by V. Azov [V. A. Ashkenazi]. Poems translated by T. L. ShchepkinaKupernik. (Moscow-Petrograd: L.D. Frenkel’, 1924) (in Russian). 22. Victor Fet, Alice and the Time Machine (Portlaoise: Evertype, 2016), 33–35. 23. Victor Fet, “Around Sonja: On the First Russian Translation,” Knight Letter II, 37, no. 97 (Fall 2016), 25–34. 24. Victor Fet, “Three Early Russian Translations,” Knight Letter II, 28, no. 98 (Spring 2017), 16. 25. Carroll, Alice’s Abenteuer, 88. 26. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 295. 27. [Lewis Carroll] Sonia v tsarstvie diva [Sonia in a Kingdom of Wonder]. [Translated by E. I. Boratynskaya (?)]. (Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1879) (in Russian). 28. Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 197. 29. Fet, “Beheading first,” 54. 30. Maria Elifёrova, “Bagira skazala . . . ,” Voprosy literatury 2 (2009), 265–270.

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31. Nina M. Demurova, “Golos i skripka (k perevodu ekstsentrichnykh skazok Lʹiuisa Kérrolla) [The voice and the violin (on the translation of eccentric fairytales of Lewis Carroll)]”, in Masterstvo perevoda [Mastery of Translation] (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970), vol. 7, 150–185 (in Russian). 32. Demurova, “Alice speaks Russian,” 27–29. 33. Per Ambrosiani, “A Russian Tail? On the Translation of Puns in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” in Humour in Language. Linguistic and Textual Aspects, ed. Anders Bengtsson and Victorine Hancock (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 2010), 30. 34. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Kérroll, Prikliucheniia Alisy v Strane chudes [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by D. Yermolovich. 2nd Ed. (Moscow: Auditoriia, 2016) (in Russian). 35. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Kérroll, Prikliucheniia Alisy v Strane chudes. [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by B.V. Zakhoder (Moscow: Detskaiia literatura, 1974) (in Russian). 36. Liubov’ Arbaçakova and Victor Fet, “The First Translation of Wonderland into Shor,” Knight Letter, II, 28, 98(Spring 2017), 21. 37. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Kérroll, Ӓlisӓneñ Sӓyerstandağı majaraları [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by Güzӓl Sitdykova (Portlaoise: Evertype, 2017) (in Bashkir). 38. Fet, “Beheading First,” 59. 39. [Lewis Carroll] Sonia v tsarstve diva [Sonia in a Kingdom of Wonder]. [Translated by E. I. Boratynskaya (?).] The first Russian translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. (Portlaoise: Evertype, 2017) (in Russian). 40. Fan Parker, Lewis Carroll in Russia: Translations of Аlice in Wonderland, 1879–1979 (New York: Russian House Ltd, 1994), 11. 41. Victor Fet, “Around Sonja: On the First Russian Translation,” Knight Letter II, 37, no. 97 (Fall 2016), 26. 42. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Kérroll’, “Prikliucheniia Alisy v stranie chudes” [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by Allegro [P. S. Solovyova]. (St. Petersburg: Tropinka, 1910) (in Russian). 43. Carroll, Prikliucheniia Alisy v strane chudes, 1967. 44. Carroll, Prikliucheniia Alisy v strane chudes, 1978. 45. [Lewis Carroll] L[‘iuis] Karrol’, “Prikliucheniia Ani v mire chudes”. [Ania’s Adventures in a World of Wonders]. Translated by M.D. Granström. (St. Petersburg: É. A. Granström, 1908), 29 (in Russian). 46. Parker, Lewis Carroll in Russia, 35. 47. Victor Fet, “An annotated bibliography of Russian translations,” in Okhota na Snarka [The Hunting of the Snark], ed. Lewis Carroll. Translated by Victor Fet (Portlaoise: Evertype, 2016), xi–xxxiii. 48. Demurova, “Golos i skripka,” 150–185. 49. [Lewis Carroll] L’iuis Kérroll, Okhota na Snarka v Vos’mi Napastiakh. The Hunting of the Snark in Russian. Translated by Victor Fet (Portlaoise: Evertype, 2016) (in Russian).

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WORKS CITED Ambrosiani, Per. “A Russian Tail? On the Translation of Puns in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” In Humour in Language. Linguistic and Textual Aspects, Edited by Anders Bengtsson and Victorine Hancock, 30–63. Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 2010. Arbaçakova, Liubov’ and Victor Fet. “The First Translation of Wonderland into Shor.” Knight Letter, II, 28, 98(Spring 2017): 20–22. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holmquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson & Michael Holmquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Abenteuer im Wunderland. Uebersetzt aus dem Englischen von Antonie Zimmermann. London: Macmillan, 1869 (in German). ———. Sonia v tsarstvie diva [Sonia in a Kingdom of Wonder]. [Translated by E. I. Boratynskaya (?)]. Moscow: Tipografiia A. I. Mamontova, 1879 (in Russian). ———. Karrol’, L[‘iuis]. “Prikliucheniia Ani v mire chudes.” [Ania’s Adventures in a World of Wonders]. Translated by M.D. Granström. Illustrations by Ch, Robinson. St. Petersburg: É. A. Granström, 1908 (in Russian). ———. Kérroll’, L’iuis. “Prikliucheniia Alisy v stranie chudes.” [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by Allegro [P. S. Solovyova]. Illustrations by John Tenniel. St. Petersburg: Tropinka, 1910 (in Russian; first serialized in 1909 in the journal Tropinka). ———. Karrol’, L[‘iuis]. “Ania v stranie chudes” [Ania in Wonderland]. Translated by V. Sirin [V. V. Nabokov]. Illustrations by S. Zalshupin. Berlin: Gamaiun, 1923 (in Russian). ———. Karroll, L’iuis. Alisa v Zazerkal’i [Alice in Transmirroria]. Translated by V. Azov [V. A. Ashkenazi]. Poems translated by T. L. Shchepkina-Kupernik. Illustrations by John Tenniel. Cover by D.I. Mitrokhin. Moscow-Petrograd: L.D. Frenkel’, 1924 (in Russian). ———. Kérroll, L’iuis. Prikliucheniia Alisy v strane chudes. Alisa v Zazerkal’e [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by N. M. Demurova. Poems translated by S. Ia. Marshak and D. I. Orlovskaia. Introduction by N. M. Demurova. Illustrations by P. Chuklev. Sofia: Izdatelʹstvo literatury na inostrannykh iazykakh, 1967 (in Russian). ———. Kérroll, L’iuis. Prikliucheniia Alisy v Strane chudes. [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by B.V. Zakhoder. Illustrations by G. Kalinovskii. Moscow: Detskaiia literatura, 1974 (in Russian; first serialized in 1971–1972 in in the journal Kostёr). ———. Kérroll, L’iuis. Prikliucheniia Alisy v Strane chudes. Skvoz’ zerkalo i chto tam uvidela Alisa, ili Alisa v Zazerkal’e [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There]. Commentary by Martin Gardner. Translated by N. M. Demurova. Poems translated by S. Ia.

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Marshak, D. G. Orlovskaia and O. A. Sedakova. Illustrations by John Tenniel. Moscow: Nauka, 1978 (in Russian). ———. Kérroll, L’iuis. Prikliucheniia Alisy v Strane chudes [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by D. Yermolovich. 2nd Ed. Moscow: Auditoriia, 2016 (in Russian). ———. Kérroll, L’iuis. Okhota na Snarka v Vos’mi Napastiakh. The Hunting of the Snark in Russian. By Lewis Carroll. Translated by Victor Fet. Illustrations by Henry Holiday. Portlaoise: Evertype, 2016 (in Russian). ———. Sonia v tsarstve diva [Sonia in a Kingdom of Wonder]. The first Russian translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. [Translated by E. I. Boratynskaya (?)]. Illustrations by John Tenniel. Introduction and Notes by Victor Fet. Portlaoise: Evertype, 2017 (in Russian). ———. Kérroll, L’iuis. Ӓlisӓneñ Sӓyerstandağı majaraları [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland]. Translated by Güzӓl Sitdykova. Portlaoise: Evertype, 2017 (in Bashkir). Chalov, V. P. “Iz nabliudenii nad nekotorymi sibirsko-kubanskimi frazeologicheskimi sootvetstviiami” [From the observations on some Siberian-Kuban’ phraseological correspondences]. In Issledovanie leksiki i frazeologii govorov Sibiri [A Study of the Lexics and Phraseology of the Siberian Dialects]. Edited by L. G. Samotik et al., 78–88. Krasnoyarsk: Krasnoyarskii pedagogicheskii institut, 1984 (in Russian). Demurova, Nina M. “Golos i skripka (k perevodu ekstsentrichnykh skazok L’iuisa Kérrolla) [The Voice and the Violin (on the Translation of Eccentric Fairytales of Lewis Carroll)].” In Masterstvo perevoda [Mastery of Translation] 7: 150–185. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1970 (in Russian). ———. “Alice speaks Russian: The Russian translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.” Harvard Library Bulletin 5, 4(1994–1995): 11–29. Elifёrova, Maria. “‘Bagira skazala . . .’ Gender skazochnykh i mifologicheskikh personazhei angloiazychnoi literatury v russkikh perevodakh.” [Bagira said . . . The gender of the fairytale and mythological characters of English-language literature in Russian translations.] Voprosy literatury 2(2002): 254–277 (in Russian). Fet, Victor. “Beheading First: On Nabokov’s Translation of Lewis Carroll.” The Nabokovian 63(2009): 52–63. ———. “Around Sonja: On the First Russian Translation.” Knight Letter II, 37, 97(Fall 2016): 25–34. ———. “An Annotated Bibliography of Russian Translations.” In: [Carroll, Lewis] Kérroll, L’iuis. Okhota na Snarka [The Hunting of the Snark], xi–xxxiii. Translated by Victor Fet. Portlaoise: Evertype, 2016. ———. Alice and the Time Machine. Illustrations by Byron W. Sewell. Introduction by August A. Imholtz, Jr. Portlaoise: Evertype, 2016. ———. “Three Early Russian Translations.” Knight Letter II, 28, 98(Spring 2017): 16–17. Fet, Victor and Slav N. Gratchev. “Another Adelaida: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot in Nabokov’s Ada.” The Nabokovian 74(2015): 6–12.

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Goodacre, Selwyn. “The Real Flood of Translations.” In Аlice in a World of Wonderlands, Vol. 1, Essays. Edited by Jon Lindseth and Allan Tannenbaum, 99–107. New Castle: Оak Knoll Press, 2015. Gyulamiryan, Tatevik. “On Re-accentuation, Adaptation, and Imitation of Don Quixote.” In Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero. Edited by Slav N. Gratchev & Howard Mancing, 11–22. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Imholtz, August A., Jr. and Clare Imholtz. “Alice goes to Russia.” Slavic & East European Information Resources 15(2014): 150–160. Jakobson, Roman. Raboty po poetike [Works on Poetics]. Moscow: Progress, 1987. Lindseth, Jon and Allan Tannenbaum (eds.) Аlice in a World of Wonderlands, Vols. 1–3. New Castle: Оak Knoll Press, 2015. Parker, Fan. Lewis Carroll in Russia: Translations of Аlice in Wonderland, 1879–1979. New York: Russian House Ltd, 1994. Vid, Natalia. “Domesticated Translation: The Case of Nabokov’s Translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Nabokov Online Journal 2(2008). Zbinden, Karine. “The Bakhtin Circle and Translation.” The Yearbook of English Studies 36, 1(2006): 157–167.

Chapter 4

Bakhtin Reading Cervantes The Birth of the Novel Slav N. Gratchev

“In principio erat Verbum,” as we read in the Gospel of John. I would say: in the beginning there was a novel, and the theories crept up to us later. Fortunately, theories generally come with reprise, and it is good because, when they come, they immediately distribute labels, and control and cool inspiration. Maybe, to explain the birth of theories, we can recall Nicholas Boileau with his statement that “l’ennui naquit un jour de l’uniformité” (boredom is often born from monotony). Don Quixote was born in 1605, and Cervantes would have been very surprised to know that 300 years later his novel would become a cornerstone in the birth of one of the major literary theories of the twentieth century—the theory of the novel. The artist’s direct duty is to show life and not to prove its right to exist. The birth of illusions and the death of illusions—this is not symbolism; it is real life. The vulgar term born in Russia—donkishotsvovat’ [to act foolishly, like Don Quixote]—is absolutely unacceptable to the poetic image of the world’s greatest literary hero who has been re-accentuated a thousand times in literature, on the stage, in the cinema, and in imagery.1 Who told you that the wings of the windmills are just wings and not the arms of the giants? We think that we see things clearly, but how do we know that we do? Don’t you believe that if Dulcinea was just a peasant girl, she would not have moved the provincial idalgo to become a poet and the knight-errant? And don’t you believe that if Don Quixote were not truly in love with her, the image of Dulcinea would never have become so clear, so wonderful, with the novel itself endlessly benefitting from this in an artistic sense. To achieve this perfectly balanced mix of “Art and Answerability” in a piece of art, Cervantes had to build his own intricate artistic universe, break with the intractability of the classic homophonic romance that was, still, the 85

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precursor of the modern European novel, and create instead a unique type of novel—the hybrid novel called Don Quixote.2 This is how the novel was born. Let’s see now how the theory was born. CERVANTES AND BAKHTIN Literary critics often use theory to explain important phenomena observed within a literary artifact; I do not recall that anyone has suggested that the process can go in the opposite direction and that theory can grow and mature out of a certain literary artifact. In this chapter, I want to argue that Don Quixote has played a singular role in the evolution of Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary views and the development of Bakhtin’s theory of the novel. It might not be easy to tease out this idea, however, since Rabelais, Dostoevsky, and perhaps others are mentioned much more prominently in Bakhtin’s work. However, it is a fact that Don Quixote appears in Bakhtin’s writings on the novel at crucial times and almost certainly played a key, perhaps definitive, role in his theory of the novel. My chapter, therefore, will show how Bakhtin, while formulating his theory of the novel, turned to and took examples and inspiration from Cervantes’s great novel. Some years ago, Morson and Emerson also indicated that Bakhtin “developed three major theories of the novel and its relation to other genres”3 while his ideas about the preeminent importance of the novel were taking shape. For me, this describes the natural process of the development of any idea, but for a concept as enormous as the theory of the novel, such a process is not only anticipated but expected. The variety of contexts where Bakhtin uses the term “novel” is not, by any means, a sign of inconsistency in Bakhtin’s own theoretical views but rather it is the constant precalculated attempt to finally narrow the focus to come up with an “ideal” example that would most fully describe the nature of the novel. It is not a coincidence that Don Quixote became for Bakhtin the “classic and purest model of a genre.” While reading and contemplating Cervantes’s singular contribution to the modern novel, Bakhtin sharpened his personal perception of the novel. It seems quite logical to suggest that, as much as Bakhtin’s works on the theory and history of the novel influenced our thoughts on the novel, Don Quixote undoubtedly was the text that most influenced his own thoughts on the novel. Following the line of reasoning of Howard Mancing—a scholar whose views on Bakhtin are very similar to mine—I also would prefer to cite, whenever it is necessary, from Bakhtin directly as I believe that no one speaks better for his own views than the author himself. Morson and Emerson for a long time tried to convince their readers that Bakhtin would be too difficult for

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them to understand and that Bakhtin certainly needs someone to “represent” his ideas to the world. In my opinion, he does not, and Bakhtin is not difficult because he is always logical and always consistent. Perhaps everything started when Bakhtin read George Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel. Perplexed and puzzled, fascinated and challenged at the same time, Bakhtin seemed quite disappointed by Lukács’s “discoveries”: The reason why this danger (bad abstraction and bad infinity) is avoided in Don Quixote, this immortal objectivation of this type of hero, lies not only in Cervantes’ genius and the extraordinary tact with which he overcomes the danger by means of the impenetrably deep yet radiantly sensuous interweaving of divinity with madness in Don Quixote’s soul.4

Bakhtin was challenged by this blunt simplification of the most meaningful prototype of the modern novel and upset that Lukács saw in Don Quixote nothing but the mere “interweaving of divinity with madness.” If this were the case, then Don Quixote would never have become more than “a parody of the chivalrous novels,”5 which seemed to be Lukács’s final discovery. Lukács’s magnum opus was published in Berlin in 1920. Even though it was after the Red Russian Revolution,6 the Bolsheviks7 had not yet cut all lines of communication with the outside world, and Bakhtin was able to obtain Lukács’s book and read it in its original language (German), which he knew as well as his own. It is unfortunate that we do not know anything about Bakhtin’s initial reaction to the book, but we know that he was considering its translation into Russian. Suddenly, he changed his mind for unknown reasons. As a translator myself, I tend to believe that Bakhtin, after some more deliberation, found himself disappointed by the views of Lukács (the first impression is not always the most lasting one!) and decided that translating something he did not quite believe in was not a good idea. Instead, he started to sharpen his own idea—that was, without any doubt, already brewing in his mind for some time—on the same subject, the novel. It is interesting; the subject was not entirely new but rather timely. Yury Tynyanov, one of the leaders of the Russian Formalists with whom Bakhtin would soon have a serious disagreement, was also occupied with the same question. In an article written in 1924 and published in the same year, Tynyanov argued that, “the place of poets, retreating in panic, was taken up by prose writers.”8 He continued, saying that what seemed to be a dead end would eventually be no more than a gap, and the poets, even if they were writing prose, were simply trying to get through this gap. As examples, he named Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Boris Pasternak who, according to him, were going through this difficult process.

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However, Lukács’s book challenged Bakhtin’s scientific curiosity and sprang up his intellectual quest—a quest that would soon bring him closer to Cervantes and farther away from Lukács. As indicated by Parr, “the novel is thought to derive from the epic, to be a sort of poor man’s épopée. Lukács is mainly responsible for this view, enunciated in 1920, as well as the concept of the novel as a sociological genre.”9 In his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (1929), “Bakhtin does not counter Lukács outright, but he does not maintain that there exists an alternative informing tradition for the novel.”10 It is in his later works that Bakhtin discovered in Cervantes the existence of a special relation between art and life—that is, he discovered the imminent presence of a discourse that in Don Quixote was “structured on an uninterrupted mutual interaction with the discourse of life.”11 It was precisely this interaction that created the uninterruptable universal dialogue that explains the unattainable answerability of Don Quixote.12 Instead of a period when “the demos let loose,”13 a period “of great confusion of values in the midst of an as yet unchanged value system,”14 Bakhtin saw in Don Quixote a clear discourse expressed in the form of a perfect dialogue that brought the novel to the heights of a semi-polyphonic novel,15 and that enabled Cervantes to “answer with [his] own life for what [he] ha[d] experienced and understood in art.”16 For Bakhtin, Don Quixote was gradually becoming the quintessential genre where all voices, all points of views, all ideologies, and all types of consciousness could finally find a place to meet, an argument to discuss, and a reason to interact: The novel must represent all the social and ideological voices of its era, that is, all of era’s languages that have claim to being significant; the novel must be a microcosm of heteroglossia. Formulated in such a way, this imperative is in fact immanent to that conception of the novel motivating the creative development of the most important major modern novel types, beginning with Don Quixote.17

The true novel, according to Bakhtin, can never be characterized by a single voice, and only multivoicedness seasoned by heteroglossia and reinforced by dialogism could reveal in the novel its real potential and, possibly, even start its gradual modulation toward polyphony.18 It is said that: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”19

However, before according to Don Quixote “an important role in the history of the novel,”20 before naming Cervantes as the first modern novelist, and before identifying Don Quixote as the most “classic and purest model,”

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Bakhtin thoroughly and critically examined European literature in its ultimate totality. I do not believe it was accidental that he mentioned Lazarillo de Tormes and Amadís de Gaula numerous times in his Discourse in the Novel.21 Although we often hear critical voices expressing doubts about Bakhtin’s competency with regard to the Spanish language, it is my strongest opinion that Bakhtin’s close familiarity with Spanish literature cannot be seriously questioned. It is hard to imagine a literary critic of the caliber of Bakhtin who would not be closely familiar with one of the European’s leading literatures, the Spanish one. Thus, Cervantes’s place in the field of cultural production, for him, was certain and well defined. It is noted that: Of such a sort if the classic and purest model of the genre—Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which realizes itself in extraordinary depth and breadth, all the artistic possibilities of heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic discourse.22

As Bakhtin’s work on the history of the novel continued over the next decade, Don Quixote gradually became a central model selected by Bakhtin to support many of his theoretical claims that concerned not only the problem of novelistic discourse but also the development of the novel as a new genre. “The first and most typical novel in European literature,”23 Don Quixote, the careful study of which brings one to understand the importance of Cervantes’s novel in the development of a simple romance into a complex novel that has not only all constituent elements of a genre but also the seeds of the polyphonic novel, was something yet to be discovered by Bakhtin in Dostoevsky. It is essential that, while working on his two most important philosophical essays, on the carnival and on the novel, Bakhtin kept turning to Don Quixote. He did so often enough to know that the two major protagonists, Don Quixote and Sancho, “are cited, discussed, or referred to over 75 times.”24 His monumental works, such as Epic and Novel and Discourse in the Novel, are permeated with the spirit of Cervantes. Bakhtin insisted that the roots of the modern fiction novel could be found in the Renaissance era because “the Renaissance was the only time when all the necessary ingredients were available for the novel to emerge”25 (my emphasis). I believe that some clarification is due here; the three “necessary ingredients” that Mancing refers to are: (1) the integration of different languages that led to speech diversity within a single narrative frame; (2) the achievement of the worldview that, for the first time in history, encompassed the decisive shift from a vertically oriented otology to a horizontal one; and (3) the invention of the printing press that made the book a commodity rather than a luxury. This is when the new and most powerful genre—the novel—finally comes on the literary stage on which “Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare

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represent an important turning point in the history of laughter. Nowhere else do we see so clearly marked the lines dividing the Renaissance from the seventeenth century and the period that followed.”26 DON QUIXOTE AND BAKHTIN’S THEORY OF THE NOVEL The beginning of the twentieth century in Russia, as well as in other civilized countries of Europe, was marked by the emergence of numerous literary discourses and artistic and literary movements. Some of them experienced transformation into literary theories; others went into oblivion and became nothing but mere historical facts. At those times, literary critics still believed that everything could be studied, examined, and explained by the mere application of theory while the role of the historical context was largely overlooked. As a result, the literary phenomenon was often studied in complete isolation from reality. The perfect example of such theories and the critics representing them were the famous Russian Formalists—Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and Yury Tynyanov—who put the main emphasis on the functional role of literary devices and an original concept of literary history. They advocated a “scientific” method for studying poetic language and championed the complete exclusion of traditional psychological and cultural-historical approaches. That was the time when many artists and critics alike readily accepted the belief that art could and even should be made for its own sake, that reality either does not exist at all, or, if it does, it exists only in the artist’s own imagination. Understandably, the novel was viewed as being nothing more than a mere assembly of short fictions gathered together within a single narrative frame, and Don Quixote was used as a perfect example to support such a claim. At the time of this universal “theoretical intoxication” as I would call it, Bakhtin was one of the few27 literary critics who believed that a good novel is born only when the author feels “responsible” for everything that he or she tries to represent by means of his or her artistic creation. For the first time in literary criticism, we hear the word “responsibility”—responsibility of the author. But to whom? To himself, to his readers, and, most importantly, to life as he or she tries to represent it. Those “believers” in the responsibility of literature to life soon formed a group that today is usually called “the Bakhtinian Circle.” It included people with a wide range of interests and professions. For instance, Kolyubakin was a medical bacteriologist; Vladimir Rugevich was an engineer; Anna Remisova, a granddaughter of Anton Rubinstein (the famous Russian pianist and

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conductor), was a medical doctor; and Valentin Voloshinov, one of Bakhtin’s closest friends and disciples, was a literary critic who decisively rejected all those views and hotly defended the uniqueness of the novel, together with Cervantes as the greatest creator of it. This is precisely when Bakhtin made his very first reference to Don Quixote as well as to the main corpus of the Spanish Golden Age literature in general. This is when he, for the first time, mentioned Diego Hurtado de Mendoza as a possible creator of Lazarillo de Tormes,28 and, of course, he talked about Cervantes. This is when, in his Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin mentioned the brilliant romance Amadis de Gaula several times, and this is when Don Quixote became for Bakhtin an unquestionable model that encompasses all the best qualities of a perfect novel: It will be clear to any open-minded reader that the unity of Don Quixote is not achieved through the devices of stringing together and framing. If we ignore these devices and the motivation for the introduction of material, the impression of the inner unity of this novel’s world remains with us.29

Starting from The Formal Method, one can see the constant references made to Don Quixote, and those references will appear persistently in virtually every work of Bakhtin. In Discourse in the Novel alone, the book of Cervantes is cited and discussed nineteen times! As Mancing rightfully noted, “no other novel is ever described or discussed in terms comparable to these in any of Bakhtin’s writings.”30 Apparently, as Bakhtin developed into a more and more mature literary scholar,31 his admiration of Don Quixote grew equally. As time went by, this book became for him not only the best novel ever written but the unquestionable prototype of an entire genre. Together with his appreciation of Don Quixote, Bakhtin’s dialectical approach toward the dialogue as a special “culture,” the constituent part of any novel, evolved and developed, and these views on dialogue soon became a cornerstone of all his literary views: “I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them.”32 Here it is convenient again to recall Alice who does not understand how a book can be interesting “without pictures and conversations.” It is not at all surprising that in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which, incidentally, has been the most translated English literary text since the date of its publication (1865), everyone talks, including the Queen of Hearts, the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, and the White Rabbit. Dialogue permeates the book, and through this dialogue the characters enter into the most unimaginable relationships. Arguing with the Formalists, and with Shklovsky in particular, Bakhtin, refused to see Don Quixote as merely the sum of its constituent parts. Exactly

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like in Wonderland, all the characters become the constituent parts of the novel (no one would doubt today that Wonderland is certainly a novel), and Don Quixote is clearly more than the “sum” of its parts—whatever these “parts” are. For Bakhtin, the fact that both main and secondary characters are so easily identifiable (just as are the Cheshire Cat and the March Hare), that motifs and themes easily dissolve in the multiplicity of voices, and that heteroglossia attempts to modulate into more complex and sophisticated structure—the polyphonic structure—does not belittle Don Quixote nor reduce the novel to a mere collection of episodes that chaotically coexist under the same novelistic roof. Quite the opposite, all those “effects of character and theme, multiple levels of metafictional paradox, and polyphony and heteroglossia, make the novel much, much more than the sum of its parts.”33 One can easily see that the more Bakhtin read Cervantes, the more he became convinced that “the author when creating his work does not intend it for a literary scholar and does not presuppose a specific scholarly understanding; he does not aim to create a collective of literary scholars. He does not invite literary scholars to his banquet table.”34 And if so, then “there is neither a first nor a last word and there is no limit to the dialogic context,”35 as the context can extend endlessly into time and into space, creating an unique chronotopic understanding of a literary artifact. Almost fifty years ago, Harry Levin coined the term “the Quixotic principle” to apply in literary scholarship.36 In the same seminal essay, he also asserted that, “the tragicomic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination”37 remains constant essentially in all the novels written in all the places since that magic year of 1605. Lionel Trilling, in turn, essentially laid down the initial block in Cervantes’s studies in the West by acknowledging the same fact and stating that in Don Quixote we see “the old opposition between reality and appearance, between what really is and what merely seems.”38 All that is true, but many of us have forgotten that Mikhail Bakhtin, who all his life lived in Communist Russia and worked behind the Iron Curtain and who was not familiar with any of these “fresh” ideas that captivated Western literary scholarship, discovered Don Quixote long before Levin and Trilling presented the same discovery to us. Bakhtin worked for years in complete isolation, oppressed by the Communist regime, exiled to Kustanay, a tiny town hidden in the Kazakhstan steppes more than 3,000 miles away from Moscow and Leningrad, where even simple telephone communication was nonexistent for the ordinary citizens. There, Bakhtin managed to create one of the most singular works in the literary scholarship of the twentieth century—his Discourse in the Novel. In this book, written during 1934–35, the time of Stalin’s war against Russian intelligentsia, Bakhtin granted Don Quixote the status of an ultimate model for all other novels that would be written for many years to come:

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And there arrived on the scene, at last, the great Renaissance novel—the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes. It is precisely in these two works that the novelistic word . . . revealed its full potential and began to play such a titanic role in the formulation of a new literary and linguistic consciousness.39

NOTES 1. Regarding the notion of Re-accentuation, see the recently published book: Gratchev, Slav N. and Mancing, Howard. Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017). 2. About the notion of the hybrid novel and the semi-polyphonic novel, see: Slav N. Gratchev. The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017). 3. Morson, G. and C. Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 300. 4. Lukács, George, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 101. 5. Ibid., 101. 6. Red Russian Revolution that is often referred to as October Revolution was a coup d’etat on October 25, 1917 (November 7, 1917, New Style). The power in the country was seized by the Bolsheviks. 7. The Bolsheviks were one of the numerous (and one of the least influential) parties in Russia before the February 2017 revolution that toppled the monarchy. However, due to the dirty political maneuvers, in October of the same year, Bolsheviks managed to overthrow the provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky, and seized the power. Later Bolshevik party was renamed into the Communist Party that ruled the Soviet Union for over seventy years. 8. Tynyanov, Yury, Poetics. History of literature. Cinema. (Moskva: Nauka, 1977), 168. 9. Parr, James, Don Quixote: A Touchstone for Literary Criticism (Kassel: Reichenberg, 2005), 133. 10. Parr, 135. 11. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Dialogic Imagination (Austin: Texas University Press, 2008), 383. 12. Regarding the notion that ultimate answerability of Don Quixote even compared with the most polyphonic novel of Fyodor Dostoevsky The Idiot, see my article on Cervantes: “Prince Myshkin as a Tragic Interpretation of Don Quixote.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 35.1 (2015): 137–151. 13. Lukács, 104. 14. Ibid. 15. The notion of Don Quixote as a semi-polyphonic novel is elaborated in detail in my book The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky, Lexington Books, 2017. 16. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 1.

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17. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 411. 18. About the notion of modulation toward polyphony, see my book: Slav Gratchev. The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky (Lexington Books, 2017). 19. Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London, Macmillan, 1865), 1. 20. Mancing, Howard, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes” in Cervantes for the 21st Century (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000), 142. 21. Regarding these novels and their role in the development of the “respectable” discourse within the First Stylistic Line novels, see Dialogic Imagination, 372, 380, 390, 391, 398, to name a few. Amadís de Gaula alone is mentioned in Discourse in the Novel over half a dozen times. 22. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 324. 23. Mancing, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes,” 160. 24. Ibid., 148. 25. Ibid., 152. 26. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 80. 27. We say “one of the few” because there also existed the so-called Nevel circle that consisted friends and followers of Bakhtin who shared the same views and ideas about literature and art. 28. In the Russian literary scholarship, up until the 1960s it was believed that Lazarillo was not anonymous, but it was written by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. There also were scholars who defended the idea that author was Juan de Valdés, or any other disciple of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but their voice was not heard, and their opinion was not well received. 29. Bakhtin, The Formal Method, 136. 30. Mancing, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes,” 154. 31. We may recall that when The Formal Method was written, Bakhtin turned only thirty. 32. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press,1996), 169. 33. Mancing, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes,” 152. 34. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press,1996), 165. 35. Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 170. 36. Levin, Harry, “The Quixotic Principle: Cervantes and Other Novelists.” In The interpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 45–66. 37. Ibid., 58. 38. Trilling, Lionel, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” In The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950), 207. 39. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 80. Emphasis mine.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

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Bakhtin, Mikhail, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Bakhtin, Mikhail, and Medvedev, P. N. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. Albert. J. Wherle. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Dialogic Imagination. Austin: Texas University Press, 2008. Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1865. Gratchev, Slav N. and Mancing, Howard. Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Gratchev, Slav N. “Prince Myshkin as a Tragic Interpretation of Don Quixote.” Cervantes:Bulletin of The Cervantes Society of America, 35.1 (2015): 137–151. Levin, Harry. “The Quixotic Principle: Cervantes and Other Novelists.” In The interpretation of Narrative: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. Lukács, George, The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971. Mancing, Howard, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes.” In Cervantes for the 21st Century. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000. Parr, James, Don Quixote: A Touchstone for Literary Criticism. Kassel: Reichenberg, 2005. Trilling, Lionel. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” In The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York: Viking Press, 1950. Tynyanov, Yury. Poetics. History of literature. Cinema. Moskva: Nauka, 1977.

Chapter 5

Bakhtinian Re-Accentuation and the Commemoration of the Third Centenary of Don Quixote at the University of Havana (1905) Ricardo Castells

During the 1905 Spanish commemoration of the third centenary of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de La Mancha, there were elaborate ceremonies not only throughout the length and breadth of Spain - from Albacete and Almería to Zamora and Zaragoza—but also in the former Spanish colonies of Argentina, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela.1 As Francisco J. Flores Arroyuelo has noted, much of the impetus for the Cervantine celebration comes from an article by Mariano de Cavia that appears on the front page of the El Imparcial newspaper in Madrid on December 2, 1903.2 According to Cavia’s article, the proposed 1905 tribute would represent “an act of Spanish revival and of spiritual recovery in this land” following the Disaster of 1898.3 At the same time, Cavia writes that Cervantes and Don Quixote are essential cultural figures who would reunite the metropolis with the distant nations that once formed part of its overseas empire: The Don Quixote centenary should interest and honor the Spanish-speaking American nations just as much as the people who gave them their blood, language, laws . . . and perhaps some of their vices, and also so many powerful virtues! Neither the government entities nor the artistic and literary societies . . . will ask the foreigner for anything other than the moral and intellectual support that this task deserves. But is it even possible to conceive of Latin Americans as foreigners in this celebration in their ancestral home?4

While Cavia’s attitude is admirable, there is a certain irony in making Don Quixote the standard bearer for the resurgence of Spanish culture at the 97

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beginning of the last century. As we know, Cervantes jealously guarded the possession of his most important literary character, so he was only willing to share him with his fictional author Cide Hamete Benengeli: “For me alone Don Quixote was born, and I for him; it was his to act, mine to write; we two together make but one.”5 Considering that Cervantes affirmed his proprietorship over the knight errant, we may wonder how he would feel about the many books, essays, poems, artwork, and even music that appropriated the character of Don Quixote during the 1905 anniversary. Nevertheless, Mikhail Bakhtin argues that Cervantes’s literary success is such that other artists would naturally adopt Don Quixote as their own. According to Bakhtin, the original books of chivalry such as the Amadís de Gaula represent novels of the First Stylistic Line, which means that they have “only a single language and a single style (which is more or less rigorously consistent).”6 Don Quixote, on the other hand, would be one of “the great exemplars of the novel of the Second Line” because it includes more complex, double-voiced speech as a fundamental element in the text.7 Since Don Quixote’s novelistic image develops within these heterogeneous forms of speech, Bakhtin believes that the novels of the Second Line present “an open, living, mutual interaction between worlds, points of view, accents. This makes it possible to re-accentuate the image, to adopt various attitudes toward the argument sounding within the image, to take various positions in this argument and, consequently, to vary the interpretations of the image itself.”8 Rather than belonging exclusively to his creator, Bakhtin writes that Don Quixote can be repeatedly reinterpreted by other writers, artists, and scholars because his image can be modified time and again within new cultural contexts: The [double-voiced novelistic] image becomes polysemic, like a symbol. Thus are created the immortal novelistic images that live different lives in different epochs. The image of Don Quixote has been thus re-accentuated in a variety of ways in the later history of the novel and interpreted in different ways, for these re-accentuations and interpretations were an inevitable and organic further development of the image, a continuation of the unresolved argument embedded in it.9

Bakhtin understands that despite Cervantes’s wishes, Don Quixote is not a static character with only one possible depiction, so over the years the Manchegan knight has become a multifaceted image that appears in any number of media as part of an extraordinary variety of historical contexts. While Cavia, for example, interprets Don Quixote as the embodiment of a national ideal in the midst of a social and political crisis, this concept is refracted once it comes into contact with other Spanish-speaking nations. Significantly, of all the Latin American countries that participate in the Cervantine anniversary,

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Cuba represents the most contradictory cultural environment for the celebration, so it is only natural that the island’s writers and intellectuals would alter Cavia’s template for Don Quixote’s image. The Havana commemoration of 1905 is held a mere seven years after the end of the Spanish–American War, and a scant three years after Cuba received its conditional independence from the United States. Moreover, the Cuban tribute takes place only one year before the collapse of the national government and the start of the second American military intervention of 1906–1909. The 1905 Cervantine centenary thus occurs during a fleeting moment of political and social optimism on the Island, but it also turns out to be an extremely challenging period for a young republic that attempts to forge a stable national identity while maintaining essential cultural and economic relations with both Spain and the United States. As a result of the many social and family ties between the Cuban Republic and the former metropolis, the Havana newspaper Diario de la Marina—under the direction of the Spaniard Nicolás Rivero—becomes the principal patron of the Cervantine celebration on the Island.10 The Diario publishes the first Cuban edition of Don Quixote in 1905, and that edition turns out to be the only one printed on the Island until 1960, the same year that the conservative daily is shut down by the new revolutionary government.11 The Diario also provides its full support to the effort to raise money for the first statue of Cervantes in the Americas, which was sculpted by the Italian artist Carlo Nicoli and placed in the San Juan de Dios Park in Central Havana. In addition, the newspaper sponsors a literary, artistic, and musical competition as part of the centenary, which concludes with an awards ceremony infused with the imperial nostalgia that still affects many Creoles and Peninsulars during the early years of the republic. According to the anonymous foreign correspondent for Madrid’s La Correspondencia de España, “The Cervantine competition celebrated by the Diario is devoted to defending Spanish interests in Cuba and keeping alive the love that Cubans feel towards their former Metropolis,” while also attempting “to encourage Cubans in their devotion towards Spain’s undisputed glories.”12 The Spanish press adds: The grand Teatro Tacón was the site for the awards ceremony for the literaryartistic-musical competition organized by the Diario de la Marina, with the collaboration of the Spanish cultural societies, the president of the Republic, the Ateneo [cultural society], and other Cuban organizations. No one had ever seen this famous theater so magnificently and artistically decorated, nor with such a large and elegant audience.13

The main speaker at the awards ceremony is the Cuban jurist Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante, who celebrates the unity of Creoles and Peninsulars

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in Cuba: “Never have one and the other been so united as they are now separated. . . . Because of this centenary Cuba has shown itself to have some of the most cultured people in Latin America and, as a result, who most honor the Mother Country.”14 Sánchez de Bustamante seems to believe that the cultural level of the former colonies can be measured according to the Spanish traditions that they praise and preserve, which means that the third centenary represents above all an affirmation of the everlasting bonds between Cuba and Spain. Since the conservative attitude toward the mother country indicates that national culture should be largely imported from Spain, then this viewpoint suggests that Cuba would have no need to re-accentuate Don Quixote beyond Mariano de Cavia’s patriotic interpretation of the knight errant. Nevertheless, President Tomás Estrada Palma attends a second Cervantine fiesta—this one celebrated at the University of Havana on May 13, 1905, precisely one week before the third anniversary of Cuban independence—that exhibits a far different attitude toward the nation’s former colonial masters.15 According to a brief article in the Diario de la Marina, “The University celebration [had] a large and distinguished attendance [that included] the President of the Republic, the entire University faculty, and the senior professors of the institution,” not to mention the presidents of the Casino Español and the Centro Asturiano cultural societies.16 The academic celebration consisted of speeches from four of the university’s professors: Ramón Meza y Suárez Inclán, professor in the School of Education; Guillermo Domínguez Roldán, professor of the history of Spanish literature; Esteban Borrero Echevarría, professor in the School of Education; and Enrique José Varona, professor of psychology, moral philosophy, and sociology. As we will see, the four speakers openly question Spain’s cultural primacy on the Island, so these Cuban nationalists re-accentuate the peninsular concept of Don Quixote as they reinterpret his figure to fit within the context of a newly liberated Spanishspeaking republic. Ramón Meza’s speech, entitled “Don Quijote como tipo ideal” (Don Quixote as the Ideal Archetype) not only celebrates Cervantes’s masterpiece, but also “the Cuban university’s magnificent celebration.”17 Meza is the author of some of the most important realist novels in late nineteenth-century Cuba, such as Mi tío el empleado (1887), which presents a vision of a Spanish colony that appears to be little more than a “a nation of scoundrels.”18 Nevetheless, the beginning of Meza’s speech follows the guidelines proposed by Mariano de Cavia two years earlier, as he indicates that Don Quixote is “the book that will make this beautiful and resonant language live on for centuries to come.”19 However, as Meza begins his study of artistic types in art and literature, he demonstrates that he does not share Cavia’s vision of the Cervantine centenary as a unifying element for all Spanish-speaking nations. Meza instead mentions his recent visit to the Corcoran Gallery in

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Washington, where he sees “a statue of cold white stone . . . [that] represented Napoleon I in his final agony.”20 According to the gallery’s official catalog of 1882, Meza must be referring to The Last Days of Napoleon I (1871) by the Swiss sculptor Vincenzo Vela, which is a copy based on the original of 1866, “bought by Napoleon III from the French International Exhibition in 1867, . . . now at Versailles.”21 After mentioning a sculpture whose original version was presented at a French universal exhibition, Meza then discusses one of the more than twenty examples of Rodin’s The Thinker—“the latest outstanding expression of modern French art”—that he saw in the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904.22 Meza’s allusions to the cities of Washington and St. Louis are significant from a geographic, cultural, and even political perspective. On the one hand, the places that Meza mentions are not located in the mother country, but rather in the United States, a nation that has become the new reference point for the Island. On the other, the artistic works that he studies are related to France rather than Spain, which confirms that Paris has become a much more important cultural model than Madrid. At the same time, by studying European sculptures that have been presented in two different international exhibitions, Meza underlines one of the main weaknesses in the Cervantes commemoration. The principal international exhibitions from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I—such as the those in London (1851), Paris (1855), Viena (1873), and Chicago (1893)—showcase the host nation’s modern-day economic, technological, and imperial power.23 National commemorations such as the Cervantine centenary, on the other hand, consist of “historical representations of national events [that have] the intention of establishing a relationship between the spectators and the memory they represent. . . . either to create a new historical narrative, or to reinforce one that already exists.”24 In other words, there is a stark contrast between the universal expositions that highlight each country’s present and future glories, and the historical commemorations that recall past triumphs that will never be repeated. The St. Louis Exposition that Meza visits is particularly important for the United States because it celebrates, with a one-year delay, the first centenary of President Thomas Jefferson’s acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803. This territorial expansion doubled the size of the United States overnight, and the treaty was so important for the opening of the American West that the 1904 observance is also called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. At the same time, the St. Louis World’s Fair is a celebration of the nation’s new territorial conquests following the Spanish–American War, so it represents a commemoration of American expansionism at the beginning as well as the end of the nineteenth century.25 Although Meza’s speech should only exalt the linguistic and cultural links between Cuba and Spain, the professor pointedly reminds the university audience that there is a new imperial power

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that has the ability not only to create a new museum like the Corcoran Gallery, but also to hold the largest universal exposition in history. Moreover, Meza emphasizes the significant differences between two competing cultural traditions by re-accentuating the literary characters that he believes embody the fundamental contrast between the English- and Spanish-speaking peoples. According to Meza, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe personifies the industriousness and social progress of Anglo-Saxon civilization, while Cervantes’s Don Quixote symbolizes not the grandeur of the imperial past, but rather the stagnation and backwardness of contemporary Spanish society. Presenting an historical analysis of Spanish literary archetypes, Meza indicates that the most important character in medieval Spain is El Cid Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar, whom he calls “the most genuine and most exact representative of the ideals of the Spanish people of that era.”26 Over the years, the literary knight errant takes the place of the “invincible warrior” as a national ideal, including characters such as Palmerín, Esplandián, and “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.”27 This social model is the result of a state of continual warfare in medieval Europe, which produces common literary archetypes throughout the continent. Nevertheless, no other country maintains cultural connections with these military heroes that are “so deep and so ingrained, as the Spanish people.”28 Meza believes that while the rest of Europe begins to develop new literary figures in the late Middle Ages— such as Dante’s Beatrice—the knight errant never loses his relevance in the Spain of the Reconquest and the empire. As a result of this particular historical background, Cervantes creates not only the most important character in all modern literature, but also the principal symbol of Hispanic culture: “Among all of these archetypes that appear, full of glory for their creators, in universal literature . . . there is none so familiar, so precise, in his gestures and proportions, so alive, who exhibits such well-delineated characteristics as the protagonist of Cervantes’s unique novel.”29 Don Quixote is thus a direct reflection of Spanish history and culture, as Meza indicates that the most emblematic characters in each particular civilization “embody feelings, tendencies, portrayals, and movements taken from real life”; for this reason, “it is useful to study them together in order to compare the two, confident that they will provide us with useful lessons.”30 Meza uses this comparative approach to contrast Don Quixote with Robinson Crusoe, as he observes that Daniel Defoe’s protagonist, Cast away far from inhabited lands, on a deserted island, where he won’t search for adventures or exceed the heroic deeds of the rivals of the knight Quijano; he [instead] proceeds in a different fashion, and that is logical because that is what the idiosyncrasies of his race dictate. The first thing he does, after spending the night peacefully in a tree branch to stay out of the grasp of the paws of

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wild beasts, . . . is to kneel on the white sand . . . to give thanks to Providence for giving him the great and invaluable treasure of health and life; build a raft that takes him back to the ship to get tools, weapons, and provisions; and choose the most protected and hidden area [on the island], where he builds his house, places his home, digs a pantry that is soon full of grains, products of the harvest that he himself farms. . . . He does not leave that place in search of challenges, fights, or adventures; on the contrary, he prepares to defend himself with a prudent virility.31

Meza’s double re-accentuation establishes an absolute dichotomy between the Spaniard Don Quixote and the Englishman Robinson Crusoe because these two characters are the product of very different historical traditions. Alonso Quijano is an older gentleman who squanders his limited resources because his love for chivalric novels leads him to ignore “the management of his property” and to sell “many an acre of tillage-land.”32 His parents are long gone, and he has no direct heirs to his meager fortune, but he maintains his fragile ties to his family’s military background through “some armour that had belonged to his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a corner.”33 When he assumes the identity of Don Quixote, Alonso Quijano recovers a family tradition that has lost its relevance in a nation undergoing irreversible economic and political decline, but the young Robinson Crusoe does just the opposite in Defoe’s novel. Defoe writes that Crusoe falls under “[an] evil influence which carried [him] first away from [his] father’s house— which hurried [him] into the wild and indigested notion of raising [his] fortune.”34 When he arrives in Brazil, he dedicates himself to the cultivation of sugar and tobacco, but he is later shipwrecked on a deserted island when he sails to Africa to participate in the transatlantic slave trade. Crusoe does not share any of Don Quixote’s chivalric ideals because rather than dedicating himself to “the support of his own honour” like the Manchegan knight,35 he instead devotes himself to increasing his personal fortune in the most dishonorable way possible. More important, Meza writes that Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe are “archetypes that unquestionably symbolize two civilizations, two peoples with perfectly distinguishable sentiments,” and for this reason “the activities [of the two characters] find a faithful replica” in the New World.36 According to Meza, Spanish America begins with a conquest by “the children and legitimate heirs of El Cid, with no small amount of the qualities that the Manchegan squire exhibited in his mind and his arm.”37 The inhabitants of the American colonies, on the other hand, remind us of Robinson Crusoe because “they don’t stay far from their property, don’t go looking for adventures or combat, like the medieval warriors who scrambled the brains of the famous squire; instead, they calmly and firmly . . . preserved at any cost what they

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produced from the land that they watered with the sweat of their own brow.”38 Meza concludes that the Spanish colonies were created by “daring warriors [with a] chaotic and tumultuous spirit,” and so their “characteristics and sentiments are still found in a part of our continent.” The English-speaking Robinsons, however, “didn’t come [to America] with a bellicose spirit or a war bugle, but rather to spread agriculture [and] religion.”39 Meza thus employs these two literary characters to present a very personal vision of the Spanish- and English-speaking nations in the New World. Each civilization is characterized by a series of specific qualities that Meza finds in Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, and these cultural norms help to explain each society’s particular destiny. There is no question that Meza adopts an excessively negative attitude toward Spanish America, while his vision of the United States appears rather ingenuous and distorted. Nevertheless, the essential point in Meza’s speech is that the clash between these two civilizations will always favor the Robinsons of the Colossus of the North over Spanish America’s Don Quixotes. At the same time, Meza’s re-accentuation strongly contradicts Mariano de Cavia’s image of the knight errant as a national paragon because the Cuban author turns the peninsular vision of Cervantes’s character on its head: And after . . . looking all around us, perhaps we can convince ourselves that the image of Don Quixote still exists, in the same way that Robinson Crusoe’s still does. Yonder this hero, working with his bellows, constructing, building, grandly creating human production; elsewhere, oh ladies and gentlemen!, Don Quixote’s lance is destroying, destroying . . . while risking its own destruction.40

Meza’s novels are characterized by an extremely critical vision of colonial society, so it is no surprise that he would present a similar viewpoint about the Spanish influence in the Americas. Nevertheless, Meza is a pedagogue as well as a novelist, so his speech presents an important lesson about modern Cuban life. Since the island has recently received its independence from the United States, it is no longer sufficient to point out the numerous defects in the Spanish colonial legacy. On the contrary, the future of the republic requires the same discipline and persistence that the Island’s American neighbors have demonstrated over the centuries, which means that twentieth-century Cubans will have to forget about the quixotic sentiments inherited from the metropolis. For Meza, it would make no sense to adopt the same colonial nostalgia found in the Diario de la Marina celebration because the Island’s development will depend on the industry and diligence of the Cuban people rather than on the exaltation of the glories of the imperial past. Meza may admire Don Quixote as a literary character, but as he re-accentuates his figure in a postcolonial context, Meza concludes that the Manchegan knight belongs to a bygone era that has no practical place in the modern Cuban Republic.

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The second speech, by Guillermo Domínguez Roldán, is entitled “Lugar que ocupa Cervantes en las letras castellanas” (Cervantes’s Place in Castilian Letters). Since Domínguez Roldán is a professor of the history of Spanish literature, he adopts a very favorable attitude toward Cervantes and Don Quixote. At the same time, he writes that it is important for the University of Havana to participate in the Cervantine centenary because it represents “a family celebration as long as we speak Castilian and do not forget that this beautiful language was the one used by our most cherished poets.”41 Adopting a nationalistic perspective, Domínguez Roldán reminds the audience that Cuban lyricists such as José María Heredia and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda wrote in Spanish, as did prose writers like José Antonio Saco and Enrique José Varona. More important, it is the language of the central figures of the independence movement because Cuban Spanish reflects “the arrogance, strength, and independence of our legendary heroes such as Céspedes, Agramonte, and Sanguily, [who] in epic battles echo the deeds of a Cid o a Count Ferrán González.”42 (Curiously, modern-day icons such as José Martí and Antonio Maceo are completely ignored.) Domínguez Roldán believes that the Cuban Wars of Independence reflect the combative nature that the Island inherited from the mother country, which suggests that the insurgents who joined the rebel forces represented the modern-day equivalents of the medieval knight errant. At the same time, since his paper is related to the history of Spanish literature, Domínguez Roldán emphasizes his knowledge of authors such as the Arcipreste de Hita, Jorge Manrique, Fernando de Rojas, Juan Boscán, Garcilaso de la Vega, Fray Luis de León, Lope de Vega, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. He also seems to know all of Cervantes’s work—commenting, for example, on Don Quixote, the Persiles, the Exemplary Novels, and the Viaje al Parnaso—in addition to many of the most important literary scholars of his own time, including Julio Cejador, José María Asensio, Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera, Clemente Rochel, Guillermo Junemann, and the Count von Schack. Nevertheless, while Domínguez Roldán demonstrates a sincere appreciation for Spanish literature, he also points out some important defects in the peninsular character. For example, he presents a long citation from Martin Hume (1847–1910), the Cambridge-educated English scholar who was also a member of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Royal Academy of History. Curiously, Hume’s Historia de la España contemporánea includes observations about Spain that seem to anticipate many of the ideas found in Ramón Meza’s speech: [T]he nation was formed [with] a false ideal of honor and conduct, and an exaggerated idea of its own merits. Ladies and gentlemen, and even common laborers, with their heads full of these books of chivalry, made an effort to dress and live according to a literary standard. The bad seed fell on fertile soil, because

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the Spaniard always found an excuse to persist in the belief that he was a special individual, and in that way, once the world’s modern age began, he became a visionary, searching for adventures in far-off countries, but also an enemy of steady work in his own country.43

Hume believes that books of chivalry perverted Spanish culture to such an extent that the typical Spaniard became “an enemy of steady work”—much like Cervantes’s Alonso Quijano—which is the opposite of the Protestant work ethic of Meza’s Robinsons. In other words, Hume suggests that Spain has not re-accentuated Don Quixote as a literary figure, but rather that individual Spaniards recreated themselves in his image in a novel form of self re-accentuation. Moreover, while Meza highlights the religious nature of the Colossus of the North, Domínguez Roldán believes that this quality is more typical of Spanish society: “One of the most important characteristics of the Spanish people has been their religious character,”44 an aspect of their civilization that has a bearing on the recent War of Independence. According to Domínguez Roldán, the many religious conflicts on the peninsula have made Spain the bulwark of Catholicism, to the extent of converting the recent War of Cuban Independence into a religious war, as demonstrated by the pastoral letters of the Spanish bishops in 1896 and 1897, which called Cubans heretics and considered them enemies not only of the homeland, but also of the Catholic faith. Each Cuban was, for those Spaniards, a Lutheran, an Arab. Absolutely the same standard used by Pelayo and Charles V.45

Based on Domínguez Roldán’s analysis of recent history, the Spanish Church saw the struggle for Cuban Independence as a holy war with an absolutely medieval character, a concept that would explain why Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo would declare that Spain was willing to fight on the island until the last man and the last peseta. Domínguez Roldán clearly adopts a negative attitude toward Spain’s colonial policy and its distorted view of the Catholic faith, but he curiously concludes that this religious background is a double-edged sword rather than an absolute defect. Spain’s religious devotion makes the nation excessively traditional and oftentimes stuck in the past, but this spiritual character also produces many of the most important works in Spanish culture: Over the centuries, that strong and unshakeable faith, that religious character that to this day separates Spain from the rest of the world’s nations, has been and is one of the fundamental causes of its isolation and relative backwardness; it has also been, combined with Spain’s exuberant creativity, the source of a powerful and brilliant [literary] school known for its mysticism and religiousness, which unquestionably characterizes the work of Raymund Lull, although he adds a philosophical basis to it.46

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This comment highlights the ambiguous nature of Domínguez Roldán’s speech. Thanks to Don Quixote, “[T]he language and letters of Castile have become immortal,” while world literature has acquired “a jewel, the most beautiful one created by men from all ages and all nations.”47 Moreover, a republic that has recently received its independence should recognize that its language forms part of the traditions inherited from the mother country, so it is only appropriate to celebrate a book “that has made the language that we speak immortal, as long as beauty remains the ideal of our understanding.”48 Yet Domínguez Roldán appears to be far more divided in his outlook toward the metropolis than Ramón Meza, so while he emphasizes the importance of Spanish literature and culture, he is well aware that these works have been created by a country that is bogged down by seemingly insurmountable social and economic problems. In the end, Domínguez Roldán does not offer a personal vision of Cuba’s future as Meza does, as he instead concludes his speech with a sincere appreciation for Cervantes’s work and for the beauty of the Spanish language. Esteban Borrero Echevarría’s speech, entitled “Influencias sociales del Quijote” (The Social Influence of the Quixote) represents one of the three studies that make up his book Alrededor del Quijote (Around the Quixote) (1905). Borrero Echevarría is a poet, writer, and doctor, an insurgent in the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878), and a delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1895. According to Borrero Echevarría, Don Quixote is “the most delightful book that man has ever written,”49 and it is so important to its readers that it has created “a movement that brings people closer together, a real social class, and that dedication is the basis for . . . its civil state, which has created a passionate and absolute dedication in their lives.”50 Borrero Echevarría believes that Don Quixote is much more than a book or a field of study because it has united “an entire world of individuals,” even though this group does not agree whether Cervantes is “a religious reformer,” a “a profound cosmographer,” or even a “political revolutionary.”51 At the same time, Borrero Echevarría closely follows Mariano de Cavia when he cites a recent Diario de la Marina editorial that indicates that Don Quixote “brings together at this time all of the American nations of the Spanish race, from Mexico to Peru and Chile, from the republics in the center to those in the south, which will unite with the Mother Country in a common aspiration, and holding hands, with strong emotions, will share the same sublime thoughts.”52 Much like Meza and many other contemporary Latin American writers, Borrero Echevarría does not believe that Spain still represents a cultural model for the modern world, but he does think that Don Quixote more than makes up for this defect because of “the satisfaction that modern Spain, surpassed in its literary creative power by other European countries who exceed it in overall vitality, feels at possessing an artistic work that by itself is capable

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of counterbalancing . . . all of these nations’ literary production.”53 Borrero Echevarría thus indicates that other European countries surpass Spain in their “overall vitality”—in much the same way that Meza’s Robinsons exceed the Spanish-speaking colonies in their efficiency and organizational skills—but he surprisingly believes that Cervantes’s masterpiece compensates for any backwardness in contemporary Spanish civilization. It seems that Borrero concludes that there is no need to re-accentuate Don Quixote for the modern world, as his historical and literary image is so important that Cervantes’s character does not have to adapt to the twentieth century at all. In fact, Borrero claims that while Spanish absolutism is an historical aberration that was destroyed under the weight of its own internal contradictions, Don Quixote forms part of a larger human empire that will last for many years to come: From the same national womb were born, twins perhaps, Philip II and Cervantes; one of them sacrificed his Empire on the altar of his insane ambitions, as in a holocaust; the other, from the mysterious and sacred field in which humanity develops its artistic creations, full of original and civilizing energies, produced the work that has most affected the human soul and established an even greater empire in the spiritual world. . . . The thoughts of a despot have never been as great as that of a genius, and have never brought with them the discernable seed of human life.54

The last speech of the Cervantine celebration, entitled “Resumen de los trabajos anteriores y consideraciones acerca de Cervantes y del Quijote” (Summary of the Previous Studies and Considerations on Cervantes and the Quixote), is by Professor Enrique José Varona, an insurgent in 1868, a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York (1895–1898), secretary of the Treasury during the American occupation (1898–1902), and later vice president of the republic (1913–1917). Despite the paper’s title, Varona makes few observations about the first three speeches, which suggests that he might not have had time to read them carefully before the celebration.55 Nevertheless, as one might expect given his personal history, Varona makes an absolute distinction between the language of Cervantes and the politics of the metropolis. The future vice president recognizes the importance of the Spanish language in Cuban public life—“because the Quixote was written in our native language, and there is nothing more profoundly one’s own as the language in which man expresses his ideas”—but he does it while reminding the audience that Cuban and Spanish patriots faced off in battle a scant seven years before.56 Moreover, despite the importance of the Spanish tongue on the Island, Varona insists that Creoles and Peninsulars “find themselves far apart in all the other aspects of their lives,”57 as though the cultural and personal relations established over four centuries of colonial rule had disappeared with

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the proclamation of Cuban independence. Varona does not attempt to reaccentuate Don Quixote for modern-day Cuba, as he wants Cervantes and his literary character to remain a part of the nation’s past. Varona instead adopts an attitude that seems quite similar to that of Ramón Meza because he insists on maintaining the two countries completely isolated from one another, even as he sings the praises of the most important masterpiece in Spanish peninsular literature. Varona’s words confirm that President Estrada Palma participates in two Cervantine celebrations with an absolutely contradictory nature. The president first attends the certamen cervantino organized by the Diario de la Marina, which appears to be a typical Spanish celebration of the third centenary, even though it happens to take place in what is now a foreign country. As we have seen, Antonio Sánchez de Bustamante affirms in Havana’s Teatro Tacón—now known as the Gran Teatro de La Habana Alicia Alonso—that Spain and the Island have never been so united, which gives the impression that the Cuban Republic has not severed any of its colonial ties with the Spanish metropolis. Mariano de Cavia asked two years earlier whether it was possible to conceive of Latin Americans as strangers in the Cervantine celebration, and it is clear that the Diario de la Marina’s answer to that question would be a resounding no. The University of Havana commemoration, on the other hand, is the nationalistic or Creole celebration of the same centenary, which is why the four professors—three of whom have long-standing anticolonial convictions—emphasize time and again the vast social and political differences between the two countries. There is no question that each ceremony follows its own internal logic, and that the two observances reflect distinct parts of the Island’s diverse and conflicting social composition during the first decades of the twentieth century. The speakers in the two Havana celebrations may accept Cavia’s re-accentuation of Don Quixote as the essential symbol of Hispanic culture; they may also recreate him as the image of the social problems that Latin America has inherited from the metropolis, or they may even decide not to re-accentuate him at all in order to relegate him to the colonial past. But no matter what each speaker’s particular attitude toward the Manchegan knight may be, Bakhtin is correct to observe that “these re-accentuations and interpretations [are] an inevitable and organic further development of the image, a continuation of the unresolved arguments embedded in it.”58 Unfortunately, the unresolved arguments on the Island were not limited to the competing interpretation of Cervantes’s literary hero because they went so far as to encompass the character and the composition of the entire Cuban Republic. With such antithetical opinions about the nation’s culture and public life, it is little wonder that there was so much instability during the six decades of the republican period on the Island. As a result of this volatility, it was not

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Don Quixote’s lance that was “risking its own destruction”59—in the words of Ramón Meza—but rather the very foundations of Cuba’s social and political structures, which unexpectedly turned out to be as fragile and transitory as the third centenary’s principal patron, the Diario de la Marina. NOTES 1. Miguel Sawa and Miguel Becerra, eds., Crónica del centenario de Don Quijote, Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Antonio Marzo, 1906, 552–556. 2. Francisco Flores Arroyuelo, 1905, Tercer Centenario del Quijote, Madrid: Náusica, 2006, 13–14. Francisco Rico adds that the commemoration also reflects the great interest in Cervantes that began during the second half of the nineteenth century: “It was in the midst of that clamor so typical of the time . . . when the anniversary was transformed into a centenary. It is true that the starting signal and a large part of the plans for the great celebrations of 1905 were given by Mariano de Cavia in El Imparcial of December 2, 1903. But to contradict the legend, it was not an invention of the journalist from Zaragoza, who, in fact, was echoing a letter from a reader and following the instructions of his publisher, Don José Ortega Munilla.” Tiempos del Quijote, Barcelona: Alcantilado, 2012, 13–14. All translations from Spanish to English are my own. 3. Mariano de Cavia, “La celebración del tercer centenario del Don Quijote,” Miguel Sawa and Miguel Becerra, eds., Crónica del centenario de Don Quijote, Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Antonio Marzo, 1906, 93–102, 93. 4. Cavia, 95–98. 5. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, tr. John Ormsby, Kindle edition, Chapter 2.74. 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: U of Texas P, 1981, 375. 7. Bakhtin, 409. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 409–410. 10. María Ángeles Chaparro Domínguez, “Las celebraciones del III y IV Centenario del Quijote en Hispanoamérica a través de la prensa española de 1905 y 2005,” Anales Cervantinos 44 (2012), 65–82, 69. 11. According to José Antonio Baujín, the Diario originally published Don Quixote in weekly, sixteen-page sections, and then in a four-volume book. “De la cabalgata cervantina por los caminos de la cultura cubana,” cvc.cervantes.es. The connection between the Diario and Spain was so strong that the first column of the morning edition normally began with “Spain Last Night,” while the afternoon edition often started with “Today’s Spain.” 12. Chaparro Domínguez, 69. 13. Sawa, 555. 14. The Spanish press also presented the following information on the literaryartistic-musical competition: “The winners were the Biography of Cervantes by José

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de Armas (Cuban), and a Cervantine Narration by Don Anastasio Rivero (Spanish); two oil paintings by Molero y Surroca; and two musical scores by Don José Mauri, that were performed by an orchestra of sixty musicians.” Sawa page 555. For the relations between Creoles and Peninsulars following the War of Independence, see Alejandro García Álvarez and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, “Cubanos y españoles después del 98: de la confrontación a la convivencia pacífica,” Revista de Indias 48.112 (1998): 101–129. 15. The 1905 Cervantes commemoration in Cuba was not limited to these two public celebrations, as there were four books on Don Quixote published on the Island that year: Esteban Borrero Echevarría, Alrededor del Quijote. Trabajos escritos con motivo del tercer centenario de la publicación de la obra inmortal de Cervantes, Havana: Librería e Imprenta La Moderna Poesía, 1905; José de Armas, Cervantes y el Quijote (El hombre, el libro y la época), Havana: La Moderna Poesía, 1905; Pedro Giralt, Bellezas del Quijote. Comentario y glosa de las maravillas que contiene el gran libro de Cervantes, Havana: Imprenta Avisador Comercial, 1905; and Guillermo Domínguez Roldán, Estudio comparativo de Cervantes en relación con los literatos de su época, así de España como de las demás naciones de Europa, Havana: Imprenta Avisador Comercial, 1905. 16. Diario de la Marina, “La Fiesta del Quixote en la Universidad” (May 15, 1905): 4, University of Florida online collection. 17. Ramón Meza, “Don Quixote como tipo ideal,” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 3–18, 3. 18. Mi tío el empleado, Barcelona: Imprenta de Luis Tasso Serra, 1887, 2 vols, Google Books, volume I, 200. 19. Meza, “Ideal,” 3. 20. Ibid., 4. 21. William MacLeod, Catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington: Gibson Brothers Printers, 1882, 12. 22. Meza, “Ideal,” 5. 23. Jeffrey A. Auerbach, Introduction, Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, eds. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg, Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008, xi. 24. Alda Blanco, Cultura y conciencia imperial en la España del siglo XIX, Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2012, 82. 25. Paul Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the ­Philippine Exposition, St. Louis 1901–1905,” Radical History Review 73 (1999): 74–114, 81. 26. Meza, “Ideal,” 8. 27. Ibid., 9. 28. Ibid., 9. 29. Ibid., 12. 30. Ibid., 14. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. Cervantes, 1.1. 33. Ibid.

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34. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richeti, New York: Penguin, 2001, 15. 35. Cervantes, 1.1. 36. Meza, “Ideal,” 15. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 16. 39. Ibid., 17. 40. Ibid., 18. 41. Guillermo Domínguez Roldán, “Lugar que ocupa Cervantes en las letras castellanas,” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 19–47, 19. 42. Domínguez Roldán, 19. 43. Ibid., 20. 44. Ibid., 31. 45. Ibid., 31–32. 46. Ibid., 32. 47. Ibid., 47. 48. Ibid. 49. Esteban Borrero Echevarría, “Influencias sociales del Quijote.” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 48–60, 48. 50. Borrero Echevarría, 50. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 54. 53. Ibid., 58. 54. Ibid., 59. 55. Varona also participated in the Diario’s celebration, but there is no information available on the talk that he presented that evening. 56. Enrique J. Varona, “Resumen de los trabajos anteriores y consideraciones acerca de Cervantes y del Quijote,” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 61–73, 61. 57. Varona, 61. 58. Bakhtin, 410. 59. Meza “Ideal,” 18.

WORKS CITED Auerbach, Jeffrey A. “Introduction.” In Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Eds. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg. Burlington VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008. i–xv. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Baujín, José Antonio. “De la cabalgata cervantina por los caminos de la cultura cubana.” cvc.cervantes.es. Blanco, Alda. Cultura y conciencia imperial en la España del siglo XIX. Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2012.

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Borrero Echevarría, Esteban. Alrededor del Quijote. Trabajos escritos con motivo del tercer centenario de la publicación de la obra inmortal de Cervantes. Havana: Librería e Imprenta La Moderna Poesía, 1905. Googlebooks. ———. “Influencias sociales del Quijote.” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 48–60. Cavia, Mariano de. “La celebración del tercer centenario del Don Quijote.” In Crónica del centenario del Don Quijote. Eds. Miguel Sawa y Miguel Becerra. Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Antonio Marzo, 1906, 93–102. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. Tr. John Ormsby. Kindle edition. Chaparro Domínguez, María Ángeles. “Las celebraciones del III y IV Centenario del Quixoteen Hispanoamérica a través de la prensa española de 1905 y 2005.” Anales Cervantinos 44 (2012): 65–82. De Armas, José. Cervantes y el Quixote (El hombre, el libro y la época). Havana: La Moderna Poesía, 1905. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Ed. John Richeti. New York: Penguin, 2001. Diario de la Marina. “La Fiesta del Quixote en la Universidad” (May 15, 1905): 4. University of Florida online collection. Domínguez Roldán, Guillermo. Estudio comparativo de Cervantes en relación con los literatos de su época, así de España como de las demás naciones de Europa. Havana: Imprenta Avisador Comercial, 1905. Googlebooks. ———. “Lugar que ocupa Cervantes en las letras castellanas.” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 19–47. Flores Arroyuelo, Francisco. 1905, Tercer Centenario del Quijote. Madrid: Náusica, 2006. García Álvarez, Alejandro and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio. “Cubanos y españoles después del 98: de la confrontación a la convivencia pacífica.” Revista de Indias 48.112 (1998): 101–129. Giralt, Pedro. Bellezas del Quijote. Comentario y glosa de las maravillas que contiene el gran libro de Cervantes. Havana: Imprenta Avisador Comercial, 1905. Kramer, Paul. “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis 1901–1905.” Radical History Review 73 (1999): 74–114. MacLeod, William. Catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Washington: Gibson Brothers Printers, 1882. Meza, Ramón. “Don Quixote como tipo ideal.” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 3–18. ———. Mi tío el empleado. Barcelona: Imprenta de Luis Tasso Serra, 1887. 2 vols. Google Books. Rico, Francisco. Tiempos del Quijote. Barcelona: Alcantilado, 2012. Sawa, Miguel and Miguel Becerra, eds. Crónica del centenario de Don Quijote. Madrid: Establecimiento Tipográfico de Antonio Marzo, 1906. Varona, Enrique J. “Resumen de los trabajos anteriores y consideraciones acerca de Cervantes y del Quijote.” Revista de la Facultad de Letras y Ciencias 1.1 (1905): 61–73.

Chapter 6

Bakhtin and the Spanish Picaresque Between La Pícara Justina and Lunes de Aguas Brian M. Phillips

This chapter investigates two of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin’s leitmotifs, cultural and literary manifestations of the carnivalesque and the grotesque, in parallel with the Spanish picaresque genre and the Salamanca festival, Lunes de Aguas.1 For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque appears as a literary technique of the novel that subverts the established system of hierarchies and emancipates its participants from static roles by dint of humor and chaos. In Rabelais and His World, the Russian literary critic traces the carnivalesque as having roots in the medieval European festal traditions of carnival and the Feast of Fools. The latter was a popular festival in France, likely adapted from the Roman Saturnalia, wherein undistinguished church officials would perform burlesques of religious ceremonies to release socio-hierarchical tension.2 Similarly, “Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of the time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.”3 Likewise, the grotesque takes on an equally important and collaborative role with the carnivalesque, a role that Bakhtin understands as necessary to renew social relations. “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”4 Owing to grotesque, mostly corporeal, humor, Bakhtin sees the carnival of medieval society as a reversal of order that permits new ideas or points of view to flourish. Consequently, the literary manifestation of carnival, which for Bakhtin is the carnivalesque-grotesque episodes in Renaissance literature particularly evident in the French author François Rabelais’s 115

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Gargantua and Pantagruel, permits authors a break from normal structure that frees creative processes. And although the Russian critic finds Rabelais to be exemplary of this type of literature, he also avails himself of carnivalesquegrotesque instances among other authors and literary genres of Medieval, Early Modern, and even Enlightenment Europe: Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Goethe; theater, the short story, and the picaresque, to name a few. Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque-grotesque realism arises frequently in imagery produced throughout the Spanish picaresque genre when authors display their protagonists alongside degrading corporeal material or anatomy.5 This phenomenon occurs repeatedly within Francisco de Quevedo’s deterministic take on the picaresque lifestyle.6 He positions Pablos as a character that is continually ushered back to his situation of origin alongside grotesque scatological imagery for as much as the picaro tries to ascend the ladder of social hierarchy and improve his lot in life. And although grotesque imagery may be easily observed in Quevedo’s picaro, and indeed has been amply researched, it is a female picaro that may best demonstrate how the Bakhtin grotesque and carnivalesque work hand in hand to produce an early modern Spanish worldview of social hierarchy.7 The importance of Bakhtin’s ideas concerning the carnival-like, topsy-turvy, upside-down nature of picaresque narrative is evident throughout this literary genre. Indeed, that the first picaro, Lazarillo de Tormes, should be narrated by an orphaned member of the lumpen-proletariat is indicative of a world turned inside out and a symbol of early modern Spain’s socioeconomic crises.8 If the power of the written word were traditionally held in the hands of the Church or the state, then placing it in the hands of picaros, rogues, or ruffians signifies a change in longestablished social standings within the body politic. Placing this authorial power at the hands of a female picaro, Francisco López de Úbeda’s La Pícara Justina, would further serve to situate the picaro as a sign of inverse power relations, upending patriarchal protagonist authority. That this female picaro moreover has strong ties with the world of prostitution also serves to hyperbolize this inversion of power roles, and thus demonstrates grotesque imagery at its apex of degradation. Nonetheless, the picaresque lifestyle of Justina does not exist in isolation. Justina’s niche in the world of fiction is a derivative of real-world events, as is the picaresque genre on whole. To this end, a brief analysis of a nonfictional carnivalesque social manifestation, Salamanca’s festival  Lunes de Aguas, will be compared alongside grotesque displays of La Pícara Justina’s degrading corporeal performances. Since Lunes de Aguas finds itself rooted in the tradition of debates circulating prostitution, and the picara Justina wields her sexuality as a tool to achieve greater power within the social construct, this chapter’s ultimate goal is to underscore biopolitical power relations apropos female space under carnivalesque and grotesque circumstances.

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LUNES de AGUAS OR CARNIVAL PROSTITUTED Sebastián de Covarrubias’s etymological display of carnival traces the word to its Italian, and indeed Latin, roots. Carnival originates with the Italian carnevale or the Latin carnelevare—a word composed of two separate terms, carne (meat) and levare (remove or detach): llamamos carnal el tiempo del año, que se come carne, en respeto de la quaresma, y los dias cercanos a ella llamamos Carnaval, por que nos despedimos della como si le dixessemos, carne vale, y por otro nombre carrastollendas, corrompido de carnestolendas.9 (We call carnal the time of year that one eats meat, with respect to Lent, and the days nearing it we call carnival, because we take our leave of it as if to say meat lifted, and by another name carrastollendas, the corrupted word for carnestolendas.)

Carnestolendas, its synonym in Spanish, likewise takes root in an elision of the Latin phrase dominica antes carnes tollendas, or Sunday before removing meat. Accordingly, carnival signifies the time of year on the liturgical calendar when meat was consumed before the onset of Lent, signifying abstinence, fasting, and penitence to commemorate Christ’s fasting of forty days during the Temptation of Christ. It is not unusual, therefore, that before the sacrifices made for Lent, carnival would evoke a cultural or socioemotional release wherein remaining meat would be consumed and dancing, games, and feasts would take place, in anticipation of a long fast. Covarrubias’s definition for the Carnestolendas underscores the commonality of temporary madness attributed to the event: “Quiere dezir abstinencia de carnes, y à esta causa se corren entonces los gallos, que son muy lascivos, para significar la luxuria, que debe ser reprimida en todo tiempo, y especialmente en Quaresma”10 (It [Carnestolendas] means abstinence from meat, and due to this the cocks are run, which are very lascivious, in order to signify lechery, which should be suppressed at all times and especially during Lent). This temporary madness, signified by gaming with cocks and the disguising of individuals with masks and feasting, might be indicative of a purgation or cleansing of social anxieties previous to the anticipated sacrifice of Lent. Michael Holquist warns that Bakhtin’s carnival “must not be confused with mere holiday or, least of all, with self-serving festivals fostered by governments, secular or theocratic.”11 For Bakhtin, carnival predates “a calendar prescribed by church or state,” and originates “from a force that preexists priests and kings and to whose superior power they are actually deferring when they appear to be licensing carnival.”12 In essence, the chaotic, upside-down world of carnival is a cathartic and natural

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necessity that takes place before self-sacrifice and is not willingly subdued by institutionalized control. Bakhtin’s interpretation of carnival undeniably situates it as an inversion of institutionalized power. Not only were certain foodstuffs abstained from during Lent, but typical behavior concerning gaming and prostitution was restricted or prohibited altogether. It is no coincidence that Covarrubias refers to the cock as a lascivious animal in his definition of Carnestolendas. That this animal was used for carnival gaming but was also symbolic of lechery indicates that the suppression of lustful acts and gaming during Lent was strongly suggested. Treatises regarding the pros and cons of gambling were widespread.13 In large part, these treatises reflected debates circulating gaming and prostitution that stemmed from the Council of Trent’s twenty-second session prohibiting “luxuriousness, feastings, dances, gambling, sports, and all sorts of crime whatever, as also the secular employments.”14 Nonetheless, debates on gambling existed, in part, due to its ambiguous status. Enrique García Santo-Tomás notes that “Gambling was considered, in fact, a ‘necessary evil,’ as it guaranteed the survival of institutions like the Estanco Real de Naipes . . . the guild of candle makers, and even a whole microcosm of rogues and opportunists . . . that subsisted from the charitable distribution of the barato, or tips.”15 The root issue for the Church did not reside with gaming per se, but with material gain stemming from gambling.16 Thus, during carnival, gaming was exercised to an extreme perhaps due to the impending restrictions of it over the period of Lent. The overzealous gaming that transpired pre-Lent fits Bakhtin’s understanding of carnival’s neutralizing or inversion of power relations since, “Chance was considered a type of unnatural equalizer that dissolved boundaries and rank.”17 The erasure of hierarchical boundaries at the card table reset and rejuvenated the social relations that permeated daily life of the established system. Those who participated in these acts of risk did so on equal footing. The debates that circulated around gaming were analogous to those found in treatises on prostitution and women’s space in society. From Juan Luis Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman (1523) to Fray Juan de la Cerda’s Vida política de todos los estados de mujeres (1599), treatises concerning what women do and where they do it abound. For Enriqueta Zafra, prostitution in Habsburg Spain “consistía una herramienta importante dentro del proceso de control y unificación” (constituted an important tool from within the process of control and unification) of the established system.18 Her analysis of official and royal decrees, medical, judicial, and religious literature details the necessity for and the condemnation of bordellos and prostitution: Por un lado . . . [with the bordellos] se pretendía acabar con las pendencias ­callejeras, los raptos, las violaciones, la sífilis y hasta con la práctica de la

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sodomía. Por otro lado . . . la presencia de la prostitución promovió la asociación entre la sexualidad femenina y el pecado.19 (On one hand . . ., bordellos existed to quell the presence of quarrels in the streets, kidnappings, rape, syphilis and even the practice of sodomy. On the other hand . . . the presence of prostitution promoted the association between female sexuality and sin.)

In many cases, these prohibited or restricted activities of gaming, unruly life, and prostitution were lumped together in the same treatises or city ordinances. In Juan de Mariana’s Tratado contra los juegos públicos (Treatise against Public Gaming; 1609), the Jesuit priest takes aim not only at public gaming but also at those who frequent the theater, thieves and murderers who prey upon travelers at inns, and the whoremongers who patronize the brothels of las malas mujeres (the bad women).20 In point of fact, he dedicates several chapters of this treatise on gaming to prostitution and brothels: Chapter 17, “Si conviene si haya rameras” (If it is advisable to have prostitutes); Chapter 18, “No se puede llevar ningún tributo de las casas públicas” (Tax cannot be administered on brothel houses); and Chapter 19, “Si es lícito alquilar casas a las rameras” (If it is lawful to rent housing to prostitutes). Gaming, attending the theater, prostitution, and other daily activities that did not imitate the life of Christ were hotly debated on an equal playing field, and, for the purposes of important dates on the liturgical calendar, mostly prohibited or greatly frowned upon. The city of Salamanca’s present-day festival Lunes de Aguas finds its genesis in this contentious discourse.21 It is a cultural manifestation that arises from an intended prohibition of contact with prostitutes during the forty days of Lent; legend has it that this celebration emerges from a royal edict issued at the hand of prince, later king, Felipe II of Spain. According to mostly oral tradition, in November of 1543, Felipe II passed through Salamanca on his way to the town of Tormes to contract marriage with the princess María of Portugal. The prince is dumbfounded upon discovering the lecherous and animated life of Salamanca’s inhabitants and devises a stratagem to encourage greater dedication to religious devotion and the meditation of the Passion of Christ for Salamanca’s citizens.22 He decrees that all women of ill repute were to take voyage across the river Tormes and remain exiled from the city and its bawdyhouse until Lent concluded, “tras el domingo de Cuasimodo” (after Low Sunday); they would return to the open arms of a heartwarming fiesta, giving rise to our contemporary twenty-first-century celebration.23 Nowadays, of course, prostitution does not form part of the festival. Nonetheless, the yearly event presents a modern-day cultural curiosity sprung from past forms of relinquishment and sacrifice—a walling out or separation—of material things that still maintains certain aspects of its origins.

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Due to the proscription of consuming meats, gaming, and the exclusion of prostitution from within city walls during Lent, the banks of the river surrounding the city suddenly became the site of a second carnival, post-Lent. The common dish of Lunes de Aguas is hornazo, a variety of meat pie filled with pork loin, chorizo, cured ham, and other meats—a collection of the prohibited foods of Lent contained and baked in bread. Cabezudos, carnival figures with large heads worn as masks, walk about in processions satirizing local or culturally symbolic figures. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “[las prostitutas] Desterradas habitualmente al otro lado del río, una vez acabado el recogimiento penitencial de la Cuaresma, eran traídas a la ciudad en triunfo por los estudiantes el llamado ‘lunes de aguas’, con cortejo festivo de jolgorio, desenfado y comilonas”24 ([the prostitutes] habitually banished to the other side of the river, once the penitential devotion of Lent concluded, were triumphantly brought to the city by students to the festival of “lunes de aguas”, with wooing and festive revelry, and appeasing lavish feasts). This festival resembles carnival on multiple levels that reestablish presacrificial conditions and rejuvenate social relations. Likewise, during Lunes de Aguas, a common cabezudo figure known as Padre Putas (priest/father prostitutes) or Padre Lucas satirizes the publicly appointed figure who was accountable for the well-being of the ill-reputed women of the city brothel. “El ‘padre’ de la mancebía debía velar para que sus puertas estuviesen cerradas [durante Cuaresma]. Con el Lunes de Aguas se normalizaba de nuevo el ejercicio de la prostitución en el seno de la urbe.”25 (The “father” of the bawdyhouse was charged with ensuring that its doors remained closed [during Lent]. With Lunes de Aguas the exercise of prostitution was once again normalized in the bosom of the metropolis.) The humoristic positioning of the cabezudo of the Padre Putas as a central figure of Lunes de Aguas is what Bakhtin understands as an essential part of grotesque realism. According to the city ordinances of Salamanca of 1619, among various other regulations concerning De mançebia, y mugeres publicas (Of brothels, and public women), “El padre dela mançebia sea nombrado por el Cosistorio desta Ciudad” (The father of the bawdyhouse will be named by the city consistory).26 Consequently, the Padre Putas is a publicly appointed civil servant whose main role was to ensure that prostitutes of the city and their patrons follow city ordinance before, during, and after Lent. During Lunes de Aguas, the Padre Putas converted into cabezudo becomes a burlesque of his normal position as a lowly civil servant. Over the span of one to two days, his figure transmutes into a symbolic inversion of established power roles wherein the profession that he serves is central to the existence of the fiesta. For Bakhtin, “One of the main attributes of the medieval clown was precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere.”27 In the medieval and early modern body politic, the sexual

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appetite of living beings was closely related to basic desires. For the English physician, astrologer, and philosopher of the Renaissance, Robert Fludd, whose depictions of human relationships between the microcosmos and macrocosmos delineated man’s body in relation to a divine structure, genitalia of the human body were akin to the lowest point of divine structure. “Man’s loftiest faculty, the higher mind receives the direct rays [of Sun] from God. Below are the regions of intellect, the point of balance at the heart, and the elemental realm of the appetites whose base and nadir, for Fludd, is sexuality.”28 To this end, situating prostitution at center stage of the Lunes de Aguas festival inverts the divine meaning behind Lent’s piety by dint of its degradation with humor. “The people’s laughter which characterized all the forms of grotesque realism from immemorial times was linked with the bodily lower stratum. Laughter degrades and materializes.”29 In a word, positioning Padre Putas—and through him prostitution and materialistic sexuality—at the forefront of the fiesta not only reestablishes and renormalizes prostitution back into daily life, but moreover transposes the anti-materialistic message of Lent; sacrifice and devotion return to their proper place as the work of ecclesiastics while gaming, prostitution, the theater, and eating meat are reintroduced to quotidian routine. Under this perspective, Lunes de Aguas could conceivably be construed as a transitional event from the abnormal and sacrificial period of Lent to quotidian life. The cabezudo figure of Padre Putas during Lunes de Aguas dons a hyperbolized oversized mask that is intended to represent the lowly civil servant of daily life. Bakhtin understands the mask as being “related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames.”30 Not only is the mask of the Padre Putas cabezudo symbolic of a transition from the period of Lent to that of everyday life, but also the title of this festival as Lunes de Aguas (Monday of Waters) marks a crossing of a physical boundary, the river Tormes. Prostitutes were escorted back to the city by students, thereby traversing the physical river while simultaneously delineating the two phases of social life: sacrificial abstemiousness and festive carnival.31 Thus, the cyclical nature of normality during daily life and sacrifice during Lent is bookended with carnival-festiveness and Lunes de Aguas-festiveness, marking a transitional period of resetting hierarchies and a rejuvenation of social relations. JUSTINA’S BURLESQUE SHOW MEDICATES FROM THE MARGINS Among treatises dealing with gaming and the control of women, Inquisitorial Spain—as with the rest of Europe—experienced an emergence of new

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medical and scientific treatises that influenced sociopolitical discourse. Juan de Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575), works by the Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius, or references to humoral theory and the Greeks, such as Galen, permeated literary, political, and religious discourse. At stake in these works is a medical metaphor that aims to steer readership toward a conclusion by dint of relating corporeal language and language related to illness to social problems. One particularly popular example of medical language in political discourse is Diego de Saavedra Fajardo’s Empresas políticas (1640), written for Prince Baltasar Carlos. In this treatise, Saavedra Fajardo makes repeated reference to the body of man as being analogous to that of the state: “haga anatomía deste cuerpo, reconozca sus arterias y partes, cuáles están sanas y cuáles no, y de qué causas vienen sus enfermedades”32 (anatomize this body, recognize its arteries and parts, which are salubrious and which are not, and from whence originate its illnesses). Of course, the body that Saavedra Fajardo refers to is the body politic, thereby making the metaphor of society and body. Attempts at providing cures to societal ills using medical language via social treatises were not lost on literature. Francisco López de Úbeda, suspected author of the Libro de entretenimiento de la pícara Justina and Royal Court medical practitioner,33 paints his protagonist as a loquacious intermeddler.34 Picaresque literature, autobiographical in nature, is a significant early modern step in the formation of stories told from the perspective of the marginalized. Yet when marginalized figures speak with female voice, they threaten traditional male territories or structures. In David Mañero Lozano’s introduction to his edition of La pícara Justina, he notes that the protagonist’s ability to speak freely of her life’s story “permitió acentuar . . . el tratamiento paródico de las técnicas compositivas empleadas por Alemán” (permitted an accentuation . . . of the parodic treatment of compositional techniques employed by Alemán) in El Guzmán de Alfarache.35 Mañero interprets López de Úbeda’s picaresque story as a parody of Mateo Alemán’s male picaro. According to Mañero, since Justina is the first female protagonist counterpart to a masculine dominant genre, it is a clear attempt by this novel’s author at producing risible situations by positioning her in spaces that males occupy under traditional circumstances. Mañero forms part of a line of interpretation of La pícara Justina founded with Marcel Bataillon’s Pícaros y Picaresca: La Pícara Justina. Bataillon understands López de Úbeda’s picara as a roman à clef, satirizing social structure: “En realidad, este desconcertante tipo de pícaro hembra hay que entenderlo como resultante de un doble disfraz, femenino y picaresco, adoptado por un médico ‘chocarrero’ o bufón en los palacios de los nobles” (In reality, this disconcerting type of female picaro must be understood as the result of a doble disguise, female and picaresque, adopted by a “crude”

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medical doctor or jester of the noble palaces).36 Bataillon observes that part of Justina’s charm is her ability to utilize humor in settings with serious social implications. The fact that Justina is a female and a picaro lightens the blow of what would otherwise be a nonlaughing matter. Mañero’s interpretation of the novel builds upon Bataillon’s, including a section of his introduction concerning the protagonist’s loquacious nature as an additional virtue aiding in her ability to draw upon comedy to scrutinize social problems. According to this critic, being parlera—chatty or talkative—assists in the accentuation of societal concerns that are specifically inherited by women. For her part, Justina—or perhaps her male author—appears to agree with Mañero: el día que nacemos, del cuerpo de Eva heredamos las mujeres ser gulosas y decir que sabe bien lo que sólo probamos con el antojo; parlar de gana, aunque sea con serpientes . . . comprar un pequeño gusto, aunque cueste la honra de un linaje; poner a riesgo un hombre por un juguete; echar la culpa al diablo de la que peca la carne. (the day we are born, from the body of Eve women inherit gluttony and we say that we know well that which we try only on a whim; we are extremely willing to chat, even with serpents . . . we buy all sorts of little things, even if it costs us our honor and blood lineage; we will risk men’s lives for a toy; we will blame the devil for our sins of the flesh).37

This affirmation of women’s inherited evilness signifies every major concern of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s bodies and unites them with the act of speech—parlar—in a jocose fashion. Justina’s affirmation links her to the first perceived female evil as an inheritor of Eve’s role in original sin. Furthermore, she unites this sin with the perceived female propensity for the spoken word, even if it is to merely speak with serpents. To be brief, unchecked female voice presents a danger to honor and thus blood lineage. Yet the jocular style with which Justina illustrates her story entertains a twofold effect. Bataillon, Mañero, and others would argue that it permits space for social criticism. For Luc Torres, the book’s meaning is for none other than to provide a “imagen burlesca, carnavelesca, de la sociedad de la época reflejada en el espejo deformador de una corte festiva, que . . . busca huir de una inquietante realidad: . . . una España que está iniciando un profundo proceso de crisis política, moral y económica . . .”38 (burlesque, carnivalesque image of the society of this period, reflected in the deforming mirror of a festive Noble Court, that . . . sought to flee a disturbing reality: . . . a Spain that was beginning a profound process of political, moral and economic crisis . . .). The author of the text contextualizes his novel’s meaning in the reality of a Spain in crisis, and he calls our attention to these realities of calamity through satire and laughter. Nonetheless, José A. Maravall exposes

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the picaresque laughter as a cruel and nefarious one that the picaro-protagonists procure through the downfall of the victims that they desecrate in their paths: “El picaro . . . No ríe de chanzas, chistes, agudezas, etc.; ríe, vengativamente, de la crueldad, del engaño, del mal . . .”39 (The picaro . . . does not laugh of derisive comments, jokes, witticisms, etc.; he laughs, vengefully, out of cruelty, trickery, evil . . .). Maravall continues by noting that this particular characteristic of the genre is most prevalent in female picaresque stories.40 His observation that tales of the female picaresque seek to cause laughter at the expense of the downfall of others illustrates a key component to the functioning of these narratives. Specifically, the reader views the hyperbolized abuse of certain elements of society, or that of certain other characters in the novel, at the hands of the protagonist as risible. Meanwhile, the author is developing a relationship with the reader that permits him to articulate moralistic propaganda under the guise of a story of entertainment. Justina breaks the rules of traditional female comportment that books approximating Juan Luis Vives’s The Education of a Christian Woman attempt to outline. But she does so in a manner that permits readership to sympathize with her situation and simultaneously interpret her life as a joke. For Maravall, López de Úbeda’s book of entertainment and humor gives him a platform to communicate an underlying moralistic message: “es explicable que [López de Úbeda] acuda a la solución de introducir ‘moralejas’ que conviertan en edificantes los modos de conducirse una persona marginada y anómica”41 (it is explainable that [López de Úbeda] resorts to a solution of the introduction of “morals” in his tale that converts the modes of conduct of a marginalized and anomic person into edifying modes of conduct). It is important to bear in mind that Bakhtin views laughter as an equalizing instrument and that carnivalesque situations on the whole offer “the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things.”42 Justina, not unlike other picaros, concocts a variety of preposterous situations, beginning with her prologue wherein she dialogues with a hair on the end of her pen as she composes her tale. For Bakhtin, one of the fundamental elements of novelistic structure outlined in The Dialogic Imagination is the interchange of ideas between characters.43 Justina’s ludicrous conversation with a hair on her pen breaks from normalized picaresque format in which the picaro relates his life’s events in first-person narrative with almost no dialogical exchange.44 And although the pen does not respond to her, and it is therefore not a true dialogical example, Justina’s account of the events that shaped her life give the appearance of a more active or realistic and present-time discourse than other picaresque tales. This is due, in part, to an attempt at this novel breaking the generic mold and permitting readership to see the picaresque under the lens of a “completely new order of things,” one in which the author positions

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his character, who is female, at a table composing her story while speaking to her pen and simultaneously to her audience; meanwhile the author guides the reader with moralistic glosses in the margins of each page and at the end of each chapter.45 The pen transforms Justina into a fiction writer, an occupation usually attributed to men who traditionally constructed discourses of power. Justina upends pre-established social order, creating confusion, indignation, laughter; she becomes her own grotesque-carnivalesque order. Justina’s manufacturing of risible situations throughout the novel destabilizes the established novelistic structure of picaresque narrative, but the structure of López de Úbeda’s narrative is perhaps equally as important as its content. The author composed the book of four parts, subdivided into chapters. He precedes each chapter with verses that announce their theme, and ends them with aprovechamientos—moralistic conclusions that refer to Justina’s narrative. The verses and aprovechamientos bookending each chapter of the novel are reminiscent of the structure of the events of carnival and Lunes de Aguas bookending Salamanca’s period of Lent.46 With the fictional bookends of López de Úbeda’s novel, moralistic examples are situated on both sides of Justina’s first-person text to contain the frenzy produced within the chapters and transition from one phase to the next. Meanwhile, carnival and Lunes de Aguas provide frenzy that transitions between daily life and sacrificial life/Lent. The novel’s structure of verse-narrative-aprovechamiento (exploitation) aligns itself with the story’s frontispiece (Figure 6.1), and concomitantly with the structure of moralizing treatises of the period. The illustration displays La nave de la vida picaresca (The ship of the picaresque lifestyle) floating along the River of Forgetfulness—Río del Olvido. Time guides the boat full of picaros toward the Port of Death who grips the mirror of Disillusion—desengaño—in his left hand, potentially indicating what awaits those who lead a lifestyle akin to that of the picaresque. The image, and the labels written across the boats and the picaros on board, all indicate allegorical or direct reference to what may happen to a life lead outside of established acceptable social mores.47 What is most interesting for the purposes of this study is the image of Justina situated squarely in the center of the frontispiece leafing through a book with the words “¡Hola! que me lleva la ola” (Hello! the wave is carrying me away) printed on its cover. A. A. Parker notes that the book’s cover could be hinting toward “the first line of a song, perhaps traditional, that is found in a play by Lope de Vega.”48 Central to the song’s lyrics are the verses “¡Hola!, que llevarme dejo / sin orden y sin consejo, / y que del cielo me alejo, / donde no puedo llegar” (Hello!, I let myself be carried / without order or advice, / and from the heavens I am distanced, / to where I cannot arrive).49 These lyrics, together with the illustrations and allegorical words inscribed on the frontispiece, serve to draw an ekphrastic depiction of what

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Figure 6.1  Juan Bautista Morales (1605).

Justina recounts in her story. Specifically, as the central figure of this image, Justina’s example will take her and the picaros down a path in which they forget order and advice, which distances them from the divine and guides them to donde no puedo llegar (where I cannot arrive). Of course, where one must not arrive would be to Death with a lost soul, if we read this story in a moralistic light.

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It is also significant to consider the location of these boats as crossing the Río del Olvido. Olvidar, to forget, may be an authorial suggestion to forget these picaros and their example as they sail off toward Death. Despite this, the river, as mentioned above, is also a physical transitionary boundary that presumably carries the picaros from one bank to the next. This transition takes place in much the same way that the prostitutes would leave the city of Salamanca by crossing the river Tormes during Lent, only to have the university students retrieve them during the carnivalesque transitional phase of Lunes de Aguas. Unlike male picaros, their female counterparts relied upon sexual allure to subsist in the margins of society.50 This undoubtedly positions Justina within the life of prostitution on homogeneous terms with the women of the mançebias of Salamanca. Noteworthy of attention concerning the Río del Olvido is that the picaresque literary tradition was born in the river Tormes in the form of Lazarillo, from a mother who was likewise suspected of exercising a profession in the sex industry: “Mi nascimiento fue dentro del río Tormes”51 (My birth was in the river Tormes).52 Thus, in carnivalesque-grotesque fashion, the roles of male-female and respectableunrespectable/prostitute are inverted as Justina captains her vessel, thereby positioning the traditionally lowly member of society—a picara—at the helm of a group of male picaros. Likewise, she guides her ship through a transitional phase from existence to forgotten, following the river of Olvido, all of which creates a humorous image that fulfills the Bakhtinian vision of the carnivalesque-grotesque. The interpretation of this picaresque tale as an account of lifestyles to avoid redoubles in strength when we factor in the gender of the protagonist and the medical terminology the author utilizes to correct her behavior. Not only does this “desconcertante tipo de pícaro hembra” (disconcerting type of female picaro) yield the reader a double disguise of being female and picaro, but Justina also fetters her story to discourses of medicine and disease.53 In the “Prólogo al Lector” (Prologue to the Reader), López de Úbeda outlines the arguments he wishes to touch upon throughout the novel, linking his picaresque tale to medicine. “Pero será de manera que en mis escritos temple el veneno de cosas tan profanas con algunas cosas útiles y provechosas . . .” (But in my manner of writings I will temper the venom of profane things with a few useful and worthwhile . . .).54 The medical-practitioner turned picaresque-author illustrates that he perceives the acts of mujeres libres (free women) along the lines of venom and he will demonstrate how to procure medicine from poison.55 “Usando de lo que los médicos platicamos, los cuales, de un simple venenoso, hacemos medicamento útil, con añadirle otro simple de buenas calidades, y de esta conmistión sacamos una perfecta medicina perfecta purgativa o preservativa . . .”56 (Using what we physicians speak of, a simple venom, we make useful medicine, by adding another

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venom of good qualities, and from this combination we get a perfect purgative medicine or preservative). He emphasizes the medical practitioner’s ability to create a purgative or preservative medicine out of venom by simply adding good qualities to it. The venom of which our author speaks is that of a “free woman” or woman of ill repute, and he later elucidates the purpose of this book as one of advice to those women, like so many treatises of the era. Likening these figures to an illness that requires an antidote aids in the construction of the author’s platform from which he will denounce these figures with medical terminology. Justina’s “Introducción General” is a noteworthy illustration of the protagonist and author’s use of medical terminology to elucidate the problem of “free women” in the body politic. The introduction to her tale is subtitled “La melindrosa escribana.” A common acceptation of the term melindrosa indicates an excessive use of words, actions, gestures, and expressions. The fact that Justina authors a prologue and a three-part “Introducción General” before she even commences to write her picaresque tale is an indicative and hyperbolized warning of the dangerous role that female voice plays for those following the guidelines of the established system. Furthermore, not only is she melindrosa but Justina is also the author, escribana, of her story beyond the introductory sections of the book. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the act of writing is referred to as pharmakon, a cure or remedy for forgetfulness. He also specifies that writing is a dangerous element that might harm those who misinterpret it.57 With this in mind, Justina outlines her erroneous path along the picaresque walk of life for her readership to heed the lessons of a “free woman,” and remedy their ill ways. Meanwhile, López de Úbeda reassures himself that the book’s readership will follow the correct path upon finishing each section of Justina’s introduction and chapters with aprovechamientos. The novel itself is a pharmakon that offers a dual interpretation. Within her introduction, Justina alludes to this when, while putting her thoughts on paper, she locates a hair on her pen and begins to lecture it. The abundance of introductory chapters and nonsensical talk with a hair on the end of her pen only further signify the author’s intent on ridiculing female voice, all of which creates a grotesque situation by elevating the lowly female voice to a position of authority. Nevertheless, the protagonist’s discussion with this hair provides an interesting segue into medical terminology that exposes female voice, and writing, as pharmakon. In The Antiheroine’s Voice, Edward Friedman notes how Justina ponders the hair’s significance as a possible “allusion to the loss of hair from venereal disease.”58 Friedman is not alone in this assertion. Justina’s deliberations concerning this troublesome hair lead her to put thoughts into the pen’s head, likening it to “las amargas memorias de mi pelona francesa”59 (the bitter memories of my pelona francesa). Bruno Damiani also

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suggests that the pelona francesa was a venereal disease, which is likely the more commonly known French Disease or syphilis in the English language.60 The hair on the end of this pen brings memories to Justina’s mind of a time when she suffered from this infirmity commonly associated with prostitution. Her ability to put her picaresque life on paper will quell those memories of illness and cure her if we understand the act of writing as pharmakon in the Platonic sense. Writing represents a cathartic action that aids the author in dealing with illness. The picara protagonist continues her dialogue with the hair expanding upon the purpose of writing down this tale as a curative act: “pretendo descubrir mis males, porque es cosa averiguada que pocos supieran vivir sanos si no supieran de lo que otros han enfermado”61 (I am attempting to discover my ailments, because it is a known thing that few understand how to live salubriously if they do not know what has made others ill). Similar to medical and social treatises of her time, Justina urges her readership to heed her written words as her very own cure to a physical disease of syphilis and her ideological ailment of an untethered life as a “free woman.” According to Justina, she wishes to discover her own ailments through the act of writing, which will also serve as an example to like-minded women. Nonetheless, the written word as pharmakon is a double-edged sword that requires proper guidance to appropriately administer it. It possesses qualities that will remedy a possible contagion but may also create a rift in the fabric of the social system. López de Úbeda’s aprovechamientos associate Justina’s venereal disease to the carnal sins that brought it on and he warns the reader not to follow in her steps, much like social treatises along the lines of Saavedra Fajardo’s Empresas políticas employ the medical/body metaphor to guide princes and kings on serious social matters. This very serious subject concerning physical and social illness or problems in treatises becomes the object of ridicule when situated within the context of picaresque fiction or the post-Lent folk-festival, Lunes de Aguas. Spain’s socioeconomic difficulties are inversely represented in the festal figure of Padre Putas and the picaresque figure of Justina by positioning them as a focus of social ridicule. Bakhtin posits that “Medieval laughter is directed at the same object as medieval seriousness.”62 Consequently, in a carnivalesquegrotesque context, laughter directed at social ills releases tension in similar fashion to the cathartic release Justina seeks by recounting her life. Laughter revives and rejuvenates since it is “directed toward” the upper stratum of society and creates an inverse social order, thereby evoking social interaction: male picaros become female, male ship captains become female, the lowly Padre Putas becomes the center of social life, and so on.63 “One might say that it [laughter] builds its own world versus the official world.”64 And it is within these alternate worlds that Bakhtin’s ideas of the carnivalesque find a

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universal meaning of human social interactions. The reversal of social order and the laughter it produces serve to underscore the arbitrary nature by which social hierarchies are constructed, and in the end, figures akin to Padre Putas and the picara Justina situate societies’ darkest secrets in the spotlight through carnivalesque-grotesque laughter. NOTES 1. Archival research for this project was aided by the NeMLA Summer Fellowship grant of 2017. 2. For an overview of carnival in the Spanish tradition, see Julio Caro Baroja, El Carnaval (Análisis histórico-cultural) (Madrid: Taurus, 1965); for further explanation of Saturnalia, see Eliseo Serrano Martín, “Julio Caro Baroja y sus estudios sobre las fiestas,” Historia Social 55 (2006): 148. 3. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. 4. Ibid., 19–20. 5. For Bakhtin, literature of early modern Europe remains connected to medieval society, and indeed the prehierarchical and Romantic spiritual order, in terms of the essence of carnival values. For this reason, he focuses most of his analysis on Renaissance examples, and it is also for this reason that the Spanish picaresque fits into this Bakhtinian mold of carnivalesque-grotesque exploration with such ease. 6. Quevedo’s protagonist forever strives to achieve his goal of becoming a gentleman, having been born to the lower stratum of the social structure. The author repeatedly thwarts the picaro-protagonist’s attempts at realizing his goal until we are eventually confronted with Pablos’s final sentiments, which happen to also be his only moralistic or ideological message throughout the whole story: “determiné . . . de pasarme a Indias . . . a ver si, mudando mundo y tierra, mejoraría mi suerte. Y fueme peor . . . pues nunca mejora su estado quien muda solamente de lugar, y no de vida y costumbres.” See Francisco de Quevedo, El Buscón, ed. Domingo Ynduráin (Madrid: Cátedra, 2007), 308. Quevedo’s final message clearly alludes to his own desire for the Vagamundos of the world to change their way of life, and he most probably advocates for the members of the body politic to simply accept the conditions into which they are born. For a contextualization of Quevedian thought, see Ariadna García-Bryce, Transcending Textuality: Quevedo and Political Authority in the Age of Print, (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). 7. James Iffland’s seminal study dedicates an entire chapter to Quevedo’s Buscón, albeit his interpretation of the grotesque is markedly different from Bakhtin’s understanding: James Iffland, Quevedo and the Grotesque Vol. II (London: Tamesis Books, 1978), 76–140. Likewise, there have been more recent studies that do indeed focus on a Bakhtinian grotesqueness, including Valentín Pérez Venzalá’s “Del bufón al pícaro,” and Julio Vélez-Sainz’s “¿Amputación o ungimiento?” Valentín Pérez Venzalá, “Del bufón al pícaro. El caso de La pícara Justina,” DICENDA. Cuadernos

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de Filología Hispánica 17 (1999): 215–250. Julio Veléz-Sainz, “¿Amputación o ungimiento?: Soluciones a la contaminación religiosa en el Buscón y el Quijote (1615),” MLN 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 233–250. 8. David Castillo and Nicholas Spadaccini, “Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Light of Current Political Culture,” Critica Hispanica 19.1, (1997): 1–13. For an overview of socioeconomic crises in early modern Spain, see J H Elliot, Spain and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); also see José A. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986). 9. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro De La Lengua Castellana O Española, eds. Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra (Madrid: Universidad de Navarra; Iberoamericana, 2006), Carnal. 10. Ibid., Carnestolendas. 11. Michael Holquist, “Prologue,” in Rabelais and His World, eds. Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), xviii. 12. Ibid., xviii. 13. Pedro de Covarrubias’s Remedio de jugadores (1519), Francisco de Alcocer’s Tratado del juego (1559), Adrián de Castro’s Libro de los daños que resultan del juego (1599), and Francisco Luque Faxardo’s Fiel desengaño contra la ociosidad y los juegos (1603) are but a few of these treatises; see Enrique García Santo-Tomás, “Outside Bets: Disciplining Gamblers in Early Modern Spain,” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 152. 14. “Decree on Reformation,” in The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. James Waterworth (London, 1848): 152–170. 15. García Santo-Tomás, “Outside,” 151. 16. Michael Scham, “Concepts of Play in Literature of Golden Age Spain,” Hispanófila 135 (2002): 48. 17. García Santo-Tomás, “Outside,” 150. 18. Enriqueta Zafra, Prostituidas por el texto: Discurso prostibulario en la picaresca femenina, (Purdue University Press, 2008), 1. 19. Ibid. 20. Juan de Mariana, Tratado contra los juegos públicos, ed. José Luis Suárez García (Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2004), 115. 21. The historical origins of this celebration that relate to Felipe II’s royal edict have not been documented as of the date of this study. There is some official documentation concerning brothels in the form of the city ordinances of Seville, which were later transcribed and applied to the city of Salamanca and the Kingdome of Castile. These ordinances document the suppression of prostitution during Lent, but do not make direct reference to Lunes de Aguas as such. See “De mançebía, y mugeres publicas,” Ordenanças desta ciudad de Salamanca que por su mandado recopiló Don Antonio Vergas de Caravajal Regidor Perpetuo della, Archivo Municipal de Salamanca, Sección Gobierno, Ordenanzas Municipales, Caja 3257, Lib. 424, Título XXXV, 1619.

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22. Juan Francisco Jordán Montes, “De las fiestas del Lunes de Aguas al Cortejo de San Jenarín: caos ritualizado, avatares del carnaval,” Culturas Populares. Revista Electrónica 7 (julio-diciembre 2008): 5. 23. Francisco Javier Lorenzo Pinar, Fiesta religiosa y ocio en Salamanca en el siglo XVII (1600–1650), (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2010), 75. 24. Luis E. Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares and Roberto Martínez del Río, Estudiantes de Salamanca (Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2008), 51. 25. Lorenzo Pinar, Fiesta, 75. 26. “De mançebía, y mugeres publicas,” Titulo XXXV. 27. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 20. 28. Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1979), 48. 29. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 20. 30. Ibid., 40. 31. Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares and Martínez del Río, Estudiantes de Salamanca, 51. 32. Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Empresas políticas, ed. Sagrario López Poza (Madrid: Cátedra, 1999), 416–417. 33. For references to López de Úbeda’s medical background, see José A. Maravall, La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI Y XVII) (Madrid: Taurus, 1986), 328; and also Bruno Damiani, “Introducción,” in La Pícara Justina, ed. F. López de Úbeda (Madrid: Turanzas; Potomac, MD: Studia Humanitatis, 1982). 34. As the protagonist recounts her story, the omniscient narrator annotates each paragraph with glosses in the margin. In Libro Primero, Capítulo Primero, Número Primero, in addition to various other locations throughout the text, the author reveals several defining motes (sobriquets)—usually a derogatory nickname—of Justina as a person prone to speak with frequency: “Motéjala de parlera y enrededora” (López de Úbeda 88). (Apply to her the sobriquet of talkative and troublemaker). 35. David Mañero Lozano, “Introducción,” Libro De Entretenimiento De La Pícara Justina, ed. F. López de Úbeda (Madrid: Cátedra, 2012), 55. 36. Marcel Bataillon, Pícaros Y Picaresca: La Pícara Justina, trans. Francisco R. Vadillo (Madrid: Taurus, 1969), 185. 37. Francisco López de Úbeda, La Pícara Justina, ed. Bruno Damiani (Madrid: Turanzas; Potomac, MD: Studia Humanitatis, 1982), 112. 38. Luc Torres, “Introducción,” La Pícara Justina, ed. F. López de Úbeda (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2010), 49. 39. Maravall, La literatura picaresca, 240. 40. Ibid., 240. 41. Ibid., 327–328. 42. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 34. 43. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 44. This is not to say that conversations do not occur in other picaresque narratives. In the Lazarillo de Tormes, for example, Lazarillo’s mulatto half-brother has a brief exchange with his father. Nonetheless, this exchange is related to us as a past

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occurrence from a third person, Lazarillo. Justina, on the other hand, is speaking to us—readership—while simultaneously speaking to the hair on the end of her pen, in the present. 45. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 34. 46. Aprovechar, or to take advantage of something or someone, is obviously what these short glosses are doing with Justina. They quite literally take advantage of Justina’s story for the purpose of teaching moralistic lessons. 47. For further discussion on the significance of the images on the frontispiece, see A. A. Parker, Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599–1753 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967); or: Mañero Lozano, “Introducción,” 65–66. 48. Parker, Literature, xi. 49. Ibid., xi. 50. Enriqueta Zafra illustrates that even though Justina holds claim to virginity throughout her story, until matrimony, she demonstrates characteristics normally associated with active participation in prostitution, such as her allusions to suffering from syphilis “y sus actividades en el mesón como aprendiz del comercio carnal de la madre.” See Zafra, Prostituidas, 79. I view Zafra’s affirmation that Justina and most picaresque women are prostitutes as a logical conclusion, no matter how much the pícaras deny it. 51. Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. Francisco Rico (Madrid: Cátedra, 2006), 12. 52. Francisco Rico suggests that Lazarillo’s mother exercised prostitution in the horse stables, but it should be noted that she also cleaned the clothes of students, who were known to frequent women of questionable moral values. See Lazarillo de Tormes, 15.; Also see Francisco Rico, “Introducción y notas,” Lazarillo de Tormes (Madrid: Cátedra, 2006), 15. 53. Bataillon, Pícaros, 185. 54. López de Úbeda, La Pícara Justina, 42. 55. The term mujer libre, circulated widely throughout Habsburg Spain, refers to women who do not maintain an immediate overseeing patriarchal connection; prostitutes, widows, adulteresses, and procuresses comprise this category. 56. López de Úbeda, La Pícara Justina, 43. 57. See: Jaques Derrida, “The Pharmakon,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 58. Edward Friedman, The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 86. 59. López de Úbeda, La Pícara Justina, 56. 60. Damiani, “Introducción,” 56. See also Jon. Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and R. K. (Roger Kenneth) French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 61. López de Úbeda, La Pícara Justina, 57. 62. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 88. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid.

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WORKS CITED Arrizabalaga, Jon, John Henderson and R. K. (Roger Kenneth) French. The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. Bataillon, Marcel. Pícaros Y Picaresca: La Pícara Justina. Translated by Francisco R. Vadillo. Madrid: Taurus, 1969. Caro Baroja, Julio. El Carnaval (Análisis histórico-cultural.) Madrid: Taurus, 1965. Castillo, David and Nicholas Spadaccini. “Lazarillo de Tormes and the Picaresque in Light of Current Political Culture.” Critica Hispanica 19.1 (1997): 1–13. Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de. Tesoro De La Lengua Castellana O Española. Edited by Ignacio Arellano and Rafael Zafra. Madrid: Universidad de Navarra; Iberoamericana, 2006. Damiani, Bruno. “Introducción.” in La Pícara Justina. Edited by F. López de Úbeda. Madrid: Turanzas; Potomac, MD: Studia Humanitatis, 1982. “Decree on Reformation.” in The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent. Edited and Translated by James Waterworth. London (1848): 152–170. Derrida, Jaques. “The Pharmakon.” in Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. “De mançebía, y mugeres publicas.” Ordenanças desta ciudad de Salamanca que por su mandado recopiló Don Antonio Vergas de Caravajal Regidor Perpetuo della. Archivo Municipal de Salamanca, Sección Gobierno, Ordenanzas Municipales, Caja 3257, Lib. 424, Título XXXV, 1619. Elliot, J. H. Spain and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Friedman, Edward. The Antiheroine’s Voice: Narrative Discourse and Transformations of the Picaresque. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. García-Bryce, Ariadna. Transcending Textuality: Quevedo and Political Authority in the Age of Print. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011. García Santo-Tomás, Enrique. “Outside Bets: Disciplining Gamblers in Early Modern Spain.” Hispanic Review 77, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 147–164. Godwin, Joscelyn. Robert Fludd: Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1979. Holquist, Michael. “Prologue.” in Rabelais and His World. Edited by Mikhail Bakhtin. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984. Iffland, James. Quevedo and the Grotesque Vol. II. London: Tamesis Books, 1978.

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Jordán Montes, Juan Francisco. “De las fiestas del Lunes de Aguas al Cortejo de San Jenarín: caos ritualizado, avatares del carnaval.” Culturas Populares. Revista Electrónica 7 (julio-diciembre 2008): 1–21. Lazarillo de Tormes. Edited by Francisco Rico. Madrid: Cátedra, 2006. López de Úbeda, Francisco. La Pícara Justina. Edited by Bruno Damiani. Madrid: Turanzas; Potomac, MD: Studia Humanitatis, 1982. Lorenzo Pinar, Francisco Javier. Fiesta religiosa y ocio en Salamanca en el siglo XVII (1600–1650). Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2010. Mañero Lozano, David. “Introducción.” in Libro De Entretenimiento De La Pícara Justina. Edited by F. López de Úbeda. Madrid: Cátedra, 2012. Maravall, José A. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986. ———. La literatura picaresca desde la historia social (siglos XVI Y XVII). Madrid: Taurus, 1986. Mariana, Juan de. Tratado contra los juegos públicos. Edited by José Luis Suárez García. Granada: Editorial Universidad de Granada, 2004. Parker, A. A. Literature and the Delinquent: The Picaresque Novel in Spain and Europe, 1599–1753. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967. Pérez Venzalá, Valentín. “Del bufón al pícaro. El caso de La pícara Justina.” DICENDA. Cuadernos de Filología Hispánica 17 (1999): 215–250. Quevedo, Francisco de. El Buscón. Edited by Domingo Ynduráin. Madrid: Cátedra, 2007. Rico, Francisco. “Introducción y notas.” in Lazarillo de Tormes. Madrid: Cátedra, 2006. Rodríguez-San Pedro Bezares, Luis E. and Roberto Martínez del Río. Estudiantes de Salamanca. Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2008. Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de. Empresas políticas. Edited by Sagrario López Poza. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999. Scham, Michael. “Concepts of Play in Literature of Golden Age Spain.” Hispanófila 135 (2002): 41–59. Serrano Martín, Eliseo. “Julio Caro Baroja y sus estudios sobre las fiestas.” Historia Social 55 (2006): 135–152. Torres, Luc. “Introducción.” in La Pícara Justina. Edited by F. López de Úbeda. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 2010. Veléz-Sainz, Julio. “¿Amputación o ungimiento?: Soluciones a la contaminación religiosa en el Buscón y el Quijote (1615).” MLN 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 233–250. Zafra, Enriqueta. Prostituidas por el texto: Discurso prostibulario en la picaresca femenina. Purdue University Press, 2008.

Chapter 7

Contextualizing Bakhtin’s Intuitive Discoveries The End of Grotesque Realism and the Reformation Yelena Mazour-Matusevich

This study proposes a working hypothesis that aims to substantiate Bakhtin’s theory concerning the aesthetic concept of grotesque realism, by placing it against theological background of the sixteenth-century Europe. More specifically, the study seeks to respond to Bakhtin’s ideas pertaining to the end of grotesque realism, which, according to him, occurred shortly after the publication of Francois Rabelais’ masterpieces, and to the ascent of new aesthetics that began immediately afterward. Using Bakhtin’s own hints, the chapter argues that the theological perspective, although ostensibly absent from his work, sheds a new light on Bakhtin’s assessment of the sixteenthcentury aesthetic revolution that he describes, in his own idiosyncratic terms, in Rabelais and His World. BAKHTIN’S THEORY OF GROTESQUE REALISM One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. (Nietzsche)1

Although Bakhtin’s concept of grotesque realism has been extremely influential and has become almost pervasive in Western academia, a minimal presentation is in order.2 Bakhtin introduced this concept in Rabelais and His World but never gave it a clear definition.3 He describes rather than 137

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defines grotesque realism as a “peculiar aesthetic concept . . . which differs sharply from the aesthetic concept of the following ages,”4 a “non-individualized, incomplete and constantly intertwined with the earth,”5 “a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming . . . the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis.6 The Russian philosopher calls grotesque realism an artistic expression of humanity’s organic and material connection with “the single procreating earth . . . the collective, growing, and continually renewed body of the people.”7 Following Friedrich Nietzsche, who “was the first philosopher to call explicit attention to the body, particularly in relation to representation,”8 in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin makes corporeality his priority, linking it to all that is positive and creative in life. In his binary view of medieval culture―people/elite, body/mind, open/closed, laughter/ seriousness, freedom/oppression―grotesque realism belongs to the brighter side of collective, bodily, joyful, material, open, and free life of the people. The church and official, ecclesiastical culture, on the other hand, embody the other, dark side, the “icy petrified seriousness,”9 “infused with elements of fear, weakness, humility, submission, falsehood, hypocrisy . . . violence, intimidation, threats, prohibitions.”10 Within this binary opposition, grotesque realism persisted in constant conflict with, and in spite of, the oppression of medieval church culture. Then, in the middle of the sixteenth century, right after Rabelais, the ongoing conflict between the official culture of seriousness and the unofficial culture of grotesque bodily laughter abruptly ended, much to Bakhtin’s regret, with the victory of the former, the destruction of the latter, and the creation of the modern art canon, which he detested. His entire aesthetic theory operates within “before and after grotesque realism” framework, where the sudden end of grotesque realism is perceived as a European cultural catastrophe for which he offered no explanation: “The sixteenth century represents the summit in the history of laughter and the high point of this summit is Rabelais’ novel. After this work, a rather sharp descent starts with the Pleade.”11 Bakhtin’s insights most relevant to our objective might be summarized as the following: 1. Grotesque realism played a major role in aesthetic expression of a premodern Europe. 2. This form of expression dominated European cultural scene from antiquity to the second part of the sixteenth century. 3. There is a fundamental distinction between the aesthetics of grotesque realism and modern art forms. 4. The shift from grotesque realism to classical (or modern) art canon was revolutionary rather than evolutionary in nature.

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5. The second half of the sixteenth century is the point of cultural and aesthetic no return for Western civilization. 6. Grotesque realism is associated with artistic heterogeneity, while modern art is associated with homogeneity. The Russian scholar came up with these ideas in isolation, working alone, more than seventy years ago, before World War II. Being neither a historian nor an anthropologist, he formed his theories based solely on his intuition and scarce sources he had to rely on in his long imprisonment and subsequent exile under Stalin’s regime. Geoffrey Harpham is right in pointing out obscurity and ambiguity of Bakhtin’s terminology and his “overuse of the term ‘grotesque,’” which is never fully explained.12 Indeed, all attempts to match Bakhtin’s description of what he calls “grotesque” with art forms generally described with this term fail to grasp the meaning of his theory. Bakhtin’s lack of scientific clarity and logical organization appears to be justified here, however, if one takes into account the fact that these characteristics are essentially alien to the phenomenon that he actually describes in Rabelais and His World. This becomes clear once one realizes that “his true subject is not grotesque art but mythological consciousness,”13 which “belongs to the borderline between art and life.”14 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White remark on “the convergence of Bakhtin’s thinking and that of current symbolic anthropology,” pointing to striking correlations between his understanding of premodern mind-set and findings of structural anthropology: “Bakhtin and Lévi-Strauss “have much in common in their treatment of the ritual or the carnival, which can be traced back historically to ritual performance.”15 To be sure, even an amateurish reading of Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane16 reveals correspondence between Bakhtin’s characteristics of popular festive culture, described in his own ingenious terms, and Eliade’s anthropological findings concerning premodern consciousness. Among these correlations are the notion of cyclic return to “terra mater,” “the idea of the renewal of time and the regeneration of the world,” “openness to the world,” “a symbolism of death and a new birth,” and the idea that “death is not final, that it is always followed by new birth.”17 Historical anthropologists also generally agree with Bakhtin that the holistic and sacred worldview persisted from the most remote and archaic times up until the Renaissance because “the relationship of the ‘lofty’ and ‘low,’ the sacred and the profane, in eddic poetry and in the late medieval religious novella, remained somewhat similar.”18 Bakhtin’s description of people’s life, where “the cosmic, social, and bodily elements are given as an indivisible whole,”19 also coincides with Eliade’s depiction of the mythical “paradigmatic” or total consciousness through which man “succeeds in living the universal.”20 Historical anthropologists

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Jacques Le Goff and Aron Gurevich identified this reality as, respectively, “archaic (agricultural) mentality” and “collective consciousness,” while Mircea Eliade named it the “sacred mode of being.”21 Bakhtin’s astonishing ability to sense and describe this anthropological reality single-handedly, without access to research and data, led some critics to imply Bakhtin’s preChristian sensibilities.22 Whether it is true or not, his view of premodern collective consciousness is undeniably nostalgic. His festive folk are “drunken philosophers,” oblivious of themselves and relieved of themselves during the festival’s “joyous recreation,”23 merging into “the collective ancestral body of all the people.”24 “It is ecstatic collectivity, the superseding of the individuating principle in what Nietzsche called ‘the glowing life of Dionysian revelers.’”25 Bakhtin seems to have given the terms of “carnavalesque culture” and “grotesque realism” to the anthropological phenomenon that Mircea Eliade defined as “the periodical retrogression of the world into a chaotic modality.”26 “Chaotic” is a central characteristic in Eliade’s rendition of premodern sacred worldview, and so it is in Bakhtin’s depiction of grotesque realism. The renewed focus on concept of chaos, likely also of Nietzschean origin, offers the key to understanding of Bakhtin’s view of premodern culture and of art forms he associated with it, as well as to his perception of what he identifies as modern aesthetics. Although both traditional interpretations of chaos—as a chasm before there was any order or creation, and as the eternal potential, transpire in Bakhtin’s rendering of grotesque realism, it is the second understanding that strongly prevails. For Bakhtin, the primordial abyss is a life-generating cornucopia of the familiar mother earth, bursting and pouring forth her abundance.27 All abstract, ideal, metaphysical categories (soul, faith, virtue, spirit, God) are sterile. In Rabelais and His World, he prefers “earth and its lower stratum as a fertile womb, where death meets birth and a new life springs forth”28 to any form of perfect yet unearthly, abstract reality whatever it might be.29 The Russian philosopher sides, with Nietzsche, against “the fundamental, yet impossible, task of modernity―the imposition of order onto chaos.”30 His grotesque realism is “the eternal and original artistic power”31 that naturally welcomes “a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception or selection,”32 actively embracing “unholy, forbidden, contemptible, fateful.”33 His position in Rabelais and His World is characterized by the readiness “to perceive not merely the necessity of those sides of existence hitherto denied, but their desirability,”34 and by the welcoming of “the most detested and notorious” aspects of being as “more powerful, more fruitful, truer sides of existence, in which its will finds clearer expression.”35 In Rabelais and His World, “various deformities, such as protruding bellies, enormous noses, or humps, are symptoms of pregnancy or of procreative power,” and

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hell itself appears as a “cornucopia” or a bottomless source of creativity that “had burst and has poured forth abundance.”36 Bakhtin perceived Renaissance in general and Rabelais’s work in particular as the arena of the final battle between chaos-inclusive and chaos-exclusive cultures in the West, as the last “tense struggle against the stabilizing tendencies of the official monotone culture . . ., the struggle of the grotesque against the classic canon.”37 CATHOLIC GROTESQUE? I had come to see that though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone. (Augustine, Confessions)38

While Bakhtin’s depiction of premodern collective mind-set has been substantiated by cultural and historical antropologists, his purely negative evaluation of medieval church has been significantly challenged and reevaluated by medievalists. Already in 1972, Aron Gurevich rejected Bakhtin’s binary opposition between good simple folks and the evil medieval church, describing the premodern Catholic worldview as a “subjective-anthropocentric position,” where “the palpable and physically visible world is contiguous with the suprasensual world.”39 Ten years later, in 1982, art historian Geoffrey Harpham identified this contiguousness as the main organizing force of the medieval universe, calling it the “principle of dependency.”40 Philosopher André Malraux defined this principle even earlier in his 1960 book The Metamorphoses of the Gods: “Rome found God’s presence immanent in all things and . . . sought to discover God in all he had created.”41 Accordingly, the existence of premodern art forms—characterized by the synthesis of “lower” bodily and higher spiritual elements, which is so representative of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism—is no coincidence but a consequence of deeply rooted theological views of Christian dogma itself.42 Among these views was the idea of incarnation, the Augustinian theodicy, according to which “disordered non-being contributes to the ordered beauty of the whole,”43 and the belief that through the intervention of the Roman Church, “the whole existing world came to be regarded as God’s creation, and thus absolved.”44 Evidencing consistency of this theological position, Thomas Aquinas reiterates, almost thousand years after Augustine, that “the disorder must itself bear validity to the validity of order.”45 The theology of immanence allowed the premodern church to rationalize the incorporation of its antagonist into itself, “preserving a Neolithic paganism of which we have almost no other traces, so that myth lives in the Church and nowhere else.”46 Instead of being completely excluded from the sacred edifice of the Church, the monstrous,

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the scary, the repulsive sides of existence were restrained within it, like the gargoyles firmly attached and integrated into the sacred space of the Gothic cathedral. The grotesqueries and other monsters demonstrated that “incoherence and disorder, too, have been attended to, and that motley has a place in the grand scheme.”47 Consequently, the premodern Catholic culture appears to be the very carrier and preserver of grotesque realism, as Bakhtin understood it, rather than its slayer. This reevaluation of medieval Catholic culture obviously conflicts with Bakhtin’s vision of the medieval Catholicism as exclusive, narrow minded, and closed to life. His beloved grotesque realism persisted not despite medieval Catholicism, but thanks to its theological principles. The collapse of “grotesque mode of being” has more to do with the advent of the Reformation(s), which openly attacked the mythological consciousness, which the premodern Roman Catholic Church had been willing to accommodate. THE GROTESQUE AND THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION Bakhtin’s depiction of aesthetic war on premodern artistic canon, leading to its demise, corresponds to the uncompromising position of the early modern Protestant theologians determined to eliminate the remnants of the mythical consciousness―the essence and foundation of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism― from the Christian worldview.48 Bakhtin himself points in this direction: “In the sixteenth century Protestant circles deplored the joking and degrading use of sacred text in familiar verbal intercourse . . . of the continual profaning use of sacred words during drinking bouts.”49 Already Martin Luther maintains a clear distinction between the earthly and heavenly matters, resulting in two distinct relationships that man has with the two spheres: “coram Deo and coram hominibus.”50 In Zwingli and Calvin, this tendency is even more pronounced.51 Feeling an irrepressible aversion to uniting the divine and the human, Protestant theologians insisted on the sharp and insurmountable distinction between the “spirit” and the “flesh”: “For it [spirit] dweleth not amidst the sensible and bodily, and hath nothing in common therewith.”52 Similarly, Calvin states that “Flesh must therefore be flesh; spirit, spirit—each thing in the state and condition wherein God created it.53 This study will focus on the impact of the latter theologian because Calvin’s influence “in relation to the most fundamental difference between medieval and modern mindsets”54 was the most geographically broad and universal in scope. Calvinist theology, which is the most systematic, is believed to have the most tangible and profound impact on visual arts and literature. Finally, Geneva reformer was the most articulate and coherent opponent of the Catholic concept of

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immanence,55 and, more specifically, unequivocally positioned himself as an enemy of chaotic modality in all its expressions. In his theology chaos and harmony, concepts, which are not central to the Christian doctrine, take sudden and unprecedented importance. While Bakhtin does not explicitly name Calvin as the one who “purified religion from materiality and brought to it the [pure] spiritualism of common sense,”56 his hints in Rabelais and His World do point in this direction. He repeatedly mentions the Geneva reformer, calling him agelasta  (Greek Ἀγέλαστος, meaning smile-less), and an enemy of laughter, merriment, and humor,57 stressing the fact that “he [Rabelais] was also attacked from the Protestant side by Calvin.”58 Insisting on the total otherness of God, he rejects “confusionism”59 of those who “unwisely mingle the elements,” which “have a completely different nature from one another,”60 and opposes what he calls “unite et conionction naturelie” (harmonious union)61 to “an ill-patched hodgepodge”62 of Catholic “coniuration” (alliance, grouping). This distinction is crucial. While “coniuration” allows for an amalgamation of potentially alien elements, the conjunction forms the unity within the ‘same,’ that is, within the elements of the same essence. Calvin’s “coniunction” is based on the idea of purity, which he saw as the divine archetype.63 Purity is a restrictive concept for it can be neither partial nor relative. It is, by definition, absolute. Needless to say, while medieval Catholic conjuration could sanction grotesque realism, Calvin’s conjunction would have no place for it: “God loves modesty and purity, all uncleanness must be far from us. We should not become defiled with any filth or lustful intemperance of the flesh.”64 Consequently, all “mixed” forms of expression, all “local conjunction or contact or some gross form of enclosing,”65 were to be abolished.66 While Luther insisted on the complete dissimilarity between the prefallen universe, which was characterized by harmony and perfection, and our world of sin, where “even the sun and moon appear as though they put on sackcloth,”67 in Calvin the contrast between what God had made over the course of the six days of creation and the state of the universe after the fall is even more notable: “The earth was so marred by the deluge, that we retain scarcely a moderate portion of the original benediction. Even immediately after the fall of man, it had already begun to bring forth degenerate and noxious fruits, but at the deluge, the change became still greater.”68 All that is out of order and seemingly chaotic in creation is the fruit of human sin:69 “There is some deformity of the world, which ought by no means to be regarded as in the order of nature, since it proceeds rather from the sin of man than from the hand of God.”70 For Calvin, order is divine and disorder ungodly: “Disorder had crept into . . . nature [which] is rather the order prescribed by God.”71 Calvin is also the one who regularly speaks of “rude and unpolished . . . shapeless chaos.”72 Reading his work, one gets the

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sense of a real terror of an ever-threatening, enclosing chaos, always ready to devour the world hanging solely on God’s Word. His purely biblical association of chaos with water, as Bible does not talk about chaos per se if not as waters, combined with the Ptolemaic geography of the flat earth, resulted in Calvin’s belief that, if it were not for God, water, which is lighter than earth, would cover the surface of the world.73 We are very far from Bakhtin’s joyful cornucopia, which he detected in Rabelais’s works written and published between 1534 and 1564, that is in the same years as Calvin’s Institution de la religion chrétienne, which appeared in 1536, 1541, 1959, and 1560.74 New theological views found almost immediate reflection in the arts. While for Luther art was a matter of indifference—“[Christians] are free to have them [images] or not”75—Calvin pushes artistic expression further to the periphery of Christian experience. Not hostile to visual arts as such, he mostly sought to dissociate art from the sacred, insisting on the invisibility of God.76 Reducing artistic expression to the category of “useful,” Calvin sees art as serving one of the two legitimate purposes: edifying (or moral) and gratuitous (or decorative). The first was to remind people of their sins. The second was allowed for recreation.77 What was left of premodern grotesque was recycled according to these two uses. In 1611, Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues already describes grotesque as “pictures wherein (as please the Painter) all kinds of odde things are represented without anie peculiar sense, but only to feed the eye.”78 Grotesque’s use for the edifying purposes promptly transformed it into a staple of propaganda and a powerful satirical weapon in the ideological wars between supporters and opponents of the Reformation, as well as within the Protestant camp.79 Once more, Bakhtin himself intuited that the “interpretation of the grotesque image as purely satirical, that is, negative”80 had to do with Reformation: “Exaggeration becomes a caricature. The beginning of this process is found even in early Protestant satire”;81 and “the Protestant satire is the heir to grotesque realism.”82 Under the pressure of Protestant theological views and policies, ranging from direct prohibitions to more subtle methods of persuasion, grotesque realism was wiped out from visual arts. Thanks to printing press Calvin’s judgments and opinions quickly reached his followers, and his idea of conjunction was quickly put to work. Responding to the “irreconcilable dissonance and fragmentation in postlapsarian time,”83 Huguenot artists invested their talents in building a “fire wall against the dark, willful chaos of fallen, fleshy matter.”84 Philibert de l’Orme (1514–1570), a crypto-Calvinist architect,85 states that he wants to “assemble and sew together properly the pieces that are now in disarray and that cry out for reorganization . . . All that is needed is to display the principles and method of this restructuring.”86 Calvinist artist Bernard Palissy (1510–1589) declared “the primacy of a hidden, interior world―the world of the spiritual

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heart―over the ‘dead letter’ of inanimate appearances.”87 This is a complete reversal of premodern aesthetics cherished by Bakhtin.88 Aesthetic Views of the Catholic Reformation It would be incorrect to assume that Protestant artists were the only ones affected by the Reformation’s new aesthetic views. On the Catholic side, Protestant perspective also brought an acute awareness of religious beliefs and practices that had previously been seen as customary, and which the Catholic Church, fearful of accusations of idolatry from the Protestants, had to reconsider. Such practices concerned the absence of defined policy regarding the image use in the church, religious literature, or liturgical theater, and even such daily routine as the tolerated presence of animals in churches. The Catholic reaction to the Protestant criticism took two forms, one negative and the other positive.89 The first essentially consisted in prohibitions and restrictions imposed on artists, instructions about what not to do. This policy, which had a strong “‘Protestanizing’ flavor,”90 imposed on local priesthood the duty to purge all that appeared “profane, false, fantastic, indecent or superstitious”91 from the churches. The second reaction took the form of a concern to reform religious art in such a way as to put it beyond the reach of Protestant criticism.92 These were recommendations about what to do differently. By focusing on prevention and repression of scandals, the Catholic position was initially losing its leadership and originality in aesthetic warfare. For example, in order to avoid further attacks on Catholic permissiveness, the Council of Trent (1545–1563) banned religious plays like miracles and mysteries, which were already banned in Protestant territories. The Roman Catholic Church adopted, at least in the beginning of the Catholic Reformation, positions in many ways similar or even coinciding with Protestant interdictions. The new idea of ecclesiastical supervision of the arts had an immediate impact on the aesthetic policies of provincial councils. The councils summoned Catholic artists to approach their mission with “more seriousness and force of mission,” keeping in check their imagination and limiting themselves to “the severity of the composition and austerity of the decorum.”93 Already in 1550 the artist Pierre Pourbus (1523–1584) was asked to eliminate from the paintings by the late medieval Belgian artist Jean Provoost (1462/65– 1529) all ecclesiastical figures placed in “hell.”94 Cardinal and Archbishop of Bologna and the famous chronicler of the Council of Trent, Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1597) urged the complete exclusion of grotesqueries from ecclesiastical art. In connection with Trent, it was ordered that the offending nudity be covered in Michelangelo’s works. An influential Flemish Catholic theologian Johannes Molanus (1533–1585) turned the vague recommendations of the

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Council of Trent into minutely detailed instructions for artists, demanding simplicity of cloths and surroundings, and forbidding depiction of nudity, including babies, with drapes completely covering the genitals.95 Molanus’s directives were widely enforced in Catholic countries. Archbishop of Milan and papal secretary under Pius IV, Saint Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) was at pains removing all traces of nudity in his diocese,96 and censuring all sculptures that appeared to him to be “difformes, maladroites, prétant à la derision.”97 Jesuit theologian and papal envoy Antonius Possevinus (1533–1611), in his book De Poesi et Pictura, also professed that art should be “not merely chaste, but decent and dignified,”98 and insisted on artists respecting “the necessary rules of propriety,” while forbidding them painting “lascivious and pagan images.”99 Both Possevinus’s book and the Dialogue on the Error of Painters (1564) by Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano (died in 1584) are obsessively preoccupied with the issue of propriety. Catholic theologians also reiterated Calvin’s views in their vigorous condemnation of all “pitture miste,” and of all cohabitation of profane and sacred elements.100 These prohibitions led to the complete disappearance of scenes familiar to medieval viewer: drolleries, animals, and “mixed creatures.” Despite the Catholic emphasis on the educational function of religious images, the Church of Rome also inadvertently shared the Protestant principle of literal understanding of the Bible as well as the Lutheran position that “a work of art ought to be orderly (ordentlich).”101 Saint Carlo Borromeo, for example, prohibited all elements that were “oiseux, inutiles, destinés au seul plaisir de l’oeil ou de l’esprit” in religious paintings to be displayed in churches.102 Just like their Protestant counterparts, Catholic reformers were now guided by the fear of mixing earthly with the divine, the horror of confusion and the obsessive, all-controlling attitude. Both Protestant and Catholic reformers become obsessed with the idea of total control. Consequently, grotesque realism did not fare better in the Catholic than in the Protestant milieu. As the result of the sixteenth-century theological revolution, both Protestant and Catholic Reformation movements, though with significant differences that cannot be addressed here, adopted a rather similar attitude toward grotesque premodern aesthetics. On both sides of the theological divide, it produced two major outcomes. The first consists of waging war on chaos and its manifestations—wild nature, body, raw emotions, sexuality, crime, or disease—as well as on forms of expression associated with chaotic modality—carnival, medieval theater, “gauloiseries,” grotesqueries, or other “mixed forms.”103 The second outcome consists of the already mentioned rationalistic and deliberate use of grotesque as either a satirical weapon or a decorative device, which neutralizes the remnants of grotesque’s dangerous, chaos-related nature. The rapidity and abruptness in the transformation of mental attitudes in the sixteenth century are truly amazing.104 By seventeenth

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century, grotesque realism is all but dead: “The ambivalence of the grotesque can no longer be admitted. The exalted genres of classicism are freed from the influence of the grotesque tradition.”105 Even though Bakhtin did not identify the Reformation(s) as the beginning of awareness of the essential correspondence between grotesque aesthetics and chaotic modality, he was able to become aware of this new awareness, its timing, its consequences, and its fundamental, world-changing and worldshaping importance. His theory, which some historians dismissed and some characterized as a “charming myth,”106 as the one that cannot withstand detailed historical scrutiny,107 succeeded in revealing the most essential difference between premodern and modern worldviews, the one, in my opinion, from which all the others derive: the stance toward chaos. In this Bakhtin was correct. NOTES 1. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” 129. 2. For ‘Bakhtiniana,’ to name just few, see: Craig Brandist and Galin Tihonov, ed. Materializing Bakhtin: Bakhtin’s Circle and Social Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Carol Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Thomas J. Farrel, ed. Bakhtin and Medieval Voices (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1995); Vadim Linezky, AntiBakhtin―Luchshaya kniga o Vladimire Nabokova (St. Petersburg: Kotlyakov, 1994); Peter Stallybross and Allon White, The Politics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986); and many others. 3. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Further on Bakhtin will be cited according to this edition as (Balhtin: page number). Deborah J. Heynes, “Bakhtin and the Visual Arts,” in Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde, A Companion to Art Theory, 293–303, 293: “Bakhtin never defined aesthetics explicitly.” 4. Bakhtin, 18. 5. Ibid., 24. 6. Ibid., 24. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Dalia Judovitz, The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 6. On Nietzsche and Bakhtin, see Y. Mazour-Matusevich, “Nietzsche’s Influence on Mikhail Bakhtin’s Aesthetics of Grotesque Realism,” Journal Comparative Literature and Culture, 11 (2), 2009, online. 9. Bakhtin, 73: “The very contents of medieval ideology asceticism, somber providentialism, sin, atonement, suffering, as well as the character of the feudal regime, with its oppression and intimidation all these elements determined this tone of icy petrified seriousness.”

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10. Bakhtin, 94. 11. Bakhtin, 101. Bakhtin’s division is naturally superimposable on the separation between the analogical universe and “the great enclosure” of classical age proposed by another Nietzschean, Michel Foucault. What Foucault deplores as enclosure of the modern world corresponds exactly to the “closure” described by Bakhtin. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 143. 12. Geoffrey Harpham, On the Grotesque (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 51. 13. Harpham, On the Grotesque, 51. 14. Bakhtin, 7. 15. Peter Stallybross and Allon White, The Politics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 17. 16. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World Inc., 1959), 147. 17. Eliade, 141, 147, 167, 192, 157. Eliade, 192: “for all archaic societies, access to spirituality finds expression in a symbolism of death and new birth.” 18. Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, ed. & trans. Jana Howlett (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), [hereafter: HA], 175, my italics. Grotesque images from the Elder Edda, described in his Historical Anthropology―mile-deep kettles, a giant grandmother with nine hundred heads, bulls used as bait for fishing etc.―irresistibly bring to mind Rabelais’s hyperboles (Gurevich, HA: 160). 19. Bakhtin, 19. 20. Eliade, 212. 21. Jacques Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 10; Gurevich, HA., 99; Eliade, Sacred and Prophane, 15. 22. Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 184. 23. Bakhtin, 91. 24. Ibid., 19 25. Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 19. 26. Eliade, 79. 27. Bakhtin, 91. 28. Ibid., 395. 29. Here Bakhtin’s celebration of the mother earth echoes the typically Russian religious sensitivity to the cult of the mother earth, which survived, according to Fedotov, up to recent times (The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1, 36). 30. Klatell, “Modernity and the Dinner Party,” 2. “Then, relying on Bakhtin, I will examine the carnivalesque as an aesthetic which denies the underpinnings of the project of modernity.” 31. Nietzsche, BT: 25: 143. 32. Nietzsche, WP: 1041: 536. 33. Nietzsche, WP: 459: 252. 34. Nietzsche, WP: 1041: 536–537. 35. Ibid.

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36. Bakhtin, 91. 37. Bakhtin, 433. The struggle described by Bakhtin is easily identifiable with the struggle between Dionysian and Apollonian types of cultures. Ralph Abraham in his famous book Chaos, 1994, seconds Nietzsche and Bakhtin in his diagnosis: “Following the Renaissance, first came the basic split between matter and spirit.” (15). 38. St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (New York: Penguin Classics, 1961), 149. 39. Gurevich, A. Ya. Categories of Medieval Culture, trans. G. L. Cambell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 87. Hereafter: CMC, page number. 40. Harpham, On the Grotesque, 188. 41. André Malraux, The Metamorphosis of the Gods, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1960), 186. 42. Gurevich. MPC, 181. For concrete examples, see Ernst Curtius, R. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans by W. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952), 417–434, and Gurevich, Historical Anthropology. 43. Andrew Taylor, “Playing on the Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Descretals,” in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed. by Thomas J. Farrell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 17–37, 29. 44. Malraux, Metamorphosis of the Gods, 186. 45. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, II, I, 82.3 & II, I, 85, 3, in Gottfried W. Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981), 8, note 18. 46. Harpham, On the Grotesque, 83. 47. Ibid. 37. 48. Regarding the attitude toward premodern aesthetics, it seems justifiable to speak about Protestants in general. As Peter Burke put it in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978, 216–218): “The reform of popular culture in Catholic Augsburg meant showing St. George without the dragon . . . Lutherans were more tolerant than Zwinglians and Calvinists, but Lutherants were strickter than Luther.” Anabaptists had an even more uncompromising position. 49. Bakhtin, 87. 50. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. by Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Bellingham WA: Fortress Press and Concordia Publishing House, 1900–1986), De servo arbitrio, vol. 18, 720–721, 748–753. 51. Ralph Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), 139: “In his doctrine of the Last Supper, as in his teaching on the two natures of Christ, Calvin departs significantly from Luther by insisting on the radical distinction between the human or earthly and the divine.” 52. S. M. Jackson and C. N. Heller., eds. Zwingli: Commentary on True and False Religion (Durham, NC, Labyrinth Press, 1981), cited by Denis R. Janz, A reformation Reader, 195. 53. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by Ford Lewis Battles, ed. by John T. McNeil (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), Institutions, book IV, Chapter 17, section 24, page 1391. Hereafter: Calvin, book, chapter, section, page. 54. Ralph Hancock, Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics, 7. I agree with Heiko Oberman who believed Calvin, and not Luther, to be the foremost Protestant in the movement. For Oberman’s argument, see The Two Reformations: The

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Journey from the Last Days to the New World, ed. by Donald Weinstein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). On Calvinist stand toward chaotic modality, see Y. Mazour-Matusevich, “The Calvinist Stance toward Chaotic Modality: The Case of Visual,” in Protestant Traditions and the Soul of Europe (Leipzig, Evangelische Verlag, 2017). 55. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I: V:5: 57: “Some persons, moreover, babble about a secret inspiration that gives life to the whole universe, but what they say is not only weak but completely profane.” Jérôme Cottin, Le regard et la parole: une théologie protestante de l’image, 290: “Calvin dénonce certes toute conception immanentiste d’un Dieu présent . . .”  56. Doumergue, L’art et le sentiment, 6. 57. Bakhtin, 351. 58. Ibid., 269. 59. Cottin, Le regard et la parole, 301: “Calvin a défendu l’altérité de Dieu face a tout confusionnisme.” 60. Calvin, Institutes, IV: 20: 2: 1486. 61. Calvin’s Commentaries, trans. John King, [1847–50], (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing: 1963), Vol. 39: Corinthians, Part I: http://www.sacred-texts. com/chr/calvin/cc39/cc39018.htm. 62. Calvin, Institutes, IV: 10: 12: 1190. 63. Calvin, Institutes, II: 8: 51: 415: “now it will not be difficult to decide the purpose of the whole law: the fulfillment of righteousness to form human life to the archetype of divine purity.” 64. Calvin, Institutes, II: 8: 41: 405. 65. Calvin, Institutes, IV: 17: 16: 1379. 66. Dietz-Rüdiger Moser convincingly argues that the geography of carnival corresponded and changed according to the geography of Catholic and Protestant territories. See “Lachkultur des Mittelalters: Michael Bachtin und die Folgen seiner Theorie,” Euphorion, Bd. 84 (1990): 89–111, 99: “While the feast was assiduously maintained on the Catholic side, an evident rejection opposed it on the evangelical side. . . . One good Bonn pastor put into words: ‘Our Lord is not prince carnival, but Jesus Christ.’ The 16th century evangelical Church orders abolished popular feast regarded as ‘popish,’ while it persisted on the Catholic side and was reinstalled in the territories regained by Catholics. Indeed, it continually played a focal role in the Catholic world centers, in Rome as in Venice, in Mainz as in Cologne, in Munich as in Rio de Janeiro.” My translation. 67. Luther, Lectures on Genesis, 2:8, WA 42:68:35. 68. Calvin, Commentaries, Genesis, ch.1, 100. 69. Calvin, Commentaries, 1, Genesis, ch. 1, 177: “The inclemency of the air, frost, thunders, unseasonable rains, drought, hail, and whatever is disorderly in the world, are the fruits of sin. Nor is there any other primary cause of diseases.” Or, in Genesis 3:18: “[B]y the increasing wickedness of men, the remaining blessing of God is gradually diminished and impaired; and certainly there is danger, unless the world repent, that a great part of men should shortly perish through hunger, and other dreadful miseries” (Ibid., 175).

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70. Calvin, Commentaries, Genesis, ch. 1, 104. 71. Calvin, Institutes, I: 5: 5: 58. 72. Calvin, Commentaries, Genesis, 73. 73. C. R. Jody, Calvinism and the Arts: A Re-assessment 181. 74. The juxtaposition of Rabelais and Calvin appears, although sporadically and inconsequentially, in Bakhtin’s book itself. He recognizes that Rabelais and Calvin created modern French language. However, it is no secret that it is far easier for a modern French reader to read Calvin than Rabelais. It is Calvin’s language that is modern, not Rabelais’s. 75. Luther, Complete Works, 51:81. 76. Calvin, Institutes, I: 11: 2: 101: “God’s majesty is sullied by an unfitting and absurd fiction, when the incorporeal is made to resemble corporeal matter, the invisible the visible likeness, the spirit an inanimate object.” 77. Jody, Calvinism and the Arts, 3: “Calvin uses the Latin word ‘imago’ to describe certain acceptable art forms, such as histories that have epistemological value in teaching and admonishing. He also favors landscapes” (Jody, p.3). See Calvin, Institutes, I: 11: 12: 112: “Within this class some are histories and events, some are images and forms of bodies without any depicting of past events. The former have some use in teaching or admonition; as for the latter, I do not see what they can afford other than pleasure.” 78. Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: 1611). 79. Thus, the vast majority of objects exposed in the Museum of the Reformation in Geneva are caricatures of the ever-changing political foes, rivaling in gross exaggeration and fantastic monstrosity. 80. Bakhtin, 306. 81. Ibid., 63. 82. Ibid., 184. 83. Kamil, Neil. Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1577–1751 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 119. 84. Kamil, Fortress of the Soul, 61. 85. Katherine Randall, 19. 86. Philibert, Architecture de Philibert de l’Orme oeuvre entire, contenant onze livres, augmentee de deux (Rouen, 1626, reprint London, 1981, III, ix, 71). James Simpson argues that the sixteenth century’s increasing homogeneity in arts and literature resulted from the excessive administrative centralization, which “provoked practices that stress the values of unity” (Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1)I would suggest that the homogeneity in artistic and literary domains might be better explained by the sixteenth-century theological revolution. It seems sensible to believe that in regard to a textual phenomenon, such as literature, the theological factor should be given consideration. The opposed sets of practices, which Simpson uses to illustrate the medieval culture as the culture of reform and the early modern culture as the culture of revolution—juxtaposition versus coherence, accretion versus cleanness of line, addition versus conversion, totality versus purity—correspond to theological differences between medieval Catholic and Protestant worldviews.

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87. Kamil, Fortress of the Soul, 51. 88. Bakhtin’s account of the end of grotesque realism as a sudden and deliberate destruction of the otherwise healthy late medieval popular culture finds confirmation in Eamon Duffy’s celebrated book The Stripping of the Altars. Examining the abundant art-historical evidence, Duffy argues, independently and seemingly unaware of Bakhtin’s theory, that the Reformation, which should more appropriately be called Revolution, brought an abrupt, rapid, and violent end to the still vigorous and vibrant medieval spirituality and culture. Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 4: “The Reformation was a violent disruption, not the natural fulfilment of most of what was vigorous in late medieval piety and religious practice.” 89. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1978, 215: “Catholic reform tended to mean modification, Protestant . . . abolition.” 90. Michalski, The Reformation, Introduction, xii. 91. Olivier Christin, Une révolution symbolique, l’iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique (Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1991), 261. 92. See Keith Moxey, Pieter Aertsen, Joachim Beuckelaer, and the Rise of Secular Painting in the Context of the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 93. Christin, Une révolution symbolique, 256 and 282. For further research on Catholic Reformation art see Anthony Blunt, Art et architecture en France 500–1700. English version. 94. Christin, Une révolution symbolique, 284. 95. Molanus’ De picturibus et imaginibus sacris is not the only influential text on this matter and is cited here as an example. Two other texts, Discorso sulle imagine sacre e profane by Gabriele Paleotti (1582–1599) and l’Arte de la Pintura by Francisco Pacheco (1622–1644) share the same concerns. See Pierre-Antoine Fabre, “Décréter l’image? La XXVe session du concile de Trente,” in De invocatione, veneratione, et reliquiis sanctorum, et sacris imaginibus (Paris, Les belles Lettres, 2013), XVI: “L’Arte de la Pintura de Pacheco propose de semblables surprises, lorsque par exemple, au même chapitre de la nativité, et discutant de la nudité de Jésus, Pacheco note qu’il est « préférable de baisser les yeux avec humilité et de rendre la peinture conforme à l’Écriture sainte.” VII: un seul exemple : Pacheco proscrit de représenter, dans le moment de l’Annonce, la conception de Jésus sous la forme d’un homonculus, parce que, dit-il, ce serait tomber dans l’hérésie en niant la double nature du fils de Dieu. 96. René Taveneaux, Le catholicisme dans la France classique 1610–1715 (Paris: SEDES, 1980), Vol. 2. 449. 97. Taveneaux, Le catholicisme, 452. 98. Pierre Janelle, The Catholic Reformation (Simon & Schuster, 2007), 165. 99. Janelle, Catholic Reformation, 162. 100. On the Church policy to restrict artistic imagination, see Von Schlosser, J. La litterature artistique, (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), 429–432. 101. Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts, 193. 102. Taveneaux, Le catholicisme, Vol. 2, 449.

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103. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2007), 83: “both their action in expelling the sacred from the worship and social life and . . . building their order, tends to drive out the enchantment from the world.” Joan Dejean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002), 19: “the most significant turning point ever in the history of the discourse of sexuality, the moment at which an extraordinary continuum from antiquity to the sixteenth century finally came to end” (Ibid., 33): “The tolerance for ‘gauloiserie’ suddenly came to an abrupt end.” 104. According to Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, 218: “the body is dealt its most devastating blow . . . by Descartes.” “En sorte que ce moi, c’est-à-dire l’âme par laquelle je suis ce que je suis, est entièrement distincte du corps” (Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed., Geneviève Rodis-Lewis [Paris, Flammarion, 1966], 60). Also see Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 53). The subject of Descartes and his impact on the modern aesthetics lie outside this chapter. 105. Bakhtin, 101. 106. Yelena Mazour-Matusevich, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aaron Gurevich,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 35, 1, (2005), 135. 107. This is a traditional reproach to Bakhtin’s theory. In his book Zametki i Nabliudenia (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’ 1989, 163–164), Dmitry Likhachev remarks that “Bakhtin’s concept suffers [from]. . . a certain degree of non-historicity.” The same argument is made by Michael George, in “An Austere Age without Laughter,” in Misconception about the Middle Ages, eds. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby, see the website http://www.the-orb.net/non_spec/missteps/miscon.html. The German scholar Dietz-Rüdiger Moser in his article “Auf dem Weg zu neuen Mythen oder von der Schwierigkeit, falschen Theorien abzuschwören” (Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, 85 (1991): 430–437) also criticized Bakhtin on historical grounds.

WORKS CITED Augustine of Hippo, Confessions. New York: Penguin classics, 1961. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York, Ashgate, 1978. Calvin, John. Commentaries. Trans. John King, [1847–50]. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1963. ———. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. by Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeil. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960, Institutions, book IV. Cotgrave, Randle. A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues. London: 1611. Cottin, Jérôme. Le regard et la parole: une théologie protestante de l’image. Labor et Fides, 1994.

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Christin, Olivier. Une révolution symbolique, l’iconoclasme huguenot et la reconstruction catholique. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991. Curtius, Ernst R. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. W. Trask, New York: Pantheon Books, 1952. Descartes, René. Discours de la méthode. Ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis. Paris: Flammarion, 1966. Dejean, Joan. The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Doumergue, Emile. L’art et le sentiment dans l'oeuvre de Calvin. Geneva, 1902. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1992. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. Harcourt, NY: Brace & World Inc., 1959. Emerson, Carol. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Fabre, Pierre-Antoine. “Décréter l’image?La XXVe session du concile de Trente,” in De invocatione, veneratione,et reliquiis sanctorum, et sacris imaginibus. Paris: Les belles Lettres, 2013. Fedotov, George. The Russian Religious Mind, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1946. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977. George, Michael. “An Austere Age without Laughter,” in Misconception about the Middle Ages. Eds. Stephen J. Harris and Bryon L. Grigsby, http://www.the-orb.net/ non_spec/missteps/miscon.html. Greenberg, Mitchell. Baroque Bodies: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of French Absolutism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Gurevich, Aron Ya. Categories of Medieval Culture. Trans. G.L. Cambell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Gurevich, Aron. Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Ed. & Trans. Jana Howlett. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992. Harpham, Geoffrey. On the Grotesque. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Hancock, Ralph. Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Heynes, Deborah J. “Bakhtin and the Visual Arts,” in A Companion to Art Theory. Eds. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde. John Wiley & Sons, 2008, 293–303. Jackson S. M. and C. N. Heller., eds. Zwingli: Commentary on True and False Religion. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1981. Janelle, Pierre. The Catholic Reformation. Simon & Schuster, 2007. Janz, Denis R. A Reformation Reader. Fortress Press, 2008. Jody, Christopher Richard. Calvinism and the Arts: The Re-Assessment. Peeters Publishers, 2007. Judovitz, Dalia. The culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Kaufmann, Walter. The Portable Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part, “Zarathustra’s Prologue,” Penguin, 1977.

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Klatell, Chris. “Modernity and the Dinner Party: The Carnivalesque Nature of Eternal Return in Zarathustra Book. Four.” Unpublished paper. Williamstown: Department of Philosophy, Williams College, 1995. 1–24.  Le Goff, Jacques. Pour un autre Moyen Age. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Likhachev, Dmitry. Zametki i Nabludenia. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1989. Locher, Gottfried W. Zwingli's Thought: New Perspectives. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works, 55 vols. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann. Bellingham, WA: Fortress Press and Concordia Publishing House, 1900–1986, vol. 18. Malraux, André. The Metamorphosis of the Gods. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1960. Mazour-Matusevich, Yelena. “The Calvinist Stance toward Chaotic Modality: The Case of Visual,” in Protestant Traditions and the Soul of Europe. Leipzig, Evangelische Verlag, 2017. ———. “Nietzsche’s Influence on Mikhail Bakhtin’s Aesthetics of Grotesque Realism,” Journal Comparative Literature and Culture, 11 (2) (2009), online. ———, “Writing Medieval History: An Interview with Aaron Gurevich,” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (1) (2005). Menn, Stephen. Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Michalski, Sergiusz. The Reformation, and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1993. Moser, Dietz-Rüdiger. “Auf dem Weg zu neuen Mythen oder von der Schwierigkeit, falschen Theorien abzuschwören” Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, 85 (1991): 430–437. ———. “Lachkultur des Mittelalters: Michael Bachtin und die Folgen seiner Theorie,” Euphorion, Bd. 84 (1990): 89–111. Moxey, Keith and Pieter Aertsen. Joachim Beuckelaer, and the Rise of Secular Painting in the Context of the Reformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Neil, Kamil. Fortress of the Soul: Violence, Metaphysics and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1577–1751. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. O’Connell, Marvin R. The Counter Reformation. London: Harper & Row Publishers, 1974. Oberman, Heiko. The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last Days to the New World. Ed. Donald Weinstein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Philibert. Architecture de Philibert de l’Orme oeuvre entire, contenant onze livres, augmentee de deux. Rouen, 1626. Randall, Katherine. Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Schlosser, Julius von. La litterature artistique. Paris: Flammarion, 1984. Simpson, James. Reform and Cultural Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2002. Stallybross, Peter and White, Allon. The Politics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

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Taveneaux, René. Le catholicisme dans la France classique 1610–1715. Paris: SEDES, 1980. Taylor, Andrew. “Playing on the Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Descretals,” in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices. Ed. Thomas J. Farrell. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995, 17–37. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2007.

Chapter 8

Rejecting a Quixotic End Kenzaburo Oe’s Bakhtinian Reading of Don Quixote Yumi Tanaka

The Infant of the Mournful Countenance (Urei gao no douji, 2002, hereafter Mournful Countenance), Kenzaburo Oe’s novel, portrays an old Japanese novelist, who returns to his hometown at the late stage of his life. Choko Kogito, the protagonist, comes to ponder how to face the end of his life as a writer and as an independent man. The novel is the second volume of the “pseudo-couple” trilogy: the first volume is The Substituted Child: The Changeling (Torikaeko, chenjiringu, 2000) and the third one is Good-bye, My Books! (Sayounara, watashi no hon yo! 2005). The word “pseudo-couple” derives from Frederick Jameson’s review of Oe’s Somersault (Chugaeri, 1999, English version, 2003). Jameson explains it as “a vaudervillesque situation of neurotic dependency in which two differentially maimed and underdeveloped subjectivities provisionally complete each other” and traces it back to Don Quixote.1 Mournful Countenance features the pseudo-couple Kogito and Rose, an American literary scholar researching Kogito’s works. Upon Kogito’s decision to return to the Valley, his hometown in the rural area in the island of Shikoku, with Akari, his son, Rose decides to live with them in the Valley to support their life. She brings with her the modern library version of Don Quixote translated by Samuel Putnam into English. Rose tries to explain what happens to Kogito through comparison to Don Quixote. In such an attempt, Kogito and Rose self-consciously play the roles of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Rose observes Kogito’s decision to return to the Valley as an attempt to “re-read” his life and works at the end of his life. Mournful Countenance as an explicit allegory of Don Quixote is full of direct and indirect references to structure, characters, and episodes.

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Oe’s text seems to be eager to reproduce Cervantes’s world in itself, but it is awkward and, as Hisaki Matsuura says, “megalomaniac”2 to incessantly point out direct analogies to Don Quixote in the details of Kogito’s life in the Valley, a place located in a marginalized area in twenty-first-century Japan. This chapter attempts to show that the awkward connection between the two novels can be explained if mediated by Mikhail Bakhtin’s arguments on Don Quixote. Developing Bakhtin’s understanding of Cervantes, Mournful Countenance rewrites Don Quixote in the context of modern Japan. In Rabelais and His World (hereafter Rabelais), Bakhtin discusses the regenerating power in Don Quixote in his argument of grotesque realism. In “The Discourse in the Novel,” Don Quixote is a significant work where Bakhtin discusses self-criticism internalized in the genre of the novel. Oe’s text makes analogies mainly with carnivalesque episodes, which cause physical injuries, and with self-reflective structure, which is related to Avellaneda, who published a false sequel to Don Quixote. Mournful Countenance reinforces the regenerative power of Don Quixote, which Bakhtin argues decreases, and uses Don Quixote to show the complicated relationship between text and reality, by expounding Bakhtin’s observations on Don Quixote as a typical novel. Such frequent references, moreover, do not mean that Mournful Countenance is “loyal” to Don Quixote. Oe is not interested in forming coherent and direct parallels between the two texts. The most curious departure from Don Quixote is that Mournful Countenance rejects the ending of Don Quixote, which describes the dying Don Quixote criticizing chivalric romance and regretting what he has done. Even Rose, who is the reader of Kogito’s life using Don Quixote, warns Kogito to avoid a Quixotic end. Instead of Don Quixote, Oe introduces to his text the motif of “old mad man” from William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” which describes an old man furiously trying to survive the end of his life. This chapter aims to explain the imitative but somehow dismissive relationship of Mourning Countenance to Cervantes’s text. Considering Oe’s deep commitment to Bakhtin’s literary theory, I attempt to analyze the intertextuality to Bakhtin’s argument on Don Quixote. Bakhtin briefly analyzes it in Rabelais and some other writings, and finds a symptom of a decrease in the regenerative power of grotesque realism. I will show that Oe’s awkward and somehow insincere dependence on Don Quixote can be understood as a “re-accentuation” of Cervantes’s novel. Bakhtin defines “re-accentuation” as “to adopt various attitudes toward the argument sounding within the image, to take various positions in this argument and, consequently, to vary the interpretations of the image itself.”3 Sounding the image of Don Quixote, Oe picks up the arguments on the text/ reality relationship and the knight’s finale, and cultivates a new interpretation of Quixote’s image in Mournful Countenance.

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DON QUIXOTE, BAKHTIN, AND OE Bakhtin’s theoretical writing is an important reference in the field of Don Quixote studies. Bakhtin locates Don Quixote as a significant work both in the history of the novel in “The Discourse in the Novel” and in the tradition of grotesque realism in Rabelais. In Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Don Quixote is called “one of the greatest and at the same time most carnivalistic novels of world literature.”4 While Bakhtin, however, did not write an independent essay or a book devoted only to Cervantes, which makes Walter L. Reed find the “inconspicuousness” of Cervantes’s position in Bakhtin’s writing,5 Howard Mancing states that a section about the two lines of the development of the European novels in “The Discourse in the Novel” can be read as “a meditation on Don Quixote as the prototype of the novel”6 and “it is Cervantes, and not Rabelais, who dominates Bakhtin’s discussion of the novel.”7 In the introduction to Rabelais, Bakhtin carries out an analysis on degradation in Don Quixote. Degradation, “the essential principle of grotesque realism,” is “the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity.”8 For Bakhtin, Don Quixote is full of episodes and details that subvert the high, ideal, and abstract mainly represented by Don Quixote and chivalric romance, by lowering them to the level of earth and body, mainly associated with Sancho and everyday life. “The fundamental trend of Cervantes’ parodies is a ‘coming down to earth,’ a contact with the reproductive and generating power of the earth and of the body.” “Sancho’s materialism, his potbelly, appetite, his abundant defecation, are on the absolute lower level of grotesque realism of the gay bodily grave (belly, bowels, earth).” The grave is dug for “Don Quixote’s abstract and deadened idealism.” This burial is “a bodily and popular corrective to individual idealistic and spiritual pretense,” and “a regenerating and laughing death.”9 In this situation, Bakhtin finds the structure of a carnival, which makes it possible for popular culture to overthrow high culture. Bakhtin’s observation leads us to read Don Quixote as a place where high and traditional cultural world can be subverted and corrected by popular and humorous culture. After lowering the world of the idealistic knight by that of the earthy squire, “the gay principal of regeneration” follows.10 Bakhtin explains that “[t]o degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place.”11 Bakhtin, however, discusses that the bodily principle of regeneration, which is the most significant part in the cycle of degradation, is gradually weakened in Don Quixote. Bakhtin points out that “bodies and objects begin to acquire

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a private, individual nature; they are rendered petty and homely and become immovable parts of private life, the goal of egoistic lust and possession. This is no longer the positive, regenerating and renewing lower stratum, but a blunt and deathly obstacle to ideal aspirations.”12 Unfortunately this suggestive observation is not followed by any further textual analysis. Therefore, I supplement Bakhtin’s observation by investigating some episodes, for example, Sancho’s promise to whip his bottom 3,300 times and the ending of Don Quixote. In Chapter 71 of part II, Sancho is situated in the position of manipulating the duration of Dulcinea’s curse. Don Quixote uses money to persuade Sancho to whip his bottom spontaneously. Sancho is lured by the reward and accepts the master’s request, but deceives Don Quixote by pretending to whip the tree instead of his bottom. Ultimately, losing his patience, Quixote forces Sancho to whip himself. From the perspective of degradation, this episode portrays the tension between the high, Dulcinea, a product of Don Quixote’s idealism, and the low, Sancho’s bottom. Sancho’s bottom determines Dulcinea’s fate, but Don Quixote consequently acquires dominance over Sancho’s bottom with the power of money. Don Quixote’s threats and Sancho’s deception moreover make their relationship chilly. We can see the framework of degradation in this episode, but there is no actual reversal of the high and the low. The two are just struggling for dominance, and there are no correctional or regenerative moments. The ending of Don Quixote is also worthy of being discussed as more evidence of the weakened lower stratum. After a series of carnivalistic images and episodes through the whole story, Don Quixote returns to Alonso Quijano, the Good, and deeply regrets what he has done. He does not regenerate himself into a new man; he rejects himself as Don Quixote. His will forbids his niece to marry a man who knows what chivalric romances are. As Marthe Robert says, this end might be just a way of preventing another fake sequel like Avellaneda’s,13 but Don Quixote’s death does not promise any positive regenerating and renewing force. Another important argument is that Don Quixote is self-critical in its own novelistic language. In “The Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin says that the “auto-criticism of discourse is one of the primary distinguishing features of the novel as a genre,” and Don Quixote has “a literary, novelistic discourse being tested by life, by reality.”14 The test is divided into two categories. The first type “concentrates the critique and trial of literary discourse around the hero—a ‘literary man,’ who looks at life through the eyes of literature and who tries to live ‘according to literature.’”15 Don Quixote and Madame Bovary are mentioned as the best-known examples. The second type of the test “introduces an author who is in the process of writing the novel . . . as the real author of the given work.”16 Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy is mentioned as a typical example of this type, but the passage “the polemic of the

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author against the author of the projected second part” suggests Don Quixote is included in this type as well.17 Not limited to Bakhtin’s arguments on Don Quixote, Oe is deeply influenced by Bakhtin’s literary theory.18 Oe is particularly interested in the concept and mechanism of degradation, and he says that Bakhtin’s writing inspired him to develop folklores and experiences in his hometown for his works. Oe talked about his relationship to Bakhtin in his speech at the Nobel Banquet in 1994, showing a respect for Kazuo Watanabe, his mentor, who translated Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel into Japanese: In both my life and writing I have been a pupil of Professor Watanabe’s. I was influenced by him in two crucial ways. One was in my method of writing novels. I learned concretely from his translation of Rabelais what Mikhail Bakhtin formulated as “the image system of grotesque realism or the culture of popular laughter”: the importance of material and physical principles; the correspondence between the cosmic, social, and physical elements; the overlapping of death and a passion for rebirth; and the laughter that subverts established hierarchical relationships. The image system made it possible to seek literary methods of attaining the universal for someone like me, born and brought up in a peripheral, marginal, off-center region of peripheral, marginal, off-center country.19

This indicates Oe’s considerable interest in what degradation evokes, which Bakhtin described in Rabelais. More significantly, the image system, which is associated with material and physical principles, death as a regenerating force, and subversive power against hierarchy, encouraged Oe to find a way of reaching the universal through the peripheral, marginal, and off-center. Oe again wrote in detail about the connection of Bakhtin to his problematization of marginality in How to Make a Novelist Like Me first published in 1998, and revised in 2001, which is a year before the publication of Mournful Countenance. Oe regards marginality as “a decisive condition inscribed on my life.”20 He grew up in Ose Village (now a part of Uchiko town in Kita district), Ehime Prefecture on Shikoku, one of the four main islands of Japan. When World War II was over, Oe was an elementary school student in Ose in the nationalistic educational system, from 1941 to 1947. Oe retrospectively thinks that Japan after the war “looked like a country hidden in mysterious shadow if it is seen from Europe and the US, the center of cultures.”21 In addition to the fact that he is in Japan, far from the center of the world, Ose, his hometown, is in a marginalized place distant from Tokyo, the center of Japan. Even in Ose, Oe, who spent much time in more marginalized areas like “the hill in the woods and the edge of the river at the outskirts of the village,”22 identifies himself as “a child who was born and grew up in thoroughly marginalized local area.”23 At the triply marginalized space, young Oe, who experienced traditionally unique events and customs in his everyday life and

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was fascinated by local folklore, was able to accept it as a Bakhtinian world where “the new and the old, what is dying and what is born, and the beginning and the end of a change are there together, as Bakhtin says.”24 Bakhtin’s writing showed Oe the value and meaning of his childhood and how to expand it into his work. “The Valley” in Oe’s novels is a fictional place inspired by his childhood hometown, and he has described it as having a strained relationship to the Center. The Valley is not an independent and utopian space filled with mythic folklore and alternative histories. While Oe recognized the potential of the marginal through Bakhtin’s theory, he also knew that the marginal has an aspiration to be a part of the Center. Oe kept some distance from the nationalism in the educational system in the marginalized village during the war and to “the psychology of the marginal, which desires to be directly absorbed to the Center under the absolute emperor system of Japan.”25 Thus, Oe’s work, especially that featuring the Valley, is a fruit of his attentive reading of the mechanism of degradation in grotesque realism and the power of the periphery. He does not talk about Bakhtin’s reading of Don Quixote directly, but it is highly possible that he considered it when he expanded Don Quixote in Mournful Countenance. In the following sections, I will show that Mournful Countenance can be read as an attempt to read Don Quixote from Bakhtin’s

Figure 8.1  Ose Area in Uchiko City, Ehime Prefecture, Japan. The Valley, a fictional place Oe created in his novels, is inspired by this area, his hometown. Photo by the author, 2017.

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Figure 8.2  Mishima Shrine in Ose Area. Makihiko, a fictional priest of this shrine, appears in Mournful Countenance. Photo by the author, 2017.

perspective substantially and to re-accentuate Don Quixote with “the positive, regenerating and renewing lower stratum,” which, according to Bakhtin, was originally missing in Cervantes. MOURNFUL COUNTENANCE AS A RESPONSE TO BAKHTIN’S READING OF DON QUIXOTE This section discusses the possibility that Oe’s use of Don Quixote is a response to Bakhtin’s arguments that we saw in the last section. Bakhtin argues in “The Discourse in the Novel” that Don Quixote uses two different ways of criticizing its own language. One of the ways is to criticize literary discourse through “a literary man,” who lives by following literary texts. The other way is to reveal the real author in the process of writing the novel. Mournful Countenance shares both ways of testing with Don Quixote. First of all, Kogito is nothing but a literary man like Don Quixote and Emma Bovary in the sense that he reads his actual life through a variety of literary texts including his own works. Kogito and Rose always interpret certain situations and significant events in the Valley in connection to similar episodes in Don Quixote, and link each of several main characters to ones in Cervantes’s text. In addition to Kogito as Don Quixote and Rose as Sancho (she calls

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Figure 8.3  Koshindo, a small shrine, in Ose Area. Local residents, including Oe’s mother, have great faith in it. The sign was handwritten by Oe. Photo by the author, 2017.

herself “Sancha”),26 Makihiko, the priest of Mishima Shrine in the Valley, is Sansón Carrasco, and Matsuo, the priest of Fushiki Temple, plays the two roles of Priest and Barber. Kurono, Kogito’s college friend who encourages him to join a demonstration as an homage to the radical student movement in the late ’60s, is Ginés de Pasamonte. Mr. and Mrs. Tabe, the top of the Tabe financial group, is the Duke and Duchess, who make fun of Don Quixote and Sancho. Kogito and Rose view their surroundings as an allegory of Don Quixote.

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Kogito’s actual life as an allegory of Don Quixote forms an intertextual relationship to a variety of other books Kogito has read and written, as well as to some critical writings on his books. Rose shows her understanding that what Kogito attempts to do in the Village is an act of “re-reading”: As you [Kogito] often say, you came back to the woods with Akari because you realized that you entered into the late stage of your life, but don’t you think another reason is for “re-reading”? In your case, I don’t mean that you re-read other writers’ works. You can include them, but the most important text is all you have written and done.27

His life in the Valley, which is also described with words from Don Quixote, functions as a reality and “tests” the language of Don Quixote and other books he has read and written. The distinction of Kogito’s life from literary texts is blurred by showing a number of moments in which literary texts control and guide characters’ action. Mournful Countenance as a unity of Kogito’s life and literary texts takes part in another reality. The reality is shared with the actual reader outside the text, who has some information about Oe’s personal life. The reality depends on a number of similarities between Kogito and Oe. The Changeling, the first volume of the “pseudo-couple” trilogy featuring Kogito, includes a picture in which young Oe is sleeping on a mirror. Kogito’s details are almost the same as Oe’s. Kogito’s hometown is located in the valley in the woods of Shikoku, which reminds us of Oe’s hometown. Like Oe, a Nobel laureate, Kogito is an old novelist who was awarded an internationally known prize in literature. Akari, Kogito’s son, is also similar to Hikari, Oe’s son, who was born with a herniated brain and physically and mentally challenged. Most other family members are also paralleled with Oe’s real family. The list of Kogito’s novels also induces us to identify Kogito with Oe. The list of Kogito’s works includes Rugby Game in 1860, Correspondences for Nostalgic Years, and The Substituted Infant, while Oe wrote Football in 1860 (the title of English version is The Silent Cry, and a literal translation of the Japanese title is Football in the First Year of Man’en), Letters for Nostalgic Years, and The Substituted Child: The Changeling. These details force us to identify Kogito with real Oe. This exhaustively metafictional juxtaposition of Mournful Countenance with Oe as a real writer provides another moment of selfcriticism on the language of the novel. In the middle of the multilayered and self-critical structure, which Rose calls “the labyrinth of words,” Don Quixote is a model of the structure and at the same time a beacon of Kogito’s “quest”: Rose encourages Kogito, saying that “I hope it [your re-reading of all you have written and done] will not be a wander in the labyrinth of words, but a clearly directed quest for the life and death of a person in the late stage of life.”28 Guided by Rose’s encouragement

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and Don Quixote, Kogito starts to self-criticize what he has done and written, expecting the end of his life. According to Bakhtin, the second way of testing the language of the novel is to reveal the real author in the text. When he explains this, Cervantes’s use of Avellaneda’s sequel was in his mind. In Mournful Countenance, Kato Norihiro’s essay on Kogito’s The Substituted Infant (Torikae douji plays the role of the fake sequel. Kato is an actual literary critic, who was a professor at Waseda University. His name and essay are mentioned without any change. He actually wrote the essay on Oe’s The Substituted Child: The Changeling, which was published in a magazine named A Book (Issatsu no hon) from January to March in 2002. At that time Oe was working on Mournful Countenance, which was published in September 2002.29 Oe uses Kato’s essay as a criticism on Kogito’s The Substituted Infant. As Cervantes commented on Avellaneda’s forgery when he was writing part II, Oe probably read Kato’s essay while he was writing Mournful Countenance, the sequel to The Substituted Child: The Changeling. In Mournful Countenance, Kogito rejects Kato’s argument on The Substituted Infant, his novel. Kato speculates that Kogito and Goryo Hanawa, his wife’s brother and film director, were raped by young members of a local political group when they were high school students, and the traumatic incident was represented as a violent experience that the young people caught Kogito and Goryo and covered them with still warm and bloody cow skin. Rose encourages Kogito, who was very offended by the essay, to finish his story before Kato changes Kogito’s novel to “a different story,” comparing this case to Avellaneda’s.30 Like Avellaneda’s sequel, Kato’s essay, without any change, constitutes both Oe’s actual world and Kogito’s fictional world. The text crossing the border between reality and fiction tests the quality of the language forming the genre called the novel. Imitating the structure of Don Quixote, Mournful Countenance emphasizes the continuum between the world and text, the author and the protagonist, which challenges the autonomy of text and consequently the novel. The real author’s life is also included in “the labyrinth of words.” The model of the complicated structure is seen in parallel with Don Quixote, which guides the reader in the middle of the labyrinth. Thus, Mournful Countenance foregrounds and develops Don Quixote’s metafictional characteristics analyzed by Bakhtin’s arguments. RE-ACCENTUATING THE ENDING OF DON QUIXOTE In his argument on grotesque realism in Rabelais, Bakhtin points out that the regenerative power in Don Quixote diminishes. As we have already seen, the observation is persuasive if we consider, for example, Sancho’s episode of

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whipping his bottom and Don Quixote’s death. In this section, I will show that Oe re-accentuates the end of Don Quixote, substituting regeneration for what Bakhtin called degradation. In The Method of the Novel, Oe analyzes the structure of incessant parodies in Don Quixote. He focuses on Chapter 41, part II, where the mischievous Duke and Duchess force Don Quixote and Sancho to take a trip to the sky on Clavileño, a flying wooden horse. Oe attempts to clarify the structural and methodological aspects of the parody, but he puts an emphasis on Don Quixote and Sancho’s “human dignity gradually revealed by being ridiculed and scorned”31 at the end of parodies: We, the reader, doubtless find human dignity in the death of Don Quixote as a sane man and in his entire life and thought, considering even his life in madness too. Human dignity can be expressed solely by the literary and multilayered devices of this madness and laughter.32

In contrast to Bakhtin’s degradation, Oe seems to be interested in Don Quixote and Sancho’s “ascension” after incessant parodies and ridicules when he wrote this essay. Oe emphasizes Sancho’s ascension as the result of parody and ridicule too. When Sancho becomes the governor of the Island of Barataria and solves some puzzling problems the Duke’s servants provides, he demonstrates “the fool’s wisdom.” At the end of the whole story, Oe finds the ultimate ascension in Sancho’s words on his master’s deathbed. Sancho, who is associated with the role of the lower in Bakhtin’s degradation, lived the “enclosed life as a farmer” and “everyday life in sanity.” After the adventure with his master, he realizes “another lively world with self-release” and “the world where the power of imagination works.” While Sancho obtains a “great renewal of life,” Don Quixote dies regretfully without any promise of regeneration. Oe’s emphasis on Sancho at the end of this essay implicitly indicates that a variety of parodies, part of which can be regarded as degradation, does not bring about a regenerating power to Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s lack of regeneration justifies Bakhtin’s observation that the power of degradation comes to be weakened.33 Other literary characters as a result of re-accentuations of Don Quixote inherit the distance to this kind of regenerative end from their prototype. According to Tatevik Gyulamiryan, there are four main Quixotic traits in a variety of examples of the re-accentuation of Don Quixote: a reader, a dreamer, an adventurer, and a lover. The category of dreamers, who are unable to “acknowledge the unreasonableness of the goals,” includes Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Jay Gatsby from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and Daniel Quinn from Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985).34 Gyulamiryan observes that “the novels end in minor

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key; Don Quixote renounces his identity as a knight-errant, Ahab and Gatsby are killed, and Quinn simply vanishes from the novel.”35 The re-accentuated Quixotic dreamers created by three American novelists share with Don Quixote the difficulty of having a regenerative opportunity in the end. Kogito is also a result of re-accentuating the ending from the image of Don Quixote. In contrast to the three Quixotic dreamers who foreground the argument as it is, Kogito tries to re-accentuate Quixote in a different way. Mournful Countenance attempts to overcome the lack of Don Quixote’s regeneration, using and developing original episodes, especially the fight against windmills and Sansón Carrasco as the Knight of White Moon, both of which lead to the degradation of Quixote. In the episode of the windmills, Don Quixote, whose mind is full of imagined giants, literally goes up to the higher place blown by the wind and is thrown down, has a hard fall, and “was rolling over the plain.” As the passage “so great with which he and Rocinante had hit the ground” shows, Don Quixote is violently brought to the ground.36 In the fake fight against the Knight of White Moon performed by Sansón Carrasco, Sansón brought Don Quixote and Rocinante “to the ground in an exceedingly perilous fall (por el suelo una peligrosa caída),” and Don Quixote said “as if speaking from the grave (como si hablaba dentro de una tumba)” that the enemy could take his life.37 These two episodes are not only famous episodes but also typical moments of degradation, where, as Bakhtin says, someone associated with high concept and idealism is lowered into “the gay bodily grave (belly, bowels, earth).” In Mournful Countenance, these original episodes of degradation sneak into the portrayal of the two most serious accidents Kogito experiences. The accidents are more thoroughly degradative and closer to Bakhtin’s description of degradation than Don Quixote. One of the accidents happened when he was looking for an old picture at the warehouse of Fushiki Temple. Kogito found many wooden boxes on the board located on the wall near the ceiling, and decided to investigate them using a ladder. When he reached the board and extended his hand to some of the boxes, a passage from Don Quixote suddenly occurred to him: “Do not seek to flee, cowards and vile creatures you are, for it is a single knight with whom you have to deal!”38 The passage is what Don Quixote said just before the attack against the windmill. When Don Quixote’s words came to his mind, Kogito “found himself falling headfirst.” Falling down, Kogito kicked a number of funerary urns arranged on the shelf nearby. His left ankle got caught at the prop of the shelf. He found himself hung upside down, totally covered with the ashes of the dead. The details of these accidents include some significant elements of Bakhtin’s degradation, which are the reverse of the high to the low, upside down, and the metaphor of the death. Moreover, the picture Kogito was looking for portrayed a feast celebrated by people in the Valley about 200 years

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ago. The feast is for farmers who groaned under local government’s tyranny and raised a rebellion by abandoning their villages. Represented as a brilliant young boy in the picture, Meisuke Kamei hosted the party along with old people from the Valley. Men and women, guests and hosts of all ages, drink and eat something like colorful candies, which creates “a cheerful scene like a festival” and “the festive ambience.”39 Oe emphasizes the festive tone of the picture, and the picture causes Kogito’s degradative accident. Kogito was hospitalized after this accident, but he recovered quickly. Rose said to him again mentioning Don Quixote, “Don Quixote has such serious accidents as falling from the horse and being knocking down, but he always recovers from the injury, doesn’t he? Except the scene of his deathbed.”40 Rose’s words suggest that Oe recognizes the moment of recovery after each degradative episode except the end of the story. Thus, Kogito’s fall at the Fushiki Temple can be understood as a reemergence of degradation with the promise of recovery in a new context. In the other accident, which is linked to the fight between Don Quixote and Sansón Carrasco/the Knight of White Moon, Kogito falls into a narrow ravine from the trail named “the Road of the Dead.” The ringleader of this accident is Makihiko, the priest of Mishima Shrine in the Valley. At the beginning of the novel, Rose assigns him to the role of Sansón Carrasco, who directs his effort to correct Don Quixote’s madness and take him home. Kogito was waiting for the parade of the festival in the Valley, which moved along the Road of the Dead. Makihiko included a special performance in the parade, which is a reproduction of Peter, an occupational force personnel. Prior to Mournful Countenance, The Substituted Child: The Changeling furnishes some details of Kogito and Goryo’s relationship to Peter and of Peter’s tragic death as a result of the conflict with the political group, who covered Kogito and Goryo with cow skin. Kogito and Goryo saw Peter at the library of the Matsuyama Branch of Civil Information and Education Section. Peter was sexually fascinated by Goryo, a beautiful adolescent. The leader of the political group attempted to have Peter steal broken automatic rifles from the base, making use of Peter’s feelings toward Goryo. The group was planning to use the rifles when they attacked the base of the occupation army before the Peace Treaty of San Francisco came into effect. They expected that the self-sacrificial attack with broken weapons would evoke nationalism among Japanese people. What we are able to know is that when Peter was taking a bath with Goryo, he was assaulted by young members of the group, who seemed to try to rid Peter of a pistol he had with him for self-protection. Naked Peter was carried away by the members to the woods. Mournful Countenance provides us with some information about a few versions of rumors, which suggests what happened to Peter after the assault. Someone says that an American man, whose legs were totally

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crushed, escaped to the depths of the forest, crawling using only his hands. Ultimately Peter died. Kogito and Goryo have felt a sense of guilt about Peter’s death probably because they connected Peter to the group. The incident was a taboo among Kogito and Goryo, and they had not talked about it for a long time until Goryo planned to shoot a film about it. Goryo became a well-known film director, but killed himself before he completed the film. Kogito alone still suffers from Peter’s death. Makihiko, knowing Kogito’s unresolved guilt, made the festival parade include a performance portraying Goryo as a beautiful young man and injured Peter in the uniform of the occupational force and GI hat. Peter with broken legs is stuck to Goryo’s legs and approaches Kogito. Makihiko intends to provide Kogito with an opportunity to face the past and overcome the traumatic incident, but the performance just horrified Kogito. He fled in a panic, running into the woods, and fell down a narrow ravine. Rose again likens seriously injured Kogito to Don Quixote, suggesting that Kogito running in the wood reminds her of “tragic dignity and ridiculousness of Don Quixote falling from Rocinante.”41 This episode contains again the elements of degradation: physically falling, carnival, death, and an anticipation of regeneration.42 Thus, Kogito’s two accidents show typical characteristics of degradation, but they foreground the regenerative moment more than Don Quixote. In addition to intensified regenerative moments in Kogito’s accidents, we should consider the negative attitude toward Don Quixote’s end in Mournful Countenance. Rose does not accept the knight’s end as regeneration. After Kogito’s second accident, Rose distinguishes Kogito’s recovery from Don Quixote’s restoration to sanity, saying “I do not mean that I want you to be Don Quixote restored to sanity.”43 Makihiko shares the same attitude with Rose and gives words of encouragement to Kogito: “If you kick off the sanity of commonsense people, in contrast to Don Quixote’s repentance on his deathbed, I will follow you!”44 Rose continues “If you [Kogito] attempt to have Don Quixote’s adventure, I, your old friend Sancha, follow you as Makihiko, Sancho, does so!”45 Despite the explicit desire of imitating Don Quixote, Mournful Countenance shows a definite rejection at the end of the novel. After incidents causing degradations, Don Quixote passes away deeply regretting what he has done: “I realize how foolish I was and the danger I courted in reading them; but I am in my right senses now and I abominate them.”46 The rejection leads us to reconsider how Cervantes ended Don Quixote. It might be possible to read Don Quixote’s restoration to sanity as an ultimate regeneration, but Cervantes’s words justify Oe’s reading of the last scene. Instead of offering regeneration, Quixote suffers one, last degradation. After the knight’s death, Cide Hamete Benengeli completely seals off the protagonist in his grave.

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if perchance thou shouldst come to know him [Avellaneda], advise him that he should let Don Quixote’s tired and moldering bones rest in their sepulcher and not try to bear him off, contrary to all the laws of death, to Old Castile by raising him from that grave where he really and truly lies stretched out, being quite unable now to sally forth once again on a third expedition.47

In Benengeli’s closing passage, there is a final and utter degradation. Don Quixote is now “tired and moldering bones,” and “really and truly lies stretched out” in the grave. Benengeli forbids “a third expedition,” which could have been an opportunity for Don Quixote’s renewal or further development. Benengeli’s decision to eliminate Don Quixote’s future possibilities derives from the fear of more plagiarism, which is a result of a sense of “possession” which Bakhtin describes as a weakened power of regeneration in Don Quixote. Benengeli states “For me alone Don Quixote was born and I for him; it was for him to act, for me to write, and we two are one in spite of that Tordesillesque pretender.”48 The authorship becomes an obstacle for the full operation of degradation. Regarding regeneration, Mournful Countenance owes a debt not only to Don Quixote but also to folklore which tells the story of a mysterious boy called “the infant,” that has been handed down in the Valley. The infant’s spirit never dies. If he physically dies, he regenerates himself in the body of another boy. Meisuke, one of “the infant,” led a political riot just before the Meiji Restoration (around 1867). When he was executed, his mother came to see him in jail, and said “All right, no problem, if you are killed, I will give birth to you again soon.”49 In the legend of the infant, death is always followed by life. Death is even an expectation of new life. The regeneration represented here is different from the dignified image of Don Quixote emerging after incessant parodies, which, as we have already seen, Oe analyzed in The Method of the Novel. In a review for Mournful Countenance, the reviewer points out a sort of pretense in the idea that Kogito, who is similar to Oe, models himself on Don Quixote, “a character representing the soul of modern literature.”50 Oe responded to this review, saying “the critic does not have time to research how miserably characters based on Don Quixote are described in contemporary Western literature and Central and South American literature (my novel is the case too).”51 This response suggests that Kogito is one of such miserably described Quixotic characters. In other words, Mournful Countenance is not an effort to add Kogito/Oe to a list of great heroic characters/authors in the Western canon. Kogito is wounded all over his body, has been cheated by old friends, and must live with his son without many people’s support. Oe does not locate dignity after Kogito’s many troubles alone. Using the image of William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” Rose encourages Kogito to live as a

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“mad old man,” who continues to “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress” at the end of life.52 Kogito, who once translated this poem into Japanese by himself, feels that the poem is like “a song of me in this current situation.”53 In contrast to Don Quixote’s remorseful and quiet death, Kogito wants to live his remaining life energetically without any reconciliation even after quixotic troubles. Kogito is not looking for an end related to regeneration even if it turns out to be miserable. At the end of the novel, Kogito again receives a serious strike to his head, the higher part of Kogito’s body, that puts him into a coma. The novel ends before he wakes up from a coma; in other words, Kogito’s end is postponed. In Good-bye, My Books!, the sequel to Mournful Countenance, Kogito recovers from his long coma and finds in himself the birth of another Kogito. During my recovery, I truly realize that I am in the late stage of my life. I feel another me in myself, who is a little strange and like a color copy with only a little difference. The original me is the me who has written novels for a long time, but the other me seems to be the protagonist of a novel I wanted write but couldn’t, or young me, who was anxious to write the novel.54

Kogito metaphorically dies once and regenerates himself in the sequel. Kogito even anticipates “a kaboom moment,”55 which a rejuvenated Kogito may bring about even if Kogito’s remaining years are not so long. Oe definitely rejects the Quixotic end for the novels about Kogito, and makes Kogito pursue a new way of living. Reinforcing the degradation in Don Quixote with the emphasis on regeneration, Kogito’s renewed life is achieved at the beginning of Good-bye, My Books! The “kaboom moment,” which Kogito expects in his revitalized life, can be understood in the context of Edward Said’s argument on “late style.” Theodor Adorno’s critique of Beethoven’s late work led Said to find not “serenity and maturity” but “a bristling, difficult, and unyielding perhaps even inhuman challenge” and something “unreconciled, uncoopted by a higher synthesis” and “catastrophic”56 in late works of great artists including Richard Strauss, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Luchino Visconti. Oe and Said built up a friendship until Said passed away in 2003. Said’s On Late Style was posthumously published in 2006, but Oe came to link his work with Said’s concept from around 2003. In 2013, he published In Late Style (Ban nen yoshiki shu), another novel on Kogito. I do not mean to say that the concept of late style directly influenced Kogito’s survival described at the end of Mournful Countenance published in 2002 and at the beginning of Goodbye, My Books! published in 2005, but Oe’s vision of a catastrophic “kaboom moment” after degradation/death was elaborated at the same time in conversation with Said’s late style.57 Oe’s devotion to late style is not reconcilable to

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Don Quixote’s return to repentant Alonso Quijano and explains his use of the motif of Yeats’s mad old man. The role of Don Quixote in Mournful Countenance is an understandable model of an old man rereading “the labyrinth of words,” a complicated world consisting of literary texts Kogito/Oe read and wrote and Kogito/Oe’s realities. As Bakhtin suggested, Don Quixote put death at the end of the quest in the labyrinth. Supported by other literary motifs and the concept of late style, Mournful Countenance continues, and heads for another catastrophic quest, which is closer to Bakhtin’s concept of degradation in grotesque realism. CONCLUSION: ANOTHER POSSIBLE DON QUIXOTE ON THE PERIPHERY Despite the serious desire to imitate Don Quixote, Mournful Countenance refuses the Quixotic end as its own finale. It and its sequel come to be more attached to Kogito’s regeneration after degradation. How can we understand this relationship between Mournful Countenance and Don Quixote? Here we should remember what Oe learned from Bakhtin, the way of reaching the universal through the marginal. Don Quixote is one of the canons in the history of Western literature. Kogito’s story is about a writer in the tradition of Japanese literature, that is, non-Western literature, and develops itself on the periphery located far from the center of Japan, Tokyo. The story depends not only on the Western canon but also on unique folklore. The details of indigenous culture are connected to those in Don Quixote awkwardly, but Oe does not seem to conceal the awkwardness. When the motif of Don Quixote is not useful any more especially about the ending of the protagonist, Oe does not hesitate to deviate from the original and use another motif or concept. The awkwardness and deviation come from unbridgeable distance of Kogito’s life from Don Quixote, which is natural if we consider the differences of culture, history, and age. That means Kogito’s life described in the details of the culture in the Valley already achieves an independent world, which cannot be easily dominated by and assimilated to the canon. Kogito’s or Oe’s long writing career, through which he has elaborated the saga of the Valley, already acquires an autonomy. As we have seen, Bakhtin suggested to Oe a way of achieving the autonomy of the world of the Valley. If we consider the fact that Don Quixote sometimes gives way to other motifs and concepts, Mournful Countenance does something more than claim its own independence. When Itamar Even-Zohar says “There is no symmetry in literary interference,” he assumes a source literature (Don Quixote, in this case) “completely ignores” a target literature (Mournful Countenance).58 Following Bakhtin’s argument on Don Quixote, Mournful Countenance becomes

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another possible Don Quixote set on the periphery, this time with a different ending. Mournful Countenance is Bakhtinian rereading and re-accentuating of Don Quixote, which accomplishes a balanced and mutually stimulus relationship between the dominance of the text from the center and the subversive revision of the text from the periphery. This mutually dynamic relatedness between the periphery and the center is the direction that Bakhtin provided to Oe, allowing him to write his Quixote-inspired novel, leaving open the possibility of regeneration that Cervantes had buried at the end of his novel. NOTES 1. Frederick Jameson, “Pseudo-Couples,” London Book Review 25(2003): 21–23. The word “pseudo-couple” originally comes from Samuel Beckett, who uses it for the protagonists of Mercier and Camier. 2. Hisaki Matsuura, “Like Part II of Don Quixote (Don kihote kouhen no gotoku),” Weekly Reader (Shukan Dokushojin), 2458(2002): 1. 3. Mikhail Bakhtin, “The Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), Kindle edition. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), Kindle edition. 5. Walter L. Reed, “The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin’s Poetics,” Cervantes 7.2 (1987): 29. 6. Howard Mancing, “Don Quixote and Bakhtin’s Two Stylistic Lines of the Novel,” Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg, ed. Thomas Lathrop (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009), 177. 7. Howard Mancing, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature and Cervantes,” Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes para el siglo XXI: Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley, ed. Francisco La Rubia Prado (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000), 153. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 19. 9. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 22. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 21. 12. Ibid., 23. 13. Marthe Robert, The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 4. “Cervantes never succeeded in finishing Don Quixote (he only resolved to finish it after discovering the shameful plagiarism of the first part of the book).” Oe mentions this passage in Mournful Countenance (500). 14. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” Kindle edition. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid.

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18. Michiko N. Wilson analyzes grotesque realism with an emphasis on degradation in Oe’s Pinch-runner Memorandum (Pinchi rannaa chōsho, 1976). “Bakhtin’s analysis sheds light on Ōe’s constant reference to the lower part of the human body or bodily elements and copulation.” The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study of Themes and Techniques (1986, Oxford: Routledge, 2015), Kindle edition. Han Xu observes grotesque physical images in Mournful Countenance. “A Comparative Study of the Literature of Kenzaburo Oe and Mo Yan after the Year of 2000: From the View of Grotesque Realism,” Comparatio 17 (2013): 84–86. Akinobu Okuma pays special attention to Oe’s reception of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism as “a sample of creative transplant of Bakhtin.” “How Bakhtin Was Received (Bafuchin wa ika ni ukeire rareta ka).” Reading Bakhtin (Bafuchin wo yomu). (Tokyo: NHK Publishing, 1997), 196. Oe owes his understanding of Bakhtin to Masao Yamaguchi, a Japanese anthropologist, who developed Bakhtin’s theory in Folklore of the Fool. 19. Kenzaburo Oe, “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself,” Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: The Nobel Prize Speech and Other Lectures (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995) 123–125. 20. Kenzaburo Oe, How to Make a Novelist Like Me (Watashi to iu shosetsuka no tsukurikata), (Tokyo: Shinchosya, 2001), 129. 21. Oe, How to Make a Novelist Like Me, 129. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 133. 25. Ibid., 131. 26. Kenzaburo Oe, The Infant of Mournful Countenance (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002), 307. 27. Oe, Mournful Countenance, 72. 28. Ibid., 72. 29. This essay was revised and published as a part of Kato’s anthology, Far from Texts (Tekisuto kara toku hanarete) (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2004), 135–168. 30. Oe, Mournful Countenance, 500. 31. Kenzaburo Oe, The Method of the Novel (Shosetsu no houhou) (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), 160. 32. Oe, The Method of the Novel, 170. 33. Ibid., 159 and 170. 34. Tatevik Gyulamiryan, “On Re-accentuation, Adaptation, and Imitation of Don Quixote.” In Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero, eds. Slav. N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing (Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2017), 17. 35. Gyulamiryan, “On Re-accentuation,” 17. 36. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Trans. Samuel Putnam, Modern Library edition (New York: Random House, 1998), Kindle edition. 37. Cervantes, Don Quixote, Kindle edition. The original Spanish version used here is Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Instituto Cervantes edition, ed. Francisco Rico, 3rd ed., (Barcelona: Crítica, 1999), 1160. 38. Oe, Mournful Countenance, 99.

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39. Ibid., 94. 40. Ibid., 105. 41. Ibid., 163. 42. This accident is also connected to Don Quixote’s fight against a Biscayan (Chapters 9 and 10, part 1) and the cats’ attack against Don Quixote (Chapter 46, part II). Both troubles cause serious damage to the knight’s head, the highest part of the body. The Biscayan cuts off half of Don Quixote’s left ear. Kogito received a laceration on his left ear too (161). When Rose saw Kogito wear bandages at home after the hospitalization, she quoted a passage from Putnam’s English version, “The badly wounded Don Quixote was melancholy and dejected,” which is a description of Don Quixote just after the cats’ attack (161). In this episode, the cats attacked Don Quixote’s face with their nails and teeth. Thus, Kogito’s accident at Fushiki Temple is explicitly tied with the attacks of the higher part of the body. 43. Oe, Mournful Countenance, 163. 44. Ibid., 307. 45. Ibid. 46. Cervantes, Don Quixote, Kindle edition. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Oe, Mournful Countenance, 61. 50. Mushi, “This Should Be the Last Novel (Kore wo motte shosetsu wa saigo ni subeshi),” Weekly Asahi (Shukan asahi) 107.54 (2002), 132. 51. Kenzaburo Oe, A Reading Man (Yomu ningen) (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2011), 172. 52. Oe, Mournful Countenance, 73. Yeats’s phrase comes from “Sailing to Byzantium.” 53. Ibid. 54. Kenzaburo Oe, Good-bye, My Books! (Tokyo: Koudansha, 2005), 18. 55. Oe, Good-bye, My Books!, 18. 56. Edward Said, On Late Style (New York: Vintage, 2006), 12–13. 57. Oe says that he read Said’s On Late Style after he finished the pseudo-couple trilogy, and he retrospectively understood how he overcame the difficult time, when he lost some important friends including Jyuzo Itami, a model of Goryo. Oe, A Reading Man, 235. 58. Itamar Even-Zohar, “Law of Literary Interference,” Poetics Today 11.1 (1990) 62.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. “The Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Kindle edition. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Kindle edition. ———. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1984.

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Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Francisco Rico. Instituto Cervantes edition. 3rd edition. Barcelona: Crítica, 1999. ———. Don Quixote de la Mancha. Trans. Samuel Putnam. Modern Library edition. New York: Random House, 1998. Kindle edition. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “Law of Literary Interference.” Poetics Today 11.1 (1990): 54–73. Gyulamiryan, Tatevik. “On Re-accentuation, Adaptation, and Imitation of Don Quixote.” Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero. Eds. Slav. N. Gratchev and Howard Mancing. Lanham, MD: Bucknell University Press, 2017. 11–22. Jameson, Frederick. “Pseudo-Couples.” London Book Review 25 (2003): 21–23. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n22/fredric-jameson/pseudo-couples. Kato Norihiro. Far Away from Texts (Tekisuto kara toku hanarete). Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2004. Mancing, Howard. “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature, and Cervantes.” In Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes para el siglo XXI: Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley. Ed. Francisco La Rubia Prado. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000. 141–162. ———. “Don Quixote and Bakhtin’s Two Stylistic Lines of the Novel.” In Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg. Ed. Thomas Lathrop. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. 177–196. Matsuura Hisaki. “Like Part II of Don Quixote (don kihote kohen no gotoku).” Weekly Reader (Shukan Dokushojin), 2458 (2002): 1. Mushi. “This Should be the Last Novel (Kore wo motte shosetsu wa saigo ni subeshi).” Weekly Asahi (Shukan asahi) 107.54 (2002): 132. Oe Kenzaburo. Good-bye, My Books! (Sayounara watashi no hon yo!) Tokyo: Koudansha, 2005. ———. How to Make a Novelist Like Me (Watashi to iu shosetsuka no tsukurikata). Tokyo: Shinchosya, 2001. ———. The Infant of Mournful Countenance (Urei gao no douji). Tokyo: Kodansha, 2002. ———. “Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself.” Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself: The Nobel Prize Speech and Other Lectures. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1995. 105–128. ———. The Method of the Novel (Shosetsu no houhou). Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993. ———. A Reading Man (Yomu ningen). Tokyo: Shueisha, 2011. Okuma Akinobu. “How Bakhtin Was Received (Bafuchin wa ika ni ukeire rareta ka).” Reading Bakhtin (Bafuchin wo yomu). Tokyo: NHK Publishing, 1997. 193–196. Reed, Walter. “The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin’s Poetics.” Cervantes 7.2 (1987): 29–37. Robert, Marthe. The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Said, Edward. On Late Style. New York: Vintage, 2006. Wilson, Michiko N. The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study of Themes and Techniques. 1986. Oxford: Routledge, 2015. Kindle edition.

Chapter 9

Power, Privilege, Testimony Bakhtin’s Legacy in Discourses of Privilege in I, Rigoberta Menchú and “Pasión de historia” Melissa Garr

A significant portion of public discourse in U.S. media in 2017 has revolved around questions of sexual harassment and assault involving public figures in the highest echelons of politics, media, film, and popular culture. Following the initial allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, an increasing number of women have become empowered to share their stories of gendered discrimination and abuse, spawning a social media movement using the hashtag #metoo. Many of the accusations stem from events that occurred decades ago, which has prompted many people to ask what conditions have changed that encouraged women to suddenly speak out against these behaviors. The behaviors themselves are not new; what appears to be new is the desire not to tolerate behaviors that victims previously had been stigmatized for exposing or discussing. Sexual assault and misogynistic discourse have been prominent in several campaigns for political office, as well. Within the discussion of sexualized gendered violence, many people question the validity of the women’s assertions, dismissing their discourse as frivolous, fanciful, vindictive, or just lacking the social calibration to correctly interpret men’s intentions. The way that these attitudes in public discourse about gendered violence and inequality reflect patriarchal power structures, and the contexts in which that discourse occurs, appears reflected across the literary spectrum in literature written by women. Many thinkers and writers have explored converging ideas about power discourse in literary and social contexts; Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussions of dialogism, authorship, polyphony, heteroglossia, and other concepts contain important frameworks for examining the highly systemic and socially contextualized representations 179

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of intersectional privilege in literature. Given the importance of current discussions creating awareness of systemic privilege, it is necessary to examine literary representations of that privilege using an intersectional and Bakhtinian reading of literary texts that explicitly foreground systemic non-hegemony in the first-person narration of female characters and their experience with violence at the intersection of race, gender, and ethnicity. For this study, I will examine two texts that reflect two of Bakhtin’s major concepts that align closely with intersectional feminist thought: I, Rigoberta Menchú, via questions of authorship and testimony, and Ana Lydia Vega’s “Pasión de historia,” with respect to heteroglossia. Both texts feature first-person narratives of women in the postcolonial world, who experience abuse and suffering due to intersections of privilege in their lived experience, as represented in the narratives. Bakhtin’s discussions of power and discourse in “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” and “Discourse in the Novel” clearly converge with and can inform contemporary literary criticism on intersectional hegemonic discourse, and popular discourse with respect to social conditions that have encouraged women to become vocal and active against gendered violence and abuse by people in positions of power and privilege. Privilege as a concept has become increasingly polemicized in popular discourse by both conservatives and progressives; the former see it as a way of deflecting responsibility for the personal failure to progress, and the latter see it as an acknowledgment of systemic institutions that prevent personal hard work from resulting in progress. The term, however, is not new; the concept originated in the late 1980s in the work of feminist Peggy McIntosh. McIntosh addressed the issue of what she called “white privilege” by listing forty-six “special circumstances” that she, as a white person, enjoys in U.S. society as a privilege of birth, without them being earned. These circumstances were based on her observations of the privilege of her male colleagues in academia that females seemed to lack. She later excerpted these forty-six privileges and described them as an “invisible knapsack” of privilege which one enjoys as a white person in the United States.1 McIntosh discusses how white people are taught that racism disadvantages some people but not that it also benefits and gives advantage to others. Similarly, men may acknowledge the disadvantages of women, but rarely take the extra step of acknowledging that men benefit from an “unearned advantage” regarding their own gender.2 McIntosh stressed the systemic nature of the privilege she described; it is not a protection against individual acts of discrimination, but rather an understanding that, from a systemic standpoint, there is a difference between “earned strength and unearned power conferred systemically. Power from unearned privilege can look like strength when it is, in fact, permission to escape or to dominate.”3 A year later, Kimberle Crenshaw extended the discussion of systemic privilege to incorporate an understanding that privilege is also intersectional;

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that is, people can experience systemic oppression on multiple fronts if they are at an intersection of two or more identities lacking systemic privilege, or that an individual can have privilege in one area but lack it in another (such as being a white woman). Her discussion centers on the lived experiences of black women being discounted, overlooked, or examined only through the lens of race or gender, not both. For example, in the first case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, the plaintiff’s case of discrimination by GM was thrown out because it couldn’t be determined whether the suit was a case of sex discrimination or race discrimination; the court determined that it couldn’t be both.4 This development in the understanding of privilege is significant because, as Crenshaw points out, “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism.”5 There remain, however, significant popular misunderstandings about the intersectional nature of privilege and power: poor white men, for example, who assume that they cannot benefit from white or male privilege because they have had struggles related to the socioeconomic class, or who may have been victims of individual (rather than systemic) racial or gender discrimination. McIntosh’s knapsack is invisible precisely because those who benefit from privilege are the least likely to be aware of its existence. Intersectionality may assist those who lack privilege in one area in becoming aware of their privilege in other areas; varying areas of privilege or lack thereof tend to interrogate one another and respond to one another dialogically. Lynn Weber’s conceptual framework for understanding intersectionality extends the work of McIntosh and Crenshaw into a system of six common themes defining the systemic nature of class, gender, race, and sexuality privilege. First, the categories of race, gender, and sexuality are contextual, always situated within a specific temporal, spatial, historical, economic, and ideological context. One example Weber gives is the changing appropriateness of various words referring to people of color over time. Second, these categories are socially constructed by dominant groups as fixed hierarchical dichotomies, but dominant groups maintain hegemony by justifying these categories according to laws of nature rather than human design. Third, the power hierarchies thus created and perpetuated create entire systems of power relationships in which dominant groups control and guard access to a greater proportion of resources, both material and nonmaterial. Fourth, categories such as race, gender, and sexuality operate in both a social structural (macro) and social psychological (micro) way. As a social structural entity, groups of people lacking institutional power in one or more of these categories use other collective means to assert resistance and struggle for a greater share of power (such as strikes or marches). As a social psychological entity, on the other hand, membership in hegemonic groups aligns itself with dominant social norms and values, leading to greater individual psychosocial development

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of members of dominant groups (e.g., self-esteem, positive body image, and feelings of ability to succeed). Fifth, all of these categories are simultaneously expressed, meaning that one can have power in one or more areas but lack power in others. Finally, Weber describes an interdependence of knowledge and activism in these categories. Knowledge and awareness must “reflect back to social groups their experiences in such a way that they can more effectively define, value, and empower themselves to seek social justice.”6 Many of Weber’s common themes in race, class, gender, and sexuality echo themes in Bakhtinian thought. The idea that these social categories operate in a social structural and social psychological way that are often struggling with one another, for example, is similar to Bakhtin’s discussion of centripetal and centrifugal social and linguistic forces. Likewise, the social hierarchies built around race, class, gender, and sexuality resemble in their construction and perpetuation an internally dialogic image, such that people who belong to non-hegemonic groups are seen more as representations of people than fully actualized people (leading to objectification, discrimination, and a sense of being Other than the social norm). While Mikhail Bakhtin’s work focuses a great deal of attention on discourses of power in literary texts, he does not explicitly address questions of gender, race, or sexuality in power discourses in literature. It is here that the concept of intersectional privilege, particularly where it centers on female experience, is important to connect with Bakhtin’s body of work. The many convergences between Bakhtin’s ideas and the body of research on power discourse related to intersections of privilege both illuminate aspects of Bakhtin’s work, with regard to texts written by authors from non-hegemonic groups, and are enriched by connection with Bakhtin’s theories of how discourses interact in text. The examples used here to highlight these convergences are written by Latin American authors whose texts address intersectional violence, and who themselves are at the intersection of various privilege axes: gender, race, and, postcolonialism, by virtue of U.S. hegemony and imperialism. We will examine these texts with respect to authorship and heteroglossia, and demonstrate how these concepts converge with intersectionality and privilege discourse. AUTHORSHIP Authorship is one of Bakhtin’s earliest literary preoccupations, and one of the most central questions confronting scholars of Latin American literature. The testimonies of the conquistadors and their conflicting narratives of events surrounding the conquest of the Americas impose themselves effortlessly onto history, while the narratives of pre-Columbian inhabitants of the

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Americas have struggled to be heard. Subsequently, the personal testimony has become a significant literary genre in Latin America and has influenced the development of literary movements. They form a part of the sociocultural collective resistance mechanisms Weber describes for non-hegemonic groups to reclaim the right to tell their stories and be heard. The importance of these testimonies is perhaps due to the fact that, by nature, they are intimately linked to questions of hegemony and privilege: Who decides what stories to tell? Who gets to tell them? Is the objective accuracy of the testimony as important as the truths it imparts as a work of literature? In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Bakhtin focuses explicitly on the “essentially necessary foundations of the author-hero relationship” rather than its individuation in particular works;7 here I propose to extend that discussion precisely into individuation via the personal testimony of a Latin American woman of color, Rigoberta Menchú. The intersectional nature of the author’s experience as a member of multiple marginalized groups exemplifies an identity politics described by Bakhtin in which we are, as individuals, least able to see the whole of ourselves and all aspects that interact to affect us; in terms of privilege, this reflects the ways in which privilege is something both seen and not seen, particularly by those who have it. In the case of aesthetic activity, however, the representation of a hero by an author is a product of the author’s privileged view; the author is able to view all “particular self-manifestations of the hero hav[ing] significance for the characterization” of the hero’s whole self.8 In this way, Menchú’s voice (and Elizabeth Burgos’s transcription/editing) has created a representative image of herself that allows her to represent her experiences in a finalizable way, giving the readers a full and complete representational view of the intersections of privilege that Menchú experiences, reflected in her discourse. Bakhtin tackles the problem of self-representation in memoir quite directly; for him, an aesthetic event (i.e., a literary one) “presupposes two noncoinciding consciousnesses”; when the author and hero “coincide or . . . find themselves standing either next to one another in the face of a value they share or against one another as antagonists, the aesthetic event ends and an ethical event begins.”9 Particularly in the case of Rigoberta Menchú’s testimony, the line between aesthetic and ethical event is somewhat blurred. Rumina Sethi notes that “Menchú’s memoir may be a personal utterance but it has universal resonance in that it unites people struggling for peace, egalitarianism and honesty at the level of commitment to humanitarian values,”10 which highlights the ethical nature of the interrogation of hegemony and answerability prompted by the narration of her own lived experience. On the other hand, our ability to examine the relationship of the author and hero is complicated by questions of authorship raised by the linguistic intermediation of Elizabeth Burgos in the actual construction of the narrative, the

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transference of the narrative from an oral medium to a literary one, and the controversy surrounding how much of what Menchú relates about her lived experience was actually experienced personally by Menchú.11 Leigh Gilmore’s book Tainted Witness describes in detail the effects of the discreditation of Menchú’s testimony on her ability to stand as a witness to the abuses and genocide suffered by her people. Gilmore describes the mobilization of Menchú’s witness as occurring “in the joint context of history and trauma. This context helps to clarify the two clashing histories unfolding in the contact zone the testimonial network became: the story of Menchú’s life and the story of her testimonio.”12 These contexts have accrued a power differential in the way that Menchú is believed to be “truthful” by readers of her testimony; thus, her right to testimony itself becomes a part of the socially constructed intersecting systems whereby those with privilege strip her of agency and power even when discussing her own lived experience. In this way, we can see that Menchú’s testimony itself is already intersectional on the plane of our existence outside the written narrative. Within Menchú’s narrative, of course, the intersectional experience of marginalization is seen everywhere, from her experiences working on the farms and in the homes of wealthy ladinos, to experiencing oppression at the hands of the Guatemalan army, to her desire to get an education being thwarted by her father’s desire for her to work in the fields. She grows up speaking Quiché rather than the hegemonic language, Spanish. Her experience of marginalization rests at the intersection of class, race, gender, language, and political privilege, to name a few. It is perhaps her intersectional experience itself and growing awareness of her lack of privilege in many areas that enables her to transcend her own personal history and incorporate the polyphony of community voices that coexperience marginalization with her. The many themes of oppression incorporated into her narrative permeate, as Slav Gratchev points out, her individual identity such that it organically grows into those themes and becomes a truly polyphonic testimony of the lived experience of the community of people like her13—that is, people along all the axes of privilege and marginalization that intersect in her individual embodied experience. This process aligns with McIntosh’s description of the necessary conditions in which systems of privilege and oppression can be addressed; in which, “to redesign social systems, we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. The silences and denials surrounding privilege are the key political tool” to the maintenance of those systems.14 To that end, testimonies like Menchú’s are extraordinarily important, in that the narrative gives voice(s) to the otherwise voiceless, and exposes the structure of privilege and its sociocultural strategies for self-preservation (in this case, violent). Bakhtin also describes the process of moving from individual lived experience to collective restructuring of ways of perceiving the world; for him, the

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process is dialogically involved with an understanding of the place of others along the axes that form the architecture of one’s lived experience: “In order to vivify my own outward image and make it part of a concretely viewable whole, the entire architectonic of the world of my imagining must be radically restructured . . . [This] consists in my outward image being affirmed and founded in emotional and volitional terms out of the other and for the other human being.”15 Menchú’s friend Candelaria, another maid in the house of wealthy ladinos in Guatemala City, represents a different way to understand the process of restructured perception of the world stemming from understanding of and response to the Other. Candelaria has learned how the privileged racial/ethnic and economic classes behave, dress, and speak, and she adopts the trappings of their racial/ethnic privilege (speaking Spanish) and of their economic privilege (their manner of dress) to create a personal sphere of resistance within the world to which her lack of privilege has relegated her. Candelaria sees her job cleaning the family’s home as a space of resistance, deliberately pushing back against the authority of the lady of the house to create a space for her own identity formation as an empowered subject. On the other hand, Menchú does not limit her resistance to that which benefits herself and those closest to her; in fact, Menchú’s brand of resistance is dangerous to her family and friends, but prioritizes her identity as part of a collective group of individuals who experience oppression along one of the axes that she experiences simultaneously and intersectionally. Her intersectional awareness grows when Menchú traps an indigenous soldier and speaks to him. The indigenous women in the village were routinely raped by soldiers, and considered it almost sacrilegious and monstrous to carry the child of a soldier. When the villagers confront the soldier about the women he and others like him have raped, he cries and describes how, as an indigenous man, he had been forcefully taken from his own village, beaten into submission, taunted for his “stupidity” in having to be taught Spanish, and forced to commit atrocious acts ordered by the captain, including rape, or face death. “If one side doesn’t kill me, the other will,” he says.16 The conflict of power between the soldier and the villagers occurs at multiple intersections of privilege. He has male privilege with respect to the women who are raped, and political privilege by being in the army. He lacks racial and ethnic privilege, however, with respect to the hegemonic groups in Guatemala, and is likely also poor. Rigoberta’s dawning realization that the soldiers are victims of the conflict as well stems from the intersections where their lack of privilege coincides. Her desire to “go on fighting and getting to know [her] people more closely”17 necessarily involves better awareness of the ways in which power and privilege intersect in complex ways among her people, and her reclaimed authorship provides the vehicle for sociocultural resistance to oppression.

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HETEROGLOSSIA Bakhtin’s discussion of heteroglossia focuses on the many languages that people use in everyday communication, and the ways in which these languages are stratified socio-ideologically in literary discourse. He explicitly describes the artistic and literary manifestations of heteroglossia in intersectional terms; there is a “common plane that methodologically justifies our juxtaposing” the languages of heteroglossia: they all, “whatever principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view of the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific worldviews, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values.”18 But instead of coexisting independently of one another, these languages interact dialogically, creating through their interaction and struggle for hegemony an evolution into a social tapestry of heteroglossia that can highlight the intersectional experience of the characters and the worldviews that are embodied by that lived experience. The languages of heteroglossia in literary texts function as systems of power relationships, much as do the classifications of race, class, gender, and sexuality described by Weber. The intersectional nature of heteroglossia results in what Bakhtin describes as a double-voiced discourse—one that “serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author.”19 In the context of the multiple intersections under discussion in the texts examined here, however, one might rather consider it a “multi-voiced discourse,” as the intentions of the speaking character are themselves the product of the intersections of their own identities within systems of social privilege (as are the intentions of the author). Ana Lydia Vega’s short story “Pasión de historia” highlights intersectionality through her sophisticated play with language and positions of power and privilege. In this fiction story, a Puerto Rican author named Carola, who has been writing about the local murder of a woman by her lover, finds herself being stalked by her own ex-lover. At the same time, Carola’s friend Vilma, now married and living in France with her husband and his family, asks Carola to visit, as Vilma is the victim of domestic violence. Although the family seems slightly eccentric, Carola never witnesses the abuses that Vilma describes, and ultimately returns home to Puerto Rico. Following her return, however, all letters to Vilma are subsequently returned with the label “unknown addressee.” The story ends with a report by the editor that Carola has been shot in the head and killed. Although Vilma’s fate and the identity of Carola’s shooter are unknown, the text implies that Vilma has been killed and that Carola has been shot by her ex-lover/stalker.

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Carola’s investigations of the murder and the abuse accusations made by her friend are ultimately an investigation of her own murder and the social systems of power that lead up to it. Linda Craig’s article on the story examines the intersections of these systems of power in terms of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and feminism, asserting that each of these elements adds an additional layer of meaning to the story, without which one cannot fully realize the hierarchical picture that Vega is creating through the experience of the story’s main character. She notes, for example, Puerto Rico’s significantly different position with respect to the rest of postcolonial Latin America; Puerto Rico, rather than gaining its independence, merely passed from one colonization (that of Spain) to another (that of the United States). Thus, Puerto Rican daily life is permeated far more deeply with the values and culture of the United States than other places in Latin America.20 The story is full of ironic references to Puerto Rico’s lack of privilege relative to European and North American political hegemony; for example, when Vilma’s husband Paul insists upon Carola and Vilma playing Scrabble with him in French, Carola compares her feelings to “como acusada puertorra en corte federal gringa”21 (a Puerto Rican defendant in a Yankee federal court). With this phrase, she not only expresses the oppression of Puerto Ricans as a group by the powerful U.S. justice system, but also reacts to the insistence of a man that the women engage in the activity of his choice and that they do so in a European language being imposed upon them. With respect to feminism, the story explicitly and repeatedly foregrounds the power dynamics that privilege men over women through its self-conscious investigations of abusive, controlling relationship dynamics, leading to the women’s deaths. Finally, Craig ascribes to postmodernism the story’s highly complex linguistic and discursive juxtapositions. Craig asserts that the extreme variations in use of register and language, code-switching, and colloquial phrases and references to literary and cinematic highbrow culture “point to a discourse which eschews any notion of purity or of fixity in language which embraces a dynamic of growth, change and mixing.”22 I would argue, however, that these linguistic features are not specifically postmodern in nature, but rather reflect Bakhtin’s previous idea of heteroglossia as a way of reflecting and refracting social hierarchies and positions of power in an individual’s socio-ideological landscape. Three particular aspects of Bakhtin’s discussion on heteroglossia from “Discourse in the Novel” highlight the intersectional nature of the female/ postcolonial/linguistic experience in “Pasión de historia.” The first of these is that heteroglossia manifests itself, in novelistic discourse especially, through a novel’s incorporation of other genres.23 Vega creates a framework for the incorporation of multiple genres by making the main character an author

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herself. The novel Carola is working on is described as “medio documental, medio policíaca”24 (half documentary, half detectivesque), already a mix of genres, and the research in which Carola is engaged is similarly blended between police reports, newspaper clippings, and interviews with neighbors of the victim. This novel, however, is not the text presented to the reader; the story Carola is telling to the reader is initially a testimony about her experience researching and writing the novel, along with the dangerous situation in which she finds herself being stalked by her ex-lover. The story then transforms into a tragic romance novel, as Vilma describes the development of her relationship with Paul and his increasingly controlling and abusive behavior; then becomes a travel narrative full of descriptions of France as seen by two women from the New World. Vega does not shy away from the irony of this inversion; she describes the early days of Vilma’s marriage as “el descubrimiento del ‘Viejo Mundo’”25 (the discovery of the “Old World”) and describes her own excitement at the “idea platónica del exotismo”26 (platonic ideal of exoticism), which Craig describes as a postcolonial ironic inversion of the typical directionality of exoticization between America and Europe. I would add to this assertion that these elements also present an inversion of typical gendered and racial dynamics of exoticization, in which a white European man would typically objectify the bodies of women of color, while in the case of “Pasión de historia,” it is the Latina women who are exoticizing and objectifying the white European male experience. After describing her travel experiences, and having become absorbed in this new narrative and abandoned the crime novel, Carola decides to begin keeping a diary, and the narrative gives way to daily diary entries from the 26th of July until the 3rd of August. The diary is an intimate genre frequently associated with female discourse in literature. The first diary entry occurs after the first time that Carola witnesses any behavior by Paul that would corroborate Vilma’s descriptions of his abuse; the last diary entry occurs when Vilma’s mother-in-law confronts Carola about a suspected affair between Vilma and the doctor next door. Each of these entries marks a change in the intimacy between the protagonist and Vilma; in the first case, representing the first time Carola really begins to believe that Vilma is telling the truth, and in the last, the reintroduction of doubt into the trust Carola had begun to establish with her friend regarding her marriage. Thus the change to and from the diary genre reflect how the power dynamics of the house effect changes in the relationship between the two Puerto Rican women in a white-male-Europeandominated space. The final shift in genre in the novel occurs at the end, with a note from the editor explaining that Carola has been shot and killed. This shift represents the complete dissolution of Carola’s agency, taken from her by a man who is ostensibly punishing her for the social transgression of female independence (described by Carola as “Woolfian”). Thus, the heteroglossia

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manifested in the juxtaposition of these particular genres emphasizes the intersections of social privilege that “Pasión de historia” seeks to examine critically. The second aspect of heteroglossia that this story exemplifies is the tension between what Bakhtin calls the “authoritative word” and the “internally persuasive word.” The authoritative word “demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally . . . it is, so to speak, the word of the fathers.”27 Authoritative discourse does not merge with other discourses, but rather “remains sharply demarcated, compact and inert . . . [and] demands our unconditional allegiance.”28 In “Pasión de historia,” the authoritative word is seen both explicitly in the representation of the male characters (particularly Paul) and implicitly through the subversive stance of the author’s discourse with regard to hegemonic positions of race, gender, and colonial power structures. One example of this authoritative word in Paul’s behavior represents masculine rigidity in the face of unmeasured, spontaneous emotional expression from Vilma and Carola. When the two women are struck with a fit of uncontrollable laughter at dinner, Paul yells, “Ça suffit!” (That’s enough!) loudly and abruptly enough that Carola likens the sound to that of a “como un tiro de cazador expert” (gunshot by an expert hunter), immediately followed by a “pausa brutal”29 (brutal pause). Following this, Carola retreats upstairs so as not to be involved in any family scene; Paul follows her upstairs to where she has taken refuge and sits there in angry silence. Although he says nothing, it is clear that he is imposing discomfort on her with his presence, inserting himself into her solitary space as a function of his assumed privilege and dominating her solitude. It is after this uncomfortable silent imposition that Carola begins her diary, becoming an agent of her own word for herself alone. Paul imposes himself on her at other times, as well; touching her hair and calling her “poor little girl,” making unwelcome intimate confessions about his relationship with Vilma (describing her as abnormal, nervous, badtempered, overly emotional, unable to fit in), and forcing her to look at grisly, graphic photos of his hunting victims. Paul enjoys the privilege of the authoritative word; the world is his, he controls it, and others must adapt not because they are convinced or persuaded of the rightness of it, but rather because his world demands unquestioning acceptance of it. Vilma’s inability to conform to this white-European-male-centered set of privileged expectations is seen as a purposeful transgression; her body itself is transgressive in that space. Existing in tension with this authoritative word, however, there is an internally persuasive word that is “affirmed through assimilation”; this word is creative and productive because it opens up new and independent words. The internally persuasive word is always in a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses in that “our ideological development is just such an

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intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view.”30 It is this internally persuasive word which permeates the narrator’s discourse with respect to her postcolonial identity; the irreverence with which she applies nicknames to Paul and his family and neighbors (“Sir Beret,” “Madame Yocasta,” “Bluebeard,” “Doctor Jekyll,” “the witch from Snow White,” etc.); the frequent allusions to U.S. domination over Puerto Rico (the 25th of July being both “infausta fecha de la pseudo-constitución puertorriqueña y de la aún más infausta invasion yanqui a nuestras plácidas riberas”31 [the unlucky date of the Puerto Rican pseudoconstitution and the even unluckier Yankee invasion of our placid shores]); and her wrestling with internalized misogyny as well as that imposed on her by systemic sexism (how she felt, in part, flattered by her ex-lover stalking her, even as she described how terrifying and irritating it was). The internally persuasive word is also exemplified in Carola’s response to Vilma’s discourse. Upon Carola’s arrival in France, Vilma details the horrible abuses she suffers in her marriage to Paul. Carola’s impression of Vilma’s story is incredulous; she uses indirect discourse to couch Vilma’s experience as if it were a film or a fairy tale: the beginning of their marriage is described by Carola as “felicidad fílmica”32 (cinematic felicity), and as the story unfolds Carola makes wry judgments about what she is hearing (“bajo esas circunstancias, me preguntaba inclusive cómo [Paul] había autorizado mi discreta invasion de su universo”33 [under these circumstances, I even wondered how (Paul) had authorized my discreet invasion of his universe]). She describes Vilma as a “princesa taína secuestrada por el malévolo cazador de jabalíes” (princess kidnapped by an evil boar hunter) who additionally must “sufría también los vejámenes de la bruja con delantal y cafeteria que tan gentilmente me había tratado esa mañana”34 (also suffer the humiliations of the witch with the apron and coffee pot who had treated [Carola] so genteelly that morning). The lack of belief toward a female victim of gendered abuse is emblematic of social systems of sexism; Leigh Gilmore gives a brief catalogue of studies across diverse disciplines addressing systemic disbelief of women’s claims and experiences, particularly for women of color.35 Gilmore identifies two (primarily discursive) counterarguments to women’s accounts of mistreatment, harassment, and abuse: “he said, she said” and “nobody really knows what happened.”36 The former, because it is a counterargument to a woman’s own account of her experiences, implicitly preferences male discourse as more reliable, while the latter denies the authority of the woman to recount her own story in a believable way. Unlike Paul’s word in “Pasión de historia,” which admits no doubt nor negotiates meaning with any other word, Vilma’s word is constantly heard in relationship to that of others, particularly Carola’s. Each time Vilma speaks, Carola reports it along with her own judgments and impressions about what has been said. The creative story

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about Vilma’s situation is in no way borne of Paul, but rather in the struggle between Carola’s discourse and Vilma’s. As women of color in a space of white European male privilege, they are used to their voices being one among many struggling against other ideological and intersectional points of view, as opposed to having the privilege to be assumed true and valid as a monologic whole. For Bakhtin, it is this internally persuasive word, here representing the intersectional experience of women of color from a postcolonial nation, that is most productive, independent, creative, and dialogic. The internally persuasive word is where “objectivity of understanding is linked with dialogic vigor and a deeper penetration into discourse itself.”37 The case under investigation is not just the murders of the three women; it is rather an investigation of the discursive agency of women in general at intersections of privilege, when they come up against hegemonic discourse that seeks to impose itself onto them. The final aspect of heteroglossia discussed by Bakhtin that expresses itself in “Pasión de historia” is the “image of a language.” The languages of a novel, according to Bakhtin, do not serve a purely communicative function as they do in real life, but rather an artistic and literary function subordinate to the finalized whole of the work itself. Thus, language in a novel is not a fully socialized actual communicative language; it is a representative image of a language. This image reflects a “concrete socio-linguistic belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of a language that is unitary only in the abstract”38—that is, in the context of the literary representation of the world created by the artist. Bakhtin identifies several devices for creating an image of language in novelistic discourse. One such device is hybridization, or the “mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, encounter . . . between two different linguistic consciousnesses separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor.”39 “Pasión de historia” is full of examples of hybrid language specifically used to highlight the intersectional experience of its protagonist. Craig discusses in detail the linguistic juxtapositions that permeate Carola’s voice. For example, although she primarily speaks in Spanish, her narration is frequently peppered with words and phrases in French, English, Latin, and Italian. She also incorporates frequent changes in register, juxtaposing colloquial regional Puerto Rican words with Latin legal phrases or erudite words in Spanish. She also makes frequent references both to popular culture and film and to intellectuals such as Beauvoir and Sartre. The ideal reader of the text is clearly erudite, multilingual, and particularly well versed in Puerto Rican language and identity politics. By the same token, P. Childs and P. Williams point out that the problem of noting these juxtapositions of different languages is that they are mostly European or North American, so that it reflects a “continuation of Western hegemonic

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practice.”40 What is notable, however, is that nearly all the speech of other characters, no matter what languages they use, is indirect speech reported through Carola’s voice. Her incorporation of elements of their voices and words into her own is precisely the hybridization effect Bakhtin describes, and its function in this story is to highlight Carola’s intersectional experience by reflecting the social differentiation of the languages she must navigate and use in the contexts described in the story. Bakhtin argues that the image of a language as a hybrid must be intentionally crafted as “the perception of one language by another language, its illumination by another linguistic consciousness.”41 The incorporation of others’ languages into Carola’s voice also reflects the second device of heteroglossia, the image of a language in literary text: that the languages interact dialogically. That these multiple languages coexist and interact with each other in the space of even a few words within Carola’s voice, rather than being spaced out among the voices of multiple characters, emphasizes the internal dialogism of the word in the heteroglot text. Ultimately, what is accomplished in “Pasión de historia” as a heteroglot text is “the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own horizon within someone else’s horizon.”42 In this story, the heteroglossia within the text parallels Carola’s intersectional experience in the storyworld; she not only speaks others’ languages, but also coexperiences her own patriarchal oppression by investigating the abuse and murder of two other women, eventually sharing their fate. While intersectionality here and its attendant heteroglossia do not result in freedom or a happy ending for Carola herself, the fact that the editors published her story in the volume entitled TEXTIMONIOS indicates that the languages and intersections of oppression represented in her story should be understood to be a real and valid testimony to our own intersectional understanding of privilege in the world. There is by no means space in the scope of this chapter to do an exhaustive catalogue of the many other ways in which Bakhtinian concepts (polyphony, carnival, dialogism) connect with intersectional experiences in Latin American women’s literature. The two works under examination here are particularly relevant, however, in connecting Bakhtin with the context of popular discourse surrounding victim testimonies and questions of privilege 100 years after Bakhtin’s work began. Although one is a memoir and the other is fiction, both texts feature first- person accounts of gendered violence and abuse, which also raise questions about the reliability of the victims in recounting their own lived experience. Similarly, women testifying on their own behalf about gendered harassment and abuse at the hands of powerful men in 2017 have encountered cultural backlash questioning the validity of their embodied experience and their right to advocate for themselves at all. Testimony is crucial to the reclaiming of agency and overcoming trauma on the part of the

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victims; therefore, discursive strategies to suppress victims’ voices serve only to maintain systems of privilege that perpetuate the same abuses onto others, particularly those who lack privilege at multiple intersections within the system. As Frances Gouda points out, “whether it is called discourse, rhetoric, or semantics, the use of a certain kind of language matters . . . linguistic statements imply a judgment as to what is either more or less important in the identity and social conduct of a specific human being or a certain group of people.”43 This is why it is important to name privilege, to identify it, and to create awareness of intersectionality, so that knowledge and activism can interact to empower underprivileged groups to disrupt the power systems that recursively abuse them. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, with its emphasis on context, dialogic interaction, and the need to examine intersectional systems of language, discourse, and power, can lead to fundamental changes in the way we understand testimony and power discourse in literature and in society. Menchú herself demonstrated how a narrative can shape or change the world; perhaps by conceiving of the embodied experience of victims of gendered violence along intersectional lines, we may cease to protect the perpetrators of abuse and those in power, and instead restore the voices of the underprivileged to a more socionormative place in literary history. NOTES 1. Peggy McIntosh, Wellesley Centers for Women, “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies,” Working Paper 189 (1988). 2. McIntosh, 2. 3. Ibid., 10. 4. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1, article 8 (1989): 141, https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1052&context=uclf. 5. Crenshaw, 140. 6. Lynn Weber, Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework (New York: McGraw Hill, 2001), 16–25. 7. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liupanov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 4. 8. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 5. 9. Ibid., 22. 10. Rumina Sethi, The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 15–16.

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11. David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (New York: Avalon, 2007). 12. Leigh Gilmore, Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 84. 13. Slav Gratchev, “La sustitución gradual del ‘Yo,’ y la polifonía en La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú,” Céfiro 7, no. 1–2 (2007): 30. 14. McIntosh, 13. 15. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 30. 16. Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchu, an Indian Woman in Guatemala (New York: Verso, 2010), 174. 17. Menchú, 175. 18. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Hohlquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Hohlquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 291–292. 19. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 324. 20. Linda Craig, “Intersections in Ana Lydia Vega’s ‘Pasión de Historia,’” MaComère 4 (2001), 71. 21. Ana Lydia Vega, Pasión de historia y otras historias de pasión (Buenos Aires: de la Flor, 1987), 29. 22. Craig, 73. 23. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 320. 24. Vega, 9. 25. Ibid., 16. 26. Ibid., 11. 27. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 342. 28. Ibid., 343. 29. Vega, 21. 30. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 345–346. 31. Vega, 21. 32. Ibid., 16. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Gilmore, 186. 36. Ibid., 20. 37. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 352. 38. Ibid., 356. 39. Ibid., 358. 40. Childs, P. and P. Williams qtd. in Craig, 74. 41. Bakhtin, “Discourse,” 358. 42. Ibid., 365. 43. Gouda, What’s to Be Done with Gender and Post-Colonial Studies? (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 9.

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WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Hohlquist and Vadim Liapunov, translated by Vadim Liapunov, 4–256. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Hohlquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Hohlquist, 259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Craig, Linda. “Intersections in Ana Lydia Vega’s ‘Pasión de historia.’” MaComère 4 (2001): 71–83. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1, article 8 (1989): 139–167. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/ Gilmore, Leigh. Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Gouda, Frances. What’s to Be Done with Gender and Post-Colonial Studies?. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2001. Gratchev, Slav N. “La sustitución gradual del ‘Yo,’ y la polifonía en La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú,” Céfiro 7, no. 1–2 (2007): 22–35. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies,” Wellesley Centers for Women, Working Paper 189 (1988). Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. New York: Verso, 2010. Sethi, Rumina. The Politics of Postcolonialism: Empire, Nation and Resistance. London: Pluto Press, 2011. Stoll, David. Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. New York: Avalon, 2007. Vega, Ana Lydia. Pasión de historia y otras historias de pasión. Buenos Aires: de la Flor, 1987. Weber, Lynn. Understanding Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality: A Conceptual Framework. New York: McGraw Hill, 2001.

Part II

BAKHTIN’S HERITAGE IN ARTS AND PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 10

Acting Philosophy Bakhtin, Jollien, and the Art of Answerability Michael Eskin

A philosopher’s strength and endurance—above and beyond his or her historical significance—can be measured by the continued relevance of his or her thought over time. In other words, whether we feel that a philosopher speaks to us today depends on whether the questions that animate his or her philosophy and the answers it proposes help us to articulate our own questions and answers vis-à-vis the realities, challenges, and tasks we find ourselves confronted with here and now. Thus, undoubtedly, to this day Plato helps us tackle such questions as to whether education contributes to moral betterment and, concomitantly, whether knowledge ought to be trusted as a “guide in political conduct.”1 It is, therefore, fair to ask, especially as we approach the centennial of his first published text—“Art and Answerability” (1919)—if Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy, or rather “philosophical anthropology,” can be said to have endured in the strong sense suggested above?2 My simple answer is yes—which, of course, wouldn’t mean much unless Bakhtin’s claims and insights were persuasively shown to be borne out by “reality” (and beyond the merely “subjective” or anecdotal). Which is precisely what I elaborate in this chapter by productively engaging Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology in conjunction with contemporary Francophone Swiss philosopher Alexandre Jollien’s autobiographically inflected ethics of disability and overcoming, thereby aiming to achieve two goals: hermeneutically probing Jollien’s idiosyncratic existential project with the interpretive “apparatus” supplied by Bakhtin in mind and presenting an exemplary instance of the latter’s philosophical anthropology in actu, as it were. Jollien’s life and ethics, I argue, pointedly instantiates Bakhtin’s major existential-dialogical postulates, which they thus “demonstrate” to be “working” in intimate 199

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concert with actual human reality, while at the same time being theoretically shored up and “confirmed” by them. Jollien’s existential project reveals itself as “living proof” of the sheer realism and veracity of Bakhtin’s anthropological insights, and, consequently, their philosophical staying power. I proceed by first laying out what I take to be the key features of Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology, by then elaborating what I consider the gist of Jollien’s philosophical project, and, finally, by juxtaposing both thinkers in the light of what will have emerged as their striking conceptual-ethical affinities. BAKHTIN As has been pointed out by a number of scholars, Bakhtin’s oeuvre—covering, among others, such fields as ontology, phenomenology, aesthetics, ethics, linguistics, literary theory, and the history of the novel—is characterized by an “interconnected set of concerns” approached from a “multiplicity of perspectives,” which “recur in strikingly stable form throughout the course of his career, from his very last writings to . . . the first,” and which “constitute, in his own terms, his ‘philosophical anthropology.’”3 Thus, not surprisingly, we find Bakhtin still preoccupied, toward the end of his life, with some of the same topics that had already constituted the focus of his earliest works— “Art and Answerability,” “Toward a Philosophy of the Act,” and “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” (all written between 1919 and the mid-1920s), such as, summarily: our responsibility vis-à-vis ourselves and others; the conception of existence as a perpetual challenge or task; the significance of language, literature, and art in general as an alembic that distills and, thus, allows us to witness human interaction in the sharp relief of its mediated complexity; the concomitant question of the dialogical constitution of consciousness; and the overarching question of authorship and dialogue in life and art as the key to understanding agency and human existence more generally.4 Equipped with this preliminary, skeletal characterization, I would now like to flesh out Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology with particular attention to those of its aspects that are directly relevant to this chapter’s overarching argument. What are some of the key features of Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology? To grasp the overall thrust of Bakhtin’s philosophical project, it is crucial to keep in mind its two foundational methodological pillars: the twofold goal of overcoming what Bakhtin refers to, throughout his writings, as “theoretism” and constructing a new “first philosophy,” that is, a new ontological framework for reflecting on what Max Scheler—another philosophical

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anthropologist—famously summed up in the phrase: “man’s position in the [world].”5 Repudiating philosophical abstraction, Bakhtin endeavors to think and understand Being in the most concrete, non-“theoretist” terms, which involves the singular human being as the one doing the thinking and understanding: “Only from within my participation in it can Being be understood.”6 And because Being can only be experienced and understood as a function of each human being’s concrete and “active participation” and engagement in it, it must be conceived of, according to Bakhtin, in terms of a continuous unfolding: as “Being-as-event” for each individual human being.7 From this specific notion of Being-as-event follow the other key features of Bakhtin’s first philosophy, which thus immediately reveals itself as a bona fide philosophical anthropology insofar as it implicitly revolves around Immanuel Kant’s basic anthropological question: “What is Man?”8 What, then, are the key features of Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology more specifically? I would like to single out six that are especially relevant to my overall argument.9 For heuristic purposes, I would like to tag them with the following umbrella terms: “act,” “task,” “answerability,” “architectonic,” “formation,” “struggle,” and “dialogue.” Act As constitutively engaged in and by Being-as-event, I am always already an agent. The diverse realms (physical, intellectual, spiritual, cultural) of my lived and concretely experienced Being-as-event—in short, my very existence, my life as whole—are bundled and joined in what Bakhtin posits as the foundation stone of the entire edifice of his philosophical anthropology, namely, the human act: “Truly real and participating in the unique event of Being is this act in its entirety; only this act is completely alive . . ., is inescapably—comes to be, and is accomplished; it is a real living participant in the event of Being.”10 Consequently, Bakhtin calls his first philosophy a “philosophy of the act.”11 Task The fact that I am an essentially acting and active being implies that I am always already tasked with such agency. In other words, to live, to exist, understood through the prism of my ineluctable engagement, implies that life and existence are not simply a “given” that I passively receive, but a constant and perpetual challenge or “task”—an “ought”—that I must actively assume: the “world-as-event,” Bakhtin emphasizes, “is not the world . . . as givenness . . . everything is always given as a task.”12 Thus, Bakhtin’s first philosophy,

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and by extension his philosophical anthropology as a whole, reveals itself as a fundamentally ethical project: it cannot, Bakhtin stresses, but be an “ethical philosophy.”13 Answerability But I am not merely tasked with living, existing. I am also taken to task for my singular participation in Being-as-event. In other words, I am always already answerable for my acts, for the unfolding of my life, and for my existence, which Bakhtin specifies as an “answerable, risk-laden, open, continuous act.”14 To whom, am I answerable? To myself, certainly. My most ineluctable answerability consists in having to assume the very task of my own life, my very existence: I have, as Bakhtin puts it, “no alibi” when it comes to my unique and singular Being-as-event.15 Concomitantly, though, Bakhtin argues, I am also answerable to and before others. For Bakhtin’s core notion of Being-as-event always already signifies Being-with-and-through-othersas-event, given that the Russian term “sobytye” (event), which consists of the prefix so- (co-, with-) and the noun “bytye” (Being) in and of itself signifies “co-Being” or “Being with (the other).” “The Being of the human being . . . (both internal and external),” Bakhtin highlights, “is, fundamentally, interaction. To be—means to interact [obshshyat’sya] . . . To be means to be for the other and through the other—for oneself.”16 Architectonic Following Kant, who in turn takes it up, most immediately, from Descartes, Bakhtin has recourse to the discourse of construction, specifying his philosophy of the act as an endeavor to capture and describe the “architectonic of the actual world of the . . . unitary singular act.”17 Given that Being is fundamentally “interaction” and “encounter” (of/with the other), this architectonic rests, according to Bakhtin, on three basic building blocks: “I-for-myself, the other-for-me, and I-for-the other.”18 “All values of real life and culture (scientific, aesthetic, social, ethical, political, and religious) are anchored,” Bakhtin explains “in these architectonic anchors of the real world of the act.”19 Formation How does human interaction transpire? How do I relate to the other and vice versa? Here Bakhtin makes a number of crucial observations, the most basic of which is that “I [only] exist with the help of the other.”20 What Bakhtin means is not simply that I obviously “need” others to have been born in the

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first place, or that I might literally need others’ help in any given situation; but, rather, that I depend on the other’s formative or aesthetic (qua predicated on mutual perception) significance for ever coming into Being-as-event, forever evolving as a person. How exactly does this work, according to Bakhtin? Because the other is “outside” of me and, thus, has a “surplus of vision” with regard to me, he or she is literally capable of “completing” me, who, as ever evolving and structurally incapable of “seeing or making sense of my own exteriority,” would be doomed to remain “dissipated and dispersed in the world-as-task . . . and in the open event of ethical activity.”21 In other words, I need and depend on the other as someone who is solely capable of bestowing a distinct shape on me and my life, of gathering me into a whole by supplying those moments that are by definition inaccessible to me from within my singularly embodied place in Being-as-event. Owing to the other’s formative role in my regard, I become an embodied member of a shared social, world; owing to the other’s formative role, my singular “field of vision” (krugozor) is supplemented by a shared “environment” (okruzheniye), which transcends the sheer facticity and perimeter of my participation in Being-asevent. In short: the other creates me as a “unitary and singular human being” (and vice versa).22 It is thus, Bakhtin summarizes, “permissible to speak of the human being’s absolute aesthetic need for the other, for the other’s seeing, remembering, completing, and unifying activity, which alone can create an externally completed person.”23 Bakhtin calls this formative activity on the part of the other toward me (and vice versa) “objective aesthetic love . . . understood as my active engagement with the other.”24 Struggle This, however, is not yet quite the end of the story. For if the other simply had the last word on forming or shaping, and thus congealing, me into an aesthetic whole—thereby reifying me into an observable “subject” (with a fixed image, character, etc.)—then this would deprive me of my irreducible existential openness, and undermine Bakhtin’s basic postulate, namely, that only the “answerable, risk-laden, open, continuous act act” is “[t]ruly real and participating in the unique event of Being.” How to get out of this impasse? Here Bakhtin gives the screw of the I-other dynamic a decisive turn in arguing that the other’s formative activity elicits its own transgression on my part, which is precisely what being and ever becoming answerable, fully assuming responsibility for one’s life and Being is all about: “Those moments in the others consciousness that could complete us, are anticipated by our own consciousness; they lose their force of completion, and lead our own consciousness to expand its orientation.”25 In other words, my existence, my

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participation in Being-as-event, and my interaction with the other transpire by way of a constant “loving” “struggle” (bor’ba), a perpetual oscillation between my completion by the other and its concomitant transgression by me.26 On the one hand, I must remain “incomplete, open to myself in order to live,” and I must forestall ever being reduced to “my mere being there”; on the other hand, only the other can create me as an answerable participant in Being-as-event.27 Dialogue It is this “loving” “struggle” between the other and me, between the other’s consciousness and mine—which is fundamentally a struggle of language, insofar as, according to Bakhtin, consciousness is “verbally constituted” in and through my interaction with others, literally in answer to the other’s evertranscended formative address—that is captured by Bakhtin’s master concept of “dialogue.”28 Bakhtin posits the “dialogic nature of . . . human existence” tout court.29 Being-as-event is “the dialogic encounter of two [or more] consciousness.”30 It is a dialogue between me and others as well as within my own consciousness, in which “diverse verbal ideological positions” constantly “struggle for hegemony.”31 *** Two questions now arise: Does Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology actually “work”? Does his “theory”—ironically, in aiming to debunk “theoretism,” Bakhtin elaborates a complex theory of his own—adequately analyze and describe the human condition?32 In other words: Is it true? And because, as already Aristotle pointed out, “it shows a lack of education not to know of what we should require proof, and of what we should not, for it is quite impossible that everything should have a proof,” for then “the process would go on to infinity, so that even then there would be no proof”—because, that is, the basic tenets, beliefs, or axioms informing any (philosophical) system of thought or theory are themselves not provable or logically necessary, but must be simply be posited and taken on faith, as it were, or rejected, the “truth” in question can only be one of intuitive or real-life evidence.33 Thus, we need to ask: Is Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology true to life? Do we exist, do we live the way Bakhtin conceives of and depicts it? Does his anthropology help us understand and think through the basic structure of human existence? To have more than “anecdotal” validity (in the sense of: “Oh, yes, that’s how I, too, experience life”)—in other words, to have what William James calls real “cash-value in experiential terms,” that is, to be pragmatically true, it must be “verifiable” and “pay” in real life.34 Which means that we need a

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reliable, persuasive, “impartial” witness to the real experiential validity of Bakhtin’s theoretical insights. Enter Jollien. JOLLIEN No two philosophers could be less alike than Bakhtin and Alexandre Jollien. The former’s work (despite his insistence on being “non-theoretist”) is impersonal, cut and dried, highly abstract, steeped in technical language, and often forbidding; the latter’s is concrete, personal, narrative, close to real life and experience, and so easily accessible that one often forgets one is reading “philosophy” at all. It is precisely because the two would seem to have nothing in common and because Jollien has not in the least been influenced by Bakhtin (and, to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t even read his work) that their juxtaposition will not have been vitiated from the get-go by hermeneutic circularity. Like two witnesses who have not had a chance to collude and get their “stories” aligned prior to appearing before the investigator, Bakhtin and Jollien tell, as I show, basically the same “story” about human existence—simply because it is true. What is the story? We have heard Bakhtin’s version. Now let’s listen to Jollien’s. Since Jollien is, as of yet, virtually completely unknown in the English-speaking world, a few preliminary facts are in order. Born in 1975 in Sierre, Switzerland, with cerebral palsy, he grew up in an institution for the severely disabled, where, as he laconically notes, “rolling cigars” was his “professional horizon.”35 Completely by chance, he discovered philosophy, and his life was forever changed. Against all odds, he succeeded in completing secondary education and enrolled at the Université de Fribourg, thus escaping a future staked out for him by his caregivers. He published his first book—Éloge de la faiblesse (In Praise of Weakness)—at the age of twenty-two, while still a student, and has since established himself as a profound and compelling moral thinker and spiritual teacher with, as of this writing, seven highly successful books to his name.36 Not only is he the first and only congenitally severely disabled thinker in the history of philosophy, but he is also the first original philosopher to have consistently reflected on what it means to be born and live with disability, not as an insurmountable obstacle but as a source of strength and creative energy. Let us look at Jollien’s version of the “story” more closely now.37 (I should note that Jollien is not a systematic, “organized” thinker and that my own attempt at presenting his meandering thought in a linear fashion ought to be viewed heuristically above all.) Jollien makes his first appearance on the philosophical scene with a Socratic dialogue in Erasmian garb: a conversation between “Socrates” and “Alexandre” that revolves around the latter’s trajectory up to the time of

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writing In Praise of Weakness; “[a]s to my choice of the Socratic dialogue,” Jollien explains, “it faithfully reflects the manner in which I learned to philosophize.”38 Following a brief retelling of the “frenzied atmosphere” of his birth, Jollien quickly moves on to the seventeen years he spent in a specialized institution for severely disabled children and youth, where caregiving was geared toward, on the one hand, remedying, within limits, his congenital “deficits”, “correcting” through “physical therapy, ergo-therapy, speech therapy” what Jollien refers to as the singular, “strange creature that I am”; and, on the other hand, reducing him to and treating him as the “incorrigibly” disabled “creature” that he felt he had been branded as, destined for a “humble” life in a menial job.39 Thus, early on Jollien sets his sights “on one thing only, one single goal: making progress . . . Our only task consisted in doing everything in our power . . . to make progress and grow.”40 Which involves both “getting healthier and stronger” and, more importantly, “arm[ing] myself to combat all the labels that people attached to us,” escaping, at all costs, what “Sartre [calls] reification . . . being reduced to a thing or attribute, being viewed in terms of a single quality or flaw, being freeze-framed, stunted in one’s growth.”41 Combat becomes Jollien’s credo: “Struggle with and against everything! Struggle—in spite of our caregivers’ and teachers’ rigidity! Struggle—against medical diagnostics, discouragement and the other kids’ cruel and hurtful taunts!”42 This struggle, Jollien poignantly reminisces in a 2013 interview, “was vital, as otherwise I would have spent my life aligning cigars in boxes, so I had to fight against this future, which had been laid out for me, fight to be admitted to a school for normal children.”43 It is in this “atmosphere of ubiquitous struggle,” that, arguably, the most momentous event in Jollien’s young life occurs: he discovers philosophy, and particular, an “introduction to the Platonic dialogues” that “contained the following two phrases: ‘No one is voluntarily evil’ and ‘Know thyself.’”44 The first changed Jollien’s way of viewing his surroundings and those around him; the second confronted him with the necessity to think through and better understand his own condition, and give direction and “meaning to [his] reality.”45 “In order to overcome the obstacles of daily life,” Jollien begins “read[ing] the philosophers,” who became his “favorite interlocutors,” with the Platonic dialogues and Socrates “play[ing] a decisive role.”46 He quickly learns two fundamental lessons: to distinguish between what “depends and what does not depend on you” and to understand that the “obstacles life throws our way can become formative” in a productive way and that he might actually “derive greater benefit from them than from all the hefty tomes compiled by education experts,” insofar as they “force you to come up with solutions.”47 From the beginning of his philosophical journey as a young boy and adolescent,

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then, Jollien experiences his ongoing dialogue with the philosophers not primarily as a theoretical activity but, above all, in ethical terms, as an opportunity to acquire “equipment for living” and as a practical guide to how to interpret and deal with his condition of disability; how to relate to himself, his surroundings, and the world at large; how to act in the face of “prejudice and negative emotion . . ., fear, and cruelty, . . . lack of self-confidence and others’ incomprehension”; and, most importantly, how to fully and creatively “accept and assume the condition of not being normal.”48 “I armed myself for life” in this “most precarious situation,” Jollien poignantly observes; “passivity” was not an option.49 His dialogue with “the philosophers” can thus be said to have enabled Jollien to take a major first step in putting what must have initially been a mostly “instinctive” or intuitive, gut-level “struggle” onto a more conscious and purposeful footing and to have provided him with a more or less explicitly articulated method as to how to go about “becoming Alexandre Jollien”: “In the course of our first tête-à-tête,” Jollien writes, addressing himself to Lady Philosophy, “you have provided me with tools, with a method.”50 In light of the avowedly “non-theoretist” philosophical journey of self-fashioning and self-realization he embarks on, then, Jollien’s mantra—“Struggle with and against everything!”—can be re-read along the lines of Descartes’ so-called morale par provision, which the latter adopts as a temporary guide to dayto-day living pending his “search for the true method of attaining knowledge about all things” and the concomitant construction of his very own new “first philosophy.” Wishing to “conduct [his] life in a much better way” and realizing that the “ethical-philosophical palaces of the ancients were built on sand and mud,” and that “nothing solid could have possibly been built on such shaky foundations,” Descartes famously decides “not to build on old foundations [but] to reform [his] own thinking and build on a foundation entirely his own.”51 But so as not to be “indecisive in his actions even as reason dictates that he suspend his judgments, and, to live as happily as [he] possibly can,” he draws up a “provisional ethics” consisting of three basic maxims: “to obey the laws on customs of my country . . . to be as firm and resolute as possible in my actions . . . to endeavor . . . to master myself rather than . . . the order of things.”52 Availing himself of Descartes’ image of a tradition “built on sand,” Jollien, expands it to apply to the precariousness and uncertainty of the human condition as such, insofar as it is marked by suffering and mortality: “No one, sentenced to die as we are, will escape his share of suffering . . . Herein, then, consists the most basic challenge: molding, building a life, sculpting existence on a foundation of sand.”53 But building we must, Jollien stresses with a nod to Sartre: “We must commit ourselves [s’engager] . . . all remains to be built.”54 This existential “task,” then, of “building a life,” of “constructing

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himself” is what Jollien’s “struggle” reveals itself to be all about.55 It begins by becoming fully answerable for one’s existence, by “wholly and completely assum[ing] our condition.”56 Significantly for Jollien, “the disabled person,” precisely due to the increased precariousness and uncertainty of his or her condition, “opens a window onto the human condition as such.”57 Jollien reaches this realization avowedly in dialogue with Nietzsche, whose “amor fati”—signifying that “we ought not merely to endure the necessary . . . but to love it”—constitutes the very backbone of Jollien’s entire ethics of disability and overcoming.58 How, now, does Jollien go about “loving” the necessary, the ineluctable, which, in his case, applies to his condition of disability above all? By harnessing the very power of his weakness, by “drawing strength” from it, by turning it on its head, so to speak, and “using” it as an opportunity to grow—hence, the title of Jollien’s first book: In Praise of Weakness.59 And how in turn does he go about drawing strength from his weakness? By fully realizing and wholeheartedly accepting the fact of his utter dependence on others: “I didn’t choose to depend on others. No, but owing to my disability—my entire past, in fact—I felt the need for support, for friends . . . all the more acutely . . . My incapacity to attain complete independence is a daily reminder of human greatness. At the very heart of my weakness, I can appreciate the gift of others’ presence, and I in turn endeavor to make them a gift of mine.”60 Recognizing and fully acknowledging “the vital role of the other” for his project of “constructing himself”—for “man doesn’t construct himself but in the presence of the other”—Jollien methodically engages in a sustained dialogue with those around him (in addition, that is, to his already ongoing dialogue with “the philosophers”)—both those whose “gaze can become an obstacle,” such as the less “benevolent” caregivers and medical professionals who wish to view him squarely in terms of his disability, thereby “stunting his growth,” and those whose “gaze [is] a source of recognition and acknowledgment,” such as his friends within and without the specialized institution, his family, and the occasional caregiver capable of looking past his disability and seeing the entire person, as it were.61 Citing Hegel and Sartre, in particular, Jollien reflects on the essential role in human development of being perceived by the other: “Hegel repeatedly stresses the significance of the other’s gaze. Encountering the other, he argues, enables us to elevate ourselves, grow and become fully human . . . Sartre, too, highlights our visceral, profound need to be seen and acknowledged by the other.”62 “Encountering the other,” Jollien avers, became the “occasion to forge the tools to build my individuality.”63 Among these formative encounters and dialogues, suffice it to adduce three (Jollien mentions many more) that capture the “vital role of the other” for Jollien exemplarily: with his severely disabled friend Jérôme, with Father Morand, and with Matthieu.

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“Often, at night,” Jollien reminisces, I would envy the lot of other children . . . A dim light illuminated our dorm with its curious inhabitants: a dwarf . . .; a mute . . .; across from me, Jerôme . . . One time, exerting a superhuman effort, he asked me . . .: “How’re ye?” To this day, I am overwhelmed by the very thought that Jerôme, paralyzed and confined to his bed, would take an interest in my petty worries. He didn’t preach courage or the necessity to think positively in the vein of so much self-help literature; yet, his simple question—“How’re ye?”—said it all. His support was unconditional . . . When he asked me how I was doing, Jerôme simply wanted to let me know that he was happy that I existed, that he existed—despite our rotten lot. Jerôme plumbed the depths of reality in order to assume it wholly and completely. He showed me that in order to accept our condition, we have to draw strength and sustenance from our own lived experience, from our very weakness . . . No pedagogue or caregiver has ever been able to teach me that.64

The institution’s chaplain had a similarly formative impact on Jollien: It was this man who kindled [and] nourished my passion for philosophy, which soon helped me to think through and break the bad habits instilled in me by my caregivers . . . I would often go to him in the hope of demolishing his theological truths, which allowed him to exculpate a God who . . . condoned suffering. In the course of our regular exchanges, he became a friend . . . Still, everything separated us: he was sixty years older than I and came from a completely different cultural background . . . Despite all that, however, we managed to establish a dialogue and build a bridge connecting our worlds. Father Morand never preached to me. . . His influence on me was radical . . . He transformed me, being neither a theoretician nor an eminent psychologist.65

His dialogue with Morand more than anything helped Jollien to turn his initially more or less “haphazard” engagement with “the philosophers” into a full-blown existential project, thus shoring up and solidifying the path he had already embarked on in his philosophical readings: “This man with hollow cheeks and yellowed teeth, who would soon die, consciously worked toward the birth of a project of which he had no idea. The construction of [myself]. . ..”66 Finally, Matthieu, one of Jollien’s most memorable caregivers, “believed in education from the ground up starting with the individual . . . [He] didn’t propound an abstract theory [but] awakened us to the knowledge we already carried inside, to our own dormant abilities.”67 Under his guidance, Jollien notes, “I finally became aware of my own responsibility . . . Matthieu taught us that life itself . . . hands us the problem-solving tools we

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need, which gradually come into view in the course of an ongoing dialogue: with friends, relatives, and, above all, ourselves.”68 Jollien conceives of this transformative dialogue, in which each participant is “invited to eternally transgress oneself”—lest he or she be “reified,” reduced to, congealed into a fixed image or form—in terms of a “deep affection” or “love,” which, in turn, Jollien suggests, will (or might) be strong enough to undo the “cruelty . . . stereotypes and taboos that poison human relations.”69 Owing to this “deep affection,” finally, Jollien’s self-transgressing dialogue with the dead and the living reveals itself fundamentally as a “combat joyeux,” a joyful, merry struggle.70 CONCLUSION: JOLLIEN–BAKHTIN The ethical-conceptual affinities between Bakhtin and Jollien are remarkable. Both are card-carrying “non-theoretists”; both conceive of the fundamental condition and unfolding of human existence first and foremost in terms of action, as opposed to, for instance, “Geworfenheit [being thrown]” (Heidegger) or being haunted by nothingness (Sartre); both view action as inherently tasked with assuming responsibility for one’s singular Being, of becoming answerable; both elaborate the pursuit of the task of living and acting in architectonic terms that imply the mutually (trans)formative engagement of I and other, on whom I absolutely depend; both specify this formative engagement in terms of love, whose emotional/psychological manifestation can be said to be but an aspect or symptom of that deeper dialogical love that Jollien calls “deep affection” and Bakhtin “objective aesthetic love”; both finally place human interaction under the structural auspices of the categories of encounter and dialogue. In other words, if we map Jollien’s ethics of disability and overcoming onto Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology and vice versa, we will—uncannily—encounter a virtually identical match, as it were. But what exactly does this mean? What do these conceptual affinities signify in the present context? It being understood that recognizing them alone would fall short of the actual hermeneutic task, namely, to present a productive way of interpreting and understanding them. These, then, are my concluding suggestions: First, these affinities signify that at least one other person, who selfidentifies as a philosopher and is perceived and acknowledged as such by his readers and the world at large, views, experiences, and articulates human existence in terms very similar to Bakhtin’s, and, most signally, completely independently of the latter. Bearing witness to the human condition and his own trajectory in the terms I have elaborated, Jollien’s ethics of disability and

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overcoming can thus be said to pragmatically validate Bakhtin’s theoretical insights and postulates. Second, Bakhtin’s philosophical framework, insofar as it persuasively captures and rasterizes the human condition, can be said to provide Jollien’s ostensibly meandering and unsystematic thinking with a more solid theoretical foundation, thus, in turn, validating Jollien’s “experiential” insights and postulates. Third, and finally, because Jollien has actually succeeded in translating his ethical-philosophical insights and postulates into a tangible, real-life project that has borne material fruit—he has become emphatically answerable for his condition, has escaped lifelong institutionalization, is now a successful author and public speaker, married with three children—he has also (given his ethical-conceptual affinities with Bakhtin) successfully (and entirely unintentionally) shown Bakhtin’s philosophical anthropology to be a more than a credible approach to understanding and making sense of what it means to be human. Against the foil of the law of unintended consequences, Jollien can be said to have taken up and answered Bakhtin’s philosophical call or challenge by living it. Just like Father Morand, who “had no idea” that his interlocutor Jollien was gearing up for a lifelong existential project drawing sustenance from the wisdom he dispensed, so Bakhtin couldn’t have possibly imagined that one day a severely disabled Swiss thinker would come along to “prove” his theories “right,” so to speak. NOTES 1. See Plato, Protagoras and Meno (both passim; esp. Meno, 99b.) Throughout this chapter, all translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. To facilitate a smooth reading experience, I dispense with quotations in Cyrillic, offering, if need be, transliterations instead. 2. See Bakhtin, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, 523; Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, 351. On Bakhtin’s practice of philosophical anthropology, see Todorov, The Dialogical Principle, 94ff.; Holquist, Dialogism, 158; Emerson, The First Hundred Years, 212. On the history and concept of philosophical anthropology since its inception in the Romantic era, see esp. Marquard, “Zur Geschichte des philosophischen Begriffs ‘Anthropologie’.” 3. For the quotes in this sentence, see Holquist, Dialogism, 5; Bakhtin, Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i, 531; Todorov, The Dialogical Principle, 94. For an extended discussion of the continuity of Bakhtin’s thinking, despite its apparent lack of systematic stringency, see also my Ethics and Dialogue, 66–67. I do not engage with the question of the authorship of the Bakhtin circle’s disputed text in this chapter (see esp. my Ethics and Dialogue, 67, note 2).

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4. See esp. Bakhtin’s late “Notes made in 1970–1971,” in: Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, 336–360. Bakhtin died in 1975. 5. See Scheler’s 1928 book Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. For Bakhtin’s discussions of “theoretism” (teoretizm])and “first philosophy” (pervaya filofofiya), see, for instance, Raboty, 16, 18–19, 21, 25, 31, 34. In aiming to create a new “first philosophy,” Bakhtin displaces Aristotle’s notion of “prote philosophia” (meaning metaphysics or ontology; see esp. Metaphysics, 1026a24). “Theoretism,” for Bakhtin, subsumes most of the dominant philosophical schools of the day, such as Neo-Kantianism (esp. Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert), phenomenology (Edmund Husserl), and pragmatism (esp. Charles Sanders Peirce and William James), as well as vitalism (Henri Bergson) and the philosophy of life (Wilhelm Dilthey). 6. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 24. In this chapter, I discuss neither the irony marking Bakhtin’s opposition to “theoretism” as part his own, new “theory” nor the validity of his assessment of the above-mentioned philosophical schools, contenting myself with underscoring Bakhtin’s aspiration toward “philosophical concreteness.” For a critical discussion of Bakhtin’s critique of and debt to “theoretism,” see my Ethics and Dialogue, 68–67. (esp. notes 6 and 7). Pace his opposition to “theoretism,” Bakhtin’s conception of Being as always already engaged by the human being is certainly inspired by Edmund Husserl’s notion of Being as an “intentional correlate” of the one who “posits Being” (Seinssetzung) (Husserl, Die phänomenologische Methode, 31, 198). 7. See Bakhtin, Raboty 24, 42. In addition to “Being as event” (bytiye kak sobytiye), Bakhtin also uses the following formulations to refer to the same phenomenon: “event of Being” (sobytiye bytiya) (Raboty, 15, 20), and “Being-event” (bytiye-sobytiye) (ibid., 34). Bakhtin’s ontological recourse to the concept of “event” is indebted to Wilhelm Windelband’s—a Neo-Kantian’s—distinction between abstract, impersonal “Being” (Sein) and its concrete manifestation as “event” (Geschehen). Only as “Geschehen” does Being, according to Windelband, become accessible to “the human being . . ., takes place with him, in him, or for him” (Präludien, vol. 2, 19). Bakhtin’s emphasis on “participation in Being” harks back to Plato’s concept of “metexis” (see esp. Phaedo, 100c, 101c; Parmenides, 129a–132e; Sophist, 255a–256a). “Metexis” designates the transient world’s “participation” in the realm of ideas, which as the highest ontological realm, “remains always the same” (Plato, Timaeus, 35a). 8. Following the publication of his three Critiques (1787–1790) and the trailblazing Anthropology from a Pragmatic Perspective (1798), Kant came to the conclusion that the main branches of philosophy—epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and religion—“ought to be considered part of anthropology” (Kant, Logik, 25), precisely because the latter is concerned with the overarching question, “What is Man?” (ibid.) qua goal-oriented, thinking, and acting being. Among other things, Kant stresses, “the philosopher must determine the bounds of the possible and useful application of all knowledge” (ibid.; emphasis mine). 9. My heuristically dictated chronological presentation of the six elements doesn’t imply a corresponding logical hierarchy. The reality Bakhtin endeavors to capture is marked by the simultaneous interface of all elements. For a comprehensive

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analysis of Bakhtin’s oeuvre (including his inquiry into “metalinguistics” as well as germane topics), see my Ethics and Dialogue, 66–112. 10. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 11. 11. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 9–68. Bakhtin’s “philosophy of the act” is indebted to Maurice Blondel’s “philosophy of action,” which articulates the intellectual, ethical, and physical realms: “Action pertains at once to all the powers in man . . . through thought . . . it is of an intellectual order; through intention and good will, it belongs to the moral world, through execution to the world of science” (Blondel, Action, 40). 12. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 35. Bakhtin’s distinction between “givenness” (dannost’) and what is “given as a task” (zadannost’) is indebted, among others, to the Neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen’s insistence that that the world is never merely “given” (gegeben) but always “given as a task” (aufgegeben) (Ethik des reinen Willens, 142–145, 170–171). Bakhtin’s use of the term “ought” (dolzhenstvovaniye) goes back to Kant’s core ethical category of “Sollen” (see esp. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 227). 13. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 53. 14. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 17 (“zhizni, kak otvetsvennogo riskovannogo otkrytogo stanovleniya-postupka”). 15. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 41; Literaturno-kritichekiye stat’i, 512. In this chapter, I use “answerable,” “responsible,” and their cognate nouns interchangeably. 16. See Bakhtin, Problemy, 186–187. 17. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 52 (emphasis mine); Literaturno-kritichekiye stat’i, 512. Appropriating Descartes’ discourse of “architecture” and “construction” in the context of his “search for truth” (bâtir; see esp. Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 28–29, 34–36, 45) Kant elaborates a “system of pure philosophy” (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 17), or “transcendental philosophy” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, vol. 1, 64), whose cornerstones are supplied by his three Critiques (Critique of Pure Reason; Critique of Practical Reason; Critique of Judgment). It is the first Critique’s task to provide—“architectonically, that is, based on principles [a priori]” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, vol. 1, 64)—the construction plan for the entire philosophical edifice. Not surprisingly, the first Critique culminates in “the architectonic of pure reason” (ibid., 695–709). By “architectonic,” Kant means specifically the “art of systems” or the “science of scientificity in our cognition” (ibid., 695); “system” in turn implies the “unitary subsumption of manifold cognitions under one idea” (ibid., 696). Kant’s and Descartes’ modern use of “architectonics” as a way of “doing” philosophy goes back to Aristotle, who, famously, spoke of the “architektonikê téchnê” of politics, which he treated as identical with ethics (Nicomachean Ethics 1094a14–1094a15, 28–29, 1094b13). 18. See, Bakhtin, Raboty, 52. For Bakhtin’s qualification of “interaction” as “encounter” (vstrecha), see, for instance, Problemy, 186. 19. See, Bakhtin, Raboty, 52. 20. See Bakhtin, Literaturno-kritichekiye stat’i, 515. 21. See Bakhtin, Literaturno-kritichekiye stat’i, 507; Raboty, 98. For Bakhtin’s concepts of “outsidedness” (vnenakhodimost’) “surplus of vision” (izbytok videniya), and the oscillation between “completeness” (zavershennost’) and “incompleteness”

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(nezavershennost’), see Raboty, 17, 21–22, 74, 91, 96–97, 139, 164, 173, 196, 222– 223; Problemy, 199. 22. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 154. 23. Ibid., 116. 24. Ibid., 59, 153. 25. Ibid., 99. 26. See Bakhtin, Voprosy Literatury i Estetiki, 158. Caryl Emerson appositely notes: “In [Bakhtin’s] texts words are always competing, doing battle . . . But this ‘violence’ . . . is ultimately a happy war” (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, xxxvii). 27. See Bakhtin, Raboty, 97. 28. See Bakhtin, Problemy, 15 29. Ibid., 198. 30. See Bakhtin, Literaturno-kritichekiye stat’i, 494. 31. Voprosy Literatury i Estetiki, 158. 32. For the irony at the heart of Bakhtin’s anti-“theoretism,” see also above, note 6. 33. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 1006a5–1006a13. Essentially, every original philosopher finds himself in the same situation as the young Socrates confronted by Parmenides. “Tell me,” the Eleatic elder asks the twenty-year-old Socrates, “Did you invent this distinction yourself, which separates abstract ideas from the things that partake of them?” To which Socrates tersely replies: “Yes . . .” (See Plato, Parmenides, 130b). No proof is given, and yet the foundations for the most influential philosophical system and worldview have thus been laid: with a simple, logically unfounded affirmation. 34. See William James, Writings, 573. “Truth,” James writes, “is simply a name for verification-processes” (ibid., 581). 35. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 112. 36. Éloge de la faiblesse (1999) was followed by Le métier d’homme (2002), La construction de soi: Un usage de la philosophie (2006), Le philosophe nu (2010), Petit traité de l’abandon: Pensées pour accueillir la vie telle qu’elle se présente (2012), Vivre sans pourquoi: Itinéraire spirituel d’un philosophe en Corée (2015), and (with Matthieu Ricard and Christophe André) Trois amis en quête de sagesse (2016; to appear in English in 2018). As of this writing, only one book by Jollien has appeared in English, In Praise of Weakness. To the best of my knowledge, there has only been one scholarly article devoted to Jollien in English to date: Sam Haigh’s “Writing Disability” (2010). 37. In my discussion of Alexandre Jollien’s work, I focus on his first three books, as his thinking underwent a radical “turning” (to use Heidegger’s famous term) somewhere between Le métier d’homme (2002) and La construction de soi (2006), fully coming into view in Petit traité de l’abandon (2012). As Jollien, points, he gradually moved away from an essentially “combative” view of existence “toward a philosophy of surrender” (Le métier d’homme [2013], 93). La construction de soi straddles both Jollien’s pre- and post-“turning” approaches to life. 38. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 18. Given the explicitly autobiographical thrust of In Praise of Weakness (and all of Jollien’s works, for that matter), I do not distinguish between the real author and his fictional persona in this chapter.

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In choosing the title In Praise of Weakness, Jollien pays tribute to Erasmus of Rotterdam, author of In Praise of Folly, which he considers an exemplary attempt to “destroy prejudice with subtlety and not without mordant irony” (La construction de soi, 84, 86). Long before Nietzsche, Jollien observes (with a nod to the latter’s Götzendmämmerung oder Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert), Erasmus “philosophize[d] with a hammer” (ibid., 84). 39. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 23, 25. 40. Ibid., 28, 32. 41. Ibid., 42. See also La construction de soi, 25, 29. 42. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 32. See also: ibid., 37, 38–39, 75, 123–124; Le métier d’homme, 15–18, 23, 25, 27, 29, 44, 51, 72–73. 43. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme [2013], 126. 44. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 32; Le métier d’homme [2013], 95. The first quote was inscribed on the pronaos at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi; and the second is taken from Plato, Protagoras, 358b-e. 45. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 33. 46. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 18. Elsewhere, Jollien writes: “For me, the hardships and challenges were the occasion for philosophy” (La construction de soi, 133). 47. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 33, 39; Le métier d’homme [2013], 95. See also Epictetus, Encheiridion, §14, §19. 48. See Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living”; Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 124. For Jollien’s opposition to “theoretism,” see also In Praise of Weakness, 47–48, 79, 85–86, 103, 106, 123; La construction de soi, 19, 78, 177. 49. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme, 18, 22. 50. See Jollien, La construction de soi, 75. The Greek term “methodos” literally means “road” or “way.” 51. See Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 36, 38, 28–29. Although Descartes does not yet use the term “first philosophy” in Discourse on Method (1636), he will do so in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). 52. See Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 45–48. Jollien explicitly refers to Discours de la méthode in La construction de soi, 44 (see also ibid., 45, 128). 53. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme, 41–42. See also ibid., 13, 26, 39, 43, 57, 69, 70, 89; La construction de soi, passim. Hannah Arendt sums up the “most general condition of human existence [in terms of] birth and death, natality and mortality” (The Human Condition, 8). 54. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme, 41–43. See Sartre, Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, 40. 55. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 32, Le métier d’homme, 27, 68 (“tâche”), 13 (“bâtir une vie”), 39, 51 (“construction de soi”). 56. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 48, 75–76, 80, 124; Le métier d’homme, 39, 44, 64, 71; La construction de soi, 35. 57. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme, 84. 58. See Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner, 297, 436. For Jollien’s many references to Nietzsche throughout his writings, see, for instance, In Praise of Weakness, 18, 40, 54, 56; Le métier d’homme, 23, 54; La construction de soi, 166–168, 171.

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59. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness and Le métier d’homme, throughout, and esp. In Praise of Weakness, 47–50. 60. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 99, 122. Here Jollien touches on the broad subject of what Friedrich Schleiermacher famously called our “sense of absolute dependence” (Gefühl schlechthinninger Abhängigkeit) (Der christliche Glaube, §§3–5) as a core element of the human condition. 61. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 98, 123; Le métier d’homme, 48, 70. 62. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 61. 63. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme, 70. 64. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 44, 48. 65. Ibid., 105, 106 (emphasis mine). 66. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme, 22. Jollien employs Sartre’s notion of “project” advisedly here (see Sartre, L’être et le néant, passim). 67. See Jollien, In Praise of Weakness, 78–79. 68. Ibid., 79–81 (emphasis mine). 69. See Jollien, Le métier d’homme, 23; In Praise of Weakness, 92. 70. An entire section of Le métier d’homme is thus entitled (15–29).

WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Introduction by Margaret Canovan. 2nd edition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Aristotle. The Metaphysics. Translated by H. Tredennick and G. C. Armstrong. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1933/1936). ———. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. London: Heinemann, 1926. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva. Edited by Sergey G. Bocharov. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979. ———. Literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i. Edited by Sergey G. Bocharov and Vadim V. Kozhinov. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1986. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. Problemy poetiki/tvorchestva Dostoevskogo. Edited by Oleg V. Garun. Kiev: Next, 1994. ———. Raboty 1920-x godov. Edited by Dmitry A. Tatarnikov. Kiev: Next, 1994. ———. Voprosy literatury i estetiki: issledovaniia raznykh let. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975. Blondel, Maurice. Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice. Translated by Olivia Blanchette. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Burke, Kenneth. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” In: Literary Criticism and Theory: The Greeks to the Present. Edited by Robert Con Davis and Leurie Finke. New York: Longman, 1989. 626–631.

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Cohen, Hermann. Ethik des reinen Willens. 2nd edition. Berlin: Cassirer, 1907 [1904]. Descartes, René. Discours de la méthode suivi d’extraits de la Dioptrique, des Météores, de la vie de Descartes par Baillet, du Monde, de l’Homme et de Lettres. Edited by Genéviève Rodi-Lewis. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1992. Emerson, Caryl, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Epictetus. The Handbook (The Encheiridion). Translated by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. Eskin, Michael. Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Haigh, Sam. “Writing Disability: Alexandre Jollien’s Éloge de la faiblesse.” Modern Language Review 105.3 (July 2010): 695–712. Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Husserl, Edmund. Husserl, Edmund. Die phänomenologische Methode: Ausgewählte Texte I. Edited by Klaus Held. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985. James, William. Writings 1902–1910: The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, The Meaning of Truth, Some Problems of Philosophy, Essays. Edited by Bruce Kuklick. New York: The Library of America, 1988. Jollien, Alexandre. In Praise of Weakness. Translated by Michael Eskin. New York: Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc., 2017. ———. La construction de de soi: Un usage de la philosophie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006. ———. Le métier d’homme: Essai. Préface de Michel Onfray. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002. ———. Le métier d’homme: Suivi de “La pratique spirituelle, un autre nom pour le métier d’homme” (Entretien avec Bernard Campan). Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. Grundlegung der Metaphysik der Sitten. Edited by Martina Thom. Leipzig: Reclam, 1989. ———. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited by Wilhelm Weischedel, 2 vols. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. ———. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Edited by Gerhard Lehmann. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1963. ———. Logik: Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen. Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1800. Marquard, Odo. “Zur Geschichte des philosophischen Begriffs ‘Anthropologie’ seit dem Ende des achtzehnten Jahrunderts.” Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie: Aufsätze. Frankfurt a. M.L Suhrkamp, 1982. 122–138. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Der Fall Wagner. Götzendämmerung. Der Antichrist. Ecce Homo. Dionysos-Dithyramben. Nietzsche contra Wagner. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 1988. Plato. Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias. Trans. Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus. Trans. Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

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———. Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library, vol. 165. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1999 [1924]. ———. Theaetetus. Sophist. Trans. Harold North Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’être et le néant: essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. ———. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Scheler, Max. Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos. 16th edition. Bonn: Bouvier, 2005. Schleiermacher, Friedrich [Daniel Ernst]. Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischnen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2009 [1821/1822]. Steinby, Liisa. “Hermann Cohen and Bakhtin's Early Aesthetics.” Studies in East European Thought 63.3 (2011): 227–249. Todorov, Tzvetan, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Windelband, Wilhelm. Präludien: Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte. 2 vols. Tübingen: Mohr, 1915.

Chapter 11

Quixotic Cinema in the Light of Bakhtin’s Theory Pablo Carvajal

Ever since French structuralists, led by Todorov and Kristeva, rescued the figure of Bakhtin and used many of his concepts to develop their own theories, this Russian critic’s work has kept gaining importance. His influence on both the central fields of the present work, Cervantine criticism and cinematographic adaptation, is getting more and more noticeable. With respect to the former, Bakhtin himself often commented about Don Quixote along his work. Although he didn’t devote a specific work to it, as he did with Rabelais1 and Dostoyevsky,2 and despite the fact that his allusions to Cervantes and his famous novel hardly amount to twelve pages of the more than 12,000 that he wrote—according to Reed’s calculations3— the fact is that, as Mancing states,4 his references to Don Quixote are most numerous where Bakhtin supports his concept of modern novel. Not in vain does he consider that “The purest model of the novel as genre [is] Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which realizes in itself, in extraordinary depth and breadth, all the artistic possibilities of heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic discourse.”5 Bakhtin’s works were translated for the first time in Spain in the early 1980s and soon studies began to appear applying his main concepts to the study of Spanish literature in general and particularly to Cervantes’s work.6 The same happens in the cinematographic sphere, mainly in the field of adaptation, where the studies by the Russian theorist are seen as a model that allows for the overcoming of the semiotic-filmic studies promoted by Metz,7 embracing the textual, intertextual, and contextual aspects, breaking the autonomous art object by placing it in a context without fixed boundaries, introducing the diachronic aspect, both political and social, in the abstract model by Metz, and reappreciating the links between cinema and other semiotic systems.8 219

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Although this Russian author applied his theories to the field of linguistics and subsequently to literature, especially to the novel genre, this has not been a hindrance for his concepts and ideas to go beyond those scopes and be used to enlighten other fields. Bakhtin’s understanding of text as “any coherent complex of signs,”9 as well as his consideration of discourse as an event shared by the author and the reader that refers “to language in its concrete, living totality,”10 and his idea that no cultural production exists outside language have made critics such as Stam11 consider that his theory is reaccentuable for the cinematographic sphere. Flanagan,12 who also re-accents Bakhtin’s theory in his book, bases on the equivalence between filmic text and utterance (“the artistically shaped series of meanings that comprise the ‘movie,’ finds and approximate analogue in Bakhtin’s ‘utterance,’ that is, the verbal or artistic statement in its dialogically animated, living, open state”),13 and Cutchins shapes his theoretical proposal about adaptation from Bakhtin’s idea of translation.14 Bakhtin points out that “the image of Don Quixote has been thus reaccentuated in a variety of ways in the later history of the novel and interpreted in different ways, for these reaccentuations and interpretations were an inevitable and organic further development of the image, a continuation of the unresolved argument embedded in it.”15 From now on, we’ll analyze a number of quixotic adaptations, versions, and recreations16 in the filmic scope according to Bakhtinian criteria to highlight the dialogic connections that take place between them and Cervantes’s novel, and how they are treated, how some of the most remarkable aspects of Don Quixote, which turn it into the first modern novel, are translated to the cinematographic genre and to the historical and social context of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and what consequences derive from it in each case. MONOLOGICAL DERIVATIONS FROM DIALOGICAL PROCESSES The dialogic approach makes me consider not only how Don Quixote influences these films but also how they in turn influence the novel (e.g., in its reception process) and sometimes one another, so we’ll speak about interdetermination, since it is a pluridirectional process where the artistic act “lives and moves not in a vacuum but in an intense axiological atmosphere of responsible interdetermination.”17 I consider the dialogic relationship between Cervantes’s novel and Gil’s Don Quijote de la Mancha analogue to the one that exists between certain works and the classic genre they belong to, where the compulsory respect

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to norms and predetermined patterns guides the artist. The works resulting from this external dialogic process are always internally monologic, such as chivalry or pastoral novels. The interviews granted at the moment by Gil and Abad Ojuel, the author of the literary summary the script is based on, bring to light this way of approaching the source. In the first place, they think that it has only one interpretation and the adaptor’s duty is to remain faithful to it: “sólo entre los españoles podemos dar una versión certera y entrañable de Don Quijote. Recordemos aquella bufonada danesa que hicieron Pat y Patachon, o el grave error de Pabst en la versión que hizo con Chaliapin; las dos fueron de una incomprensión total y culpable.”18 Second, they show an almost sacred veneration for Cervantes’s novel, which makes them reject any change or re-accentuation, which could alter the meaning attributed to the work by them: “Al realizar la síntesis literaria de El Quijote con una idea cinematográfica, trabajé con el mismo cuidado que si manipulase cosas sagradas . . . la adaptación literaria fue hecha con todo respeto y fidelidad al pensamiento central de la obra de Cervantes.”19 However, this approach, far from producing a faithful and complete Quixote as they intend, reflecting “all the social and ideological voices of its era,”20 that is, polyphonic, a defining characteristic of modern novel for Bakhtin, which we apply to modern fiction in general, results in a monologic reaccentuation in which, in addition to losing that polyphonic character, another essential characteristic of the novelistic genre is lost: the metafictional aspect, “auto-criticism of discourse”21 in Bakhtin’s words. Gil’s film is characterized by applying to Cervantes’s novel a number of deletions, mutilations, and variations, which recall the stylization and ennobling process that the different genres, voices, and discourses were subjected to when incorporated to the first stylistic line of novel—the monologic one— pointed out by Bakhtin. Those operations aim to re-accentuate Cervantes’s novel toward an ideological significance in which Don Quixote becomes a Christian knight, a symbol of Faith and Franco’s ideology. To achieve this, they suppress all the passages in which either Don Quixote is not the main character (interpolated tales, with the exception of Cardenio’s story, told by himself and without introducing a second diegetic level, that is, transforming it into one more episode of the main story: metaliterary reflections and passages in which he acts as a witness) or he has the leading role in scenes in which he does not show a desirable image. Others are mutilated and modified so that the message is coherent with the ideological goal that is pursued. A good example of the latter is offered by Mañas Martínez who has analyzed in detail the changes made in the “Discourse on Arms and Letters,” which becomes just “Discourse on Arms” in which these support “the peace” instead of “the laws”22 (as she recalls, Franco was “the commander of peace,” “the great peacemaker”). No word, no utterance is neutral for Bakhtin. In fact,

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they are the “ideological phenomenon par excellence.”23 There are always conflicting accents, and Gil’s film is a clear example of it. We can also find a clear ideological reorientation in Pabst’s Don Quichotte and Kozintsev’s Don Kihot,24 in this case through more dialogic processes. Besides the suppression operation, mandatory in any film, the processes of hybridization, transposition, and re-accentuation of certain novelistic images and episodes appear as essential. For example, in the Russian film, we can find a hybridization of the character of Altisidora and the Biscay lady, gaining prominence by being re-accentuated as a “femme fatale,” the opposite of Aldonza, who dreams of becoming Dulcinea without knowing that she is already. In Pabst’s film, an example of hybridization of episodes appears when Don Quixote and Sancho are staying at the Dukes’ palace. The Dukes are presented in a much more positive way than in Kozintsev’s version— where they are portrayed as very cruel characters in order to reflect the ideological class conflict from a Marxist perspective—and acquire the role that the priest and the barber have in the novel, deciding to set up a carnival farce to help Don Quixote recover his sanity and make him go back home. That way, they preside over a tournament confronting Don Quixote with the Knight of the Griffon, Sansón Carrasco, who appears as his niece’s fiancé in this version and is presented in a very negative way by being portrayed as a cowardly, selfish person, only concerned about preventing Don Quixote from wasting his niece’s inheritance. Any reader of Cervantes’s work will find this scene full of echoes of other passages and motifs—besides the stay at the Dukes’ palace and the confrontation with a masqueraded Sansón, we also attend Sancho’s tossing or Don Quixote’s disappointment, curiously enough in this case, not after being defeated but when he succeeds in the confrontation and discovers the farce set up around him. No doubt, the most remarkable transposition in both cases is the fact of placing the famous scene of the windmills at the end of the story. In both cases, Don Quixote’s defeat will be decisive, making the hopeless knight go back home. That way, this passage achieves relevance more in line with the previous idea that the audience has about it, which does not come from the novel, in which it is just one of the many interchangeable episodes in the first part where the structure of the chivalric novels is parodied, but from the iconic myth it has become. In Kozintsev’s version, the character of Sancho is subjected to radical re-accentuation, to the extent that he is an idealistic dreamer, just like Don Quixote.25 In this case, the Russian filmmaker reduces the polyphonic character of the novel, since for Bakhtin each voice is a point of view and a unique vision of the world “characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values.”26 By quixotizing Sancho to the extreme, the dualism between

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the squire’s materialistic, realistic point of view and his master’s idealistic, dreamy one gets lost. Alongside these hybridizations, which are often reductive but dialogical—at least in the sense that several voices or passages can be perceived simultaneously—we also find the opposite process, although equally aimed at monology. In Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote is a hybrid character, since he is both Alonso Quijano and Don Quixote at the same time. A great part of his ambiguity comes from this hybrid nature, this double-voiced discourse of the main character. In his alternation of madness and lucid intervals, the doubt always remains whether the character is mad of pretending to be so, whether Don Quixote’s madness is a designer insanity created from Alonso Quijano’s rationalism, whether it is a mask or not.27 Thanks to that, Cervantes can say and not say, can make a character in Spanish Golden Age commit sacrilegious acts such as making a rosary with his underwear, and avoid the Inquisition’s censoring without any problem. For Bakhtin, the fool is, together with the clown and the rogue, one of the figures that allow the novelist to show a carnivalesque vision of the world upside down, emphasizing the conventions and lies of the world: “Regarding fools or regarding the world through the eyes of a fool, the novelist’s eye is taught a sort of prose vision, the vision of a world confused by conventions of pathos and by falsity,”28 but it is precisely due to the hybrid nature of Cervantes’s character that the discourse in Don Quixote gets richer and more ambiguous, surpassing other fools’ simple criticism. However, in Pabst’s film, so rich in hybridizations, the hero undergoes a dehybridization so that Alonso Quijano/Don Quixote is just Don Quixote throughout the film. That is how his niece calls him at the beginning of the film, and that is how he dies. There is neither going insane, nor going back to sanity. Don Quixote’s novelistic image is re-accentuated in a monologic way. CHRONOTOPIC VARIATIONS One of Bakhtin’s concepts, which is more orientated to its filmic application in general and namely to the scope of adaptation, is the chronotope. In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,”29 Bakhtin uses this concept in three different but complementary senses: to demarcate generic forms, which are classified according to the way of representing time and space, applied to specific chronotopic motifs within the diegesis, and as a bridge between the real world and the represented one (added in his 1973 revision).30 Bakhtin describes Don Quixote’s chronotope as a “parodied hybridization of the alien, miraculous world chronotope of chivalric romances, with the

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high road winding through one’s native land chronotope that is typical of the picaresque novel.”31 This hybridazation “radically changes their character; both of them take on metaphoric significance and enter into completely new relations with the real world.”32 These new meanings appear when the alien, miraculous world of adventure time is translated to a familiar, everyday space. The parodic effect, so clear for the contemporary receiver of Don Quixote, derives from that inadequacy, placing Don Quixote “somewhere in La Mancha” and making his figure and his way of speaking—an identity based on the imitation of the knight-errants—anachronistic and laughable for the other characters and for the reader, who perceive him as a carnivalesque figure.33 When translating that situation from the book to the film, and from the seventeenth century to present time, the third of the senses of Bakhtin’s chronotope gets full validity: “Its mediation between real historical events and their appearance in the text.”34 “The Chronotope is a bridge, not a Wall, between the two worlds’ of real and represented.”35 When Orson Welles states that “The differences between the sixteenth and the fourteenth centuries are not very clear in our minds . . . [therefore] I’ve simply translated this anachronism into modern terms,”36 he is precisely pointing to this fact. The chronotope defines the relationship between the text and the reader: “how the world of the reader ‘creates the text’ and how the text completes the dialogical circuit by feeding back into the world of the reader.”37 Welles modifies the quixotic chronotope translating the action to the Spain of the ’50s and ’60s. As Stam remarks, it is a “transposition and actualization of the novel.”38 While Cervantes’s Don Quixote is contemporary to its author and its first readers, Welles’s film does the same with regard to his time. That way he re-accentuates the anachronism of the leading couple that goes across Franco’s Spain, thus managing to preserve the parodic, carnivalesque aspect of the characters. The American filmmaker also takes advantage of the chronotopic motifs typical of the novel, for example the windmills, which coexist with other “infernal machines” contemporaries to Welles, as a woman riding a Lambretta. Ah Gan, in his particular quixotic re-creation Tang Ji Kede,39 also re-accentuates the chronotope by setting the action in China during the Tang dynasty (618–907).That change is intended so that the new chronotope enables the Chinese receiver to establish a dialogic relationship with the work equivalent to the relationship that Western receivers establish with Cervantes’s novel. The translation to Chinese coordinates is carried out in order to get a recognizable setting for Chinese spectators, not familiar with knight-errants or Spanish geography. Consequently, Golden Age’s Spain becomes Tang dynasty’s China, equally indeterminate and fictitious. The period of Tang dynasty is chosen for being the Chinese counterpart to the world parodied

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in Don Quixote: “The spirit of European medieval knights is more or less the same as their equivalents in ancient China. It is easy for adaptation, even though Chinese spectators are not familiar with the background of the Middle Ages.”40 Unlike Welles, Ah Gan does not translate Don Quixote to contemporary coordinates; he chooses an equivalent world to that parodied by Cervantes. The picaresque and chivalry genres are alien to nowadays receivers; that is why it makes sense for Welles to reset the action in a more familiar setting. However, the wuxia genre in which the Chinese version is hybridated has been a very successful genre, both in novels and in films, along the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, so the receivers are totally familiar with it. Actually, as Herranz remarks, the mold of the wuxia genre is almost essential in order to reach a large Chinese audience.41 The parodic, extravagant aspect of Don Quixote/Tang Ji Kede is thus kept by setting him in the wuxia universe. In fact, Ah Gan carries out a curious operation since the hero, Tang, reads wuxia novels from the twentieth century, effecting a parodic process in which the relationship between the character and the genre he reads is also anachronistic, but inverting the usual coordinates between the reader and the work. Critics such as Contreras Espuny,42 Ulloa Bustinza,43 Tondro,44 and Weimer45 have pointed out the analogies between the chivalry and superhero genres, as well as between the historical contexts in which they develop, the rejection and contempt that they arouse in the critics as opposed to their acceptation by the audience, and the similarities between their heroes: “noble of character, visage, and body; they are most frequently recognized by their unique armour and by the coats of arm they bear on their surcoats and shields; they possess intimidating martial prowess; they devote themselves to the violent defence of the innocent against injustice.”46 The latter can therefore be seen as a re-accentuation of the same stereotype, and in a second degree, their parodies as a re-accentuation of the quixotic parodic archetype. The carnivalesque aspect to which we have referred in relation to the identity of Don Quixote is also present in the creation of the identity of superheroes starring Special, Defendor, Kick-Ass, and Super. In all these parodies of the genre of superheroes, we find scenes in which we see how they decide their superhero name, elaborate their suit/costume (or order it by Ebay, as in the case of Kick-Ass), or rehearse grandiloquent phrases and combat techniques in front of a mirror. The result of placing these characters in an urban and contemporary chronotope, opposed to the “adventure time”47 characterized by a “broad and varied geographical background”48 in which their models live and fill their minds, motivates a reception equally extravagant and laughable as that generated by Don Quixote.49

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ADAPTING METAFICTIONAL ASPECTS Bakhtin states that another essential characteristic of the novelistic genre is its “auto-criticism of discourse,” present in two aspects: “the critique and trial of literary discourse around the hero—a ‘literary man,’ who looks at life through the eyes of literature and who tries to live according to literature” and “an author who is in the process of writing the novel.”50 Those are aspects of what we call metafiction nowadays, and Cervantes’s novel cannot be understood without them. Ignoring them, as several adaptations do, means ignoring one of the essential characteristics of this kind of fiction. Don Quixote is the perfect example of a “literary man,” a character who reads life through fiction. In a similar way, Tang Ji Kede interprets the world through wuxia novels, and characters such as Crimson Bolt (Super), KickAss, Special, or Defendor do the same through superhero comics and films. In any case, there is an excess of fiction in their minds and some element acts as an agent of change to break the boundary between reality and fiction. In most cases it is madness, as in Quixote himself. Crimson Bolt has hallucinations, Special suffers an allergic reaction to an antidepressant drug, which also causes hallucinations, and Defendor is described on court as mentally ill. In the case of Birdman, who is characterized as schizophrenic (has visions, hears voices, thinks he can move objects with the mind), his excess of fiction is due to having performed a superhero with that name. The former metafictional aspect, which has to do with the hero and allows a number of games and reflections about reality and fiction, madness and sanity, idealism and materialism, individual rules and social laws, and the like, is essential in Don Quixote, but the latter is just as essential as it. In fact, the second part of Don Quixote can be read as a comment on the first one. Cervantes carries out all kinds of metafictional games, starting from the narrator (split into three: Cide Hamete, the Moorish translator, and the second author/ publisher), including the passages about literary criticism (such as the scrutiny of the books or the dialogue between the priest and the canon), the inclusion of other genres in the novel, and the process of autoreferenciality when both the first part and the apocryphal version by Avellaneda are included in the second part by characters who have read both of them. With regard to the polyphonic dialogism of Don Quixote’s narrator, Lázaro Carreter is right when he states that “Por primera vez en la historia de la novela, un autor es, a la vez, contador y glosador de lo que narra.”51 These aspects are dealt with in Welles’s and Iñárritu’s works with special complexity. In the former, Welles acts as a narrator by means of a voiceover, but he also appears as a character (as himself), so that we can see him interact with Sancho or express his personal literary criticism at the beginning, when he gives his opinion about Cervantes’s novel. His adaptation of the resources

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of literature to cinema is also remarkable. For example, we can attend the making of the film during the film itself, see how Sancho watches Welles being interviewed on television or how he listens to news about the shooting on the radio, and so on. The second part of the film, focused on Sancho, can be seen as a documentary on Spain visited by the filmmaker himself, where we attend bullfights, the Sanfermines festivities, “cabezudos” festivals, and Holy Week processions. Not in vain, the original title of the film was to be Here Comes Don Quixote: A Spanish Panorama. Metaliterature is also an essential element in the case of Birdman. In the same way as Don Quixote’s heroes “van encontrándose con géneros y temas literarios, con formas artísticas . . . polemizando con ellos y dejando oír sus lenguajes,”52 the film shows the rehearsals and premiere of a play based on a tale by Raymond Carver. It is a false long shot, which provides the work with a feeling of continuation and takes the narration to the area of influence of the dramatic genre. In turn, the play being rehearsed is shown to us complete along the film, but in a fragmentary and disorganized way, through different points of view—from inside the stage as one more actor, from the audience, from backstage by means of a voiceover, in an oblique angle from the ceiling where the scaffolding and the spotlights are, or from the point of view of the main character facing the audience. The drama presented to us is thus offered totally contaminated by the frame narration that contains it. Let’s add that the text interpreted is an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s tale What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, whose subject gets reflected on the leading actor’s real life. In the film we can also find passages of literary criticism between Riggan, a superstar fallen on hard times, Mike, a prestige actor, and Tabitha, a ruthless theater critic. We can also find a counterpart to this serious criticism in sensationalist criticism, or several allusions to the previous parts of the trilogy Riggan starred in, even posters of them. Although in a fainter way, spoofs on superhero films also show certain metafictional elements. For example, Kick-Ass begins with a voiceover addressed to the spectator, as a parodic prologue just like Don Quixote’s, since it asks us whether we have ever dreamed of becoming a superhero at the same time we see an Albanian in disguise jump from a skyscraper and fall onto the ground. In the case of Defendor, he keeps a record of his deeds, alike Super, who records a diary in which he accounts for his advances against crime. Both processes resemble Don Quixote’s concern about his deeds being evidenced in writing. Ah Gan also includes this element, but unlike Cervantes’s work, Tang rejects the offer made by a Taoist to write down his heroic deeds, as he considers that he has not done anything deserving it yet. To finish this brief tour, I would like to have a look at the different ends. Although they are apparently so different from one another, almost all of them converge in a common interpretation which differs from the one conceived by

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the genius from Alcalá, who, presumably annoyed by the appearance of Avellaneda’s Quixote the previous year, ends his Quixote with the hero’s death, having recovered his sanity and regretting his adventures. None of the commented films shows an end in which Don Quixote or his superhero equivalent ends that way. In some versions, such as Ah Gan’s or Welles’s, he simply succeeds and survives, In others, such as Gil’s, Pabst’s, or Kozintsev’s, he dies, but his spirit does not—usually illustrated with a postmortem image in which he rides again beside Sancho. That is to say, all of them defend the final victory of the idealistic message, which lives on, either through the hero or through other characters that have been infected with his spirit. None of them dares show an end far from the hegemonic, romantic interpretation, not an end that could suggest an adverse reality which idealistic spirits confront but one which simply makes fun of them. Perhaps the only exception would be the end of Super. After his moment of glory—he has rescued his wife and defeated the drug trafficker she had run away with—we are informed that she left him again soon afterward and he went back to his grey routine life. All the violence, including deaths, he got involved in has been useless. CONCLUSION By means of the aforementioned examples, I expect to have shown sufficient evidence of the different dialogic relationships established between the selected films and Cervantes’s novel, what processes they use for it and for what purposes, and how they affect the polyphonic character of the novel, its chronotope, its novelistic images, its auto-criticism of discourse, and the reception of each of these filmic re-accentuations, suggesting that those which are apparently further from Cervantes’s original, such as Welles’s, Ah Gan’s, or Iñárritu’s, which have traditionally been considered less faithful and canonical, actually reproduce better some of the most evident characteristics of Cervantes’s fiction, so that they are really closer to it. NOTES 1. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Indiana University Press, 1984). 2. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 3. Walter L. Reed, “The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin’s Poetics,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 7, no. 2 (1987): 29.

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4. Howard Mancing, “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature and Cervantes,” in Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes para el siglo XXI. Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley, ed. F. La Rubia Prado (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000), 154. In the vital section “The Two Stylistic Lines of Development in the European Novel” of the essay “Discourse in the novel” (in Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays) Cervantes and Don Quixote are quoted nineteen times while Rabelais is quoted just three times. On that subject, also see Chapter 7 “Don Quixote in Bakhtin” by Rachel L. Schmidt, Forms of Modernity: Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 238, where the importance of Don Quixote is highlighted with regard to two key concepts of the novelistic genre: its dialogic and carnivalesque essence. 5. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 324. 6. Due to its groundbreaking nature, let’s quote the early introductory article by Javier Huerta Calvo, “La teoría literaria de Mijail Bajtín (Apuntes y textos para su introdución en España),” Dicenda 1 (1982): 143–158. Within the Cervantine scope, see Fernando Lázaro Carreter, “La prosa del Quijote,” in Lecciones cervantinas, ed. Alberto Blecua and Aurora Egido (Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Zaragoza, Aragón y Rioja, 1985), 115–129. A good introduction to Bakhtin and Cervantes can be found in both texts quoted in endnote 4, as well as in Howard Mancing, “Don Quixote and Bakhtin’s Two Stylistic Lines of the Novel,” in Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg, ed. Thomas Lathrop (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009), 177–196. Another relevant item is the bibliographic review by José Montero Reguera, El Quijote y la crítica contemporánea, (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1996), 65–69, 122–134. 7. See Robert Stam, “Film and Languages: From Metz to Bakhtin,” “Bakhtinian Translinguistics: A Postscriptum,” and R. Barton Palmer, “Bakhtiniam Translinguistic in Film Criticism: The Dialogical Image?” in The Cinematic Text : Methods and Approaches, ed. R. Barton Palmer (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 277–301, 343–351, 303–342. Metz develops his theory based on Saussure’s postulates, his distinction between langue and parole. Despite admitting that in the cinematographic language there are no equivalents to the language entities (minimum units, double articulation), his abstract objectivism makes him speak about codes, meant as the site in which such signs assume meaning and conceive the language as a vehicle of expression, whereas Bakhtin understands the language as an object and subject at the same time by considering that “A sign does not simply exist as a part of reality—it reflects and refracts another reality . . . Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation . . . The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs . . . Wherever a sign is present, ideology is present, too. Everything ideological possesses semiotic,” Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Valentin N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 10. This idea of sign, inseparable from its interdependence in social practice, solves the emptiness of semiotics, where the sign hardly connects to its reality and historical practice. Literature means languages in dialogue, not characters, situations, or plots. For Bakhtin, all the utterances are determined, not by the systematicity of codes but by their unique communication circumstances.

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Dialogism would then be in the utterances, not in simple code, and that is where the cinematographic word relates to spectators and life. 8. Stam, “Film and Languages: From Metz to Bakhtin,” 298–300. 9. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 103. 10. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 181. 11. Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 12. Martin Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 13. Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film, 21. 14. Dennis Cutchins, “Bakhtin, Translation and Adaptation,” in Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film, ed. Katja Krebs (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 36–62. 15. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 410. 16. The corpus that we are handling expects to be useful to enlighten a range that goes from the supposedly more faithful adaptations of the novel to the other end, where we find re-creations which relate to Cervantes’s novel in a much more indirect and vague way: Rafael Gil, Don Quijote de La Mancha (Spain: CIFESA, 1947); Georg W. Pabst, Don Quichotte (UK/France: Vandor-Nelson Film, 1933) and Grigori Kozintsev, Don Kihot (Soviet Union: Lenfilm Studio, 1957); Orson Welles, Don Quijote de Orson Welles (Spain: El Silencio Producciones, 1992) and Ah Gan, Tang Ji Kede (China: Xinbei shi Hai le ying ye, 2010); Alejandro Iñárritu, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (USA: Twentieh Century Fox, 2014), Hal Haberman and Jeremy Passmore, Special (USA: Rival Pictures, 2006), Peter Stebbings, Defendor (Canada: Insight Film releasing, 2009), Matthew Vaughn, Kick-Ass (USA: Marv Films, 2010) and James Gunn, Super (USA: Twentieh Century Fox, 2010). 17. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability : Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 275. 18. Only among Spaniards can we give an accurate and endearing version of Don Quixote. Remember that Danish buffoonery made by Pat and Patachon, or Pabst’s serious mistake in the version he made with Chaliapin; both were of a total and guilty misunderstanding. Interview with Abad Ojuel, in Emilio de la Rosa, Luis M. González, and Pedro Medina, eds., Cervantes en imágenes: donde se cuenta cómo el cine y la televisión evocaron su vida y su obra (Alcalá de Henares: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares, 1998), 221. The same goal is pointed out by Gil when he states that “Yo pienso de acuerdo con Ivan Turgeneff que Alonso Quijano es el ‘símbolo de la fe.’ Y con ello basta puesto que toda España es fe.” I agree with Ivan Turgeneff that Alonso Quijano is the “symbol of faith.” And this is enough since all of Spain is faith. Rosa, González, and Medina, 74.

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19. When making the literary synthesis of Don Quixote with a cinematographic approach, I worked with the same care if I manipulate sacred things. The literary adaptation was made with all respect and fidelity to the central thought of the work of Cervantes. Rosa, González, and Medina, 219. 20. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 411. 21. Ibid., 412. 22. María del M. Mañas Martínez, “Don Quijote de la Mancha, de Rafael Gil: una adaptación literaria del cine español en las conmemoraciones cervantinas de 1947,” Anales Cervantinos 38 (2006): 89. 23. Bakhtin and Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 157. 24. The former is a clear example of the romantic interpretations of Don Quixote, in which the noble, idealistic hero confronts a cruel adverse reality. The latter is a veiled criticism of the contradictions of Stalinism and the socialist realism which characterized Russian art in that period. In this regard, see Jorge Latorre Izquierdo, Antonio Martínez Illán, and Rafael Llano Sánchez, “Recepción del cine soviético en España: una historia entre guerras, censuras y aperturas,” Anagramas: Rumbos y sentidos de la comunicación 9, no. 17 (2010): 93–106, as well as the chapters about both versions in Ferran Herranz, El Quijote y el cine (Madrid: Cátedra, 2016), E-book. 25. Antonio Martínez Illán, “Don Quijote en el cine soviético: Kozintsev y Kurchevski,” Area Abierta, no. 27 (2010): 11. 26. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 292. 27. See about it in Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, El Quijote como juego (Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1975). 28. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 404. 29. Bakhtin, 84–258. 30. The former of these senses has also been applied successfully to the cinematographic sphere when analyzing filmic genres. For example, Chapter 3 in Flanagan, Bakhtin and the Movies for the chronotope of western, or Vivian Sobchack, “Lounge Time. Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1998), 129–170 for film noir. 31. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 165. Emilia I. Deffis de Calvo, “El cronotopo de la novela española de peregrinación: Miguel de Cervantes,” Anales Cervantinos 28 (1990): 99–108 has studied the chronotope of picaresque in two Cervantes works: The Works of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617) and The Spanish-English Lady (1613). 32. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 165. 33. Two essential works about the carnivalesque aspects in Don Quixote are Agustin Redondo, Otra manera de leer El Quijote: Historia, tradiciones culturales y literatura (Madrid: Castalia, 1997), and Manuel Durán, “El Quijote a través del

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prisma de Mikhail Bakhtine: Carnaval, disfraces, escatología y locura,” in Cervantes and the Renaissance, ed. Michael D. McGaha (Easton Pa: Juan de la Cuesta, 1980), 71–86. 34. Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 218. 35. Katerina, Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), 279. 36. Orson Welles, Orson Welles: Interviews, ed. Mark W. Estrin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002), 37. 37. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 55. 38. Robert Stam, Literature through Film : Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Malden: Blackwell, 2005), 48. 39. It is a film that has gone unnoticed by critics. For a study of it in detail, see Pablo J. Carvajal Pedraza and Jiehui Zu, “De Don Quijote a Tang Ji Kede: Estudio Intermedial” (On progress). 40. Fragment of an interview with Ah Gan broadcast on the TVE newscast on October 16, 2010. 41. Herranz, El Quijote y el cine, E-book. 42. José M. Contreras Espuny, “La Pervivencia del héroe: Los libros de caballería y las historietas de Superhéroes,” Iberoamericana 17, no. 2 (2015): 235–259. He establishes some interesting parallels between the historical contexts in which both genres develop to their zenith (sixteenth-century Spain and twentieth-century United States). Moreover, he denies any filiations between the superhero genre and any mythology, since the former lacks both a cosmogony and an explanation of the world that can satisfy the unsolved mystery of the religious sense. An opposite vision can be seen in Peter Coogan, Superhero : The Secret Origin of a Genre (MonkeyBrain Books, 2006). Here he takes the origins of the genre back to heroic myths and boundaries literature. 43. Iván A. Ulloa Bustinza, “Superhéroes y caballeros andantes en la era neobarroca,” Temas antropológicos, revista científica de investigaciones regionales 35, no. 2 (2013): 41–61. 44. Jason Tondro, Superheroes of the Round Table : Comics Connections to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Jefferson: McFarland, 2011). 45. Christopher B. Weimer, “Leaping New Media in a Single Bound: The Quixotic Would-Be Superhero in Contemporary Graphic Fiction and Film,” in Don Quixote : Interdisciplinary Connections, ed. Matthew D Warshawsky and James A Parr (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2013), 85–107. 46. Weimer, 86. Michael Holquist, Dialogism : Bakhtin and His World (London: Routledge, 1990), 118–120, has used the example of Superman to illustrate the chronotope of adventure time. 47. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 87.

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48. Bakhtin, 88. 49. A detailed analysis of the quixotic model on which the protagonists of these films are based on can be seen in Pablo J. Carvajal Pedraza, “Personajes quijotescos en las parodias del cine de superhéroes contemporáneo,” Hipogrifo. Revista de Literatura Y Cultura Del Siglo de Oro 6, no. 2 (2018), on press. 50. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 413. 51. For the first time in the history of novel, an author is, at the same time, the story-teller and the annotator of what he tells. Fernando Lázaro Carreter, “La prosa del Quijote,” in Lecciones cervantinas, ed. Alberto Blecua and Aurora Egido (Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Zaragoza, Aragón y Rioja, 1985), 118. 52. Lázaro Carreter, 120.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky. Indiana University Press, 1984. ———. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ———. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bakhtin, Mikhail M., and Valentin N. Voloshinov. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Carvajal Pedraza, Pablo J. “Personajes quijotescos en las parodias del cine de superhéroes contemporáneo.” Hipogrifo. Revista de literatura y cultura del Siglo de Oro 6, no. 2 (2018), on press. Carvajal Pedraza, Pablo J., and Jiehui Zu. “De Don Quijote a Tang Ji Kede: Estudio Intermedial,” 2018, on progress. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984. Contreras Espuny, José M. “La pervivencia del héroe: Los libros de caballería y las historietas de superhéroes.” Iberoamericana 17, no. 2 (2015): 235–259. Coogan, Peter. Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. MonkeyBrain Books, 2006. Cutchins, Dennis. “Bakhtin, Translation and Adaptation.” In Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film, edited by Katja Krebs, 36–62. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

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Deffis de Calvo, Emilia I. “El cronotopo de la novela española de peregrinación: Miguel de Cervantes.” Anales Cervantinos 28 (1990): 99–108. Durán, Manuel. “El Quijote a través del prisma de Mikhail Bakhtine: Carnaval, disfraces, escatología y locura.” In Cervantes and the Renaissance, edited by Michael D. McGaha, 71–86. Easton Pa: Juan de la Cuesta, 1980. Flanagan, Martin. Bakhtin and the Movies: New Ways of Understanding Hollywood Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Gan, Ah. Tang Ji Kede. China: Xinbei shi Hai le ying ye, 2010. Film. Gil, Rafael. Don Quijote de La Mancha. Spain: CIFESA, 1947. Film. Gunn, James. Super. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 2010. Film. Haberman, Hal, and Jeremy Passmore. Special. USA: Rival Pictures, 2006. Film. Herranz, Ferran. El Quijote Y El Cine. Madrid: Cátedra, 2016. E-book. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism : Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990. Huerta Calvo, Javier. “La teoría literaria de Mijail Bajtín (Apuntes y textos para su introdución en España).” Dicenda 1 (1982): 143–158. Iñárritu, Alejandro. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). USA: Twentieh Century Fox, 2014. Film. Kozintsev, Grigori. Don Kikhot. Soviet Union: Lenfilm Studio, 1957. Film. Latorre Izquierdo, Jorge, Antonio Martínez Illán, and Rafael Llano Sánchez. “Recepción del cine soviético en España: una historia entre guerras, censuras y aperturas.” Anagramas: Rumbos y sentidos de la comunicación 9, no. 17 (2010): 93–106. Lázaro Carreter, Fernando. “La prosa del Quijote.” In Lecciones cervantinas, edited by Alberto Blecua and Aurora Egido, 115–129. Zaragoza: Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de Zaragoza, Aragón y Rioja, 1985. Mancing, Howard. “Bakhtin, Spanish Literature and Cervantes.” In Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes Para El Siglo XXI. Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley, edited by F. La Rubia Prado, 141–162. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000. ———. “Don Quixote and Bakhtin’s Two Stylistic Lines of the Novel.” In Studies in Spanish Literature in Honor of Daniel Eisenberg, edited by Thomas Lathrop, 177–196. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. Mañas Martínez, María del M. “Don Quijote de la Mancha, de Rafael Gil: una adaptación literaria del cine español en las conmemoraciones cervantinas de 1947.” Anales Cervantinos 38 (2006): 67–93. Martínez Illán, Antonio. “Don Quijote en el cine soviético: Kozintsev y Kurchevski.” Area Abierta, no. 27 (2010): 1–20. Montero Reguera, José. El Quijote y la crítica contemporánea. Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1996. Pabst, Georg W. Don Quixote. UK / France: Vandor-Nelson Film, 1933. Film. Palmer, R. Barton. “Bakhtinian Translinguistic in Film Criticism: The Dialogical Image?” In The Cinematic Text : Methods and Approaches, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 277–301. Georgia State Literary Studies. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Redondo, Agustín. Otra Manera de Leer El Quijote: Historia, Tradiciones Culturales Y Literatura. Madrid: Castalia, 1997. Reed, Walter L. “The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin’s Poetics.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 7, no. 2 (1987): 29–38.

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Rosa, Emilio de la, Luis M. González, and Pedro Medina, eds. Cervantes En Imágenes: donde se cuenta cómo el cine y la televisión evocaron su vida y su obra. Alcalá de Henares: Festival de Cine de Alcalá de Henares, 1998. Schmidt, Rachel L. Forms of Modernity: Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011. Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time. Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir.” In Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, edited by Nick Browne, 129–170. Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1998. Stam, Robert. “Bakhtinian Translinguistics: A Postscriptum.” In The Cinematic Text : Methods and Approaches, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 343–351. New York: AMS Press, 1989. ———. “Film and Languages: From Metz to Bakhtin.” In The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, edited by R. Barton Palmer, 277–301. Georgia State Literary Studies. New York: AMS Press, 1989. ———. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. ———. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Stebbings, Peter. Defendor. Canada: Insight Film releasing, 2009. Film. Tondro, Jason. Superheroes of the Round Table: Comics Connections to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Jefferson: McFarland, 2011. Torrente Ballester, Gonzalo. El Quijote como juego. Madrid: Ediciones Guadarrama, 1975. Ulloa Bustinza, Iván A. “Superhéroes y caballeros andantes en la era Neobarroca.” Temas Antropológicos, revista científica de investigaciones regionales 35, no. 2 (2013): 41–61. Vaughn, Matthew. Kick-Ass. USA: Marv Films, 2010. Film. Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Weimer, Christopher B. “Leaping New Media in a Single Bound: The Quixotic Would-Be Superhero in Contemporary Graphic Fiction and Film.” In Don Quixote: Interdisciplinary Connections, edited by Matthew D Warshawsky and James A Parr, 85–107. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2013. Welles, Orson. Don Quijote de Orson Welles. Spain: El Silencio Producciones, 1992. Film. ———. Orson Welles: Interviews. Edited by Mark W. Estrin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.

Chapter 12

Toward a Philosophy of the Moving Body Dick McCaw

Throughout his career Bakhtin wrote about the human body, from his early, more philosophical texts, to his magnum opus on Rabelais. In his early work he offers a theory of embodied meaning decades before embodied cognition was recognized as a theory. His ideas about action, perspective, and authorship, and his questions about meaning and value, can surely contribute to the contemporary debate about embodiment and embodied cognition. My argument aims to understand the originality and possibilities of Bakhtin’s early philosophy by bringing it into dialogue with a range of contemporary thinkers, including Guy Claxton, James Gibson, Drew Leder, Richard Sennett, and Raymond Tallis. These writers work across a range of fields—psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and sociology—that echoes the scope of Bakhtin’s thinking. At the heart of all these arguments is the claim that meaning is embodied; it is about doing rather than saying. Approaching these ideas from a Bakhtinian perspective will allow us to see them in a new light, and by that same light to reappraise his thinking. Most of the themes in this chapter can be found in the passage below, a classic account of Bakhtin’s conception of the relation between I and other, one watching and one watched. When I contemplate a whole human being who is situated outside and over against me, our concrete, actually experienced horizons do not coincide. For at each given moment, regardless of the position and the proximity to me of this other human being whom I am contemplating, I shall always see and know something that he, from his place outside and over against me, cannot see himself: parts of his body that are inaccessible to his own gaze (his head, his face and its expression), the world behind his back and a whole series of objects and relations, which in any of our mutual relations are accessible to me but not to him.1 237

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I imagine these two people sitting opposite each other. Like two characters in a Beckett play, there is no indication that they move. Bakhtin argues that any particular position taken affords a unique perspective on the world which cannot be experienced by another person at the same time. Both in terms of space and time (it is a “given moment”), the situation is static. What he calls a “concrete whole” can be distinguished from a cognized whole precisely because “the contemplator occupies a perfectly determinate place, and that he is unitary and embodied.”2 The body as described here shares the basic properties of any object: it takes up a particular place at a certain time. Bakhtin makes much of the positions that I (the contemplator) and the other (the contemplated) assume. It is true that an observer seated opposite me can see what is behind me; but is it not equally true that I could turn round to see for myself or I could move from my place to take in the greater scene as a whole? When Bakhtin argues that the “concrete, actually experienced horizons” of the two people “do not coincide,” he is alluding to the distinction he makes between “horizon” (the particular viewpoint afforded by the place occupied by a person) and environment (the total situation surrounding both of them). Starting from this distinction, I shall argue for a more nuanced approach to our perception of self and other in space, and introduce the concepts of egocentric and allocentric orientation. This will take us to an understanding of how a moving subject can think of itself either as the center of surrounding space (egocentric), or as one particular object in space (allocentric). Related to these two orientations in space is the third major theme: how a subject can imagine him/herself as an object for other people or oneself. In Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory (and we shall see also his ethical theory), these two subject positions are categorically distinguished: the other person is “situated over against me,” a phrase which evokes the German word for object, Gegenstand, a thing which stands over against the viewer. For the early Bakhtin, the “whole human being” can only ever be known from the outside. One of the reasons for his categorical statement is that his accounts of meaning, understanding, and aesthetic creation are mostly cast in visual terms: the other’s body is grasped as a “whole of meaning” (a key phrase in his argument) precisely because it constitutes an image for the contemplator. Bakhtin argues that this “excess of my seeing [that is, the position outside another person] is the bud in which slumbers form, and whence form unfolds like a blossom.”3 Although rarely spelled out, Bakhtin is actually writing about the emergence of literary form: the image of the other is the bud which will blossom into a fully blown character. In contrast to the wholeness and finishedness of an image of a person observed, first-person experience of their body is described as being chaotic precisely because it cannot be visually grasped as a whole. Much of this chapter will address Bakhtin’s failure to grasp how the experience of one’s

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own body is an important generator of meaning for oneself as a self-directed moving agent. I would go so far as to say that only as a moving being can a person grasp him- or herself as a whole. The chapter is organized in two parts, each consisting of five short sections. The first part will develop upon the spatial situation of the contemplator and contemplated. The second part will examine a more dynamic image of the moving and sensing body.

WAYS OF PERCEIVING SPACE—GEOMETRICAL OR ECOLOGICAL? Look up the word “embodied” and you will find variations on the theme of the embodiment of an abstract idea or principle. The body is the means by which an abstract concept can be given concrete form or expression. Bakhtin makes much of the difference between the conceptual (that which is cognized) and the concrete fact of embodiment, one containing potential and the other actual meaning. Thus he argues that the “unitary world of cognition cannot be perceived as a unique, concrete whole.”4 I should note that this “unique, concrete whole” is the body observed, not the one observing. Given that Bakhtin’s view is from a fixed perspective, and therefore constitutes only one aspect of a person rather than their 360º self, it would be more accurate to call this an “intuited” rather than a perceived whole. One could just as convincingly argue that to offer a convincing image of another person, one needs to see them from “every angle.” But Bakhtin’s static concept of embodiment excludes the possibility of movement. We encounter the same notion of fixity in his ethical theory of act-performing where a subject takes up a position vis-à-vis a particular object or problem. Once again, he insists that it is precisely this fixed of position which distinguishes the theoretical from the actual. “My active unique place is not just an abstract geometrical centre, but constitutes an answerable, emotionalvolitional, concrete centre of the concrete manifoldness of the world.”5 And, once again, embodiment is conceived in terms of concrete (and static) materiality rather than labile physicality. “High,” “above,” “below,” “finally,” “as yet,” “already,” “it’s necessary,” “ought to,” “farther,” “nearer,” etc.—all these expressions acquire not just a content/ sense, i.e. acquire a thinkable—only possible—[character], but acquire an actual, loved-experienced, heavy and compellent concretely determinate validity or operativeness from the unique place of my participating in Being-as-event.6

Bakhtin’s argument pits “the abstract point of view” against “a concrete and unique unity,” the “thinkable” and “only possible,” against “the unique place of

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my participating in Being-as-event.” Clearly, he is describing an ethical engagement that is rooted in one’s actual place at a particular moment in time. The risk and reality of this engagement lies in its being nontransferable and unrepeatable. In his accounts of both aesthetic and ethical activity, Bakhtin makes a philosophical reduction whereby everything he considers inessential or contingent is bracketed off. The human body and the environment are shorn of any particularity, be it historical, geographical, or biographical. Indeed, the “position” he describes is more a philosophical orientation than an actual place. Bakhtin’s space, body, and time are ultimately metaphorical rather than actual. We could thus understand his ethical sense of position (that is commitment) in terms of expressions like “she stood her ground” or “held her position.” With respect to his aesthetic theory, the interrelation between I and other is conceived in terms of an author rendering a once-and-forever image of another person. He describes the necessity of the contemplator to hold a determinate position in the same way that a photographer might require a subject to keep still so that the image is not blurred. Both result in a “still” image. I shall now introduce the notion of movement. Picking up Bakhtin’s distinction between geometrical and determinate position, Merleau-Ponty argues that “The subject of geometry is a motor subject.”7 In other words, space is a field for all the intentional movements that a moving subject could make. In a longer passage he brings into play the related Bakhtinian distinction of the abstract and the possible. Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the means whereby the position of things becomes possible. This means that instead of imagining it as a sort of ether in which all things float, or conceiving it abstractly as a characteristic that they have in common, we must think it as the universal power enabling them to be connected.8

A “sort of ether” does describe Bakhtin’s space which is very often an interval separating either the contemplator and contemplated (in aesthetic activity) or act-performer and object (in ethical activity). Merleau-Ponty demonstrates how space must be conceived as an active, meaning-producing medium, a field which furnishes things which can be brought into connection with each other, a field onto which plans for actions can be projected. “Potential” for one means theoretical (geometrical) abstraction; for the other, it is the possible as realized through physical movement. And it is to the moving body that we now turn. KNOWING MYSELF THROUGH MOVEMENT Let’s begin with a huge question: Why do we have a brain? Susan Greenfield begins her Brain Story (2000) with an account of the brief life of the sea

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squirt’s brain. In its larval state the sea squirt needs to guide itself to a surface that promises plenty of nutrients that it can sieve from the surrounding water. Once attached, it will remain immobile for the rest of its life and thus, with no further need for a brain to guide its movement, the protein-rich organ is eaten. She concludes Animals need a brain to help them move around—the brain takes in information from the senses about the changing environment, and then coordinates appropriate responses. But animals that don’t move around (and plants, for that matter) have no need of brains.9

The crucial point here is that the brain “takes in information from the senses about the changing environment.” The senses not only connect body and environment in terms of coordinating “appropriate responses” but also in monitoring the effectiveness of those responses (in a process called sensory-motor feedback). Here we have a situation where the meaning and intelligence of bodily acts relate to an environment that is lived rather than perspectival (as distinct from “horizon”). When defining embodiment, Raymond Tallis argues that human beings are unique among animals in that they have a sustained and complex sense of themselves, rooted initially in their appropriation of their bodies as their own, as themselves. Humans are embodied subjects. I have a sense “That I am this” where “This” in the first instance is my body. This makes my visual field into something which has me as its explicit centre. . . . I see the world around me as being around me, and located in that world, I see that I am seeing its objects around me. What is more, I see that I see them from a particular angle, in a particular light, and so on.10

Although Bakhtin and Tallis agree on this notion of being an embodied subject at the center of the surrounding world, there are major differences in their accounts. First, Tallis argues that one recognizes oneself as an embodied subject, a whole that is felt as one’s own body. This subject has no need for another to confirm one’s wholeness as an image because it is physically experienced as “my body.” Second, this subject is self-aware and can grasp its own activity of seeing: “I experience myself as a viewpoint in the view. A viewpoint is only one of many possible viewpoints; and I see that I am seeing from one possible viewpoint.”11 Bakhtin’s subjects find themselves in a position in space, Tallis’s subjects find their way through spaces and are aware of this self-directed “way-making”: “The gestalt psychologists talked about ‘hodological space’—a space in which we locate ourselves marked out by the tracks we have made, by the customary routes we have taken; it is woven out of the ‘ways’” (the Greek for a way is hodos) we have followed over time.”12 The main point I wish to make in this section is that human

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beings “have a sustained and complex sense of themselves,” and this includes their ability to see the world from different perspectives. Our bodies are more than concretely embodied positions in time and space but autonomous organisms capable of reflecting on their own actions, thanks to how the brain processes information from its sensory organs. EGOCENTRIC AND ALLOCENTRIC SPACE (EXPERIENCING ONESELF AS SUBJECT AND OBJECT IN SPACE) Thus far we have seen Bakhtin propose that to see is to know with the corollary that since I am unable to grasp myself as a total image, therefore I cannot know myself as a whole. Merleau-Ponty and Tallis proposed that I can know myself through my movement and pathways through space, meaning that I know myself both as a subject (through the sensation of movement) and as an object (routes indicate both where I have been and where I can travel to). Guy Claxton calls this ability “to move through the world so I can get where I want or need to be,” an allocentric sense of space. “In this frame, my body itself is an ‘object’ that travels through space, so I need a map in which I can locate myself as one object amongst an array of others. This is called an allocentric map. This map is more ‘objective’: it is like a chessboard on which I am the White King surrounded by other pieces, some benign and some hostile.”13 Claxton goes further by arguing that an allocentric sense of one’s place in space marks a development in a child’s sense of both itself and its relations with others. I become increasingly able to detach myself from my default, egocentric constellation of habits and concerns, and see the world through other people’s eyes. A child becomes better at hiding as she grows in her ability to adopt the perspective of the “hunter”; better at comforting others as she realises that not everyone shares her own portfolio of anxieties and reassurances. This ability to adopt other perspectives expands her social intelligence; if she and I can see the world from different perspectives, we are less likely to be locked into our own, and therefore better able to find common ground on which to meet.14

Claxton is proposing a developmental account of our perception of ourselves in space, the more primitive egocentric perspective being followed by the more mature allocentric perspective. Drew Leder returns to Merleau-Ponty to underscore the importance of this distinction: “it is intrinsic to lived embodiment to be both subject and an object available to external gaze.”15 While I am not suggesting that we never listen to outside accounts of our behavior, I am

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proposing that we are, and we have to be, capable of conceiving ourselves as objective agents, which in turn means that we can and do create narratives about our past and future actions. BODY AS IMAGE OR AGENT? Whereas the structure of relations in Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory is between I and other, in his theory of ethics the relation is between a subject and things in the world. Although it remains a generalization about particularity, there appear to be two strands to his ethical theory. The first is the closest he gets to an emotional and physical engagement with the outside world. He rejects the notion that one can ever experience an object “that is absolutely indifferent, totally finished” explaining that when “I experience actually, I thereby carry out something in relation to it: the object enters into relation with that which is to-be-achieved, grows in it—within my relationship to that object.”16 That “which is to-be-achieved” is, of course, the action taken in relation to the object. It is as if the subject is called to action by the particularity of these objects and lives in “a world of proper names, a world of these objects and of particular dates of life.”17 Whereas the aesthetic attitude is one of detached contemplation, the ethical attitude is one of engaged action. The subject’s “body and its limbs” comes alive in preparation for the action and “is especially impatient at the moment of performing an action which . . . invariably expands the sphere of my physical influence.”18 This is embodied action: there is no separation of “me” from “my body” when performing an action— “I grasp it with my internally experienced muscular feeling corresponding to my hand.” The same is true of the reality of the object which is felt in its “resistance, its heaviness, compactness, and so forth. What is seen merely compliments what is internally experienced.”19 Where the sensory mode of aesthetic activity is visual, the mode of ethical action is touch. The account is a compelling description of a body engaged in the world and I would argue it is more a theory of intentional—even practical—than ethical action. The other aspect of Bakhtin’s theory of ethical action is more about the practical realization of a moral principle. Although it is not clear whether an act is a physically performed deed or a statement (and it could be both), he describes it as a double movement: the subject only really exists (achieves a sense of being) and the (potentially valid) theory is only experienced as being actually true in and through the moment of action. There is something hugely appealing about such a dramatic notion of action where philosophical truth “needs to be brought into communion not with theoretical constructions and conceived life, but with the actually occurring event of moral being.”20 In brief, the event of moral being occurs in the moment when action is taken,

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when the meaning that is potential in a moral theory is actualized. When Bakhtin writes about answerability, he means that we answer with physically performed actions. The Christian overtones are inescapable—we answer with our bodies. Where his aesthetic theory is underpinned by an act of compassion, his ethical theory is marked by this act of sacrifice. While I have been co-opting several thinkers to support my claim that we know ourselves through the constant activity of our senses, Bakhtin argues that these internal sensations cannot result in a developed self-image since such accounting is only possible from the outside. There is, he states, an “emptiness” and “ghostliness” in the images that we attempt to make of ourselves and this is because “we lack any emotional and volitional approach to this outward image” that could bring it to life or give it value as something happening in “the outward unit of the plastic-pictorial world.”21 Bakhtin’s visuo-centric approach to self-perception is encapsulated in his phrase the “optical purity of being.”22 It makes sense in terms of a theory of literary creation, but not in terms of embodied meaning. VALUE AND SELF-ACCOUNTING For Bakhtin, the only way to understand your body as a whole is through the intercession of a loving other; in his philosophy the gaze of the Other (capital “O” indicating the more negative conception of Other) is not intrusive but a welcome means of offering the incomplete (incompletable) “I.” In this sense, one can speak of a human being’s absolute need for the other, for the other’s seeing, remembering, gathering, and personality could not exist, if the other did not create it: aesthetic memory is productive—it gives birth, for the first time, to the outward human being on a new plane of being.23

This new plane for the “outward” human being is of course the form of literature. In Bakhtin’s aesthetics, we are all completed as the objects of someone else’s love. He describes how “Words of love and acts of genuine concern come to meet the dark chaos of my inner sensation of myself,” words that “name, direct, satisfy, and connect” me “with the outside world—as with a response that is interested in me and in my need.”24 He argues that it is only a “mother’s loving embraces that ‘give form’ to [a baby] axiologically.”25 (Meaning here is determined in terms of value, axiologically, as opposed to epistemologically.) “The child receives all initial determinations of himself and of his body from his mother’s lips and from the lips of those who are close to him.”26 Thus a baby cannot experience from within itself “my

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‘darling little head’ or ‘darling little hand,’ but precisely my ‘head’ and my ‘hand’—I act with my ‘hand,’ not my ‘darling little hand.’” He continues that “It is only in relation to the other that I can speak about myself in an affectionate diminutive form.”27 Bakhtin is equally categorical that a person can only participate in another’s life on the aesthetic plane: to attempt to engage ethically is “to play a role, i.e., assume, like a mask, the flesh of another—of someone deceased.” He insists that “the playing of a role as a whole is an answerable deed performed by the one playing, and not the one represented, i.e., the hero.”28 I have argued that a person has to engage in self-accounting in order to make sense of their ongoing lives and that it is the sensory feedback from movement (or act-performing) that provides much of the information for these accounts. At every stage of their unfolding our actions are monitored and modified by this feedback as we match actual against predicted outcomes. An action is a process of doing and not a singular fact. If I am an embodied totality, then the executive and the supervisory roles are two necessary and interrelated moments in the process of performing an action. I shall conclude the second part by arguing that we are bodies with brains (we are more “embrained” than embodied beings) and that our capacity for empathy is a cognitive and perceptual function crucial to social existence and survival. By way of an overview of the limitations of Bakhtin’s concept of the experiencing self, I shall begin by addressing questions of time and timing. TIME: MOMENT OR PROCESS? Returning to Bakhtin’s ethical theory, he categorically insists that the “performed act constitutes a going out once and for all from within possibility as such into what is once-occurrent.”29 I mentioned above that being and meaning are coterminous in Bakhtin’s theory of the act which is at once an ontological and an axiological event. He describes the experience of being an “I” as “once-occurrent” which “constitutes a profound ontological difference in significance within the event of Being.”30 His philosophical sketch of an ethics of action echoes with the phrase “once-occurrent.”31 This returns us to the difference between a theoretical truth which is potentially true over time, and “Historically actual once-occurrent Being” which is “greater and heavier,” a difference that is only evident to “a living and experiencing consciousness” and “cannot be determined in theoretical categories.”32 I would argue that although there maybe moments of self-revelation—call them “epiphanies”— an equally important source of self-knowledge comes through the successive process of such moments which act as markers along the unfolding of an action. Bakhtin’s whole conception of being, action, and time is based on

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moment rather than process. However, one has to question how far this notion of momentary revelation can be taken. There are some fundamental problems with such a theory: Can all moral questions be answered with a once and for ever deed? Are there not processes whose nature cannot be captured in a moment in time because, by definition, they unfold over time? When James Gibson declares that “Pictures are artificial displays of information frozen in time,”33 he points to two fundamental different ways of making sense of the world. On the one hand, like Bakhtin, you can try and sum things up in one snapshot—the act of understanding being this act of framing a moment in time. On the other hand, you can argue that everything flows, that everything is in a constant state of process. Gibson argues for a more dynamic account of seeing: “Observation implies movement, that is, locomotion with reference to the rigid environment, because all observers are animals and all animals are mobile.”34 He acknowledges that “The geometrical habit of separating space from time and imagining sets of frozen forms in space is very strong. One can think of each point of observation in the medium as stationary and distinct.”35 But for all its elegance, it fails to account for the “fact that the optic array flows in time instead of going from one structure to another.”36 Bakhtin does acknowledge this flow in time, and argues that it characterizes the experience of selfhood: “I find only my own dispersed directedness, my unrealised desire and striving—the membra disiecta of my potential wholeness.”37 Just as the self cannot grasp itself as a whole in space, I cannot grasp myself in time because my mode of existence is focused on the future, in the “yet-to-be.” Elsewhere he calls this “an intuitionally experienced loophole out of time, out of everything given.”38 Indeed he acknowledges that this is a blind spot for the other since “most essential part of my actual experience of myself is excluded from outward seeing.”39 Astonishingly, Bakhtin makes nothing of this admission that, despite the aesthetic creations of the other (the Author), these images of me (as a Hero) will always be outlived and rendered obsolete by my ongoing existence and my possibility for change. Where Bakhtin sees the future “directedness” and “unrealised desire” of the self as a kind of ontological hemorrhage, Richard Sennett sees it as our natural and a positive state. He calls this projective state of being “prehension” and argues that it “gives a particular cast to mental understanding as well as physical action: you don’t wait to think until all information is in hand, you anticipate the meaning.” He continues Prehension signals alertness, engagement, and risk-taking all in the act of looking ahead; it is in spirit the very opposite of the prudent accountant who does not exert a mental muscle until he or she has all the numbers.40

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Because action-taking and making is an unfolding process, I would argue that we need to understand act-performing in this more labile sense where a person will make a leap toward a meaning, rather than waiting until all the beans have been counted. Bakhtin presents this state as one of incompletion, but it can be seen as one of emergence, where the unfolding of an action is guided and followed by sensory feedback, picking up on the possibility of an emerging outcome. The body should not be thought as the generator of once-and-for-all acts whose meaning lies in the actualization of a potential philosophical meaning, but as the source of meanings that come through the sensory awareness of the (often unseen) possibilities inherent in these actions as they unfold in time. BODILY SENSES AS INFORMATION In the same way that his world is a field for general activity, rather than a specific environment, Bakhtin’s body lacks any specific organic functionality. He privileges the visual, “outer” sense over inner sense, presumably because it can render the world meaningful as external images. Litz Pisk argues the contrary. You inhabit your body by your presence in it and by your awareness of it. You do not watch it from the outside, arrange yourself in front of the mirror, stand or walk next to yourself, observe and analyse, but connect yourself with your body and feel for an inner rightness. Awareness extends from the nakedness of your existence, devoid of any adopted attitudes.41

No surprise that this was written by a movement teacher! But does her challenge not make us think about what these inner sensations are? In an environment without physical features, without threats or opportunities to existence Bakhtin can get away with generalizations. But in a world consisting of ground that gathers in mounds and dips, with surfaces that can be slippery, rough, or smooth, we need the “inner sensations” of our vestibular system, of the pressure receptors in our feet, the receptors in our muscles and joints, to provide our sense of position and balance. To be aware is to be in connection with the needs and demands of any given environment. All of this reminds us why the larva of the sea squirt requires its basic brain. Sennett describes the difference between the senses of sight and touch: It has seemed that touch delivers invasive, “unbounded” data, whereas the eye supplies images that are contained in a frame. If you touch a hot stove, your whole body goes into sudden trauma, whereas a painful sight can be instantly

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diminished by shutting your eyes. A century ago, the biologist Charles Sherrington reformatted this discussion. He explored what he called “active touch,” which names the conscious intent guiding the fingertip; touch appeared to him proactive as well as reactive.42

I shall return to the theme of pain later, but want now to focus on the phrase “active touch” which develops my argument about an embrained body which generates meaning through making sense of sensory feedback. Sherrington and Sennett offer an image of the body which is not a concretization but rather a generator of meanings, a body which in its self-directed, living activity generates the possibility for meanings. Notice how Sennett describes touch as both proactive and reactive: this is another way of describing the intricate to-and-fro flow of the sensory-motor system. Thomas Hanna, creator of the practice Somatics, describes how the nervous system and brain are designed to coordinate our motor output and sensory feedback. The indissoluble functional and somatic unity of the sensory-motor system is testified to by the obvious structural and bodily unity that is built into the human spinal column. The column is composed of descending motor nerves and ascending sensory nerves which exist, respectively, to the fore and aft of the vertebrae. This fore and aft schema continues all the way up the spine to the top of the brain where, just to the fore of the central sulcus of the cerebral cortex, lie the motor tracts and just to the aft the sensory tracts are aligned. It is a schema that is at the centre of our being.43

Hannah and Sennett describe how the structure of our nervous system has adapted to enable us make sense of our interactions with the environment. Another such nervous structure is our largest sensory organ—the skin. ON SKIN For Bakhtin, the skin is simply a boundary, one that neither provides a sensory interface with the world nor a sense of the embodied self as a whole. From within myself, I can perceive my own boundaries as an impediment, but not at all as a consummation, while on the contrary, the aesthetically experienced boundary of the other does consummate him, contracting and concentrating all of him, all of his self-activity, and closing off this self-activity.44

Is Bakhtin here intentionally creating a paradox in order to highlight his visually oriented theory of aesthetic creation? He rejects the notion that our skin can provide the self with a sense of wholeness, and argues that it is only the

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aesthetically oriented viewer who can grasp this continuous outer surface as defining the spatial whole of a Hero. Once again, he argues against the possibility of a direct experience of our bodies, arguing instead for a philosophical theory which involves the body. He does acknowledge that “aesthetic self-activity always operates on the boundaries (form is a boundary),”45 but rather than talking about skin, he uses the more neutral word “boundary” and thereby privileges the sense of sight over touch. Sennett gives an idea of the skin as a place of interaction between organism and environment calling it an “ecological border,” “a site of exchange where organisms become more interactive,” and continues that “like a cell membrane, resists indiscriminate mixture; it contains differences but is porous. The border is an active edge.”46 The last phrase is echoed by Claxton who describes how “any apparent boundary or membrane” “seems to mark the limit of a SubSystem” and far from being a “barrier or a stockade,” “is a site of constant, vital interaction.”47 Just as Gibson takes an ecological approach to visual perception, so Claxton and Sennett demonstrate how this works in terms of touch. EMBODIED EMPATHY Bakhtin sets us quite a conundrum when he writes about pain, a subject he knew well as he suffered from the excruciatingly painful condition osteomyelitis. He argues that a person in pain “does not see the agonising tension of his own muscles, does not see the entire, plastically consummated posture of his own body, or the expression of suffering on his own face. He does not see the clear blue sky against the background of which his suffering outward image is delineated for me.”48 By now we should be familiar with Bakhtin’s turn of argument: his concern is with the “suffering outward image,” rather than the inner experience. However, recent neurological research into how we “read” each other’s bodies argues that we actually respond physically to the sight of someone in pain. I shall thus conclude with a theory of empathy that is somatically rather than visually based. In an article about cognitive neuroscience, Bruce McConachie explains that if “one person watches another grasp a door handle . . . the same group of neurons in the empathiser’s brain is activated as in the grasper’s brain; neurologically, it is as if the observer had grabbed the door handle himself.”49 He cites neuroscientist Evan Thompson that “the mutual mirroring that occurs in sensorimotor coupling first begins in early childhood, when infants mirror the intentional facial expressions of their caregivers.” This mirroring continues throughout our lives and forms “the basis of many of the unconscious affective links that help us to bond with others and to shape co-operative ventures together.” He then explores Thompson’s term “imaginary transposition,” which

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describes a more complex form of attunement. “As the name suggests, imaginary transposition allows the empathiser to attempt to place her or himself into the mind of another; it is similar in most ways to what some psychologists of empathy term ToM [Theory of Mind] and others call ‘perspective-taking.’”50 McConachie makes a final step in his argument when he argues that “This notion of empathy as perspective-taking differs from the commonplace view that confuses empathy with sympathy.”51 In other words, empathy is a cognitive function, a way of working out the possible intentions of the person involved. One could consider these as three stages in an ever more subtle form of interpersonal relation. The first stage is purely motor: I see an action and simulate it using the same parts of my brain that would be used in actual execution. The second is a form of attunement between caregiver and infant; the third extends this attunement into a broader notion of empathy whereby an observer can recognize emotional states from a person’s moving behavior. Thompson and McConachie describe a process whereby the recognition and understanding of the state of another happens without contemplation or conscious thought—although learned from infancy the process is somatic and nonconscious. McConachie concludes that Because we are often in social situations when attuning ourselves to [the] emotions of others and reading their minds is important for achieving our goals, empathy is ubiquitous and commonplace; we deploy it (mostly unconsciously) all the time.52

Without this almost instant ability to read the intentions and emotions of others our social existence would be fraught with difficulties and dangers. The experiencing subject connects with others most of whose bodily structures work in a similar way and therefore readable way. I feel the pain of another not as an image but as a sympathetically generated physical sensation (I wince, I turn away, I blush). The parts of my brain that process my pain are active when I see another’s pain. My brain uses my own bodily resources to feel that of another. Our body is a theater of sympathetic sensation whose function is shaped and educated by our every experience. Guy Claxton brings together many themes of my critique. Rather than talking about “perspective taking” or Theory of Mind, he writes about our facility for mental modeling. His account elegantly demonstrates how I can imagine myself as an other, an “object” through my dialogue with you. As the sophistication of my mental models grows, I become able to incorporate your model of Me inside my model of You. I can begin to imagine how you see me, and what you think of me. When I inhabit your vantage point, one of the things it enables me to see is myself. I can become an “object” to myself, with traits, temperament, and habits as well as a visual appearance.53

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When Claxton writes about “the sophistication of my mental model,” it becomes clear that we need a more sophisticated model for the human brain than that provided by the solitary sea squirt. While all animals need a basic brain to provide sensory motor feedback about their interaction with the environment, more social animals need a larger brain to process the infinitely more complex interactions in the social environment, described by Claxton and McConachie. And it is precisely this environment that interests Bakhtin. We have now reached a point when we can see how Bakhtin’s hermetically sealed roles and categories—I and other, aesthetic and ethical, author and hero—can be rendered permeable when we consider the body as an active (i.e., “embrained”) agent in the meaning making that goes on between people. THE VITAL BODY Bakhtin’s ideas about the body in his early philosophy have provided the structure for an argument about what constitutes a whole body, and how its functioning totality generates meaning. Drawing on the writings of various contemporary thinkers I have put forward an account of how the human body in its interaction with the environment makes sense of itself and of the world. Where Bakhtin proposed a body that was passive in terms of making sense of itself, of knowing itself as a whole, I hope I have shown a more autonomous bodily self which is constantly engaged in meaning-making. I want to end with a reflection on the word “body” by an early pioneer of movement studies, Ilse Milendorf. She observed that in the English word “life” “we can recognise phonetically the German word ‘Leib’ (body).” She goes on to contrast this living body with the other German word for body Körper (corpus).54 Leder also picks up on this distinction, To be a lived body is always also to be a physical body with bones and tendons, nerves and sinews, all of which can be scientifically characterised. These are not two different bodies. Körper is itself an aspect of Leib, one manner in which the lived body show itself.55

The totality lies not in the eye of the beholder—as an image—but in the selfexperience of one’s own body in action. Our wholeness is the product of the unfathomably complex connectivity of our nervous system, from the brain through to the furthest receptors in the soles of our feet. It is this agency that means one can be both object and subject, and thus author of one’s everunfolding life-story. This chapter is dedicated to Caryl Emerson.

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NOTES 1. M.M. Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.N. Bakhtin, Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vadim Liapunov, 4–256. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 24. 2. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 24. 3. Ibid., 24. 4. Ibid., 23. 5. M.M. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 57. 6. M.M. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 57. 7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. (London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1962), 387. 8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 243. 9. Susan Greenfield, Brain Story (London: BBC Books, 2000), 13. 10. Raymond Tallis, The Kingdom of Infinite Space (London: Atlantic Books, 2008), 138. 11. Tallis, The Kingdom of Infinite Space, 138. 12. Ibid., 261. 13. Guy Claxton, Intelligence in the Flesh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 95. 14. Claxton, Intelligence in the Flesh, 216. 15. Leder The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 6. 16. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 32. 17. Ibid., 53. 18. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 43. 19. Ibid. 20. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 12. 21. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 30. 22. Ibid., 32 23. Ibid., 35–36. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 39. 26. Ibid., 49. 27. Ibid., 50. 28. Ibid., 18. 29. Ibid., 28–29. 30. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 74. 31. For example, see Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 10–11, 12–13, 18, 27–28, 29, 39, 43, 57, 72, 75. 32. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 8. 33. James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1984), 71.

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34. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 72. 35. Ibid., 74. 36. Ibid., 74–75. 37. Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act, 123–124. 38. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 109. 39. Ibid., 37. 40. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 154. 41. Litz Pisk, The Actor and his Body (London: Methuen, 1998), 11. 42. Sennett, The Craftsman, 152. 43. Thomas Hanna, “What Is Somatics?” In Don Hanlon Johnson, Bone, Breath and Gesture (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995), 344–345. 44. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 91. 45. Ibid., 85. 46. Sennett, The Craftsman, 227. 47. Claxton, Intelligence in the Flesh, 53. 48. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 25. 49. Bruce McConachie, “Spectating as Sandbox Play” in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science. Edited by Nicola Shaughnessy. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013), 192. 50. McConachie, “Spectating as Sandbox Play,” 192. 51. Ibid., 195. 52. Ibid., 191. 53. Claxton, Intelligence in the Flesh, 217. 54. Ilse Middendorf, “The Perceptible Breath” in Don Hanlon Johnson, Bone, Breath and Gesture (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995), 75–76. 55. Leder, The Absent Body, 6.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, M.M. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity.” In Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov. 4–256. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Bakhtin, M.M. Towards a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Claxton, Guy. Intelligence in the Flesh. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Greenfield, Susan. Brain Story. London: BBC Books, 2000. Hanna, Thomas. “What Is Somatics?” In Bone, Breath and Gesture. Edited by Don Hanlon Johnson. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995. 340–350. James Gibson, James. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1984. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

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McConachie, Bruce. “Spectating as Sandbox Play” in Affective Performance and Cognitive Science. Edited by Nicola Shaughnessy. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2013. 191–206. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1962. McCaw, Dick. Bakhtin and Theatre. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Middendorf, Ilse. “The Perceptible Breath.” In Bone, Breath and Gesture. Edited by Don Hanlon Johnson. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1995. 74–84. Pisk, Litz. The Actor and His Body. London: Methuen, 1998. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. London: Allen Lane, 2008. Tallis, Raymond. The Kingdom of Infinite Space. London: Atlantic Books, 2008.

Chapter 13

Bakhtin against Dualism Restoring Humanity to the Subjective Experience Steven Mills

Identity emerges, human, social, personal, or otherwise, as individuals give meaning to their self and their surroundings. To understand and explain that identity, philosophers and literary theorists have explored human interactions for centuries. The first modern explanation for self began as a dualism that separated mind from body. This explanation suggested that identity rested in conscious thought with a body that was clearly secondary. Then, as philosophy developed, mind became an active creator that forced the external objective reality to conform to internal representations. Thinkers could manipulate the external world according to their desires and vision. As philosophy moved into the twentieth century, the mind continued to dominate identity, but codes within language and culture determined how mental representations created meaning. People, as subjects, understand and structure reality by piecing together social norms (i.e., codes) that hold the potential for defining self and world. Consequently, identity becomes a social construction shaped by individuals’ personal values and codes for permissible actions and acceptable speech. Thus, from a historical perspective, discussions of human identity have largely highlighted mental and external influences without substantial exploration of the role of the human body as a source for this identity. The absence of body or embodied connections leaves this understanding of human identity incomplete. Thus, some literary theorists may ask—is there an approach that more accurately and thoroughly illustrates how subjects create meaning and identity? Modern research in cognitive science and neuroscience indicates that the mind does not function alone in a context, but it is part of an embodied organism. Consequently, the mind draws on emotions and experiences to understand the system and codes within which 255

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it functions. While external rules influence internal representations, deep embodied connections also influence meaning among personal, cultural, or environmental interactions. For example, dark thunder clouds in the distance commonly lead an observer to label an encroaching storm as menacing. This equates the storm with a villain and attributes to it human intention and emotion. While superficially coded analysis could account for this connection— dark and heavy suggest anger and potential damage means negative harmful intentions—on a deeper level the prosopopeia emerges because of embodied connections rather than codes. Fear, adrenaline, anxiety, and similar emotions permeating people’s personal experiences, as well as the anticipation of others’ actions and bodily states (e.g., angry villains), are tools that allow them to interpret nature as if it had autonomous cognition and intentionality. Embodied interactions with people and environment drive the codes that philosophies argue determine human identity and context, and this suggests that traditional theories and philosophies are not only insufficient to explain self, but also tend to dehumanize the subject by elevating only one element of human interaction (the mind) and glossing over or ignoring altogether the other (the body), which fragments the deeply connected embodied nature of the human subject. One twentieth-century philosopher who argued against the fragmented constructed nature of identity and for the deeply embodied foundation of human essence was Mikhail Bakhtin. He claimed that humans are dialogic. They make meaning by understanding themselves within an enactive partnership with their greater social and environmental contexts. People see themselves and others through dynamic interactions with the social and physical world that not only draw on norms and codes, but also on embodied perceptions. Whereas a decoding mind takes independent elements and composes them into meaningful units, a dialogic mind constructs meaning from body, emotions, contexts, intentions, and many other social and ambient elements. Furthermore, this view of humanity is also consistent with the research on identity in modern cognitive sciences that suggests deep-rooted embodied connections underlying a sense of self and other. This research establishes a vision of humanity much richer and more complete than traditional theories. Further, because Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism reflect this research, his work will continue to inspire philosophical and literary research consistent with, not at odds with, empirical evidence well into the twenty-first century. DEEP CONNECTIONS: EMBODIED SOCIAL BEINGS Bakhtin’s theories build on his concept of dialogism, an argument that human meaning and identity forms through embodied situated interactions.

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He claimed that people develop their identity as they make meaning within social contexts via dialogic interactions in which individuals understand themselves through relationships with others. For example, Bakhtin metonymically connected language with society and argued that language “is a point of view, a socio-ideological conceptual system of real social groups and their embodied representatives.”1 Points of view extend to identity because they are a conceptual system of perspectives, and people’s perspectives characterize their sense of self. People’s language, or point of view, is also social because it only emerges in dialogue with others: “a language is revealed in all its distinctiveness only when it is brought into relationship with other languages.”2 Individuals know their own self through connections and perspectives developed in dialogue between themselves and the other. But even personal identity emerges through a dialogue among their own experiences. For example, Merlin Donald explained that “we are symbolusing, networked creatures, unlike any that went before us . . . . We act in cognitive collectivities, in symbiosis with external memory systems.”3 Memories make meaning as the past dialogues with the present because external objects such as photos inspire recall, which in turn causes an emotional and cognitive reaction in the present. Consequently, identity is a dialogue between past experiences and present sensations in memory. Damasio also explains that this combination is “the unified mental pattern that brings together the object and the self” and creates consciousness, and consciousness, as Caracciolo argues, “is not a passive taking in of sensory information from the outside world, but a structure of interaction between embodied subjects and the environments that they negotiate.”4 Human essence requires this internal/ external temporal dialogue because it helps to define identity and consciousness, and therefore “a repertoire of past experiences and values . . . guides people’s interaction with the environment. The way we deal with the world and with other subjects is always dependent on the history of our ‘structural coupling,’”5 Thus, as Bakhtin argued, meaning, or a sense of self, resides in the dialogic and autonomous nature of living characters that interact with and respond to both their internal and external world. People are dialogic, in that “everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other.”6 People’s sense of self resembles dialogism because both are multidirectional complex interactions that create meaning as they come together. Identity, however, is a dialogue that requires socially embedded embodied cognition. Identity is dialogic because humans think in and about social contexts, and even personal identity builds on connections with others to develop a sense of self. Relationships are so vital to human survival that deprivation of meaningful social bonds weakens immune systems, increases likelihood

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of mental illness, and can lead to suicide.7 Furthermore, thought, even about self, is frequently social in nature and tends to dwell on social connections. E. Tory Higgins, for example, argued in his self-discrepancy theory that selfknowledge relies heavily on both how individuals conceptualize themselves as well as what others think they should do or be (the “ought self”). External perspectives, therefore, affect emotions and actions as they try to comply with expectations.8 Similarly, Anderson explains that people depend on social contexts as a part of identity: an agent’s “situation” is itself not static, but arises in the course of dynamic transactions between internal and external resources and structures which are to a large degree mutually constitutive. Who the agent perceives herself to be plays a role in what situation she sees herself in; likewise the perceived situation may affect which role an agent chooses to adopt.9

Self-knowledge as well as social and personal expectations of how one ought to be impact self. Bakhtin argued that literary characters reflect this internal/external dialogism: “consciousness never gravitates toward itself but is always found in intense relationship with another consciousness . . . . Every thought of Dostoevsky’s heroes . . . senses itself to be from the very beginning a rejoinder in an unfinalized dialogue.”10 Subjects understand themselves through interactions and anticipated reactions with others, making such relationships essential to humanness. Consequently, social dialogism participates in internal identity and thought, as Baumeister and Leary argue: Concern with belongingness appears to be a powerful factor shaping human thought. People interpret situations and events with regard to their implications for relationships, and they think more thoroughly about relationship (and interaction) partners than about other people. Moreover, the special patterns of processing information about the self are sometimes used for information about relationship partners as well. Thus, both actual and potential bonds exert substantial effects on how people think.11

Social connections drive thoughts which are so rooted in relationships that eliminating them strips the subjects of human identity. For example, in the early twentieth century, Behaviorists claimed that the mind is a blank slate, and by removing affection, they could mold stronger, more structured people. They believed that “a child should be touched only if it has behaved incredibly well, and not with a hug or a kiss, but rather with a little pat on the head.”12 Orphanages strategically denied human social interaction to children and kept them “in little cribs separated by white sheets, deprived of visual stimulation and body contact.” Consequently, they lost some of their essence and became “zombies, with immobile faces and wide-open, expressionless

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eyes,” which illustrates that “bonding is essential for our species.”13 When they lacked interaction, they lost their humanness. Thus Zahavi explained that “persons do not exist in a social vacuum. To exist as a person is to exist socialized into a communal horizon, where one’s bearing to oneself is appropriated from the others.”14 People need other people because dialogic interactions develop emotions and connections that also form identity. Isolation dehumanizes and fragments an individual, whereas people who interact with others on a mental and corporeal level tap into the full array of embodied connections that compose human identity. Individuals need social bonds because they cannot see their exterior selves or observe themselves in full context. Without social bonds they only have a partial understanding of themselves. Bakhtin explains that subjects can only grasp their full identity with help from another, and “all those inner and outer actions which only I can perform in relation to the other. . . render the other complete precisely in those respects in which he cannot complete himself by himself.”15 Subjects can complete the other because they can see him in ways he cannot: he can perceive “his inner sensations of himself. [But] he does not see the agonizing tension of his own muscles, does not see the entire, plastically consummated posture of his own body, or the expression of suffering on his own face.”16 Others can see what he cannot; therefore, individuals can only achieve full understanding of themselves through social interconnectedness. Furthermore, these social bonds require both mental and embodied interactions: people mimic others through body and mind, and constantly alter themselves as they simultaneously alter others. This is embodied dialogism because once subjects understand themselves from within, they must see through the other’s eyes, to “see his world axiologically from within him as he sees this world. . . . I must experience—come to see and to know—what he experiences; I must put myself in his place and coincide with him.”17 Consequently, people can only know their own self fully by dialoguing with the other, not through words, but through context: they experience what the others see and feel through an embodied conversation. One clear example of this social cognition and emotion is empathy, which allows two individuals to connect in mind, body, and sensation. Humans need social bonds, and empathy provides a key part of forging those bonds. Empathy is an inherent, automatic sharing of emotions that brings two subjects together in an embodied dialogue.18 Sharing emotions requires deep connections and a mental and physical exchange of emotion. Alan Palmer argues that a key to sharing emotions and contexts is a mental connection, “imagining being the other in that situation,”19 though biologist Frans de Waal claims that it runs much deeper, and includes deep mental and bodily engagement between both parties. He argues that mimicry and mirror neurons, which fire by merely watching another as if the observer were

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actually performing the action, illicit similar real emotions and intentions that one merely observes in the other. He explains that witnessing another’s physical, emotional, or mental state automatically triggers neural circuits in our brains, such that “seeing someone in pain activates pain [our] circuits. . . [and] our behavior fits the other’s situation, because it has become ours.”20 Consequently, the boundary between subjects blurs because another’s emotions becomes one’s own. The result is shared emotion and context: “seeing someone in pain activates pain circuits to the point that we clench our jaws, close our eyes, and even yell ‘Aw!’ if we see a child scrape its knee. Our behavior fits the other’s situation, because it has become ours.”21 Because people literally feel the sensation, social relationships have a significant impact on their mood or sense of self. Stel and Vonk have explained this: Our facial muscles give feedback to our brains, which leads to the corresponding emotions being experienced. Thus, putting a smile on one’s face will make one actually feel happier. In the same way, mimicking others’ facial expressions influences our emotions, leading to experiencing the same emotions as the observed person. There is a lot of evidence supporting the finding that people are highly susceptible to catching another’s emotions.22

Not only does the bodily change of smiling affect the way people think, illustrating the embodiedness of thought and mind, but emotions become dialogic when seeing another smile creates a bodily change in the observer, illustrating the socially embodied nature of mind and self. Empathy is a complete dialogic experience: mind, body, and other inter-react, and subjects are interconnected in a complex embodied and social neural network. Bakhtin picked up the torch of empathy and claimed that it is fundamental to developing identity because it requires both what individuals perceive about themselves and what others see about them in a dialogic relationship that, for Bakhtin, is how people truly experience their concrete world. He believed that understanding self is impossible without social interactions: “the correlation of the image-categories of I and the other is the form in which an actual human being is concretely experienced . . . . I experience myself essentially by encompassing any boundaries, any body—by extending myself beyond any bounds.”23 Extending one’s self means connecting empathically with others, or, in Bakhtin’s argument, experiencing another aesthetically by “projecting myself into him and experiencing his life from within him,”24 a deep empathic connection that mixes emotions and contexts. Personal identity and meaning require that two subjects share emotions as individuals reach out and connects with another and then returns to their own state: an embodied dialogue through a “projection of myself into him . . . followed by a return into myself.”25 This return completes the dialogue because it enables the sharing

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of emotions, and Chiu and Yeh argue that empathy requires “switching to [an] altercentric perspective, and reassuming [the] egocentric perspective for simulation.”26 Through this interaction, both bodies and minds connect and share intentions and sensations because they experience the other’s simulated situation. This embodied dialogue facilitates experience and understanding through which, as Bakhtin argued, people know themselves and their world. Because empathy is essential to forming those social and emotional connections that influence the formation of identity, the body is as essential as the mind in creating a sense of self. Furthermore, dualistic philosophies that separate the mind and body fail to account for the complex connectedness of humanity. Caracciolo cautions that we must be careful not to draw a rigid distinction between our private self . . . and our public, narrativized person, as if they were two independent entities. This kind of apriorism about the self lies at the root of many misconceptions . . . . Talk about “inner mental presence” has a distinct Cartesian flavor, against which the enactivists would urge that the self emerges from an interaction, either with the physical world (phenomenological self) or with the cultural and social environment (personhood), on the basis of one’s experiential background.27

Clear boundaries and dualisms cannot fully explain human experience and identity. Consciousness and cognition require a deep interplay between mind, brain, body, and environment, as Mark Johnson explains, because “what we call ‘mind’ and what we call ‘body’ are not two things, but rather aspects of one organic process, so that all our meaning, thought, and language emerge from the aesthetic dimensions of this embodied activity.”28 He further argues that “our human forms of experience, consciousness, thought, and communication would not exist without our brains, operating as an organic part of our functioning bodies, which, in turn, are actively engaged with the specific kinds of physical, social, and cultural environments that humans dwell in.”29 Cognition, or the “I” that thinks, emerges from inseparable interactions between body and environment. Lakoff and Johnson explain that the human mind makes meaning through representations that draw on disparate elements that “arise from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have and that they function as they do in our physical environment . . . . They have a basis in our physical and cultural experience.”30 Thought alone is insufficient to make meaning because people have bodies, and they interact with the world through movements and emotions which also provides the structure for thought. Human identity, then, is essentially dialogic because mind, body, and environment mutually affect each other throughout a process of receiving and responding to external stimuli. Bakhtin thus built a philosophical legacy of dialogism that anticipated research and discoveries in modern cognitive

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psychology and neuroscience, and that also questioned traditional dualistic philosophies that dehumanize the subject as they fail to grasp the complexities of humanity. DUALISTIC THEORY: DEHUMANIZING HUMANITY Given that human identity relies so heavily on thought, embodiment, social connections, and empathy, dualistic philosophies that separate mind from body and context are insufficient to account for the full complexity of the self, and, in extreme cases, they strip subjects of that which makes them human. Such theories arguably begin with René Descartes who built a philosophy around the idea of a separate and distinct mind—the thinking thing—and body—the mind’s container. In the more recent past, this binary foundation emerges in Saussurian linguistics that give a binary relationship to communication, culture, and, by extension, identity. Structuralists claim, for example, that interactions require codes to create meaning, and human meaning can only occur as subjects manipulate those codes. Emotions, empathy, and embodied social connections are pushed to the periphery or ignored altogether, and the code takes the forefront of identity as an autonomous entity that a mind must receive and decipher. Such theories (of which Descartes and Saussure are only a couple of the many examples) set the stage and foundation for much of modern thought behind identity. However, Bakhtin refuted their tenets. He argued that individuals must be in a social context and must rely on the embodied mind to make sense of their surroundings. Bakhtin restored the humanness that theory removed from the subject. The following sections will begin with Descartes’s and Bakhtin’s dialogic nature of identity that forces a rethinking of the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and instead illustrate that mind must function as a part of a system. CARTESIAN AND THEORETICAL DEHUMANIZATION: DESCARTES’S DUALISTIC MIND Bakhtin shook dualism at its foundation because his dialogism restored embodied and social thought to human essence, which undermined René Descartes’s philosophy of a disembodied mind. Descartes’s mind and body dualism argued that consciousness and identity reside in the mind; the body, while present, is separate and secondary. Descartes’s paramount statement, “I think therefore I am,”31 declared that conscious thought is the key to identity: “thought exists; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am; I exist . . . . I am therefore precisely nothing but a thinking thing; that is, a mind, or

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intellect, or understanding, or reason.”32 He makes thought the foundation for existence and human identity, for Cartesian subjects think, reason, and know themselves and their environment through thought and contemplation. This argument removes the body from the formation of identity and consciousness, creating a dualism that contradicts dialogic embodiment. Descartes asserts that “even bodies are not . . . perceived by the senses or by the faculty of imagination, but by the intellect alone, and . . . are not perceived through their being touched or seen, but only through their being understood.”33 In dualism, the body is unnecessary for, and is only knowable through, thought; therefore, existence is thinking because from it grows every other element of identity. Baggini articulates the fundamental flaw in this Cartesianism: “this cannot explain the unity of consciousness at all. You cannot explain the unity of experience by simply positing an inner, unified experiencer.”34 Thought alone can neither determine experience nor interpret perception or context. On the contrary, people think through internal and external socially embodied connections, such as empathy, that together form identity. Bakhtin rejected the Cartesian subject and instead argued that individuals engage others through a living dialogue between mind, body, environment, and social context. On the one hand, the Cartesian subject presents an alluring argument for human identity because it “can become [a] transcendental representation of all human subjects precisely because it has been stripped of context, body, internal multiplicity—everything that has made it human.”35 Context is trivialized, and even removed, if everything happens in the mind, which places human subjects on a much more universal ground. As Michael Anderson observes, “the body is for Cartesian philosophy both necessary and unacceptable, and this ambivalence drives mind and body apart in ways Descartes himself may not have intended. Sensation requires the physicality of the body; the freedom and reliability of human reason and judgment seem to require the autonomy of the soul.”36 Descartes and cartesian duality recognizes the presence of the body, but mind is separate and independent. Bakhtin, however, as shown earlier through empathy, claimed that this is incompatible with reality, thus recognizing as Erdinast-Vulcan has stated, “the fallacy of extending the presumption of Cartesianism—logic-bound, systemic, abstracted from all particularities and contexts—to ethics”37 and, I would add, aesthetics. He advocated for an empathic, embodied relationship among subjects and, by extension, a dialogic view of a connected, embodied humanity. Furthermore, Anderson claims that the body is not only present, but is fundamental to thought: “perception and representation always occur in the context of, and are therefore structured by, the embodied agent in the course of its ongoing purposeful engagement with the world. Representations are therefore ‘sublimations’ of bodily experience, possessed of content already, and not given content or form by an autonomous mind.” Therefore,

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thought requires embodiment, given that reason “has its origin in, and retains the structure of, our bodily coping with space . . . because the particulars of our perceptual and motor systems play a foundational role in concept definition and in rational inference.”38 Descartes sought the autonomy of mind, but the body informs and guides rational thought. Consequently, thought alone is insufficient to account for identity because identity emerges through embodied dialogic connections with other subjects. In addition to Descartes, Immanuel Kant’s idealism further entrenched duality through his tenets that the mind functioned independently of objective reality, which ultimately further stripped humanity of its interconnectedness. Kant held that that the mind is the source for creating and understanding reality, and existence itself is subjective and dependent on the individual mind. This concept of pure reason extends from a fundamentally Cartesian premise: “if one removes from our experiences everything that belongs to the senses, there still remain certain original concepts and the judgments generated from them, which must have arisen entirely a priori, independently of experience.”39 The senses and subjective experience are unnecessary for thought or pure reason, “in which no experience or sensation at all is mixed in,”40 and body and mind become hierarchical. Mind is fundamental in establishing concepts of reality, and as Günter Zöller explains, “Kant proposes the radical reversal of the cognitive relation between representation and object by having it be the object that is to accord with the representation and that is to take its measure from the representation.”41 Observers do not catalog what they see; rather objects must conform to mental representations. Therefore, “the features attributable to objects . . . do not originate in the objects themselves but reflect the prior and principal formative influence of a priori cognitive forms originating in the subject as an integral part of the latter’s representation activity and being brought to bear on the representation of objects.”42 Kant gave the mind the ability to alter, even dictate, subjective experience, which removed the deep body–mind connections through which people understand self, environment, and others. This philosophy makes the mind a supreme, separate, and disembodied entity to which the body must conform. For Bakhtin, however, this is inaccurate and rejects fundamental human connectedness. Kant’s subjective experience dehumanized the subject, yet Bakhtin declared that the body and experience are essential to mental creation, not posterior to but simultaneous with cognition. Rachel Pollard argues that Bakhtin’s philosophies dialogue with Kant: “an important aspect of Kant’s influence on Bakhtin is Kant’s concern with our relationship with the world, which led to Bakhtin’s profound interest in how we interpret the world and our experience in it.”43 The difference, however, is that Kant’s idealism disassociates experience from thought and reality, whereas Bakhtin places consciousness and meaning firmly within contextual thought and social

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dialogism. While Michael Holquist claims that Toward a Philosophy of the Act in particular is Bakhtin’s “attempt to detranscendentalize Kant,”44 ultimately Bakhtin moved beyond Kant and planted the subject in a contextually embodied world. Bakhtin declared that the source of understanding the world is experience rather than subjective mental creation: The world as the content of scientific thinking is a distinctive world: it is an autonomous world, yet not a detached world, but rather a world that is incorporated into the unitary and once-occurrent event of Being through the meditation of an answerable consciousness in an actual deed. But that once-occurrent event of Being is no longer something that is thought of, but something that is, something that is being actually and inescapably accomplished through me and others . . .; it is actually experienced, affirmed in an emotional-volitional manner, and cognition constitutes merely a moment in this experiencing-affirming.45

Bakhtin reorients philosophy to the scientific, tangible, objective reality where experiences combine emotions, thought, and people to create the subject’s world. Kant’s mental creating is only a part of the process of understanding one’s world because, as Bakhtin argues, the world emerges through connections, a dialogue, among knower and known: “To understand an object is to understand my ought in relation to it (the attitude or position I ought to take in relation to it), that is, to understand it in relation to me myself in once-occurrent Being-as-event, and that presupposes my answerable participation, and not an abstracting from myself.”46 Knowledge of an object requires a relationship with that object, and relationships emerge from contextual, embodied experiences. Bakhtin thus recognized the humanness that Kantian reason removed, and he sought “to get back to the naked immediacy of experience as it is felt from within the utmost particularity of a specific life, the molten lava of events as they happen. He seeks the sheer quality of happening in life before the magma of such experience cools, hardening into igneous theories, or accounts of what has happened” as Bakhtin broaches “the relation between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse.”47 Experience, composed of mind, body, and society, defines reality, and Kantian idealism cannot explain the process through which an observer engages the world, but Bakhtin does accurately restore to the essence of humanity the complexity of contextual experience. STRUCTURALIST DUALISM: CODED EXISTENCE Beyond Descartes and Kant, structural and ideology-based dualistic theories dehumanize the subject and discount individual experience as they argue that forms and conventions largely determine identity. In structuralism,

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for example, the speaker and the listener become objects in a disembodied decontextualized process of communication in which meaning depends on a symbolic system of codes and rules. Yuri Lotman explains that “in the ideal case the informational content [of an utterance] does not change either qualitatively or quantitatively: the receiver decodes the texts and receives the initial message. . . . The text is regarded as a ‘technical packaging’ for the message which is what the receiver is interested in.”48 Two speakers decipher a conversation’s independently held meaning imbedded in the message. Emotion and social thought are inherently subjective, but the coded conventions make communication formulaic and resist subjectivity. Consequently, the structuralist system socially constructs the “I” and undermines individual identity and consciousness in a Cartesian structure that labors “under the laws of abstraction, formalization, and logic, to the exclusion of the phenomenal world, sensory experience, and the constitutive diversity of the human subject.”49 Because there is an absence of the phenomenal world, structural humans rely on thought and codes and lose the embodied essence of experience.50 Bakhtin rejected these interpretations of the subject and reoriented identity toward the foundation of mind, body, and society. Bakhtin argued that structuralist models of communication miss the complex situational characteristics in language given that listeners must give and take spoken, implied, and contextual information to create meaning. For Bakhtin, structuralism fails to describe humanity because in these models “language is regarded from the Speaker’s standpoint as if there were only one speaker who does not have any necessary relation to other participants in speech communication. If the role of the other is taken into account at all, it is the role of a listener, who understands the speaker only passively.”51 Bakhtin therefore unceremoniously razes the structuralist structure: “still current in linguistics are such fictions as the ‘listener’ and ‘understander’ (partners of the ‘speaker’), the ‘unified speech flow,’ and so on. These fictions produce a completely distorted idea of the complex and multifaceted process of active speech communication.”52 These participants are passive, disengaged, and unnecessary; they are essentially dehumanized because embodied connections such as empathy are impossible in such circumstances. On the other hand, he argued, people rely on emotion and experience as they exchange ideas and interpret thoughts. As empathy illustrates, communication is dialogic; people share words, contexts, and emotions, requiring both mind and body to understand complex contexts. Caracciolo specifically argues that structuralist and poststructuralist language is incomplete because it does not account for the body. “Our fleshy, living body is as much a product of our cultures as a constraint on them,” he explains, and this influences languages as much as codes and norms because “the pervasiveness of bodily metaphors for conceptual activities shows that the sensorimotor possibilities of our

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body inform human cultures almost to the same extent as cultures inform our body.”53 Meaning is beyond codes structures alone; it resides also in interactions and sensations. For Bakhtin, meaning can only form in such human interaction: The fact is that when the listener perceives and understands the meaning . . . of speech, he simultaneously takes an active, responsive attitude toward it . . . . He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else’s mind . . . . Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution and so forth . . . . Thus, the listener who understands passively, who is depicted as the speaker’s partner in the schematic diagrams of general linguistics, does not correspond to the real participant in speech communication.54

Understanding emerges as individuals anticipate responses in a dialogue that occurs as part of a social interaction. Furthermore, such interaction includes empathetically sharing another’s situation, which makes dialogue an embodied, shared experience rather than a simplistic decoding process. While codes and norms may influence a speaker, there cannot be a decontextualized subject whose mind works independent of body because the speaker participates within an embodied and social environment to create meaning. IDEOLOGY THEORY AND BAKHTIN Dualistic theories further dehumanize meaning-making when they apply structuralist tenets to society and claim that ideologies and hegemonic discourse codify meaning and determine subjects’ identity. Marxism, for example, claims that social oppression follows codified behaviors where “the liberation of the signifier, the rebellion against idealist repressions, and the unleashing of the forces of difference and desire against the law and order of identity” illustrate that class systems and oppression adhere to a foundation of semiology.55 The hardline view claims that codes establish one’s reality given that, as in language, symbolic representations construct social meaning because language and society “are both created by human beings and constitute their reality.”56 Meaning is inherent, and therefore independent, in a symbolic reality, and the semiotic relationship is the driving force behind identity because subjects can only interpret the autonomous message. Understanding self and context is a binary process that ignores embodied connections. Umberto Ecco, for example, argues that culture and philosophy “are models which explain the world in which we live,” a world that originates in the mind: “obviously, in explaining the world, they also construct it.”57 Much akin to Kant, such ideology theories directly create mental interpretations,

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and the mind consequently creates a reality according to the hegemony’s system. Jonathan Culler similarly claims that “structuralism is thus based . . . on the realization that if human actions or productions have a meaning there must be an underlying system of distinctions and conventions which makes this meaning possible . . . . The actions are meaningful only with respect to a set of institutional conventions.”58 Culler clearly grants primacy to external, institutionalized codes that act upon the subject independent of senses and thus strips away the embodiment on which humans rely to understand their world. Anderson links this line of thought directly to Descartes: “this denial that sensing and acting in the world require thinking, and the concomitant identification of thinking with the higher-order reasoning and abstraction paradigmatically displayed in language use is perhaps the true heart of the Cartesian attitude.”59 Reason and mind are separate and superior to body and sensation, which opens the door to analyze thought irrespective of body. Because subjects are dependent on the code, they are socially constructed products of the formulaic interpretation as outlined by those institutional conventions. Ideology theory suggests that symbolic relationships create a framework of possible meanings which determine a subject’s identity. Lévi-Strauss, for example, argues that culture consists of ideologies that heavily draw on myths or stories and justify belief systems.60 Society, then, functions according to a system of codes through which humans “categorize and classify ‘reality’ into cognitively manageable units.”61 Codes create meaning. Consequently, understanding world and self becomes a process of interpreting external structures instead experiencing deep emotional or social interactions. Culler further explains that the fullest scope of this semiotic process is precisely “the creation and organization of signs not simply in order to produce meaning but in order to produce a human world charged with meaning.”62 One’s place in the world can be winnowed down to the base formulas, and when authority or institutions manipulate those formulas, they manipulate identities. Marxism, for example, argues that authority propagates discourse (myths) to limit the mass’s ability to learn and to unite against it. Language and culture thus become a tool of oppression and indoctrination: “myths are ‘second-order’ signifying systems which are utilized by the capitalist class to enforce a particular network of connotations or signifying associations which both express and reinforce the dominant view of reality.”63 Unempowered peoples face dominant social discourse that strips them of their individuality. The dualistic social relationship in class struggle—those who have power versus those who do not—resembles the dualistic relationship between the mind and the body or the self and the society. Discourse influences thought, and thought creates social identity; the “I” is separated from the complex, embodied connections that constitute self. As with structuralism and idealism, Bakhtin rejects the

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fissured essence of ideology theories and advocates an embodied dialogic subject. Bakhtin argued that socially constructed views of people disregard the complex interconnectedness of humanity, without which people would cease to exist. Theories that present subjects who create a world primarily determined by ideological and/or mental foundations decouple embodied connections and ignore the human essence that would be found therein. He argues: In that world I am unnecessary; I am essentially and fundamentally non-existent in it. The theoretical world is obtained through an essential and fundamental abstraction from the fact of my unique being and from the moral sense of the fact— “as if I did not exist.” And this concept of being is indifferent to the central fact—central for me—of my unique and actual communion with Being (I, too, exist) . . .; it cannot determine my life as an answerable performing of deeds, it cannot provide any criteria for the life of practice, the life of the deed, for it is not the Being in which I live, and, if it were the only Being, I would not exist.64

He exists when he is part of a world of accountability—of action, reaction, and interaction. Existence requires this experience, and if theory and structure compose the world, then the mind and body, the self, are unnecessary. Bakhtin consistently holds that people live and engage the world through dialogic connections and interactions. His “I,” different from Descartes or semiology, engages and builds from the internal and external world. Symbols are unique to everyone according to emotion, thought, and experiences, and identity then is more of a dialogism with society than an institutional creation. RESTORING HUMANITY Bakhtin’s rejection of structuralism and ideology theories brings this argument full circle back to embodied social connections through which he argued people find deeper and more complete essence of human identity and meaning. Ultimately, Descartes claimed “I think therefore I am,” but Bakhtin said, “I think, I observe, I connect with others, I feel, and others do the same with me, and therefore I am.” As people think, they also perceive, gather information, and use information to understand their identity and world. Bakhtin argued that “what the actual perception of a concrete whole presupposes is that the contemplator occupies a perfectly determinate place, and that he is unitary and embodied.”65 He exists and interacts with an objective world because of mind and body, and this deviates from the Kantian theory that discounts embodiment. Bakhtin’s philosophy of dialogism couples embodiment with connectedness in communication and, by extension, identity, which becomes a social connection among mind, body, and others. Subjects will develop a sense

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of self through a deep interplay of the inner and outer bodies: “the inner body represents the sum total of the inner organic sensations, needs, and desires that are unified around an inner center,” while the outer body “has been as it were sculpted for me by the manifoled acts of other people in relation to me, acts performed intermittently throughout my life: acts of concern for me, acts of love, acts that recognize my value. In fact, as soon as a human being begins to experience himself from within, he at once meets with acts of recognition and love that come to him from outside.”66 Identity is not Cartesian because internal experiences form among external influences, and vice versa; the sculpting process requires both, and they are inseparable. Modern philosopher Julian Baggini similarly argues that self is both personal/internal and social/ external: “I am my baggage. . . . We are precisely all the things we’ve accrued, the memories, the experience, the learning. If you strip away what you call the baggage you’re stripping away precisely the things that make us, that fill us out.”67 Identity is part of communication and influence as understanding draws on bodily representations and social interactions. Identity is social, personal, logical, and embodied because it fails without any one of those elements. Cartesian duality and dualistic theory do not resonate with the contextual essence of people and characters, and Bakhtin anticipates a modern empirical approach to mind and identity that undermines duality. Because cognition is embodied, people do not exist because they think. They exist because they think, feel, emote, touch, view, hear, and interact with others, their environment, and their surroundings. People do affect their surroundings as Kant suggests, but mind is not separate from the intricately and inseparably connected body. In fact, in order to have a functional, rational mind, the brain must have a functional and emotive body. Georg Northoff argues that modern researchers in cognitive psychology and neuroscience “reject the view that minds exist over and above brains, bodies and environments,”68 and further illustrates that modern tools and methods have revealed much more about the mind than ever before known.69 Julius Schönherr also discusses a variety cognitive tools that enable successful social interactions, all of which establish deep interpersonal connections on the embodied and mental level. People need social connections or they cannot survive. Baumeister and Leary explain that “unlike the Freudian view that regarded sexuality and aggression as the major driving psychological forces, and unlike the most ambitious behaviorist views that considered each newborn a tabula rasa, our view depicts the human being as naturally driven toward establishing and sustaining belongingness.”70 Bakhtin similarly argued that deep human connections develop identity: when people perform an act, they do not grasp form and concepts alone; he sees clearly these individual, unique persons whom he loves, this sky and this earth and these trees . . .; and what is also given to him simultaneously is

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the value, the actually and concretely affirmed value of these persons and these objects. He intuits their inner lives as well as desires; he understands both the actual and the ought-to-be sense of the interrelationship between himself and these persons and objects—the truth of the given state of affairs—and he understands the ought of his performed act, that is, not the abstract law of his act, but the actual, concrete ought conditioned by his unique place in the given context of the ongoing event.71

Bakhtin discusses the complete, profound understanding that comes from knowing a person through interactions and within context. Individuals know another by sharing the other’s life, and cognitive science has explained that this requires embodied, emotional connections. In addition to empathy, the cellular functions behind the mind and body illustrate that genetics affect how brains develop and form, which influences the formation of self. The brain functions as neurons send messages throughout the brain, and these synapses and workings with the brain form the self, or Descartes’ “I.” Sebastian Seung calls the aggregate of these connections and the resulting brain functions the connectome, and the connectome is the “I” that thinks. The synapses develop as experiences strengthen the link between certain synapses, which illustrates that both mind and body combine to create the brain and mind. Therefore, “both genes and experiences have shaped your connectome. We must consider both historical influences if we want to explain how your brain got to be the way it is.”72 Genetics, cognition, and body affect the formation of the connectome and identity, or this thinking “I” as it engages its environment. Bakhtin recognized this relationship between being and environment as a fundamental element in humanity: When I experience an object actually, I thereby carry out something in relation to it: the object enters into relation with that which is to-be-achieved, grows in it—within my relationship to that object. . . . Insofar as I am actually experiencing an object, even if I do so by thinking of it, it becomes a changing moment in the ongoing event of my experiencing (thinking) it, i.e., it assumes the character of something -yet-to-be-achieved.73

He perceived experience as an ongoing relationship through interactions with an object, and because people are embodied beings, these interactions require mind and body. This reflects what Seung claims form identity: experience and genetics. Bakhtin intuited that humanness requires deep interpersonal and contextual connections, which allows his legacy to continue as further research corroborates his philosophies. Bakhtin’s legacy builds on restoring the human essence that traditional theory neglects. His theories also unite with modern research and restore the integrated identity that traditional theories stripped from humanity. When

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theories build on a Cartesian foundation of dualism, they give primacy to mind, yet Bakhtin saw that this premise was inaccurate. Indeed, as Frans de Waal argues, dualism misses the mark of the essence of humanity: “Isn’t this the problem with modern philosophy? Obsessed by what we consider new and important about ourselves—abstract thought, conscience, morality—we overlook the fundamentals.”74 While Descartes’s philosophy revolutionized theory, his dualism did not recognize that humans are essentially embodied, social beings. Modern science has illustrated dualism’s deficiencies and has explored more accurate explanations for humanity’s unique cognitive and social abilities. Bakhtin saw what science now understands; he argued that meaning emerges from human connections that are essential to personal identity. While society influences people, they do not only take but also give back and influence others in a social, embodied dialogue. The result is a legacy in which Bakhtin lifts humanity out of dualism and onto a common ground where philosophy and science together study identity. NOTES 1. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (University of Texas Press), 411. 2. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 411. 3. Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Harvard University Press, 1991), 382. 4. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (Harcourt Brace, 1999), 11, and Marco Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2014), 4. 5. Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative, 4. 6. Holquist explains this interpretation of dialogism in Dialogic Imagination, 426–427. 7. Piff et al. claim that “social relationships are central to social life and vital to human survival” (Piff et al., 884). For example, Baumeister and Leary declare that “people who lack belongingness suffer higher levels of mental and physical illness and are relatively highly prone to a broad range of behavioral problems, ranging from traffic accidents to criminality to suicide” (511). 8. E. Higgins, “Self-Discrepency: A Theory Relating Self and Affect,” The Self in Social Psychology (1999). 9. Michael L. Anderson, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” Artificial Intelligence 149, 2003, 112–113. 10. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson, (University of Minneapolis Press, 1984), 32. In addition, Bakhtin considered characters as real people who demonstrate as much complexity and embodiment as

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real people. He often turned to literature and character consciousness as an illustration and discussion of real human beings, and he gave them the same anti-Cartesian embodied and contextual complexities as the reader. He claimed that authors and readers respond to a literary hero as an independent and real person, “just as in life, too, we react valuationally to every self-manifestation on the part of those around us” (Art 4). Therefore, real people engage and react to “the whole of the hero as a human being, a reaction that assembles all of the cognitive-ethical determinations and valuations of the hero and consummates them in the form a unitary and unique whole that is a concrete, intuitable whole” (5). Bakhtin discussed heroes and characters to explore real human identity because for him we are philosophically one in the same: “heroes are no longer diminished to the dominating consciousness of the author . . . . Characters are, in short, respected as full subjects” (Booth xxiii). In Bakhtin’s words, a character is “a fully valid, autonomous carrier of his own individual word;” characters are “free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him” (Problems 5–6). 11. Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation” (American Psychological Association, 1995), 505. 12. Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society, (Harmony, 2009), 12. 13. de Waal, Age of Empathy, 12–13. 14. Dan Zahavi, “Self and Other: The Limits of Narrative Understanding,” Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel D. Hutto, (Cambridge University, 2007), 194. 15. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, (University of Texas Press, 1990), 24. 16. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 25. 17. Ibid., 25. 18. See, for example, Giovanna Colombetti, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind, (MIT Press, 2014), 187. 19. Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds, (Board of Regents of University of Nebraska, 2004), 143. 20. de Waal, Age of Empathy, 79. 21. Ibid., 79. 22. Mariëlle Stol and Roos Vonk, “Empathizing via Mimicry Depends on Whether Emotional Expressions Are Seen as Real,” European Psychologist 4, 2009, 342. 23. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 37–40. 24. Ibid., 25. 25. Ibid., 26. 26. Chui-D. Chiu and Yei-Y Yeh, “In Your Shoes or Mine? Shifting from Other to Self Perspective Is Vital for Emotional Empathy,” Emotion, (2017): 5. 27. Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative, 138. 28. Mark Johnson, Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understandings, (University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1.

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29. Johnson, Meaning of the Body, 1. 30. Ibid., 14. 31. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, (Hackett, 1998), 18. 32. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress, (Hackett, 1993), 19. 33. Descartes, Meditations, 23. 34. Julian Baggini, The Ego Trick, (Granta, 2011), 29. 35. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject, (Stanford University Press, 2013), 9. 36. Anderson, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” 93. 37. Erdinast-Vulcan, Between Philosophy, 15. 38. Anderson, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” 104–105. 39. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer, (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128. 40. Kant, Critique, 132. 41. Günter Zöller, “Critique: Knowledge, Metaphysics,” Emmanuel Kant: Key Concepts, eds. Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard, (Routledge, 2014), 23. 42. Zöller, “Knowledge, Metaphysics,” 23. 43. Rachel Pollard, Dialogue and Desire: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Linguistic Turn in Psychotherapy, (Kamac Books, 2008), 22. 44. Michael Holquist, Foreword of Toward a Philosophy of the Act, by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1993), ix. 45. M. M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1993), 12–13. 46. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 18. 47. Holquist, foreword, x. 48. Yuri Lotman, Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, trans. Ann Shukman, (I.B. Tauris, 2001), 12. 49. Erdinast-Vulcan, Between Philosophy, 12. 50. Indeed, structuralism avoids conceiving of characters as people because a character’s individual and independent thoughts and drives resist the deterministic meaning of codes and would complicate formulaic approaches to literature: “the general ethos of structuralism runs counter to the notions of individuality and rich psychological coherence which are often applied to the novel” (Culler 269). Culler’s claim suggests an attempt to avoid discussing personal complexities and embodied contexts because they do not fit with structuralism. 51. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, (University of Texas Press, 1986), 67, emphasis original. 52. Bakhtin, Speech, 68, emphasis original. In spite of such declarations, historically structuralists have argued that Bakhtin is also structuralist in nature. For example, Krystyna Pomorska has argued that “the method which Bakhtin introduces for an analysis of literary phenomena is largely based on the structure of the dialogue and

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the function of a word in a discourse. He applied the methodology elaborated by the influential linguistic trend that appeared in Western Europe and in Russia at the turn of the century, represented by such scholars as the Swiss F. de Saussure” (vi). This illustrates Erdinast-Vulcan’s and Lundquist’s point that Bakhtin’s work, “read out of context . . . appear to anticipate some of the philosophical parameters of the postmodernist pantheon to which they admitted Bakhtin, with its focus on discursivity, militant de-authoring of meaning, and debunking of master narratives” and such philosophical schools have endorsed “his work in the name of postmodernist, humanist-liberal, neoMarxist, and Orthodox Christian” (4–5). Many claim him, though I show that Bakhtin breaks with much of traditional structuralist or dualistic theory. 53. Caracciolo, The Experientiality of Narrative, 157. 54. Bakhtin, Speech, 68–69. 55. Barbara Johnson, “Writing,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd edition, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 41. 56. Pollard, Dialogue and Desire, 27. 57. Umberto Ecco, Introduction of Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, by Yuri Lotman, trans. Ann Shukman (I.B. Tauris, 2001), x. 58. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistic and the Study of Literature (Routedge, 2002), 5. 59. Anderson, “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide,” 112–113. 60. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Anchor Books, 1967). 61. Michael Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (Routledge, 1992), 144. 62. Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 221. 63. Gardiner, Dialogics of Critique, 145. 64. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 9. 65. Ibid., 24. 66. Ibid., 47–49. 67. Baggini, Ego Trick, 55. 68. Georg Northoff, Minding the Brain: A Guide to Philosophy and Neuroscience (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 2. 69. Northoff, Minding the Brain, 4. 70. Baumeister and Leary, Need to Belong, 499. 71. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 30. 72. Sebastian Seung, Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), xv. 73. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 32. 74. de Waal, Age of Empathy, 15.

WORKS CITED Anderson, Michael L. “Embodied Cognition: A Field Guide.” Vol. 149 of Artificial Intelligence, 2003, 91–130.

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Baggini, Julian. The Ego Trick. Granta, 2011. Bakhtin, M. M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. and Ed. Caryl Emerson, Vol. 8 of Theory and History of Literature. University of Minneapolis Press, 1984. ———. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. ———. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Baumeister, Roy F., and Mark R. Leary. “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Vol. 117 of Psychological Bulletin, 487–529. American Psychological Association, no. 3, 1995. Booth, Wayne C. Introduction to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. and Trans. Caryl Emerson, xiii–xxvii. Volume 8 of Theory and History of Literature, University of Minneapolis Press, 1984. Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2014. Chiu, Chui-D., & Yeh, Yei-Y. “In Your Shoes or Mine? Shifting from Other to Self Perspective Is Vital for Emotional Empathy.” Emotion, 1–7. American Psychological Association, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000346. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistic and the Study of Literature. Routedge, 2002. Damasio, Antonio. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt Brace, 1999. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Hackett, 1998. ———. Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Hackett, 1993. Donald, Merlin. Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press, 1991. Ecco, Umberto. Introduction of Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture by Yuri Lotman. Trans. Ann Shukman, vii–xiii. I.B. Tauris, 2001. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject. Stanford University Press, 2013. Gardiner, Michael. The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology. Routledge, 1992. Higgins, E. Tory. “Self-discrepency: A Theory Relating Self and Affect.” In The Self in Social Psychology, 150–175, Philadelphia, 1999. Holquist, Michael. Foreword of Toward a Philosophy of the Act by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Eds. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, vii–xv. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Johnson, Barbara. “Writing.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. 2nd edition. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 39–49. University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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Johnson, Mark. Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understandings. University of Chicago Press, 2007. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and Ed. Paul Guyer. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology. Trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. Anchor Books, 1967. Lotman, Yuri. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Trans. Ann Shukman. I.B. Tauris, 2001. Northoff, Georg. Minding the Brain: A Guide to Philosophy and Neuroscience. Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Palmer, Alan. Fictional Minds. Board of Regents of University of Nebraska, 2004. Piff, Paul K., Pia Dietze, Matthew Feinberg, Daniel M. Stancato and Dacher Keltner. “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association, Vol. 108, no. 6, 2015, 883–899. Pollard, Rachel. Dialogue and Desire: Mikhail Bakhtin and the Linguistic Turn in psychotherapy. Kamac Books, 2008. Pomorska, Krystyna. Foreword of Rabelais and His World by M. M. Bakhtin. Trans. Helene Iswolsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968. Schönherr, Julius. “What’s so Special About Interaction in Social Cognition?” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Vol. 8, no. 2, 2017, 181–198. Seung, Sebastian. Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Stel, Mariëlle and Roos Vonk. “Empathizing via Mimicry Depends on Whether Emotional Expressions Are Seen as Real.” European Psychologist. Hogrefe Publishing, Vol. 14, no. 4, 2009, 342–350. de Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Harmony, 2009. Zahavi, Dan. “Self and Other: The Limits of Narrative Understanding,” Narrative and Understanding Persons. Ed. Daniel D. Hutto. Cambridge U, 2007. Zöller, Günter. “Critique: Knowledge, Metaphysics.” Emmanuel Kant: Key Concepts. Eds. Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard. Routledge, 2014.

Part III

BAKHTIN’S HERITAGE IN PSYCHOLOGY

Chapter 14

“Live Entering” into the Act Bakhtin, Kierkegaard, and Simmel on Becoming Intersubjective Greg M. Nielsen

In both Toward a Philosophy of the Act and in his book-length essay “The Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” the young Bakhtin writes extensively on the norms of answerability—the idea that ethical actions should be both individuated, or singular, aesthetic events and universal, or general, moral responses. The body of work he built following this period continues to focus on the anticipation of rejoinder in the event as key to understanding what he and his colleagues came to call the dialogical quality in the ability to answer a given utterance. “Live-entering” or living into the sociality of the event/utterance is not simply an ethnographic act of empathy toward the other. In live-entering, one becomes intersubjective, one enters another’s place while still maintaining one’s own place, one’s  outsidedness with respect to the other. He puts it this way: “After looking at ourselves through the eyes of another, we always return-in life- into ourselves again, and the final, or, as it were, recapitulative event takes place within ourselves in the categories of our own life.”1 Bakhtin crafts a variety of innovative concepts that establish his phenomenology of intersubjectivity here. Early in the author-hero essay, he ponders the example of the case in which I encounter a friend who is suffering. First I undertake the ethical action to console. I can project myself into the other’s suffering via the mediation of outward appearance (by perceiving a sadness in the other’s face, a look around the eyes, a feel for that particular disposition) and provide a “sympathetic co-experience” by suffering from within.2 But my projection must be followed by a return to myself and only then can the information I have be made meaningful. If this didn’t happen, I would simply have a painful experience with the other, and nothing more.3 Across 281

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the essay, he focuses on the transgredience from the inner to the outer subject/ body and back and describes the principles of ordering, organizing, and forming the subiectum and the principles of rendering it whole in an active artistic vision including critiques of the moral, psychological, and epistemological points of view, and of what rhythm is in my time and the others’ time, of the unity of the intersubjective consummated act and the surrounding objective world that contains its own agency.  I propose an immanent reading and elaboration of this selection of concepts that can be illuminated when read alongside Soren Kierkegaard’s opening recountings of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling in contrast with the story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia and from his discussion of becoming subjective in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. I also propose a parallel reading of Bakhtin’s concepts alongside essays in Georg Simmel’s collection in The View of Life and other works. I am not seeking to establish philological proof of the influence of this current of thought on Bakhtin’s own writing. While there is still much work to be done in this area, others have already established this affinity. I am more interested in reading Bakhtin with and against these slightly different and very similar philosophies. FATHER AND CHILD Kierkegaard begins Fear and Trembling with versions of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac which immediately demonstrates his unique contrast between the Cartesian subject–object binary and the new anti (Hegelian)-system approach he takes to subjectivity and deep inwardness. The vexing question: Was Abraham about to commit a capital crime when he took Isaac up on the mountain because he heard the voice of an unseen supreme subject ask for his sacrifice; or was he setting aside his role and his duty as father in last instance so he could “become subjective” in the deepest sense of the moment through the profound despair over the command and a leap of faith that took him beyond all objectivity? Recall that Isaac was a precious miracle child born to Sarah already eighty years old and when Abraham himself turned ninety-nine. For Kierkegaard, we get to know ourselves only in despair and fear that has versions in both the ethical/moral and the aesthetic/poetic genres but the deepest well is in in the religious leap of faith. An opposite case to Abraham’s “teleological suspension of the ethical” would be the story of Agamemnon who gave in to political pressure from his Greek generals. In Euripides’s version of the story, he sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia as a penalty because he had offended the animal goddess Artemis by killing a deer in her forest.4 She calmed the Mediterranean winds so the

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entire Greek army could not leave the island of Aulis for Troy until he made the sacrifice. We cannot know if his decision is made for the greater good of his office or the worst kind of personal desire for power? In contrast, Kierkegaard’s first version of the story has Abraham pretend a ferocious anger toward Isaac so as to lead him into thinking he is acting out of his own desire. He feels this act will save Isaac from losing faith in the supreme good. Each actor confronts a live entering into an intersubjectivity. Each has a unique response as only he can but also a moral decision toward a generalized other with unintended externalities. Abraham becomes the patriarch of three world religions while Agamemnon is eventually murdered by his wife and her secret lover on his return after the long siege at Troy. For Bakhtin, any act or event can have a two-sided ability to be answered. “An act of our activity . . . looks in two opposite directions: it looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture and at the never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experienced life.”5 The issue is the decision, as Kierkegaard argues, “all decision is rooted in subjectivity, it is important that objectively there be no trace whatever of any case in point, because the subjective individual wants to evade some of the pain and crisis of decision, that is, wants to make the issue somewhat objective.”6 Two-sided answerability unites nonjoined objective culture and life. Live entering an act encompasses an answerable relation with  another. Bakhtin is very close to Kierkegaard on this: “The answerably performed act is a decision, a final summation that resolves within a final context. . . . The performed act constitutes a going out once and for all from within possibility as such into what is once occurrent.”7 OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE CULTURES Simmel’s definition of objective and subjective culture helps differentiate between the emotional and volitional orientation toward a representation that interests Bakhtin, on the one hand, and the representation as a rhythmic or ordering “thing” on the other. “All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality,” Simmel argues, “whereas intellectual relationships deal with persons (in time) as with numbers, as with elements which in themselves are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceptible.”8 The intellectual turn away from emotion and volition is synonymous with the shift from the subjective to objective culture that results in the emergence of modern individualism. This is why he also argues that the terms, individualism and subjectivity, need to be separated because (like Kierkegaard) as an ethical ought the individual is also objective—if each act performed by an individual is to be considered part of an entire life history.9 In contrast with subjective cultures of feeling and

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care—the lived processes of assemblage and of creativity—objective culture is made up of the already-done—all the cultural products, assembled groups, languages, signs, images, constitutions, religious doctrines, literatures, and technologies produced by generations over time. Objective culture is public in the sense that it is there for anyone to use as much as they like or are able to. Although for Simmel, the “tragedy of modern culture” is about the loss of subjective culture to the objective culture of all kinds of industry, the paradox is that one cannot completely exhaust the other. For Bakhtin, the outsidedness of the author in verbal art from his/her hero/ subject in time, space, value, and meaning allows three productive modes that shift back and forth between subjective and objective referents: (1) where the author centers a hero who is spread across a chaos of thought and action (Abraham versus his objective community values); but with a subjective energy that collects the image of himself (leaves ethics and leaps into faith) and his relation to his son (as dread and fear of the sacrifice) that spills into the dilemma of what to decide (he does raise his hand to do the deed); (2) the leap of faith is achieved by transgressing the boundary of the objective external whole; the taken-for granted background, the behind, beside, in front; the before, the never expected yet-to-come; (3) which gives the whole that contains as yet unknown loopholes (the reward is in the form of the sacrifice of the ram that miraculously appears in the bush just beside them as a way out—so ultimately, the supreme good triumphs); so that the author consummates the hero’s relation to the whole (independent of subjective meaning of the hero’s own life—or of Isaac’s subjectivity).10 Here the other (Abraham’s Isaac) is connatural with the world but his I-for-the-self is not. There is always his subjectivity which cannot be seen by him (only in a glimpse from the other’s gaze [e.g., from the intensity on Abraham’s face as he raises the knife?]) as part of the outside world. He has a loophole to save himself from being a natural given but not from the sacrifice. Kierkegaard begins his innovative contribution to the history of philosophy with the contradictory relation of subjectivity to objective systems. As he puts it: “objectively, one continually speaks only about the case in point; subjectively, one speaks about the subject and subjectivity—and see, the subjectivity itself is the case in point.”11 To put it in parlance of positive science, subjectivity is an independent variable with its own power and autonomy. While Simmel has the more secular version of the early-twentieth-century philosophy of life movement, many see Kierkegaard as its earliest precursor. We can see their voluntarist kinship in the way Simmel’s relativism innovates on the themes of objective and subjective forms of culture: “In a relativistic process, there arises an objective character and truth, norm, and absolute over the subjective psychological event, and independent of it—until even this is again as subjective because a higher objectivity is developed, and so on into the boundlessness of the cultural process.”12

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SIMMEL: A SOCIOLOGY FOR PHILOSOPHY Simmel saw his own discipline as philosophy while he also established cultural sociology as a secondary subfield and emerging discipline.13 Part of his work is an original attempt to provide an ethics for modern individualism that accompanies the sociological analysis of the metropolitan personality type. He published his classic essay “Metropolis and Mental Life” in 1903 when he was forty-four; a year later he republished sixteen lectures on Kant he had given previously to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the philosopher’s death,14 and only a few years later, in 1913, his most definitive critique of Kant’s moral philosophy “The Law of the Individual.” He rushed to publication a revision of the 1913 essay with help from his wife in his final days before his death in 1918.15 It is important that his sociological essay on the city and especially on the metropolitan mentality be interpreted through his work in philosophy— something English language sociologists have seriously neglected.16 Simmel develops the fuller philosophical ideas behind his Metropolis essay in his most famous work The Philosophy of Money. He argues money is actually about getting rid of the old symbolic order in order to allow greater differentiation and more intense intersubjectivity. While it is money that makes the city the driving force of the division of labor through its driving logic of equivalence that flattens bodily stimulation and emotional- volitional tones, it also creates a new kind of subject who cannot exist outside of a new reciprocal subjectivity. “The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture lies at the root of the bitter hatred which the preachers of the most extreme individualism, in the footsteps of Nietzsche, directed against the metropolis. . . . But this is also why the metropolis loves these preachers as saviors of unsatisfied yearnings.”17 Simmel’s text on the metropolis problematizes the tension between subjective individuation and the uniqueness of an act, on the one hand, and the demands of objective culture and the structuration power of societal organization, on the other. “The deepest problem of modern life, he argues, flows from the attempt of the individual to maintain the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society, against the weight of historical heritage and the external culture and technique of life.”18 On the one hand, Simmel notes that economic and political achievements of the modern metropolis make so many things easier and accessible for individuals, while on the other, they also make the individual almost completely insignificant. “In order this most personal element be saved, extremities and peculiarities and individualizations must be produced and . . . over-exaggerated merely to be brought into the awareness even of the individual himself.”19

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BAKHTIN: AESTHETIC ACTIVITY Bakhtin’s ideas on aesthetic shaping and two-sided answerability can be seen to parallel Simmel’s tragic sense of culture in his idea that if the bad author/ father takes possession of the other/hero/son, the “author’s relationship to the hero becomes the hero’s own relationship to himself.”20 For Bakhtin, the good hero avoids this reification because he or she also has a unique voice. When the bad author comes to possess the hero from the outside, then the hero loses ethical subjectivity and so the sense of possibility is owned by the author. This takes either of two forms: (1) “the hero is not autobiographical” and the author injects his consciousness into the consummated whole of the hero or (2) the hero is the biography of the author and cannot be consummated or be whole for itself because the author leaves a loophole for the hero such that he needs to be constantly remade.21 Was Abraham a bad father/author from Isaac’s perspective? Or was it _od the bad father? Leonard Cohen (channeling Kierkegaard?) thought so in his 1974 song “Lover, Lover, Lover” when he wrote: “I asked my father, I said, “Father change my name, The one I’m using now it’s covered up, With fear and filth and cowardice and shame.”22 If Cohen gives Isaac his own voice by removing himself from his subjectivity, then we can say that the “fear and filth and cowardice and shame” are beyond the author’s own projection and so is nonreified. The hero’s exterior is a gift from the author while his temporal ordering provides for the inner body sensation. In the contrary example of the Agamemnon dilemma, one wonders if the story were about Donald Trump, would the author order a subiectum that would seek redemption at all? If the outer man is transgredient with the human being’s potential and actual self-consciousness, would such an anti-hero be willing to go to any length, “to any means necessary” to achieve rather than suspend the worst kind of end (would he too sacrifice his children for personal gain?)? Would these children then also ask the Father to please change our names as they are covered with “fear and filth and cowardice and shame”? The key point from the Law of the Individual Simmel develops very early on is that Kant develops a brilliant but analytically flawed notion of the subject based on objective knowledge. He starts his analysis of the conception of the moral ought with a critique of the classical ideal that a law must be universal for it to be valid. As I pointed out elsewhere: “Simmel reverses the position by arguing that if the general law means the agent can give a universal value to action, and yet, the action can only be carried out by the agent’s own definition, then, law is no longer general but only particular to that agent’s case.”23 Thus each specific case has to include the formulation of a new universal law.24 The objectivity of the individual is possible, because Simmel breaks off the connection between the subjective and the individual by using the same argument he used to point out a false implication that law

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is a general law: “The decisive element, however, is that individual life is not anything subjective but . . . is thoroughly objective as an ethical ought. The false fusion between individuality and subjectivity must be dissolved, just like the one between universality and lawfulness.”25 For Simmel, there can be no ethical, aesthetic, or religious universal law but only an individual law. He challenges two different ethical strategies with the individual law: (1) ask yourself—if I do this, can I say everyone should? (Kant); and 2) ask yourself—if I do this, will I do this infinitely often? (Nietzsche). Instead the individual law asks: if I do this, does it define the rest of my life? 26 While the first question suggests a transcendent solution, the second proposes an entirely immanent one. Simmel’s immanent transcendence touches on both responsibility and dread. He argues the opposite of both duty or deontological ethics and the infinite return for an ethics of individual law that would itself be immanently emotional and transcendentally objective. Continuing with this translation into a Kierkegaardan language of becoming subjective , and Simmel’s individual law as forming the acting subject into a live event or deed, we come to see that the actor is not so much performing a drama as deciding about a “once occurrent” and universal moral decision in an active transgredience to and from another. The corporal outsidedness and excess of seeing we have with the other in space, time, value, and meaning requires we suspend the fusion between us so that the other is allowed subjectivity—ethical, moral, aesthetic, religious. Faith in the inner subjectivity of the other is not lost on Bakhtin. While a faith in Abraham’s subjectivity provides a (fatherly) center to Isaac, it is different for Iphigenia and her father (as we will see); and in turn, each of the children respectively help focus Abraham’s and Agamemnon’s despair over their decision. The two poles are largely unknowable to each other and yet formed against the backgrounds they provide each other as if they know as a faith in the animated existence of the other. RHYTHM Here is the jest of Bakhtin’s point on aesthetic shaping and rhythm that can be read as a complement to both Kierkegaard’s and Simmel’s subjective turn: “The soul is spirit the way it looks from outside, in the other.”27 For Bakhtin, the soul is not a problem in psychology because it is not causal and evaluative. For Simmel, no event occurs without a series of reciprocal relations. According to Donald Levine, for Simmel, “the place where all societal events occur is within the minds of individuals. On the other hand, there is a way of looking at those psychic events that is not psychological, but that is able to perceive the synthetic realities which individuals act upon and with one another.”28 The purpose of psychology is to look for how to get

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the inner experience to another state of yet-to-be health. For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic subject is a phase that seeks only to satisfy desire while the ethical subject gives up the individual impulse and “cancels the relation between the accidental and the essential and takes responsibility of all of himself.”29 For Bakhtin, the moral point of view is not necessarily outside lived life but it is over and above in the sense that it is purely normative; it is what you should be, not what you are.30 Epistemology is not about the individual experience but about the transcendental form of the object. As I-for–myself, the soul/subject is present to itself as a task (not as norm). It is not guided by an ultimate origin or by the original Creator either—“metaphysics can only be religious.”31 The author forms an inner life by creating rhythm, or “temporal ordering.” “Rhythm” situates the I-for-myself in an axiological context. It cannot determine the ought to be or the is; “what-is and what-ought-to-be, what-is-given and what-is imposed-as-a-task are incapable of being rhythmically bound within me myself from within myself.”32 For example, whenever I travel or leave an unfamiliar place, there is a play between the sense of nervousness and enchantment, on the one hand, and an emotional numbness on the other. I might be nervous because I do not know the route that well. I might be enchanted because I enjoy the changing landscape, or because of some spectacle I witness on the road. In this temporal order, I have to see my selfexperience from outside it, find a point of support outside it. “To be able to experience my own acts of experiencing as something determinate and present-on-hand, I have to make them a special object of my own self-activity.”33 Isaac travels for three days with his father and slave to the site of the sacrifice, assuming a normal rhythm. Emotional numbness is about banality. After three days from their home, he would have become aware that Abraham did not bring an animal to be sacrificed. There are no lambs living in the desert. Would Isaac not wonder how the sacrifice would take place? At some point, the servant has been dismissed and so wouldn’t Isaac realize something amiss? There is no recorded story update of his rejoinder either before or after the Angel comes to provide the loophole, allowing Abraham to withdraw his hand and by providing the ram for the sacrifice. The Angel actually calls twice, the second time in anger, finally getting Abraham’s attention as he is intensely lost in the unifying energy of the task.34 These temporal and spatial orderings are somehow countered with a dulling effect through a series of treatments and filters that greet the entrances and exits not only into and out of the event but also on the way to and from its landscape. It is understandable to be nervous about not knowing about the animal or the dismissal of the servants. But once the site is reached, something else must have disenchanted Isaac as spaces are traversed at rhythms

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that mark the difference between normal time and the other’s time, between what the other will do and the faith in his father’s animated existence. THE SENSE OF THE POSSIBLE The immanence of transcendence means that the possibility of going beyond what is already there, that the sense of the possible (in life) is already in the real (life), that the future is already in the present and the past, and that a faith in the animated existence of another is already in one’s own subjectivity.35 Simmel distinguishes between “moral  subjectivism” and “individual law.” Think of the former as a collective emotion that defines the consummation of an intersubjective event while the individual law is the unique expression of the person who acts out of a life history. The ought question becomes simultaneously individual and objective, as he puts it “the individual does not have to be subjective, nor objectivity transindividual.”36 The individual law is among the most demanding and even impossible forms of ethical imperatives because the real question that each action poses is, can you decide that this act comes from the “ought” in the variance of your entire life history? The decisions Abraham and Agamemnon made on a given day may not be the decision each might make at another point in their lives.  The event of the sacrifice also involves Kierkegaard’s either/or question. Do I do this deed or do I not? If I do this, am I deciding to leave my community and be absolutely unique? Or do I do good and walk away from my calling to add to my community? If my life decision involves the decision to live under the calling, will I someday betray those close to me (my son)? If I decide to act in “the good,” will I have to betray my cause/office somewhere down the road? It seems to make sense, or at least I would like to think, that most often we decide to act from the good first and second to be faithful to a cause, a job, or a calling.37 The relation between the individual and the community is also something that rhythm orders for Bakhtin. Rhythm does not make a decision. Only the subjective inner self makes the decision. “Rhythm is an embrace and a kiss bestowed upon the axiologically consolidated or bodied time of another’s mortal life.” It does not have a relationship to myself; I am only passive in rhythm. It is the secondary decision to listen to my calling that would activate a response to myself. In contrast, “in my lived life, I participate in a communal mode of existence, in an established social order, in a nation, in a state, in mankind, in God’s world.”38 This is the already determined plot of my life history, not the one I decide on. Iphigenia, for example, does not know that Agamemnon lied about Achilles’s supposed marriage interest in her person in order to peak her interest in coming to the island. She passively followed her father’s request, not her own

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calling. Why would the father make up a lie? Her incentive to go is taken under the understanding that the most brilliant and desirable warrior bachelor of her time would be waiting for her while all the while not knowing that she would be killed. But Agamemnon could not know either that his wife would plot to murder him later after the long siege at Troy with her secret lover on his return home in revenge for his treachery. He too took the community value of fidelity as a given. Events of the undetermined life and the determined one have to be instantaneously seen in the whole. The travel from one place to another and from one time to another needs to be seen “in its entirety from beginning to end.”39 This is the limit of how the ordering of time can be experienced by the subject. CONCLUSION: BODY AND SOUL Reading Bakhtin’s concepts through these admittedly simplified and yet for so many what have been sacred archaic stories and through Kierkegaard’s and Simmel’s philosophies opens a series of intersubjective levels for theorizing live entering into the act that moves beyond these figures while relying on the scaffolding their philosophies provide. The introduction of exotopy as a key aesthetic category quickly leads into a counterintuitive inward trajectory similar to what Kierkegaard sought to explore and the once-occurrent act Simmel puzzled so much over for so long. But Bakhtin adds an original point that the outside is not possible without a transgredient relation and especially that the relation between the body and the self is not possible without the consummation between the self and the other. “My own body is, at its very foundation an inner body, while the other’s body is, at its very foundation, an outward body. The inner body—my body in a moment of self-consciousness—represents the sum total of inner organic sensations, needs and desires that are unified around an inner center.”40 In the recapitulative summing up of the object’s mediator effect on the subiectum, Bakhtin concludes that the temporal and spatial rhythm does not include self-reflection. “The soul, (like the inner body) is the self-coincident, self-equivalent, and self-contained whole of inner life that postulates another’s living activity from outside its own bounds” (P. 132). The decision in the live entering of acts is a two-sided answerability between the sign of the universal and that of difference, between acting under the signs of good/responsibility and/or the calling/conviction. The subject is intersubjective when live entering into an act of decision and not when being passive in rhythm.

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NOTES 1. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 17. 2. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 26. 3. Ibid., 27. 4. See also Paul, Woodruff, The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 5. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 2. 6. Kierkegaard, Soren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: Volume I. Edited and Translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 129. 7. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translated and notes by Vadim Liapunov. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 28. 8. Simmel, Georg, The Metropolis and Mental Life. Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald Levine (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), 326. 9. Nielsen, Greg M., The Norms of Answerability: Social Theory between Bakhtin and Habermas. Preface by Caryl Emerson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 10. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 14. 11. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 129. 12. Simmel, Georg, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Translated by John A. Y. Andrews and Donald Levine. Introduction by Donald Levine and Daniel Silver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 61. 13. Goodstein, Elizabeth. Georg Simmel. And the Disciplinary Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). 14. Leger, François. La pensée de Georg Simmel: Contribution à l’histoire des idées au début du XXe siècle. Préface de Julien Freund (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1989). 15. Levine, Donald and Silver, Daniel, Introduction. Simmel, Georg, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Translated by John A. Y. Andrews and Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 16. Goodstein, Georg Simmel. 17. Simmel, Metropolis, 338. 18. Ibid., 324. 19. Ibid., 338. 20. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 20. 21. Ibid., 18. 22. Leonard Cohen, Lover, Lover, Lover. Produced by John Lissauer & Leonard Cohen from the Album New Skin For The Old Ceremony. 1974. Drawn on 19-022018. https://genius.com/Leonard-cohen-lover-lover-lover-lyrics. 23. Nielsen, Norms, 89. 24. See also Leger, La pensée de Georg Simmel.

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25. Simmel, Georg. The View of Life, 143–144. 26. Ibid., 151. 27. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 100. 28. Levine, Donald. Introduction. Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald Levine (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), X. 29. Kierkegaard, Either/or, 1972, 250. 30. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 114. 31. Ibid., 100. 32. Ibid., 118. 33. Ibid., 113. 34. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Andidjar (London: Routledge, 2002). 35. Simmel, Georg. The View of Life, 9. 36. Ibid., 140. 37. See the distinction between the choice between universal and difference in Agnes Heller. The Contingent Person and Existential Choice. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Edited by M. Kelly (Boston: MIT Press, 1991), 53–69. 38. Bakhtin, 1990; p.? 39. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 118. 40. Ibid., 47.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Art and Answerability : Early Philosophical Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Translated and notes by Vadim Liapunov. Edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Religion. Edited by Gil Andidjar. London: Routledge, 2002. Euripides. Iphigenia in Aulis. Translated by George Theodoridis. 2002. http://www. poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Iphigeneia.php. Drawn on December 2, 2018. Goodstein, Elizabeth. Georg Simmel. And the Disciplinary Imaginary. Stanford: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Heller, Agnes. The Contingent Person and Existential Choice. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Edited by M. Kelly. Boston: MIT Press, 1991, pp. 53–69. Kierkegaard, Soren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments: Volume I. Edited and Translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. Fear and Trembling and the Sickness unto Death. Gordon Marino, Introduction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. ———. Either/Or Volume 2, Edited by Victor Eremita, Transl. Howard Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

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Leger, François. La pensée de Georg Simmel: Contribution à l’histoire des idées au début du XXe siècle. Préface de Julien Freund. Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1989. Levine, Donald. Introduction. Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms, Edited by Donald Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1971.  Nielsen, Greg M. The Norms of Answerability: Social Theory between Bakhtin and Habermas. Preface by Caryl Emerson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Simmel; Georg. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms. Trans by John A. Y. Andrews and Donald Levine. Introduction by Donald Levine and Daniel Silver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ———. The Philosophy of Money. Edited by David Frisby. Translated by Thom Bottomore and David Frisby. London: Routledge, 1990. ———. The Metropolis and Mental Life. Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald Levine. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971, 324–339. Woodruff, Paul. The Ajax Dilemma: Justice, Fairness and Rewards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Chapter 15

“In Search of Lost Cheekiness” Bakhtin and Foucault as Neo-Cynics Michael E. Gardiner

The extant literature bringing Russian cultural theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin and French philosopher Michel Foucault into dialogue, mostly published during the “Bakhtin boom” of the late 1980s to the early 2000s, is modest in both scope and size. One of the reasons for this is because the moderately small corpus of Bakhtin’s writings available in translation has remained static since the early 1990s. Due to a veritable flood of new posthumous publications in English, by contrast, our understanding of Foucault has been transformed dramatically in the last fifteen years or so. These concern particularly his thirteen Collège de France lectures, delivered originally between 1971 and 1984, but also a host of other sources.1 Given the recent availability of this material, combined with the paucity of sustained discussion in the last couple of decades as to the intellectual nexus conjoining Bakhtin and Foucault, perhaps the time is ripe for reassessment. While there are many possible avenues for investigation here, this chapter proposes to bring these two figures into closer theoretical alignment by concentrating on Foucault’s treatment of the ancient Greek notion of parrhēsia—usually rendered as “truth-telling” or “fearless speech”—as it bears on Bakhtin’s complementary notion of “frank and familiar” carnival speech.2 The main contention here is that their respective usage of fearless speech stems largely from shared interest in the Cynic tradition of Greek philosophy. Initiated by Diogenes of Sinope in fourth-century BCE Athens, a figure described by Plato as a “Socrates gone mad,” Cynicism’s deep roots in plebeian street and carnival culture was manifested in its infamous predilection for, among other things, rancorous provocation and scandal-mongering; recourse to mocking laughter and satirical insolence, wielded as a prophylactic against social conformity and elites’ arbitrary exercise of power; and a dedication to the rigours of critical reflexivity and ascetic self-mastery. 295

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Cynics adhered to highly unconventional standards of dress, mannerism, and speech that reflected their indifference toward the usual pieties and comforts of mainstream society, resulting in an “animalistic” naturalism of extreme unaffectedness that seemed to most contemporaries as the very antithesis of Greek ideals. Such noteworthy features can be traced throughout the remainder of antiquity, even inspiring something of a mass oppositional movement in late Roman times. But, the Cynic impulse also transcends its ancient origins, cropping up in such unexpected times and places as the early Christian monastic tradition, Medieval antinominalism, the world of Renaissance letters, and, if Foucault is to be believed, nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, Leftist rabble-rousers, and countercultural bohemians of every stripe. Bakhtin’s and Foucault’s individual approaches to fearless speech, as inflected by Cynicism, are marked by a number of striking congruences that will be explored in the pages that follow. For both, parrhēsia is not so much a mode of communicative expression per se, much less a rarified inquiry into metaphysical essences or eternal veracities of the “soul,” than a distinctively embodied practico-ethical way of relating to oneself, others, and the world at large. Moreover, each thinker suggests that parrhesiastic conduct requires participants to enter willingly into an agonistic “game,” wherein beliefs are subject to a process of relentless “testing,” so as to bring words and deeds into the closest possible alignment. Finally, both celebrate Diogenes’s “cynical” laughter and satiric wisdom, suggesting that comic inversion (at least in this context) is not dissimulation or trickery for its own sake, but rather integral to truth-telling’s counterpower. Whereas earlier comparisons often pitted a presumptively “anti-humanist” Foucault against Bakhtin’s “dialogical” humanism, the former’s final set of Collège de France lectures raise the possibility of more commonalities in their respective projects than has been hitherto entertained generally. For instance, they share a belief that modernity’s preference for idealist knowledges and bloodless scientific abstraction has driven a sharp wedge between “truth” and lived, everyday experience. If such reifications and separations inure us to the status quo and bolster a tragic fatalism, perhaps what is needed is a strong dose of what German thinker Peter Sloterdijk calls the quintessential Cynic art: that of “pissing against the idealist wind.”3 At the same time, Foucault’s nominalistic individualism, even if tempered by his late Cynic turn toward a “care for the other,” as opposed to a more inwardly directed “care for the self,” might be supplemented productively by Bakhtin’s theorization of the carnivalesque multitude. FOUCAULT’S “SCANDALOUS BANALITY” That both Bakhtin and Foucault were strongly influenced by classical sources has been reasonably well documented. And yet, their indebtedness

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to Cynicism specifically has been downplayed, especially with regard to Bakhtin. Why this should be so is an interesting question. It may have something to do with the common sentiment amongst classicists that Cynicism is the “poor cousin” of ancient Greek philosophies, a disparate set of postures and stray anecdotes rather than a rigorous system of ideas, and hence perhaps less noteworthy than, say, Plato or the Stoics. If Sloterdijk’s analysis in his magisterial treatise Critique of Cynical Reason is correct, Cynicism is rarely accorded academic respect because it flies in the face of, and continues to trouble deeply, the widely held belief that scholarly inquiry must conform to a polite, detached form of essentially textual disputation—which, ironically, masks a roiling undercurrent of status anxiety and resentment, whereby the ultimate (but never quite openly admitted) goal, spurred by a limitless “hermeneutics of suspicion,” is the merciless destruction of rival positions and theories.4 In the early segments of Foucault’s two-volume lecture series The Government of Self and Others,5 Cynicism is mentioned only in passing, and treated as a relatively “minor” current in the broader spectrum of Greek intellectual life. But, as the final set of lectures (designated as The Courage of Truth) reaches its denouement, the Cynic tradition becomes his central focus. Foucault’s seemingly newfound interest in the Cynics, and the risky and provocative form of moral courage they embody, might well be linked to the fact he knew he was dying from an AIDS-related illness during the last lectures. In the absence of any direct evidence, however, this remains speculation. But, what cannot be denied is that Foucault is clearly drawn to Cynicism’s decisive break with the prevailing temperament and intellectual parameters of Greek philosophy, and indeed the overarching tenor of Western thought. Cynic parrhēsia takes up and synthesizes earlier notions of fearless speech, but then pushes them to radical extremes that seem to dovetail with important shifts in Foucault’s own thinking. The aftermath of this remarkable “transvaluation” of parrhēsia in the words and deeds of the ancient Cynics, and, more sketchily, its implications for our more contemporary situation, is what preoccupies Foucault in the last nine (out of eighteen) hours of lectures transcribed in The Courage of Truth.6 Throughout the two volumes of The Government of Self and Others, as well as the 1983 Berkeley seminar published as Fearless Speech,7 Foucault clearly valorizes the “courage to speak” he feels parrhēsia represents. In nuce, what is meant here is the act of presenting the unvarnished truth to oneself and others, without circumlocution or deception, as practiced in relation to, variously (depending on the historical context and the precise philosophical tradition concerned), the demos, tyrant or sovereign, a friend or intimate, oneself, or even humanity at large. Such an action invariably puts oneself into moral-existential and at times direct physical danger, one of the defining features of truth-telling itself. Foucault’s concern here is to locate and historicize

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the set of procedures by which the subject manifests truth-claims. What seems to be an entirely modern conceit—“telling the truth about oneself” to, say, clinicians, doctors, or teachers—is, in actuality, traceable to distant Greco-Roman ethical practices, ranging from the Pythagoreans to the Stoics and of course the Cynics. Whatever their differences, however, each set of practices ultimately relates back to Socrates’s epochal injunction to “know thyself.” According to Foucault, parrhēsia’s “courageous frankness” is linked constitutively to the life-long examining and testing (exetasis) of the soul, making possible a broader process of epimeleia, or care of the self. Indeed, Foucault makes the explicit claim that while certain elements of epimeleia predate the Socratic dialogues, it was the latter that fostered initially a distinctive “culture of self,” through which “a whole set of practices of self [were] formulated, developed, worked out, and transmitted.”8 To clarify, Foucault’s belief is that Socrates’s version of truth-telling differs substantially from the type that dominated Greek political life up to that point. Parrhēsia first emerged as a display of direct and unvarnished speech in democratic public fora that was very different to the silver-tongued flourishes of the trained rhetorician. It reflected what the speaker genuinely believed about this or that political question, and indicated the most efficacious way to redress the issue at hand for the good of all. But, what started out as a public, collective phenomenon gradually acquired a more private, personal tone. For Foucault, the major reason for this shift was a growing disquiet that, in the context of the demos, it was impossible to ascertain definitively the difference between “bad” and “good” parrhēsia. “Bad” truth-telling referred to discourse which was mere opinionating in thrall to passion or self-interest, typically emanating from the city’s uneducated and “ill-mannered” lower orders. “Good” parrhēsia, on the other hand, was speech grounded in a shared logos and that sincerely had the wider community’s best interests at heart. If democracy cannot make room for authentic parrhēsia, or only in a debased form that is actually a danger to the city, then it must be found elsewhere. Accordingly, there was a growing sense among the dominant schools of Greek philosophy that the only way to vouchsafe the integrity of truthtelling, and hence of the soul (psukkē) itself, was to move from the polis to the self—or, more specifically, to foster a rigorous code of personal conduct, or ēthos, by which individuals formed themselves as ethical subjects. Henceforth, parrhēsia is concerned primarily with a “set of operations which enable veridiction to induce transformations in the soul.”9 Socrates, as intimated, is the linchpin of this transformation. Yet, Foucault claims to detect two antithetical strains with regard to Socratic parrhēsia in Plato.10 In Plato/Socrates, that is, the “care of the self” can lead either toward a mode of veridiction aiming to lead the soul back to its originary essence, conforming to an abstract metaphysics upholding a soul/body dualism; or,

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alternatively, a proto-existentialist fashioning of embodied selfhood through which we give an “account of oneself.” Apart from outliers like Nietzsche or Spinoza, Foucault argues that the first, metaphysical interpretation came to dominate Western thinking. Resultantly, philosophy in the wake of Plato’s idealism became a highly technical discourse, divorcing itself from problems of life, although to some extent religion filled the gap. For its part, modern science institutionalizes a certain form of “truth-telling” in the form of axiomatic knowledge-systems and technicized methods, which are equally separate from day-to-day considerations of how to live. Hence, for Foucault, “the question of the true life has continually become worn out, faded, eliminated, and threadbare in Western thought.”11 But, what was sidelined in Plato’s writings became Cynicism’s very raison d’etre. As Sloterdijk puts it, although he undeniably kick-started this “existential” turn in Greek philosophy, Socrates remained, for all his street credibility and plebeian wiles, a “head” thinker.12 He could beat his Sophist opponents at their own game through an exacting, almost clinical process of dialectical reasoning; yet, in spite of his skepticism regarding earthly fame and fortune, Socrates was essentially one of them. Although the midwife of many brave and novel ideas, Socrates himself could not give birth to a full-bore “dirty materialism” bringing the Athenian city-state’s very ethico-political foundations into radical doubt. The task of articulating this new philosophy of flesh and blood (and shit) thereby fell to Diogenes and his successors. Diogenes the Cynic is one of the most arresting and enigmatic figures in all Greco-Roman antiquity. Details about his life and thought are sketchy at best—although alleged to have written a number of satirical dialogues and mock philosophical treatises, nothing survives—and often come to us from accounts many centuries removed from classical Athens. Born around the year 413 BCE in the prosperous Greek colony of Sinope, on the Black Sea, Diogenes was the son of a banker and money changer. His father seems to have been entrusted with minting the local currency, and, according to several accounts, a formative event in Diogenes’s life occurred when he and his father were suddenly exiled because a serious charge of counterfeiting had been brought against them. Diogenes subsequently traveled to Delphi to ask the Oracle for advice, and the latter, channelling Apollo’s sentiments, responded with the cryptic injunction: “deface the currency.” This is generally taken to mean to destroy conventional values and ways of living and transform them into something radically “other,” something Diogenes very much took to heart. This is not the place to chronicle at any length his alleged deeds and words, ranging from public masturbation to mocking Plato. Suffice to say here that Diogenes’s life was lived in a manner akin to sardonic performance art, but with an underlying seriousness of intent: for instance, when asked what the most beautiful quality of human beings was, he replied

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famously with “free-spokenness.” But, what are the key features of Cynicism for Foucault, as manifested originally by Diogenes? Above all, fearless speech, with the implication of directness to the point of insolence, was linked constitutively to everyday Cynical practice. Semiotically, it was marked by very specific accoutrements and semi-ritualized behaviours: the staff and begging bowl, voluntary poverty, peripateticism, and so forth, each of which has a specific purpose. The first is the function of exemplariness: to be able to preach indifference to worldly concerns, one must realize this principle in their own life. A second is to reduce life to the absolute minimum, a “bare life” as it were, so as to reveal the decisive inner truth of the matter. Finally, there is the function of “testing” with regard to the true life, demonstrating to all and sundry, though arduous accounting and self-discipline, the way life should be lived. As such, the Cynic is not satisfied with a loose relationship between professed beliefs and a way of being, like buying organic lettuce because you recognize certain environmental concerns. Rather, life and truth are here fused together in a much more tightly organized fashion, because the very mode of life itself is the essential condition of parrhēsia. The innovation of cynicism, Foucault writes, is that it managed to grasp “life, existence, bios, what could be called an alethurgy, [as] a manifestation of truth.”13 Foucault is keen to point out that, in order to become a Cynic, one did not need a long apprenticeship in any of the established philosophical schools, but only the requisite degree of dedication to basic virtues and practices. Also unlike these rival schools, Cynicism had no canonical texts or doctrines; rather, it was a “popular” or “street” philosophy, and its scandalous pronouncements and activities were aimed at the broad public as much, if not more so, than educated elites. All this reflected a kind of “philosophical syncretism”: the Cynics extracted certain core principles from existing intellectual tendencies and condensed them into a distinctively codified style of life. It rescued fearless speech from metaphysical exile in the Platonic tradition and its epigones, and brought it back into the streets and the demos. There is a curious dialectic at play here, insofar as Cynicism is marginalized in the history of ideas, and yet somehow lies at the very “heart” of Western philosophy, or at least constitutes the perennial thorn in its side.14 Quite apart from his somewhat unexpected detour into Cynic philosophy, which in itself marks a fascinating development in Foucault’s thinking, the specifically political implication of this turn in relation to our own contemporaneity is a significant one. This is in part because, by Foucault’s own reasoning, Cynicism has both temporally specific and “trans-historical” qualities.15 As writers such as Michael Hardt have argued,16 Foucault’s intensive focus on the Cynic version of parrhēsia in his final lectures of 1983–1984 seems motivated to overcome some of the aporias of his earlier thinking about power/knowledge, wherein the subject seems forever destined to be caught in the mesh of

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externally imposed discipline, or else sustains unwittingly a process of selfsubjectification accomplishing more or less the same thing, thereby reducing human freedom and agency to the functional reproduction of a dispositif of administrative reason. Parrhēsia, as evidenced by Foucault’s intense interest in the “scandalous banality” of the Cynic tradition, is the literal instantiation of another, different way of living, in uncompromising opposition to conventional society. It eschews a false relation to self because, in taking parrhēsia to heart, the Cynic refuses to conduct his or her life in the service of another’s power, or follow slavishly the dictates of proffered social roles, which is crucial to mastering what Foucault once described pithily as “the art of not being governed so much.”17 BAKHTIN AND THE “RIGHT TO BE ‘OTHER’” How does this discussion of Cynic parrhēsia, as filtered through Foucault’s distinctive sensibility, relate to Bakhtin’s worldview? According to noted Slavist Caryl Emerson,18 Bakhtin was part of a group of Russian intellectuals between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who believed ancient thought and literature were a living tradition, with palpable relevance for their own lives and times. Elsewhere, Emerson opines that, “In his personal behavior, Bakhtin was a Stoic; in his values and literary tastes, this admirer of Diogenes and Menippus was most certainly a Cynic.”19 Direct allusions to Diogenes in Bakhtin’s writings are relatively few, although he does argue in “Epic and Novel” that literary images of the Cynic from Sinope during antiquity and long afterward were “deeply novelized” and “dialogized,” insofar as Diogenes was portrayed typically as a semi-legendary “hero” marked by a penchant for ironism, profane satiric wisdom, and the comic picaresque, in terms completely at odds with the one-dimensional seriousness of the epic hero.20 There is, however, another Cynic figure much more central to Bakhtin’s thinking; namely, Menippus of Gadara. In factual terms, Menippus is an even more shadowy figure than Diogenes. Born a slave in the third century BCE, in present-day Jordan, Menippus apparently bought his own freedom through his money-lending skills, fell under the tutelage of the Cynic philosopher Metrocles, and eventually became a quite wealthy Theban citizen—indeed, his seeming disregard for the more usual practices of Cynicism is so flagrant that he might well be considered archetypally Cynic. He did write a number of works in the Cynic satirical tradition, although, since they are all lost, we only know of their existence through later glosses and précises. Nonetheless, his name is associated with a “seriocomic” genre called “Menippean satire,” or, more simply “Menippea,” which is linked strongly to both Cynicism and the carnivalesque.21 This genre influenced such

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later authors as Lucian, Petronius, and Seneca in significant ways, and its lineage can be traced through the Renaissance and beyond. To Bakhtin’s way of thinking, Menippea was so critical to the development of European culture and literature that, apart from numerous references elsewhere, he devoted a significant portion of his revised Dostoevsky book to analyzing its central features—fourteen distinct points in all. For our purposes, four main elements of Menippea stand out. The first is that, for Bakhtin, the entire ancient world was “refracted” through the lens of carnival, which meant that virtually all cultural and literary forms derived their vital energies from constant contact with the popular multitudes and their uppity, festive ways—indeed, when this connection weakened, particular genres, such as Old Attic Comedy, were subject to a process of enervation and decline.22 As is well known, carnival starkly opposes received authority through the use of bawdy humour, pointed satire, and grotesque imagery, and creates a liberated space of equality and freedom for the broad populace, if only temporarily. In the words of Anthony T. Edwards, despite the concerted efforts on the part of some scholars to efface the centrality of the carnivalesque in his thinking, the “theme of the oppositional, revolutionary character of the grotesque and the social stratum from which it springs runs throughout Bakhtin’s exegesis and is fundamental to his conception of the grotesque. It cannot be overlooked.”23 Second, Menippea depicts extreme forms of “moral-psychological experimentation” so as to test characters, each of whom embody a particular set of philosophical ideas. Furthermore, Menippea’s penchant for comic inversion, bizarre mésalliances, or jarring temporal/spatial shifts operates to violate received mores and conventions, representing a mode of “defamilarization” that undermines the monologic authorial voice and reveals the arbitrarily constructed character of any sociocultural or linguistic practice. As Bakhtin puts it, Menippean texts “make a breach in the stable, normal (‘seemly’) course of human affairs and events, they free human behavior from the norms and motivations that predetermine it.”24 This is exemplified by the carnival figures inhabiting the Menippean landscape, prototypically the rogue, fool, and clown, because they convey in no uncertain terms the “right to be ‘other’ in this world.”25 Third, although written in a recognizably philosophical register, authors of Menippean satire demonstrate little patience for arcane ruminations of an abstractly metaphysical character, preferring the gleeful application of Occam’s razor to thickets of unnecessary verbiage and rhetorical excess, leaving behind only “naked ‘ultimate questions’ with an ethical and practical bias.”26 Finally, despite its fondness for tropes of the fantastical or utopian, Menippean satire subscribes to a “slum naturalism” that searches for truths regarding such “ultimate questions,” not in the misty confines of an unreachable epic past, or Plato’s lofty firmament, but by diving unhesitatingly into the very muck and mire of daily

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life itself. For Bakhtin, only by getting our hands (and minds) dirty can we map out “new directions in the development of everyday life.”27 But, how does the above discussion of Menippea relate more precisely to the notion of parrhēsia? Bakhtin notes that Cynicism’s scandalous provocations, as expressed through the seriocomic genres, borrow their essential qualities and rhythms from the speech patterns of the carnival crowd. This is equally true of that famous Renaissance acolyte of Cynicism, the “Diogenic” François Rabelais. In facing up to the “cosmic darkness” of Medievalism, as even the most casual reader of Bakhtin will know, Rabelais relies heavily on the language of carnival and the “thousand year old culture of fearlessness” it represents. This helps to explain why Bakhtin’s masterwork Rabelais and His World is replete with allusions to the “free (or ‘frank’) and familiar” speech of folk-festive culture, which recapitulates virtually all key aspects of Cynic parrhēsia. First, “free and familiar” carnival speech, with its use of innumerable obscenities, profanities, and oaths, is a resolutely secular discourse, and articulates a plebeian, “anti-official” view of the world. Here, deities are roundly mocked, the pretentions of self-righteous, supercilious, sacred discourse excoriated, and a “droll,” matter-of-fact, unadorned speech of wit and bluntness promoted in its stead. The “proclamatory genres”—the languages of elites, priests, and prophets—lose their legitimacy in the face of the liberatory and egalitarian thrust of vernacular carnival speech, which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace, and the public square. Second, the “common people’s creative culture of laughter” makes possible what we might call a “carnival epistemology.” This represents a way of knowing privileging direct, sensuous experience over the arid abstractions of metaphysics and science. Here, truth can be manifested directly in a mode of intimate and embodied contact with the world as it actually is, in a state of constant change and emergent becoming. This subverts the “didactic gloom” and grim po-facedness of late Medievalism, allowing the real, open future of humanity to shine forth. Third, the “outspoken carnival word,” as embodied in folk-festive laughter, exemplifies the “courage of truth” so enamoured by Foucault, freeing us from “dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naiveté and illusion, from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality.”28 Finally, for Bakhtin, the fearless speech of carnival was not an expression of some purely subjective notion of “sincerity,” or an intimate revelation of the “inner truth” of the individual “soul.” Rather, it was an utterly transparent and grandly universalistic gesture, aimed at anyone and everyone, and it overcame the separation between public behavior and one’s interior beliefs. “Thus the exterior freedom of popular-festive forms was inseparable from their inner freedom, and from their positive outlook on the world,” writes

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Bakhtin. “Together with this new positive outlook, they brought the right to express it with impunity.”29 What is worth highlighting in this context is the precise nature of the relationship between “carnival” and “dialogism,” which has often puzzled and bedeviled Bakhtin scholars. Some, such as Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson,30 have dealt with this question by suggesting that these terms relate to entirely antithetical phases in Bakhtin’s oeuvre, authorizing them to dismiss the significance of carnival in favor of his ostensible (and “antiSoviet”) stress on individual ethics and “answerability.” Less disingenuously, Edwards is perhaps more accurate in identifying dialogue and carnival as “closely related concepts”; whereas the former relates more to literary form and genre, the latter concerns the broader “sociological and historical context.”31 Yet, Edwards arguably stumbles here too when he asserts that Rabelais’s adherence to the popular grotesque meant he had little “tolerance for dialogue,” which is why references to dialogical principles are seemingly expunged from Rabelais and His World. The alternative reading suggested here is that, although dialogism might be more or less implicit in the Rabelais’s book, it is still absolutely necessary, because carnival liberation paves the way for the unfolding of genuine dialogue, without fear of punishment or censure. In other words, reciprocal dialogical exchange is premised directly upon the levelling of social hierarchies and spatial barriers via the “parrhesiastic” mode of interaction the carnivalesque makes possible, thereby generating an “unrealized surplus of humanness.” Speech and action in the “carnival square,” Bakhtin tells us, are set loose from the moorings of all unequal social positions, including those of class, age, or property; hence, all the false pieties and hollow deferences that flow from and bolster such inequities are suspended, and fearless speech sounds out boldly, “beyond all verbal prohibitions, limitations, and conventions.”32 UNCIVIL ENLIGHTENMENT: BAKHTIN/FOUCAULT If, as argued above, the theme of Cynic parrhēsia wends in unexpected ways through the respective ideas of the late Foucault and Bakhtin, what “productive constellation” might result from considering them together on this topic? Any reflections here might acquire heightened plausibility if we acknowledge that Foucault, in the course of examining modern manifestations of the Cynic impulse such as revolutionary militantism and avant-garde art in The Courage of Truth, discusses Bakhtin in the second hour of the lecture of February 29, 1984. The crux of Foucault’s account turns on his assertion that Cynicism was not merely a philosophical category, but taken up in numerous artistic and literary forms during this period of antiquity and later, particularly in

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satire and comedy, the latter even constituting a “privileged site for [the] expression” of Cynic ideals.33 Indeed, he says that entire domains of literature during the Medieval and Renaissance eras could be labeled a form of “Cynic art,” and that they take their cue mainly from carnival. This is because carnival represents the site where a decisive, even violent rupture is realized vis-àvis conventional values and activities, enabling participants to “scandalously” manifest truth concretely in their daily lives through the effectuation of a distinctively collective “style of life.” What Foucault appears to suggest is that it is here, in the momentary break from “normal” reality carnival represents, where the parrhesiastic game plays out in its most direct, purest form. In so doing, Foucault affirms the strong connections which Bakhtin draws between Cynic thought and action, a “thousand-year-old” popular folk-festive tradition, and the various seriocomic genera of comedy, satire, and parody. To unpack this proposition a little, perhaps we can identify four key themes as being noteworthy. First, as alluded to earlier, both Foucault and Bakhtin are wont to criticize the profound separation modernity encourages between objective culture and subjective life, and the manifest difficulty of transposing experientially one domain into the other. For Sloterdijk, this attack on sensual embodiment and lived experience in the modern era results in the formation of a mass, “schizoid” personality structure oscillating between boredom and melancholia on the one hand, and crass (if knowing) accommodation to the status quo on the other, or what he calls “enlightened false consciousness” (which, of course, is “cynicism” in its contemporary guise).34 In his earlier works, Bakhtin traces this denigration of the validity of bodily, lived experience in favor of abstruse theoretical constructions to Plato’s metaphysics. Although both he and Foucault note various countervailing tendencies in the history of Western thought—including Cynicism, the (not-unrelated) Renaissance humanism of Erasmus, Montaigne, and Rabelais, as well as more contemporaneous thinkers like Nietzsche—it is modern forms of “discursive theoretical thinking” that have most systematically detached what Bakhtin terms “Being-as-event” from abstract cognition, in order to privilege the latter. Once alienated from the lifeworld, Bakhtin argues, grand theoretical constructs acquire a ghostly proxy life and operate according to their own internal laws, bypassing the experiential domain of practical consciousness and action, with deleterious results. In strikingly similar terms, Foucault asserts that, in modernity, truth has become something abstract, logical, and only “generically” universal, conflated with externalized knowledge systems and the disciplinary apparatuses that underpin them, and which function at considerable remove from our daily lives. Yet, in contradistinction to this “despotic Enlightenment,” with its appeal to timeless, metaphysical reason, Foucault insists that truth cannot be “given” to the subject from without. As the ancient Cynics understood very well, truth can only be incorporated

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into life through an arduous process of continuous testing, experimentation, and self-discipline, a living refutation of illusion and error. Which brings us to the second point of comparison: Bakhtin, no less than Foucault, makes a key distinction between “ethics” and “morality.” As regards the latter, Foucault tells us that, historically speaking, Cynic parrhēsia was eventually supplanted by the Christian church’s insistence on craven obedience to a remote and officious ecclesiastical authority. Fear and shame supplant courage and fearlessness, and the path to the coalescence of modern disciplinary practices is cleared. Christian morality (and its secular variations) means following prescribed and rigid codes of “correct” behaviour, and hence constitutes an insidious form of subjectivation because apparently self-willed. Foucault seeks to challenge such proscriptive normative systems, a well-known example being Kant’s categorical imperative, because such moral codes function to “normalize” subjects and integrate them into the dominant apparatus of power/knowledge. Of course, for Foucault, the process of subjective formation cannot unfold in a manner entirely separate from prevailing systems of disciplinary power. But, he does envisage some latitude for a playful transgression of proffered institutional boundaries and normative systems, and the continuous rejuvenation of the ethical subject according to self-delineated rather than externally imposed criteria. Bakhtin, similarly, for all his reverence for Kant, rejects the latter’s attempt to develop a systematically rational, procedurally based ethics. For Bakhtin, Kant’s “universality of the ought” is too abstract and proscriptive, and its use of transcendental a priori renders it unable to address ethical problems, ambiguities, and dilemmas as they emerge within the everyday lifeworld. The limitations of such hidebound moral and ideological systems can only be combated by a repudiation of theoretical abstraction pursued as an end to itself, so as to grasp the concrete deed as the axiological centre around which our existence necessarily revolves. We can only bridge the gap that separates our “small scrap of space and time” and the “large spatial and temporal whole” through the answerable deed, says Bakhtin.35 Hence, instead of the dreary negativity of abstract moralism, perhaps we need what Sloterdijk calls the “amoral good humor”36 of the Cynics. Third, there is a common stress in Foucault and Bakhtin on a Cynicinspired notion of self-testing, under risky and difficult conditions, as a way to realize parrhēsia fully, and to bring one’s beliefs, words, and deeds together in a tightly bound configuration. By Foucault’s reckoning, parrhēsia is a dramatic enactment of extremes, involving “threshold moments” of rupture and potential antagonism that reveal the essential contours of a “limitsituation,” and how we might push beyond such barriers. As Andreas Folkers reminds us, truth-telling is devoid of any “institutional or legal basis”; it is not a “right” accruing from membership in any particular citizenry, but an

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act of brazenly anti-official “insolence,” and a perilous one at that, which indicates something crucial is at stake.37 Unlike the abstract proceduralism that marks, say, Jürgen Habermas’s notion of “ideal speech,” the very act of parrhēsia itself, and the deep affective investment it demands from all participants, is what substantiates its truthfulness. In not dissimilar terms, Bakhtin also draws our attention to such “limit-situations” at numerous junctures in his writings, not only in the context of carnival per se, but also Socratic dialogue, as well as those authors, most notably Dostoevsky, whose works were shaped decisively by the carnivalesque impulse. As mentioned above, in discussing the serio-comedy of Menippea, Bakhtin often stresses the role played by the evocation of extraordinary situations in testing publicly the validity of, and personal commitment to, specific philosophical truths as embodied in individual characters.38 Concerning Socrates, Bakhtin asserts he was a master of “anacrisis,” a technique of philosophical dialogue wherein interlocutors were compelled, in dramatically heightened circumstances, to reveal their innermost beliefs and express them in the fullest possible terms, and, through a dialectical “baptism of fire,” face up to the incompleteness or even outright falsity of such opinions. Finally, in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin discusses Dostoevsky’s frequent use of extreme situations in his novels, such as scenes of personal calamity, emotional intensity, and psychological breakdown. These moments make evident the “ethical unfinalizability” of a person, allowing us to glimpse individuals “on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable—and unpredeterminate—turning point.” And what else is Foucault’s “scandalous banality” other than “life poised on the threshold” of decisive words and deeds?39 The fourth and final point of note is that Foucault’s late Cynic turn problematizes his earlier skepticism regarding the question of “representation”—that is, his extreme reluctance to see the intellectual as someone who can legitimately “voice” or represent the interests of oppressed or subaltern groups, but especially “humanity” in some general sense. This explains his emphatic preference for the “specific” as opposed to the “global” intellectual, inasmuch as the former shies away from making explicit normative claims (again, especially on behalf of others), and is concerned instead to uncover, in a quasi-positivistically descriptive way, the mechanisms of power in relation to some specific domain of practice. And yet, the Cynic parrhesiast does have the interests of the community, or rather humankind as a whole, at heart. Here, we arguably witness a shift from Foucault’s earlier nominalistic descriptivism to a normative idealism which makes certain affirmative, if largely implicit propositions about what “ought to be.” Foucault’s embrace of Cynicism might well mark a new, and indeed final stage in his thinking, reflecting a dawning recognition of the insufficiencies of purely “negative” critique, and the need to undergird criticism with at least some “weak” normative claims—weak in

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the sense they are not fixed or eternal, but only provisionally advanced and always subject to further refinement, refutation, and so forth. Much like the Cynic philosopher, Foucault eschews recourse to grand, all-encompassing truth claims, not least because such gestures make it all too easy to project “truth” as something wholly external to one’s life conduct. Because it is the product of a life-long process of experimental self-correction, embodied truth for Foucault is never stable or immutable, but always “becoming other.” As Sergei Prozorov suggests, Foucault’s newly forged Cynic “affirmationism” goes beyond the merely reactive forms of resistance that marked his earlier writings, representing an attempt to conceive of a radically different world of maximal freedom and creativity, and with it entirely new forms of human consociation.40 But, this supposed “ideal” form of sociality is never wholly united or homogeneous—it is an “inoperative” community, one motivated by the search for a “just and common life” to be sure,41 yet marked by irreducible difference and self-transformative dynamism, and where a multiplicity of parrhesiastic games are always at play. Similarly, Bakhtin argues that dialogic engagement is agonistic and not prone to any Habermasian telos of intersubjective agreement or unifying consensus, leading ultimately to a pluralistic and conflictual heteroglossia: “even agreement retains its dialogic character, that is, it never leads to a merging of voices and truths in a single impersonal truth, as occurs in the monologic world.”42 As such, it is fair to claim that, for both Bakhtin and Foucault, genuine truth-telling requires not a Habermasian fidelity to the rules of rational, transparent communication, but rather a “courageous” adherence to fearless speech, combined with rigorous existential work to incorporate this unvarnished truth, or truths, into life. The above discussion brings us to a deep paradox at the heart of the Cynic tradition: its emphasis on a “sovereignty of the self” is concerned ultimately with our self-abnegation and dependence on the willing generosity of others, since the Cynic is indifferent to the usual concerns of financial security, status, and so on. But, in acknowledging our abject dependence on others, the Cynic is also solicitous of the Other, attuned to their needs and requirements, thereby demonstrating a universalistic “care for the world.” This is not a kind of meddlesome busy-bodiness, but what Foucault calls a double relation of care, or epimeleia: the primary task of the Cynic is to look after people’s care generally, which is what constitutes the foundation of a true cosmopolitanism and an “ethical universality.” It is at this point where Foucault seems to break decisively with his earlier “aesthetics of existence,” which he formulated around the time of his work on the history of sexuality, between the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, Foucault denies that intersubjective relations are ontologically primary, and construes the “other” as a necessarily and permanently adversarial force vis-à-vis the self. “One must not have the care for others precede the care for self,” he declares bluntly in one

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interview, insofar as the “relationship to self takes ontological precedence.”43 But, in the final pages of The Courage of Truth, Foucault says explicitly the precise opposite: for the Cynics, at any rate, care for the other precedes care for the self. This late stance, it can be argued, conforms in all crucial respects to Bakhtin’s dialogical model, where, insofar as it is basic to the individuation of any subject, the relation to the other must take ontological precedence over the relation to self. For Vanessa Lemm, the principle of Cynic dependency indicates a renunciation of the self-contained, identitarian notion of the self, a model that seems eminently modern, but is traceable to Plato’s concern for an uncontaminated “purity” of the soul.44 This is a model of human selfhood that views contact with the other as an “immunological” threat to one’s sovereign status, resulting in a sociopolitical dynamic of paranoid surveillance, “containment,” and, finally, subjugation. However, the hermetic pureness of such a self-defined truth breaks down in the face of our absolute dependence on others, as underscored by the Cynic gesture of abjection, through which we realize that our selfhood is a “gift” bestowed on us from without. “To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself,” writes Bakhtin; as such, we only shine from the “borrowed axiological light of otherness.”45 And it is here at least, in Foucault’s last lectures, that he and Bakhtin seem in happy agreement that we need to cultivate a fundamental receptivity with respect to the other, and grapple with the awesome demands of alterity, for only then can we intuit fully the intersubjective constitution of selfhood and, in turn, be genuinely accountable to ourselves, others, and the world. CONCLUSION In Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk raises a clarion call for the revitalization of social-philosophical criticism—not by reference to established forms of Enlightenment-inspired Ideologiekritik, which have become utterly compromised by the central role they have played in the exercise of managerial reason, but through a renewal of ancient Cynicism, and a stalwart, if possibly doomed quest for “lost cheekiness.” In their own inimitable ways, Bakhtin and Foucault derive similar inspiration from the Cynic tradition of parrhesiastic courage and satiric wisdom. Perhaps the most useful way to illustrate this shared orientation is to focus briefly on the image of the “human” that emerges out of their respective ruminations on such themes. Both thinkers diagnose in modernity a key problem: that of a fundamental split between external normative, technological, and regulatory systems, on the one hand, and the conduct of a meaningful and “truthful” everyday life, on the other. Rather than surrender agency to the former, or engage in a process of self-subjectivation that effectively accomplishes the same

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task, the Cynic’s “parrhesiastic game” offers a different possibility. Such an alternative consists in refusing, à la Diogenes (if less spectacularly), to be imprisoned by what Bakhtin calls the “secondhand and finalizing definitions” that are foisted upon us from without, by abstract social forces and political ideologies. “Man is free, and can therefore violate any regulating norms which might be thrust upon him,” Bakhtin famously writes. “The genuine life of the personality takes place [outside] a being that can be spied upon, defined, predicted apart from his own will, ‘at second hand.’”46 Through such Cynic-carnivalesque gestures of revolt, a “non-coincidence” is effected between imposed external norms and the depths of one’s inner life. This gap, however fragile or tentative, is crucial in facilitating a mode of critical selffashioning. If reasonably successful, this leads to a second “level” of possibility, whereby one’s subjective commitment to truth can be better aligned with our public actions, but far more on our own, hard-won terms than is generally the case. If “second-hand” definitions are lies, they can only be countered by an existential truth that is made manifestly visible and “laughable” through the Cynic enactment of fearless speech, thereby demonstrating the “right to be ‘other’ in this world.” This helps clear a space for the proliferation of new modes of subjectivity in defiance of the seemingly insurmountable constraints of state and global market forces. Yet, because of our “abject” dependence on the care of others—that is, our existential indebtedness to the other for our gift of selfhood—the Cynic ethical subject resists the siren call of the paranoiac and narcissistic “immunological” self so prevalent in today’s Western societies. Bakhtin and Foucault jointly offer us a vision of the human as a site of experimental “guesswork” and unhindered creativity, and, on that basis, a revivified life of differentiation, openness, and diversity. But, can we have a genuine “Cynic” community? A difficult question, and, in closing, perhaps it is here where we might detect a significant difference between the late work of Foucault and Bakhtin. The answer to this query for the former would probably be in the negative; only a handful of resolute individuals can dedicate themselves to the rigors and austerities of the Cynic life, even if they may have the care of humankind uppermost in mind. For Bakhtin, by contrast, perhaps the Cynic impulse is suffused throughout the carnival multitude in its entirety. The “common people’s creative culture of laughter,” we might argue, is “mass” Cynicism, the Diogenic gesture of revolt writ large, insofar as the carnival crowd as a whole enters into the game of parrhēsia. Carnival laughter is innately parrhesiastic because all participants risk themselves; no one is immune from ridicule, and the possibility of authority-deflating self-mockery is ever present as well, thereby inoculating against overweening hubris and self-seriousness. Yet, in Bakhtin’s hands, carnival is equally what Emerson calls a “theory of creativity” because it constitutes the well-spring of a vital

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“energy that permits us to procreate in the broadest sense, to create,” and on an egalitarian, collective basis.47 Put differently, the corporeal energies and mass truth-tellings of the carnival crowd manifest an immanent potential, or incipient revolutionary charge, that realizes in lived time-space the unabashedly utopian desire for “an other world.” Foucault’s fleeting remarks on Bakhtin’s carnivalesque in The Courage of Truth point tentatively in this direction, but are not substantiated in any depth. Had Foucault lived longer, and read Bakhtin more carefully, it is interesting to speculate that he might have found some inspiration in the riotous self-surpassings and serialized becomings that mark the carnival multitude, and hence the theorization of a properly social ontology that is arguably missing from Foucault’s writings—or at least until the very end, when, tragically, the insight came too late to develop further. NOTES 1. For an overview, see Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Last Decade (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). 2. The relevant texts here are: Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Isowolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984); Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981). 3. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (London and New York: Verso, 1988), 9. 4. Sloterdijk, Critique, 13. 5. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 6. Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 7. Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). 8. Foucault, Courage, 4. 9. Ibid., 65. 10. Ibid., 127. 11. Ibid., 235. 12. Sloterdijk, Critique, 104. 13. Foucault, Courage, 172. 14. Ibid., 201. 15. Ibid., 74. 16. Michael Hardt, “Militant Life,” New Left Review 64, July/Aug (2010): 151–160.

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17. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” in The Politics of Truth, eds. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 23–82, 45. 18. Caryl Emerson, “Irreverent Bakhtin and the Imperturbable Classics,” Arethusa, 26, no. 2 (1993): 123–139, 125. 19. Caryl Emerson, “Coming to Terms with Bakhtin’s Carnival: Ancient, Modern, sub Specie Aeternitatis,” in Bakhtin and the Classics, ed. R. Bracht Branham, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 5–26, 8. 20. Bakhtin, Dialogic, PRIVATE 38. 21. See R. Bracht Branham, “The Poetics of Genre: Bakhtin, Menippus, Petronius,” in The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, ed. R. Bracht Branham (Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, 2005), 3–31, 4, fn. 2. 22. See Anthony T. Edwards, “Historicizing the Popular Grotesque: Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World and Attic Old Comedy,” in Bakhtin and the Classics, ed. R. Bracht Branham, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 27–55. 23. Ibid., 28–29. 24. Bakhtin, Problems, 117. 25. Bakhtin, Dialogic, 159. 26. Bakhtin, Problems, 115. 27. Ibid., 118. 28. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 123. 29. Ibid., 271. 30. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 31. Edwards, “Historicizing,” 32. 32. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 167. 33. Foucault, Courage, 186. 34. Sloterdijk, Critique, 120. 35. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, trans. Vadim Liapunov, (Austin: Texas University Press, 1993), 29, 51. 36. Sloterdijk, Critique, 126. 37. Andreas Folkers, “Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2016): 3–28, 8. 38. Bakhtin, Problems, 115. 39. Ibid., 61, 63. 40. Sergei Prozorov, “Foucault’s Affirmative Biopolitics: Cynic Parrhesia and the Biopower of the Powerless,” Political Theory (2015): 1–23, 19. DOI: 10.1177/0090591715609963. 41. Vanessa Lemm, “The Embodiment of Truth and the Politics of Community: Foucault and the Cynics,” in The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, eds, Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 208–223, 210. 42. Bakhtin, Problems, 95. 43. Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in The Final Foucault, eds. James Bernauer and David Rasmusssen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 1–20, 7.

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44. Lemm, “Embodiment,” 217. 45. Bakhtin, Problems, 287; Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. and notes by V. Liapunov, supplement trans. by K. Brostrom (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1990), 134. 46. Bakhtin, Problems, 59. 47. Emerson, “Coming,” 13, 20.

WORKS CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1981. ———. Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Isowolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. ———. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1990. ———. Toward a Philosophy of the Act, edited by Vadim Liapunov and Michael Holquist, translated by Vadim Liapunov. Austin: Texas University Press, 1993. Branham, R. Bracht, “The Poetics of Genre: Bakhtin, Menippus, Petronius.” In The Bakhtin Circle and Ancient Narrative, edited by R. Bracht Branham, 3–31. Groningen: Barkhuis Publishing, 2005. Caryl Emerson, “Coming to Terms with Bakhtin’s Carnival: Ancient, Modern, sub Specie Aeternitatis.” In Bakhtin and the Classics, edited by R. Bracht Branham, 5–26. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Edwards, Anthony T. “Historicizing the Popular Grotesque: Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World and Attic Old Comedy.” In Bakhtin and the Classics, edited by R. Bracht Branham, 27–55. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Elden, Stuart. Foucault’s Last Decade. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Emerson, Caryl. “Irreverent Bakhtin and the Imperturbable Classics,” Arethusa, 26, no. 2 (1993): 123–139. Hardt, Michael. “Militant Life,” New Left Review 64, July/Aug (2010): 151–160. Folkers, Andreas. “Daring the Truth: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Critique,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2016): 3–28. Foucault, Michel. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom.” In The Final Foucault, edited by James Bernauer and David Rasmusssen, 1–20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. ———. “What Is Critique?” In The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth, 23–82. New York: Semiotext(e), 1997. ———. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001.

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———. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, edited by Frédéric Gros, translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ———. The Courage of the Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France 1983–1984, edited by Frédéric Gros, translated by Graham Burchell. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Lemm, Vanessa. “The Embodiment of Truth and the Politics of Community: Foucault and the Cynics.” In The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism, edited by Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, 208–223. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Morson, Gary Saul and Emerson, Caryl. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Prozorov, Sergei. “Foucault’s Affirmative Biopolitics: Cynic Parrhesia and the Biopower of the Powerless,” Political Theory (2015): 1–23. DOI: 10.1177/ 0090591715609963. Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason, translated by Michael Eldred. London and New York: Verso, 1988.

Chapter 16

The Imagination of a Pluralistic and Dialogic Everyday Experience Bakhtin with James James Cresswell and Andrés Haye

The discipline of psychology often focuses on studying humans as selfcontained monads.1 In the 1990s, however, critical and cultural psychologists raised concerns with how this focus bypasses and trivializes on how culture and mind are constitutionally entwined.2 Bakhtin is a figure that inspires a turn to everyday culture and discourse with the aim of understanding how experience is constituted in dialogue. Therefore, in this chapter we discuss how Bakhtin offers a rich view of dialogue that can help us understand everyday phenomena. The challenge is that Bakhtin’s view contains a seeming paradox: drawing on phenomenology and Neo-Kantianism while simultaneously denying the self-contained model of the mind entailed therein. We direct the readers’ attention to a rather disconnected scene, which is the theoretical work of William James that shares remarkable similarity with Bakhtin because both figures were dealing with similar problematic influences of European philosophy. Taking into account how James dealt with his Neo-Kantian formation illuminates how Bakhtin, although in a different social atmosphere and regarding a different scientific project, responds to his philosophical background. In our hypothetical narrative, Bakhtin, as much as James, contributes to the criticism of Kant’s legacy, to the primacy of cognition, and particularly to any transcendentalism. Simply put, we argue that Bakhtin’s work on dialogue can be understood in line with a critical discussion on consciousness given earlier by James, who is reemerging as another inspiring figure within contemporary psychology3. Thus, we explore the contribution of his dynamic notion of experience, alternative to phenomenology and divorced from

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self-contained individualism, as well as its underdeveloped understanding of language, where we connect with Bakhtin’s contribution. PSYCHOLOGY AND SELF-CONTAINED INDIVIDUALISM James’s Principles of Psychology is a massive tome due to the complexity of human psychology, which is a multifarious phenomenon that includes neurology, psychophysics, phenomenology, culture, and emotions. Wundt undertook a similar monumental effort with a discussion of the structure of experience by working on the Völkerpsychologie—that is, sociohistorical folk psychology—in an attempt to grapple with culture and narratives that constitute psychological experience. Both theorists grounded the discipline in psychology as a tradition that includes both experience in its complex and basic visceral dimensions and sociocultural dimensions. Some aspects of James were formative to the discipline and they included a concern with the function of behavior.4 Aspects of Wundt’s structuralism were retained and his work on the natural science became influential in psychology. Such trends set the groundwork for Watson and Skinner to propose Behaviorism that is concerned with predicting behavior through examining how stimuli can lead to behavior by virtue of how the behavior was rewarded or punished. It bypassed the role of first-person experience in James and the role of sociocultural meaning that we see in Wundt. Behaviorism eliminated these aspects of these predecessors in order to avoid speculation about anything beyond behavior and the unseen workings of the mind: defining experience beyond the scope of psychological research. In the 1960s, more complicated statistical techniques allowed for statistical positivism where researchers could use natural science heuristics to statistically infer workings of functional relationships within individual minds and the advent of computers furnished a metaphor that supported researchers’ warrant for speculating about the inner workings of the mind. Statistical inference and the computational metaphor of mind offered insight into how the inner workings of mind could be understood. This “cognitive revolution” was an attempt to discuss mind and experience became understood as epiphenomena emerging from subconscious mental processing. The mid-1980s and early 1990s ushered in a new change that raised concerns about the exclusion of sociocultural phenomena. There were several scholars from difference disciplines and regions that coalesced at this time and we cannot discuss them all. As such, we will address one figure, Ken Gergen5, who offered a radical critique. He pointed out that what psychologists take to be real about the world does not dictate the terms by which the world

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is understood.6 Knowledge does not come from induction of positivistempiricist hypothesis testing because a major constraint on the categories of science is the language one is taught. He therein pointed out how psychologists had fallen prey to the mistake of ignoring how the way in which people understand the world is a matter of social artifacts. Gergen’s key insight is that psychologists need to look to the social origins of taken-for-granted conceptions of mind. After all, he argues, the degree to which a given form of understanding prevails is due to social processes and not empirical validity. The rules of what counts as knowledge among psychologists change as the social contexts change. This critique leads to a recognition that psychologists engage in forms of socially negotiated understandings that shape what our scientific methods supposedly “reveal.” Such a move in psychology was an attempt to escape an antinomy where knowledge is seen as mapping onto nature, or the phenomenological idea that knowledge comes from processes inside a person. Gergen confronted “Western, objective, individualistic”7 approach to knowledge. In so doing, Gergen and cultural psychologists such as Jerome Bruner and Richard Shweder brought back an appreciation for sociality that Wundt attempts to instill in the discipline of psychology. What remained unarticulated is a good discussion of experience. BAKHTIN: AESTHETICS AND LANGUAGE Bakhtin is influential in cultural psychology and social construction, but his legacy continues in the way that he can augment these efforts. Particularly inspiring is his approach to language and how it entwines with human subjectivity because it entails a helpful discussion of experience. Consider how he writes that “to live and act, I need to be unconsummated, I need to be open for myself—at least in all the essential moments constituting my life; I have to be, for myself, someone who is axiologically yet-to-be; someone who does not coincide with his already existing makeup.”8 Bakhtin shows us how human life is lived in a phenomenological openness of forward momentum as we pass from one moment to another in time. For ourselves, we are open toward the future as we continually acting out life and this forward momentum involves an openness to the meaning and value of such action. Bakhtin illuminates how we are constantly open in terms of how our own value and meaning in life manifests to us. The world manifests to us in a way that includes such meaning and value such that, for example, the “object of [our] fear is fearful.”9 Bakhtin’s later work draws heavily on language and discourse as being something integral to human subjectivity and his early work discusses how language is integral to development of experience. It could thereby seem odd

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for him to claim that life is not experienced in terms of systems of meaning or organized formal time, but he is referring to formal systems and structures as such.10 Such systems of meaning are lived in such a way that people are often blind to them: they are not experienced as confining but a seemingly natural mode of living. Our experience is one of forward-moving openness even though such systems are integral to the development of the world we experience. It is for this reason that Bakhtin writes about an experiential break from the outside world with claims like “I’m not connatural with outside world.”11 He then invokes the notion of soul to express this phenomenologically oriented claim about the “image of the totality of everything that has been actually experience—of everything that is present-on-hand in the soul in the dimension of time.”12 We have noted that Bakhtin’s efforts to discuss experience helps us avoid the bypass of first-person experience—experiences that compel people to act in a way that feels as if there is no choice. Such experiences are the moments when someone must act in a way that is faithful to themselves or others.13 His discussion on the phenomenological quality of experience includes what he calls the “incarnation of meaning in existence,” which gestures to his engagement with the body as integral to experience. The body is experienced and it is through the body that we live, yet Bakhtin attempts to avoid a vulgar materialism by arguing that the body is located on an aesthetic, ethical, and religious plane.14 It is here that he turns to the notion of human development by pointing out that the “biological life of an organism becomes value in a mother’s sympathy”15 and writes about language entailing embodied activities. When a mother expresses care in language, for example, it is completely coincident with embodied action and so the body and language are not separated in life. The embodied social dynamics of life enable what Bakhtin calls an experience of “inner determinateness”16 where the embodiment of meaning is viscerally part of people’s lives. He later links this kind of experience with the notion of rhythm in the give-and-take flow of life with others and points out that there is an axiological ordering to this embodied sociocommunal flow. In other words, we experientially ought to nod when someone addresses us and this experience is something that emerges as if it is present on hand. This approach raises a new challenge for Bakhtin to address because it seemingly resonates with an outdated mode of communication theory where the sender has to encode subjective message that is then transmitted and decoded by a receiver. Of course, Bakhtin is well aware that this is an overly simplistic mode because our subjectivity is already wrapped in the sociocommunal practices of language and so he seeks to avoid the Cartesian ethereal and subjective model of mind. He does clearly see that there is a challenge that emerges because people are positioned in such a way that

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they have a unique purview on the world. Such a purview may be uniquely positioned through one’s orientation to the world as we naturally embody systems of meaning. Others come from different constellations of languages and so their purviews may be different, which Bakhtin identifies as leaving one with the challenge of a “translating myself from inner language to language of outward expressiveness.”17 This challenge is important to Bakhtin because simply embodying a language system involves living in an unreflective mode devoid of unique creativity. We would simply live out whatever languages had been instilled in us developmentally and Bakhtin argues that such would be remaining, as it were, within ourselves. For him, we cannot be aesthetically creative in the authoring of self by remaining in ourselves. To be creative requires that “we feel another”18 and so experience different languages, which leads Bakhtin to discuss dialogue as a creative enterprise involving empathy. Dialogue, for Bakhtin, is grounded in sympathetic co-experience where one must “project” oneself into the other. This activity involves empathizing into the other in order to gain an experiential grasp of the world as it manifests in him. This first step of aesthetic creation of self involves projecting into another but this often means to experience this creation in the category of the other and the challenge is to get beyond such a narrow understanding of the other to a new valuation. This new valuation looks like sympathy that is pervasive enough to create new emotional-evaluative relationship to the other so the other comes to be experienced as one experiences oneself. These moments where we “get through” to others can become experientially immanent to our own consciousness and this is the moment when people are enacting love.19 Dialogue as a loving activity can, on the one hand, be harmonious with one’s own perspective when one and the other come from the same collective. This is the point where sympathetic co-experience is relatively unproblematic and the self–other boundary is easy to cross. Dialogue can also mean conflict with one’s I-for-myself, on the other hand, when the other comes from different languages20 and it thereby potentially introduces a kind of tension seemingly within oneself. Bakhtin’s discussion of dialogue and aesthetic self-authorship is entwined with his discussion of the novel and he points out that an author has a position empowered with an “excess of seeing” because she sees more than any of the heroes see. The author is special in this regard and Bakhtin uses this quality of aesthetic creation to point out that the experiential unity of self is eternally yet-to-be in its openness, but putting oneself in the category of the other allows a broader view. One can see oneself as part of the world because, just like an author sees more than any one hero and a hero is trapped within his own purview, people can see more than their own purviews. It is in this way that Bakhtin attempts to avoid the charge of Neo-Platonism where one would be all

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I-for-myself. Sympathetic co-experience enables us to see ourselves in terms of where we are positioned in the world and this happens via seeing through the eyes of another. Bakhtin treats this moment as an aesthetic gift from the other that comes in dialogue21 because we also can then contemplate what was formally experienced as inwardly simply given. Instead of simply living out a language, the other allows us to contemplate and reflect upon it, which relativizes its compelling quality. Dialogue therein enables a moment where one’s self-consciousness becomes “muddled with others’ consciousness”22 of oneself. Bakhtin illuminates how dialogue involves a gift from another that allows us to see the world in a new way that means an enriched inner experience includes of both I-for-myself and other-for-me.23 Such transgredience has two powerful impacts on human life. One impact is the risk of the collapse of tradition when dialogue potentially exposes its seeming meaninglessness. The traditions that one lives can be seen as less total and unquestionable, which means that an existential angst can be part of dialogue where takenfor-granted realities become optional choices. Another impact is the continual orientation to others for the rest of one’s life once there is such a moment of transgredience. Consider Bakhtin’s discussion of confessional self-accounting and how one feels a continual incompleteness as one is always oriented to others even when others are not present24. The result is a projection of self into an other of some sort in order to enrich one’s existence, but the other may not be temporally present. Humans who experience an other are always in a state of potential risk of the degradation of traditions that are held dear and always orienting toward a ubiquitous presence. Bakhtin thereby enriches psychology by highlighting the aesthetic quality of human experience. The aesthetic activity of authoring a self is a boundary phenomenon that happens in an I–other encounter because an “aesthetic event can take place only where there are two participants present; it presupposes two noncoinciding consciousnesses.”25 Psychological tensions and dynamics are reframed by Bakhtin in an experiential social consciousnesses where people must simultaneously engage another and so the tension experienced in dialogue becomes a generative experience that removes one from enslavement to the “open unitary event of being.” One is able to the escape the prison of a singular inner life through dialogue with others where one does not look in “faith or hope”26 to other but simply receives the other in sympathetic co-experience. Dialogue involves a creative psychological experience in the moment when the collapse of traditions leaves one inquiring about what they mean and an orientation to an experienced need to answer for oneself. Such an experienced demand is to “live in such a way that every given moment of your life would be both the consummating, final moment and, at the same time, the initial moment of a new life.”27 The result is that dialogue enriches

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psychology by enabling an organization and reorganization of the fabric of what one takes to be real as one “creates a new vision of the world.”28 Challenge of Phenomenological Heritage Critical and cultural psychologists who criticized mainstream psychology for its Cartesian and Kantian individualist overtones find a friend in Bakhtin. His later work on language29 fits well with late modern critiques of individualism but his early work on experience could seemingly run the risk of bypassing this rich embeddedness. Craig Brandist, for example, notes how Bakhtin’s early work is a phenomenological analysis of the various types of relations between the author and the hero. It is this orientation to phenomenology that raises a challenge that Bakhtin runs the risk of bypassing the embeddedness of human psychology and Bernard-Donals had picked up on the same orientation to phenomenology nearly a decade earlier. As we hinted at above, Bakhtin thereby takes up a discussion of language in relation to phenomenology by working on how the mind must have relation to things outside of it. Bernard-Donals reviews how Bakhtin explores the way that humans engage with language, which is populated by ideological material but remains unconvinced that Bakhtin completely avoids the individualism of phenomenology. The kind of evidence that supports this doubt is the emphasis that we see in Bakhtin’s discussion of how humans are non-coincident because of their unique location in times and space with different languages. Consider Bakhtin’s discussion of how people can see what others do not because different language backgrounds and how this difference is emphasized without an equal emphasis on the crossing of boundaries or acknowledgment of places where sympathetic co-experience becomes impossible. Benard-Donals thereby points out how Bakhtin’s work on language can be read as mixed with a phenomenological discussion about an underlying category of consciousness that Husserl sought to explicate. That is, Brandist and Bernard-Donals both recognize that Bakhtin is engaging in phenomenological description of intersubjectivity via discursive forms but could seemingly start from the uniqueness of the individualist subject. Consider further how psychological individualism is identified by Brandist as a quality inherent in Bakhtin’s implicit reliance on Neo-Kantians and the former argues that scholars on the topic of sympathy provided something like a methodological underpinning for sympathetic co-experience. Cohen and others (e.g., Natorp) argued for a very Kantian notion that the object of cognition is produced by the subject.30 The I–other of Cohen’s Neo-Kantian approach characterizes aesthetic contemplation in a way where an effort to get away from materialism is so strong that one is lead to another extreme where all matter is mind.31 Bakhtin seems aware of this problem as he attempts to

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give a greater role for the tension between mind and world by reviving a kind of Marxist materialism discarded by Neo-Kantians.32 His work on language could be read to implicitly flirt with the split of the pneumonal from the phenomenal where Bakhtin discusses how utterances and aesthetic moments are different phenomenological events. There is a lingering potential for radical otherness in Bakhtin that he does not seem to fully address and it leaves readers potentially entrapped in an individualistic mode. In other words, Bakhtin enriches psychology with an additional discussion of experience but could seemingly retain, “in modified form, the Neo-Kantian dichotomy between being and validity, fact and value.”33 JAMES: RADICAL EMPIRICISM While Bakhtin is a strong author in his own right, the potential tension above can be addressed from an unrelated source: William James. James shares a remarkable similarity to Bakhtin’s struggle with individualist thrust of European philosophy, but his discussion of experience illuminates the kind of break from individualist Kantianism that Bakhtin was attempting to address. Reading Bakhtin and James together contributes to a generative criticism of Kant’s legacy. In Bakhtin’s elaboration on the novel, discourse theory, and the act of writing, the unity of the subject and the totality of being are disputed through a philosophical image of the world that, after him, has been called “dialogism.” Bakhtin’s image of the world is implicit, indirectly expressed in dialogue with the artistic images of the world he took as models and examples. It is reasonable to hold that Bakhtin uses the idea of the nascent, taken from Rabelais’s image of the cyclic growing-and-dying, elevating toward soul and forms, and descending into body and decomposition of matter, as a key to understanding creative composition in literature and cultural memory. Likewise, he uses the polyphonic image of the word in Dostoevsky as an insight to understanding death in authorship and otherness in subjectivity, at its discursive levels. A couple of decades before James, in his last period from 1902 to 1910, worked out explicitly a philosophical image of the world radically marked by an ontology of experience around the relationships among becoming, otherness, and subjectivity at its psychological levels. In his last works, James called this image “pluralism.” We do not suggest that dialogism and pluralism are the same, but some general features regarding the radical place that otherness has in both perspectives enable us to re-read and size the value of Bakhtin’s legacy in psychology. Bakhtin’s most radical influence in critical psychology at least is about a contemporary challenge, which is until today to develop the ontological consequences of a theory, different from James’s and Bergson’s, in which experience is conceived as reply.34

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Ontology of Experience The most cited idea of James, that of the stream of thought, although from his early or psychological period,35 contains in a nutshell part of James’s later philosophy, centered around the problem of meaning in experience. His latest works can be regarded as a new development of the idea of the stream, not focus in a psychological dimension but its implications for a wider theory of experience at the same time materialistic and spiritual: “the stream of thinking . . . is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing.”36 Life and voice embody thinking; they are the materials out of which conscious and individuating experience are composed.37 In Does “Consciousness” Exist? and in A World of Pure Experience, James sketches a philosophy that accounts for knowledge and consciousness from an ontological conception of experience as the everchanging and multifarious field of existence,38 in opposition to an epistemological justification of experience in terms of supra-empirical forms endowed with universality, unity, and impassivity. James introduces his ontology of experience through the philosophical problem of knowledge, which has been put at the center precisely by those philosophies with which James is polemizing, the legacy of classical empiricism and transcendental idealism. Thus, James focuses on the problem of the subject, the presumed subject of knowledge as a unitary consciousness, and the subjective quality of experience. Kant’s legacy has been a radical dualism, by which the reality of the subject is irreducible to that of the empirical object because mind is already required for any experience to take place. The distinctions of spirit/matter and mind/body are pushed to the extreme, shifting the problem of diverse modes of entities into the duplicity between the contingency and partiality of all empirical existence and the universal and unitary “counter-factual fact” of the epistemological condition of any experience. James opposes to this radical dualism a “radical empiricism” that, as a first meaning of this technical name, reduces the subject to the same material—experienced changes and relations—from which things in the world are made, and, in this sense, it is kind of materialism.39 Consciousness, according to James, is a fictitious entity that has been constructed by analysis and abstraction, postulating that there is an entity of which we have no experience but without which there would be no ordered experience of any object (traditionally understood through the model of a complete, stable, and distinct thing). In contrast, James proposes that thoughts and things exist, both in the basic mode of relations and transitions among other thoughts and things, especially temporal relations (of continuity) that make each thought and thing a part of an open subprocess. As such, one undivided experience can be in two places, within two different fields, at the same

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time, of this numerically single experience is a member of diverse processes that can be followed from different perspectives. James’s theory unavoidably reminds Heraclitus: “The one self-identical thing has so many relations to the rest of experience that you can take it in disparate systems of associations, and treat it as belonging with opposite contexts.”40 Within this philosophy, experience essentially involves multiple perspectives that contextualize each piece of experience into different series or stories drawn at different scales and upon different interests. James uses the example of being in a room, eventually perceiving objects furnishing it. The situation is a plexus of relations crossed by different perspectives, the perspective of the first person being one relevant perspective but never the only one. The “physical” history of a building could be one series and the “psychological” history of a living body could be another perspective on the concrete experience of somebody in a building, much beyond the objective actuality of the building and the conscious elaboration of the given person. Experience in this specific sense, then, is neither psychological nor physical, but ontological; these psychological and physical accounts are series or perspectives overlapping or intersecting in a concrete conjuncture of existence, within the vast and open interlacing of processes or transitions. Moreover, thoughts and things, as processes, are not different realities; even one single part of a reticulated experience can be a thought at one moment and a thing at another, as a function of whether it is taken as member of one subprocess or another; in one case is the series of experienced changes of a knowing body approached from within, and in the other is the series of changes of a known body from the external perspective of other knowing bodies. The concept of consciousness is constructed by isolating the perspective of a knowing entity and distilling its regular and dominant ways of achieving true perceptual and conceptual knowledge, thus reworking the concept of mind into the concept of a subject that “attenuates itself to a thoroughly ghostly condition, being only a name for the fact that the ‘content’ of experience is known.”41 Ultimately this fictitious concept derives, according to James, from the experienced materiality of breathing. “The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breath’ which actually accompany them.”42 In fact, according to James, the notions of the subject as the “I” of the “I think” or the transcendental ego and of subjectivity as a distinct sphere of reality opposed to objectivity are illusions that result from a double of operation. First there is a subtraction of reality: making abstraction of all the content of experience, which is to analytically remove all that was an integral part of the concrete relation of knowledge among particular entities in transit, so that we get the idea of the living spontaneity on the part of the knower. And then, adding back this idea, in its “as-suchness” 43 to a just dismembered reality, we make spontaneity

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itself a substratum of any experience, movement, and living environment, such that this substratum is a transcendental subject, even if understood as a quasi-transcendental disposition of subjectivity, as in Hume or Deleuze. This “substantiation trick” yields the illusion of consciousness, an entity of which there is no possible experience (as object), postulated to be the condition of all experience (all possible objects), therefore assumed as necessarily fix and common among knowers and across contents. For James this spontaneity is not the principle of life (Psykhe) but the last recognizable aspect of a moving and living process embodied in an environment, after we have isolated one perspective among the multiple that give shape, texture, and rhythm to each experience. Living processes, always fringed by otherness, move and thus change with very different degrees of spontaneity, most often in regular and regulated ways, if not severely limited by otherness in nature. Again, the perspective of the first person has a place, but not the place of the whole, only of one of the multiple parts of experience. In the second essay, having already suggested that “consciousness” must be redescribed in terms of experiences, the main points of his theory of experience are explained directly in ontological grounds. Radical empiricism is not only the opposite of dualism and idealism, but for the same reason is also opposite to classical empiricism in the way of Hume, who assumed that the elements of experience are disconnected to each other and that the relationships are supplied over experience by the spontaneity of memory and imagination, habit, and fiction. Indeed, experience is both for Hume and Kant a chaotic manifold of impressions that, because of its contingency, would never guarantee the universality and necessity of true knowledge. Kantian strategies converge in searching in reason, mind, or consciousness, as opposed to experience, for a principle underlying true knowledge. Hume’s movement was to abandon the ideal of true knowledge, but he still conceived experience as a collection of parts with no intrinsic relations. What is “radical” in radical empiricism, marking a second, more fine-grained meaning of this term, is the assumption that we do not experience only particular terms but also their relations;44 that we experience different terms already in a plexus of felt relations; and, thus, that relations are experiences.45 There is no extra-empirical or trans-experiential46 source of order or relations in experience, since it includes everything we call reality, either objective or subjective. To put one of the main definitions of radical empiricism as a paraphrasis of Hegel: Everything real is experience, and every experience is real. We do not have an experience of, say, a state of things A and then of another state B, but only the transition from A to B. Experience is not about fixed and complete objects, but of processes and tendencies.47 Experience is not, like consciousness, the condition of the presentation of things, but the general name we give to situated and thus unrepeatable events at the same time passing and emerging, existing not in

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the single dimension of actuality but in the multiple relations with that which is already gone and that which is yet to be born. Experience is experience of change and continuity,48 not of states and categorically clearcut presences (phenomena). To know a definite object means only a possible experience, an eventual and anticipated termination of a movement tendency, to which conjunctive transitions would lead if sufficiently prolonged.49 So we do feel relations among aspects of experience, and these transitive feeling, themselves the bases of abstract relations, are the main building blocks of experience.50 According to James we can call the units of experience “thoughts,” insofar as we mean subprocesses, not states, framed in a web of other processes, usually undifferentiated from “things” experienced and basically consisting in a feeling of tendency hard to put in words. Thoughts are understood here as “thought-paths” within the temporal flux of life.51 James argues, as a core implication of this ontology of experience, that the felt relations articulating experience can be either conjunctive or disjunctive, that is, can generate unity out of parts, or parts out of unity. Association of ideas is not only based on similarity but also on difference, so that knowledge is not a deduction from the postulated unity of the subject but an open creeping of experience involving varying degrees of differentiation and identity at different moments. A third, more specific, meaning of “radical empiricism” is to assume, in contrast to rationalism, that conjunction and disjunction are equally valid modes of relation in experience, as well as convergence and divergence, and that, if conjunction is not more primordial or ontologically superior to disjunction, then at the summit of generalization within our conceptual system there would be no unity or identity, but a bifurcation at the top among identity and difference. Which is the same to say that at the top there is difference rather than identity. As a consequence, in radical empiricism there is neither unitary consciousness, in the sense of the unexperienced subject of experience, nor unitary objective world, in the sense of a total space containing things; there are, instead, fragmentary and transitional experiences that can be approached from its subjective or its objective aspects, phases, or perspectives. As experience, existence is not merely actuality, positive existence, but becoming: it includes in the passing present both past changes embodied in the active tendencies of movement and future lines of continuation, eventually associating a particular stream of changes to a specific goal. Even if some perspectives or lines of transformation may be oriented by goals, it is not essential that these are actually achieved. Often, we are satisfied with the initiation of a movement and then, before is it fully produced, shift by another movement tendency. Reality is articulated out of virtual movements, not actual states, that clash and intersect in convergent and divergent forms. Any perspective that takes place in reality is of the nature of a tendency among multiple other lines of continuation of movement. Because of this

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virtual dynamism and contingency, becoming is always a particular and a particularizing experience; it is a drift. “One moment of it proliferates into the next by transitions which, whether conjunctive or disjunctive, continue the experiential tissue.”52 Each piece of experience is not an isolated atom but a cross-border of multiple tendencies. Knowledge and consciousness, in this philosophy, are not renounced but, on the contrary, they are given a specific role within experience that can be accounted for empirically. On the one hand, knowledge is possible only as a fallible, local, and ever-changing body of particular attempts to draw abstract series systems or narrative lines to understand a moving reality and thus be able to manipulate or have a degree of control over the change processes. The cost of this philosophy is not skepticism, but a radical weakening of the concept of truth.53 On the other hand, consciousness is neither the foundation of absolute knowledge nor the mysterious qualia of experience, but the natural result of particular attempts to interlace lines of movements of different aspects, scales, and rhythms of the moving reality on the part of living beings; if endowed with complex nervous systems enabling the integration of experience from the perspective of a self, these attempts can be described as the formation and elaboration of psychological processes, and within these, the self-conscious individual experience is not an absurd but an adaptive tendency, a possibility to be approached at same moments and left aside at others. Although in Does “Consciousness” Exist? James is emphatic about the need to abandon the philosophical conception of consciousness,54 this does not mean that consciousness becomes a banned word or that its essence as a function of knowing has no part in reality. Experience is much more than conscious experience, but the latter is a special form of experience working out an internal perspective across multiple external relations that has an important value in some forms of becoming in which the individuation of experience relevant, as in many human activities. For humans, according to James, experience is fundamentally divided in internal and external perspectives, but the ontological process within which psychological subprocesses intermediate consists in external relations, in relations of real otherness, in becoming altered, moved, changed. Overall, knowledge and consciousness are dethroned and recuperated under a limited form in a world of particularizing and individuating tendencies to make changes converge and diverge at different rates. Experience as Transgredience In his latest works, James deepens the idea that there is no substantial and fixed totality, neither subjective nor objective, in a world of felt relations forming contingent reticulations, collections and collisions. In A Pluralistic Universe, James explicates the philosophical image of the world implied in

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his ontology of experience. In a crucial connection, he opposes radical empiricism to any ontology of the absolute, criticizing Hegelian developments that include change and difference within a reworked conception of the subject as essentially identical to the object from the perspective of a completely unfolded reality. James recognizes that Hegel offered a dynamic image of the world, in which being is mediated by becoming, but again the whole has a primacy over the parts. Ultimately, for Hegel, being must overcome becoming. James tries to figure out a sort of dialectics without overcoming, a dynamic image of the world moving at the same time toward multiple, eventually irreconcilable directions, and giving form to reticulated and concatenated subprocesses that may not be subsumed to an overall, complete, or total process. The world is an open plurality: an interwoven but not (yet) unified multiplicity. Already in his previous essay on pragmatism, applying this “method” to metaphysical problems, he argued that the most reasonable approach to the classical problem of “the one and the many,” is not to impose the principle of unity or identity to experience, but to attend to variation and opposition, because there is no empirical evidence of such an encompassing totality. As a matter of fact, “the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance; and transcendental idealism”55 assumes a sort of unity of purpose in reality. The dominant perspective in philosophy, as far as it has been dominated by the principle of identity, is the quest for the unity of the world.56 If disjunctive relations were taken as important as conjunctive ones, if oneness and manyness were spoken about as ontologically coordinate, then philosophy would have equally “celebrated the world disunion.”57 Hence, a fourth and most radical aspect of “radical empiricism” is the hypothesis that the world is then not one, but an unbound multiplicity. At this point, James is arguing against monism, not taking back an already abandoned dualism, but envisioning an empirical pluralism.58 Reality is composed by particular cases, not general forms. This means that, within this ontology of experience, entities should be approached with a grammar of “each” instead of “all” experience.59 The theoretical knot of A Pluralistic Universe is to argue that a radical approach to felt, phenomenal, and lived experience—or, to use James’s preferred expression taken from Bergson, to “pure” experience—must be a theory of alteration. In this book, James dedicates a specific chapter to Bergson, manly to adhere to his critique of intellectualism and to his ontology of the continuing change.60 As different from Bergson, though, James explains alteration as becoming other and being other to oneself, borrowing “dialectical” terms that put the external dimension of interaction at different compositional scales, as the source of variation and difference. This is more in line with the Bakhtin, who could masterly employ and displace dialectical jargon to criticize the idealist notion of the a priori unity of consciousness,

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developing theories of how language transforms subjectivity at historical and psychological levels of becoming. James’s main contribution in this context is probably to offer a philosophical image of a world heterogeneous and open, and to suggest conceptual paths to think that experiences are the elements of reality such that each contains its negation and its transcendence: “all real units of experience overlap”61 because “my present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more.”62 In a continuous chain of changes, each experience is its own other (is in transit to being another), engenders otherness (gives birth to the new) and is constituted by alterity (becomes affected by other experiences). Pluralism is the aesthetic and political, if not ethical and religious, image of the world implied by radical empiricism, whose radicalism is sharpened in opposition to (pre- and postKantian) absolutism, for which “nothing is its only alternative.”63 CONCLUDING REMARKS We have discussed the legacy of Bakhtin in psychology not as an independent philological heritage, but as a dialoging voice whose messages we receive can be read in a wider intertextual field. Today, Bakhtin’s legacy in cultural psychology has important resonances with process philosophy, such as that of James, accentuating the former distance from individualist themes. Although in different cultural and geopolitical contexts, and despite the fact that Bakhtin never quotes James, these two authors share some relevant positions within the decline of European classical philosophy of consciousness, one in the Russian sociohistorical drift toward a dialogical image of the world, and the other in the American pragmatist drift toward a pluralist image of the world. Both Bakhtin and James valued philosophy for the image of the world it can offer to others and for its possible effects on society. Bakhtin discussed the artistic images of the world that made Rabelais and Dostoevsky great authors, with a persistent and evolving perspective that makes him the author of a philosophical image of the world whose hallmark is a divided and moving language, the nonidentity that constitutes discursive life. James developed his own philosophical image of the world more explicitly, offering arguments and explanations that we miss at some points in Bakhtin, but the most general idea of a divided and moving reality, the nonidentity constituting experience. Even considering important theoretical differences between these two authors, there are some conceptual similarities. Both thoughts and utterances, as the units of experience and of discourse, respectively, are problematic units that sink their roots into other units, concatenating with other units, and envelop other units. Both are conceived as cross-border processes instead of substantial terms. Thoughts are shaped by unifying and diversifying tendencies around

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the bodily nucleus of experience, and utterances are shaped by centripetal and centrifugal forces of discourse. Finally, in James and Bakhtin, the perspective of the first person is considered, but not as the primordial perspective but as a possibility and a tendency always in relations with other perspectives. If, in his arguments about experiences as both disappearing into the past and emerging to the future, James emphasizes the perspective of the second, Bakhtin in his latest works stresses the perspective of the third. Already in his earlier works Bakhtin analyzes consciousness in a way that implies the constitutive role of the other, as well as the essential capacity to take a perspective that exceeds one’s individual consciousness in terms of transgredience. According to our discussion, charges that Bakhtin remains trapped in phenomenological individualism are misleading because they fail to see how radical Bakhtin’s analysis of consciousness is, detaching it from individuality and at the same time giving individual consciousness its specific place within the open process of refraction of reality. We have suggested a narrative in which Bakhtin may be grouped with James, and located as a third step in the unfolding of a theoretical emphasis in alterity and within an epochal shift away from the philosophy of consciousness and toward a philosophy of the nonidentical, of otherness. Bakhtin’s contribution toward experience as discursive reply can be retrospectively thought of as an elaboration on top of Bergson and James, a next step after their concept of experience as a “preverbal” flow of becoming, so to speak. However, it is important to stress the difference introduced by Bakhtin in developing a theory of language based on this non-subordination of difference to identity. Language becomes, with Bakhtin, the field of experience in which unifying and diversifying forces meet around the production of images through which reality can be troubled. As such, language is conceived not as an abstraction from life but as a psychological and culturally embodied milieu of a “post-verbal” flux of becoming, implying that the technical and dialogical articulation of experience is not secondary to human experience but its very condition. Our narrative is not meant to be truer than others but to stress that Bakhtin’s legacy in psychology is precisely to question the naive and dominant assertion of the coincidence between subjectivity and individual mental states. The openness, multiplicity, and variation that characterize the realms of social practices mediated by language, including inner discourse, would then be further explained by the dialogic enveloping of otherness.64 NOTES 1. Ken Gergen, An Invitation to Social Construction (3rd Edition) (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press, 2015), 94–103.

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2. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4. 3. James Cresswell, Brady Wagoner, and Andrés Haye, “Rediscovering James’ Principles of Psychology”, New Ideas in Psychology 46 (2017): 1. 4. Morton Hunt, The Story of Psychology (2nd Edition) (New York: Random House, 2007), 598. 5. Ken Gergen, “The Social Constructionist Movement in Modern Psychology,” American Psychologist 40 (1985): 266. 6. We should note that there were a number of theorists working on this problem including Jonathon Shotter, Michael Billig, Jonathan Potter, and Derek Edwards. We selected one figure who addresses common themes. 7. Gergen, The Social Constructionist Movement, 272. 8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, trans. V. Liapunov and K. Brostrom. Edited by M. Holquist and V. Liapunov (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), 13. 9. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 112, emphasis added. 10. Ibid., 109–110. 11. Ibid., 40. 12. Ibid., 110. 13. James Cresswell, “Being Faithful to Ourselves: Bakhtin and a Potential Postmodern Psychology of Self,” Culture and Psychology 17 (2011): 462. 14. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 47. 15. Ibid., 55. 16. Ibid., 111. 17. Ibid., 31. 18. Ibid., 200. 19. Ibid., 48. 20. Ibid., 153. 21. Ibid., 100. 22. Ibid., 60. 23. Ibid., 15–16. 24. Ibid., 142. 25. Ibid., 22. 26. Ibid., 131. 27. Ibid., 122. 28. Ibid., 190. 29. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981): 266. 30. Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 16. 31. Michael Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 20. 32. Bernard-Donals, Mikhail Bakhtin, 22. 33. Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle, 36.

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34. Andrés Haye and Antonia Larraín, “Discursively constituted experience, or experience as reply,” Theory & Psychology 23 (2013): 131. 35. William James, The principles of psychology (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1890), 224–290. 36. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), 37. 37. See the discussion on the “compounding” of experience, against both atomistic and intellectualistic philosophies, in William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1909), 179–212. James criticizes there the notion of consciousness as the compounding of mental or cognitive states, and converges with Bergson introducing the notions of change and continuity in experience, and as experience. 38. James, A Pluralistic, 21. 39. James. Essays, 36. 40. Ibid., 12–13. 41. Ibid., 2. 42. Ibid., 37. 43. See specially James’s criticism of the use of “as such” in philosophical absolutism in his lectures of 1909 in James, A Pluralistic, 46. 44. See details about the distinction and relationship between things and relations in The Thing and Its Relations, originally published in 1905 in the same series of papers we are discussing. See James, Essays, 92–122. 45. Ibid., 71. 46. Ibid., 43. 47. See discussion of the classical problem of objective reference in terms of the virtual and transitional nature of knowledge in a world of movement: Ibid., 67–75. 48. Ibid., 48. 49. Ibid., 53. 50. Andrés Haye and Manuel Torres-Sahli, “To Feel Is to Know Relations: James’ Concept of Stream of Thought and Contemporary Studies on Procedural Knowledge,” New Ideas in Psychology, 46 (2017): 46. 51. See specially the discussion about the minima of experience as vehicles of continuity later in his lectures of 1909. See James, A Pluralistic, 284. 52. James, Essays, 87. 53. William James, Pragmatism, and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth (Cleveland, OH: The World Publishing Company, 1955), 131 ff. 54. James, Essays, 3. 55. James, Pragmatism, 97. 56. Ibid., 90. 57. Ibid., 95. 58. Ibid., 107–108. 59. James, A Pluralistic, 34. 60. Ibid., 214–264. 61. Ibid., 287. 62. Ibid., 288. 63. Ibid., 36.

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64. Antonia Larraín and Andrés Haye, “A Dialogical Conception of Concepts,” Theory & Psychology, 21 (2012): 3.

WORK CITED Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and answerability: Early philosophical Essays, trans. V. Liapunov & K. Brostrom. Edited by M. Holquist & V. Liapunov. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 1990. ———. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. (1981). ———. Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington, IA: Indiana University Press. 1984. ———. Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. 1984. Bernard-Donals, Michael. Mikhail Bakhtin: Between Phenomenology and Marxism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994. Brandist, Craig. The Bakhtin Circle. London: Pluto Press. 2002. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1990. Cresswell, James “Being Faithful to Ourselves: Bakhtin and a Potential Postmodern Psychology of Self.” Culture and Psychology 17 (2011): 462. Cresswell, James, Wagoner, Brady, & Haye, Andrés. “Rediscovering James’ Principles of Psychology,” New Ideas in Psychology 46 (2017): 1. Gergen, Ken. “The Social Constructionist Movement in Modern Psychology.” American Psychologist 40 (1985): 266. ———. An Invitation to Social Construction (3rd Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Press. 2015. Haye, Andrés and Larraín, Antonia. Discursively Constituted Experience, or Experience as Reply: A Rejoinder. Theory & Psychology, 23 (1), (2013): 131–139. DOI: 10.1177/0959354312465484. Haye, Andrés and Torres-Sahli, Manuel. To Feel Is to Know Relations: James’ Concept of Stream of Thought and Contemporary Studies on Procedural Knowledge. New Ideas in Psychology, 46 (2017), 46–55. DOI: 10.1016/j.newideapsych.2017.02.001. Hermans, Hubert and Kempen, Harry. The Dialogical self. London: Academic Press. 1993. Hunt, Morton. The Story of Psychology (2nd Edition). New York: Random House. 2007. James, William. The principles of psychology. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1890. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/theprinciplesofp01jameuoft. ———. “A World of Pure Experience.” In Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912 (1904): 39–91. ———. Pragmatism, and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1955 (1907 and 1909). ———. A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920 (1909). Larraín, Antonia and Haye, Andrés. The Discursive Nature of Inner Speech. Theory & Psychology, 21 (1), (2012): 3–22. DOI: 10.1177/0959354311423864.

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Mead, George Herbery. Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Behaviourist. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934. Shweder, Richard. Thinking through Cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1991. Wundt, Wilhelm. Elements of Folk Psychology. London: FB & Co. 2015.

Appendix

Figure 1  Orel, the city where Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born in 1895. Orel is located about 220 miles southeast of Moscow. At the time of Bakhtin, it was fairly large provincial town with a population of about 100,000 people. This is the main street as it looked at the beginning of twentieth century. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

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Figure 2  Bakhtin’s father, Mikhail Fedorovich Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s grandfather had been a very successful businessman who founded a commercial bank in Orel. Bakhtin’s father worked in various branches of this bank as a manager. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

Figure 3  Bakhtin’s mother, Varvara Zakharovna Bakhtin. She was a remarkable woman with a great heart who took care of a large family (two boys and four girls, one of whom was adopted). Bakhtin loved her dearly all his life, but the circumstances were such that he was not able to visit his family often, especially after his exile. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

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Figure 4  Bakhtin’s family. The family belonged to the old Russian nobility dating back to the fourteenth century. Bakhtin preferred not to talk about the 1917 Revolution since possible punishments for such an “offence” included the exile or even the death penalty. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

Figure 5  Bakhtin’s older brother, Nikolay. He did not accept the Revolution of 1917 and fought against it. In 1920, he had to flee Russia and finally settled in Paris. After defending his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge, Nikolay became a professor of classics at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. He died in 1950 when he was only 56 years old, from an unexpected heart attack. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

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Figure 6  A copy of Bakhtin’s prison sentence. It reads: “Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich is sentenced to the labor camp for 5 years, starting from the day of this sentence. July 22, 1929.” Bakhtin was initially sentenced to ten years in the labor camps, but thanks to the interference of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Minister of Education in the Bolshevik government, who read Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky, the harsh sentence was changed to five years of exile—in Kazakhstan, more than 1200 miles from Moscow. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

Figure 7  Bakhtin and the students of Saransk Pedagogical Institute, 1955. (Bakhtin is the third from the left, in the third row.) After his return from exile, Bakhtin was not allowed to live and work in a major city like Moscow or Leningrad. He was invited to work in Saransk—a beautiful old city (founded in 1641) located about 500 miles southeast of Moscow, with a population of about 150,000 at the time of Bakhtin. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

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Figure 8  The house in Saransk where the Bakhtins lived in a small apartment from 1945 to 1968. For fifty years Mikhail Bakhtin was married to Elena Okolovich—his wife, his love, his angel, and his best friend. They two lived in this house (they never had children) until Bakhtin was allowed to return to Moscow. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

Figure 9  Bakhtin in February 1973, during his conversations with Victor Duvakin. In 1969, due to the efforts of the daughter of Yuri Andropov (the head of the KGB) Irina Yurievna, Bakhtin was finally allowed to move to Moscow. Andropov’s daughter, who was one of the acquisition editors for the journal Molodaya gvardiya, approached her father and asked him to assist Bakhtin—her former teacher whom she adored. Andropov, who also wrote poetry and was an intelligent man, was very supportive of literary masters and their living situation in the USSR, and he responded positively. Shortly thereafter, Bakhtin was placed in a prestigious Kremlin clinic and given the chance to buy his own apartment in Moscow. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

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Figure 10  Bakhtin in his apartment, 1974. His wife, Elena Okolovich Bakhtin, died in 1971. After her death, Bakhtin lived in his apartment alone, with his cat. As his health was slowly deteriorating, he needed the help of a housekeeper, Galina Timofeevna, who moved in and occupied the second bedroom. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

Figure 11  Bakhtin during an interview with Victor Duvakin. In 1973, Duvakin, a former professor of Moscow State University, conducted a series of twelve-hour-long interviews with Bakhtin. The result of these interviews is a unique phono-document that has recently been edited and translated to English by Slav N. Gratchev and Margarita Marinova, which will be published in the United States in 2019 under the title Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews 1973. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

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Figure 12  The photo of Bakhtin’s grave. It reads: “Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895– 1980); Elena Alexandrovna Bakhtina (1900–1971).” Bakhtin and his wife were buried in the Vvedenskoye cemetery, parcel #21. (This beautiful historic cemetery in Moscow was founded by Catherine the Great in 1771. During that time there was an epidemic of plague, and Catherine issued an order to bury the dead outside city limits. The cemetery was first called the German cemetery as the majority of those who were buried there were Germans or other Europeans who populated the area nearby at that time. Later it was renamed Vvedenskoye.) Bakhtin, who was known to be a little superstitious, thought it was symbolic that the house number where he purchased his apartment was also #21 and the apartment number was #42: 21 doubled. Scientific Library, Moscow State University.

Index

Page references for figures are italicized. AAIW. See Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Abad Ojuel, Antonio, 221, 230n18, 283 “About Mayakovsky.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail Abraham and Isaac, story of, 282–84, 286–89 act, philosophy of the, 201–2, 213n11, 245–46; performed, 271, 283 addressivity, 7 Adorno, Theodor, 172 aesthetics, vii, xiv, 3–4, 32, 41, 46–47, 137, 140, 200, 244, 263, 317, 319–20; aesthetic shaping, 286, 287; carnivalesque, xi; premodern, 145, 149n48 Agamemnon and Iphigenia, story of, 282–83, 286–87, 298 Akari. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Akhmatova, Anna, 67 Alemán, Mateo, Guzmán de Alfarache, 24, 122 Alexander II, 71 Alexandra, Empress of Russia, 65

Alice. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (AAIW), translations of, 63–77. See also characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Alix of Hesse. See Alexandra, Empress of Russia Allegro (pseudonym). See Solovyova, Poliksena Alyabyev Alexander, 75 Amadís de Gaula, 11, 22, 24, 89, 91, 98 Ambrosiani, Per, 70 amor fati, 208 Anastasia Nikolaevna, Grand Duchess, 66 Anderson, Michael, 258, 263, 268 Andropov, Yuri, 339 Ania. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland answerability, xii, 3, 85, 88, 183, 201–2, 244, 281, 304; two-sided, 283, 286, 290 Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 8, 11–12, 25 Aquinas, Thomas, 141

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Index

Arbacakova, Liubov’, 71, 78 architectonic, 46, 185, 201–2, 210 Arcipreste de Hita, 105 Arendt, Hannah, 215n53 Aristotle, 8, 204, 212n5 Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. See Bakhtin, Mikhail Asensio, José María, 105 Ashkenazi, Vladimir, Azov, V. (pseudonym), 67 Athens, 295, 299 Austen, Jane, 8, 13, 26 Auster, Paul, City of Glass, 167 authorship, 16, 171, 179–80, 182–83, 185, 200, 320, 322. See also disputed texts auto-criticism of discourse, 26, 160, 221, 226, 228 Avellaneda, Alonso Fernández de, 158, 160, 166, 171, 226 Azov, V. (pseudonym). See Ashkenazi, Vladimir Baggini, Julian, 263, 270 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 338–40; “About Mayakovsky,” viii, 42, 47–53; Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, vii, xii, 41, 57, 85, 199–200; “The Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” xi–xii, 180, 183, 200, 281; “Concluding Remarks,” 10, 12; The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 124; “Discourse in the Novel” (“Slovo v romane”), viii, xi, 20, 25, 29–30, 42– 44, 47, 50, 89, 91–92, 158–60, 163, 180, 187; “Epic and Novel” (“Epos i roman”), 8, 47, 89, 301; “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel (“Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane”), 10, 12, 20, 47, 223–24; “From the Prehistory of

Novelistic Discourse (“Iz predystorii romannogo slovo”), 10, 47–48; Goethe and the Bildungsroman, book on, 25, 47, 58n33; Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 58n32, 340; M.M. Bakhtin: Besedy s V. D. Duvakinym, 58n32; “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art,” 18, 284; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, 12, 88; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo), xiv, 12, 25, 42, 159, 307; Rabelais and His World, x, 4, 11, 25, 41, 47, 50, 115, 137–40, 143, 158–59, 161, 166, 237, 303–4; Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, xiii; Toward a Philosophy of the Act, xii–xiii, 46, 55, 58n25, 200–1, 265, 281; “The Two Stylistic Lines of Development in the European Novel,” 7, 20–21, 23–24. See also Medvedev, P. N.; Voloshinov, V. N.; theory of the novel, Bakhtin’s Bakhtin, Mikhail Fedorovich, 336 Bakhtin, Nikolay, 337 Bakhtin, Varvara Zakharovna, 336 Bakhtina, Elena Aexandrovna. See Bakhtin, Elena Okolovich Bakhtin Circle, 4, 18, 90 Bakhtin’s family, 337 Bakhtin’s grave, 341 Bakhtin’s prison sentence, 338 Balmont, Konstantin, 75 Balzac, Honoré de, 8, 11 Baroque novel, 11, 22, 24 Barrera, Cayetano Alberto de la, 105 Bataillon, Marcel, 122–23 Batrachomyomachia (The Battle of Frogs and Mice), 76 Baumeister, Roy F., 258, 270, 272n7 Bautista Morales, Juan, 126 Beckett, Samuel, 172, 174n1, 238

Index

Being-as-event, 201–204, 240, 265, 305 Bely, Andrei, 66 Bergson, Henri, 322, 328, 330 Bernard-Donals, 321 Bildungsroman, 19–20, 47 Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). See Iñárritu, Alejandro Blok, Alexander, 42, 57, 75 Boccaccio, Gioivanni, 14 bodily lower stratum, 14, 121, 159–60, 163 body politic, 116, 120, 122, 128 Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, 12 Boileau, Nicholas, 85 Bolsheviks, 65, 71, 87, 93n7 book in the modern sense, 8, 17, 89 Booth, Wayne C., 272–73n10 Boratynskaya, Ekaterina, 68, 75 Borrero Echevarría, Esteban, 100; AlrededordelQuijote, 107–8 Borromeo, Carlo, 146 Boscán, Juan, 105 Brandist, Craig, 321 Branham, R. Bracht, 12, 21 Bruner, Jerome, 317 Bulgakov, Mikhail, White Guard, 69 Burgos, Elizabeth, 183 Burke, Kenneth, 215n48 Buscón, El. See Quevedo, Francisco de cabezudo, 120–21, 227 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 105 Calvin, Jean, 142–44, 146, 150n69 canon, 8, 15, 138, 141–42, 171, 173 Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio, 106 Caracciolo, Marco, 257, 261, 266 Carola, character from “Pasión de historia,” 186–92 Carnestolendas (Shrovetide), 117–18 carnival, vii, xiv, 3, 4, 6, 10–15, 17, 23, 41–42, 50, 55, 89, 115–18, 120–25, 130n5, 139, 146, 147n66,

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159, 170, 192, 222, 295–96, 301–5, 307, 310–11. See also carnivalesque; carnivalization; grotesque realism carnivalesque, x–xi, xiv, 6, 15, 41–42, 55, 115–16, 123–25, 127, 129–30, 158, 223–25, 296, 301–2, 304, 307, 310–11; images, 160 carnivalesque-grotesque realism. See grotesque realism carnivalization, xii, 31, 50, 59n49 Carroll, Lewis (Charles L. Dodgson), 63–77; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, viii, ix, 63–77, 91–92; Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, 67; The Hunting of the Snark, 77; Nursery Alice, 64; parodic poetry, 66–67, 73–76; parody of Pushkin, 73–74; phonetic puns, 70–72; Through the Looking–Glass and What Alice Found There, 64; translation into Bashkir, 71; translation into German and French, 63–64; translation into Russian, 63–77; translation into Shor, 71; translation into Yakut, 65; translation of phonetic puns, 71–72 Cartesian model of mind/dualism, xiii, 255, 261–65, 266, 268–70, 272, 273n10, 298, 318, 321, 323, 325, 328 Cartesian subject, 263, 282. See also identity Carver, Raymond, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, 227 Caterpillar. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Catherine the Great, 341 Cavia, Mariano de, 97–100, 104, 107, 109, 110n2 Cejador y Frauca, Julio, 105 La Celestina. See Rojas, Fernando de centrifugal forces, 13, 22, 182, 330 centripetal forces, 22, 182, 330

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Index

Cerda, Juan Luis de la, Vida política de todos los estados de mujeres, 118 Cervantes, Miguel de, viii–ix, xi–xii, 5–6, 11–13, 15, 17–18, 20, 22, 24–27, 31, 33, 85–93, 97–109, 116, 158–59, 163, 166, 170, 174, 219–28; and Cuba, 97–110; Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 105; Novelas ejemplares, 105; ElviajealParnaso, 105. See also Don Quixote; Don Quixote Cervantine criticism, 25, 219; 229nn4, 6 Chaliapin, Feodor, 221 chaos/chaotic, 19, 115, 137, 140–41, 143–44, 146–47, 244, 284 characters as people, 258, 272–73n10, 274n50 characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Ada, 65–66; Alice, 63–77; Ania (replacement of Alice in Nabokov’s Russian translation), 63, 65–66, 69; Asia (replacement of Mabel in Nabokov’s Russian translation), 65–66; Caterpillar, 70, 72, 91; Cheshire Cat, 71, 91–92; Dormouse, 68, 70, 72; Duchess, 73; Eelis (Alice in Yakut translation), 65; Frog-Footman, 68–69; Gryphon, 70; March Hare, 91–92; Mock Turtle, 70, 75; Mouse, 69–70, 76; Queen of Hearts, 91; Sonia (replacement of Alice in the first Russian translation), 65, 59, 71–73, 75; Surok (a marmot; replacement of Dormouse in Russian translations), 68, 70; White Rabbit, 91 characters from Don Quixote: Alonso Quijano, 103, 106, 160, 173, 223, 230n18; Barber, Maese Nicolás, 164, 222; Cide Hamete Benengeli, 98, 170, 171, 226; Duke and Duchess, 164, 167, 222; Dulcinea, 85, 160, 222; Ginés de Pasamonte, 164; Priest, Pero Pérez, 164, 222, 226;

Rocinante, 168, 179; Sancho Panza, 89, 157, 159–60, 163–64, 166–67, 179, 222, 226–28; Sansón Carrasco, 164, 168–69, 222. See also Don Quixote characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance: Akari, 157, 165; Goryo Hanawa, 166, 169–70; Kogito Choko, 157–58, 163–66, 168–73, 176n42; Kurono, 164; Makihiko, 163, 164, 169, 170; Matsuo, 164; Meisuke Kamei, 169, 171; Peter, 169–70; Rose, 157–58, 163–66, 169–71, 176n42; Mr. and Mrs. Tabe, 164 Charskaia, Lidiia, Volshebnaia skazka (A Magic Tale), 66 Chekhov, Anton, 57, 67 Cheshire Cat. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Chile, 97, 107 Chiu, Chui-D., 261 chivalric novel (romance), 22–24, 103, 158–60, 222–23 Christian/Christianity, 68, 140–44, 244, 306 chronotope, 3, 6, 27, 52, 223–25, 228. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail Church Slavonic, 68–69 el Cid. See Díaz de Vivar, Rodrigo (el Cid) Cide Hamete Benengeli. See characters from Don Quixote City of Glass. See Auster, Paul Clark, Katerina, 25, 27 Claxton, Guy, 237, 242, 249–51 clown, 11, 13, 120, 123, 302 codes, 255–56, 262, 265–68, 274n50 cognitive science, xii, 9, 249, 255–56, 261–62, 270–71, 316 Cohen, Herman, 5, 213n5, 321 Cohen, Leonard, 286, 291n22 collective, viii, 43, 50, 138, 140–41, 185, 298, 305, 311, 319

Index

Collège de France lectures. See Foucault, Michel Colonel Jack. See Defoe, Daniel Colossus of the North, 104, 106 community, 307–8, 310–11 “Concluding Remarks.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. See Kierkegaard, Soren Connectome; Seung, Sebastian consciousness, xiii, 29, 88, 140, 200, 203–4, 245, 257–58, 261–66, 273n10, 305, 315, 321, 329–30; first-person experience, 318, 325–27; knowledge, 316, 323, 325, 327; multiple, 28, 31, 33, 183, 191, 320; mythological, 139, 142; ontology of, 322–24, 326, 328; selfconsciousness, 32, 286, 319–20; subjectivity, 316–20, 322–24; linguistic, 10, 17, 22, 93, 191. See also dialogism/dialogic construction/building, 202, 207, 209, 213n17 Contreras Espuny, José M., 225 Corcoran Gallery, 100–102 Corneille, Pierre, 30 Council of Trent, 118, 145–46 coupling. See structural coupling The Courage of Truth. See Foucault, Michel Covarrubias Orozco, Sebastián de, 117–18 Craig, Linda, 187–88, 191 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 180–81 Critique of Cynical Reason. See Sloterdijk, Peter Cuba, 97–110 Cuban War of Independence, 105–6 Cutchins, Dennis, 220 Cynics/Cynicism, xiv, 295–301, 303–10 Cyprian Feasts, 10 Cyropaedia. See Xenophon

347

D’Aktil’ (pseudonym). See Frenkel’, Anatoly Damiani, Bruno, 128 Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, 11, 15, 25, 51, 102 Davis, Lennard J., 4 Death, 13, 56, 125–27, 139–40, 159, 161, 168, 170–71, 322 decadence, 56–57 De Consolatione Philosophiae. See Boethius Defendor. See Stebbings, Peter Defoe, Daniel: Colonel Jack, 91; Moll Flanders, 91; Robinson Crusoe, 102–4, 108 degradation, 115–16, 159–62, 167–73, 320 Deleuze, Gilles, 325 de Man, Paul, 43 demos, 88, 297–98, 300 Demurova, Nina, 65–66, 70–71, 75–78 Denmark, 65 Dentith, Simon, 6 De Poesi et Pictura. See Antoius Possevinus Descartes, René, xiii, 202, 207, 213n17, 262–65, 268–69, 271–2. See also Cartesian model of mind/dualism de Waal, Frans, 259, 272 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. See Bakhtin, Mikhail dialogic line of European prose, 6, 21, 31 dialogism/dialogic, viii–ix, xii–xv, 3, 7, 12, 27–29, 31–33, 43–45, 76–77, 88, 91, 124, 179, 191–93, 200, 204, 210, 220–24, 226, 228, 256–65, 269, 296, 304, 308–9, 319–20, 322, 329–30. See also consciousness; dialogic line of European prose; embodiment; novelistic discourse dialogue, ix, xiii–xiv, 76, 88, 91, 200– 201, 204, 206–10, 257–61, 263–65,

348

Index

267, 272, 304, 315, 319–20. See also Socratic dialogue Diario de la Marina, 99–100, 104, 107, 109–10 Díaz de Vivar, Rodrigo (el Cid), 102–3, 105 Dickens, Charles, 11 diglossia, 63 Diogenes of Sinope, 295, 296, 299–301 discourse, xiv, 3–4, 10, 45, 88, 119, 122, 124, 127, 179, 181–83, 186–91, 193, 202, 220, 265, 268, 298–99, 303, 315, 317, 322, 329–30; authorial, 21, 32, 189; authoritative, 189, 268; double-voiced, 23, 30, 45, 98, 186, 223; hegemonic, 180, 191, 267; literary, 26, 43–44, 160, 163, 186, 226; popular, 180, 192; of power, xi, 125, 179–80, 182, 193; privilege and, xi, 182. See also auto-criticism of discourse; novelistic discourse; poetic language/discourse “Discourse in the Novel.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail disputed texts, 17–18 Divina Commedia. See Dante Alighieri Dodgson, Charles L. See Carroll, Lewis domestication, as Bakhtinian re–accentuation, 63–65, 70 Domínguez Roldán, Guillermo, 100, 105–07 Donald, Merlin, 257 Don Kihot. See Kozintsev, Grigori donkishotstvovat’ (to act foolishly, like Don Quixote), 85 Don Quichotte. See Pabst, Georg W. Don Quijote de Orson Welles. See Welles, Orson Don Quixote, ix, xi, 22, 26, 30, 85, 87, 89, 97–104, 106, 108–10, 157–74; 167–73, 220–28; as carnivalesque figure, xi, 224–25; death of, 160, 167–70, 172–73, 228; idealism of,

159–60, 168, 222, 226; as literary man, 160, 163, 226; madness, 85, 87, 167, 169–72, 222–23, 226; and Robinson Crusoe, 102–4; as symbol of Hispanic culture, 102–3, 109, 116, 221. See also Cervantine criticism; characters from Quixote; Cervantes, Miguel de; chivalric romance; Don Quixote; image, literary; quixotic parodies; re-accentuation Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha), ix, xi, 5, 13, 18, 20, 22, 26, 97–100, 105, 107–8, 223–28; in Bakhtin’s works, xi, 22–27, 30, 32–33, 64, 85–92, 98, 158–63, 166–67, 173–74, 219–21; ending, 158, 160, 167–74, 227–28; metafictional aspects, 92, 165–66, 221, 226–27; at the palace of the Duke and Duchess, 167, 222; romantic interpretation, xii, 228, 231n24; third centenary of, 97–110; windmills, 5, 85, 168, 222, 224. See also Cervantine criticism; characters from Don Quixote; Cervantes, Miguel de; Don Quixote; quixotic parodies Don Quijote de la Mancha. See Gil, Rafael Doody, Margaret Anne, 21 Dormouse. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Dostoevsky, Fyodor, viii–ix, xiv, 5–7, 12–13, 18, 25, 31–33, 42, 44, 66, 86, 89, 258, 302, 307, 322, 329, 338; The Idiot, 66. See also polyphonic novel double- and multi-languagedness, 7, 10, 22 double- and multi-voicedness, 7, 22, 88 drama, 9, 28, 30, 32, 227, 287 dramatic genres, 8, 227 Duchess. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Index

Duke and Duchess. See characters from Don Quixote Dulcinea. See characters from Don Quixote Duvakin, Viktor, viii, 42–43, 47, 53–57, 60n66, 339–40 Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (Twelve Chairs). See Il’f, Ilya, and Evgeny Petrov Ecco, Umberto, 267 Edwards, Anthony T., 302, 304 Efron, Ariadna, 67 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 18, 90 Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane, 139–40 Éloge de la faiblesse (In Praise of Weakness). See Jollien, Alexandre embodiment, 9, 15, 184, 192–93, 237– 39, 241–45, 248, 255–56, 259–72, 296–97, 299, 302–3, 305, 307–8, 318–19, 323, 325–26, 230; embodied cognition, xii–xiii, 237, 257, 260, 262, 264, 269–72; embodied connections, 255–57, 259–60, 262– 63, 266–71 emergence, 19; of the novel, 6, 12, 19–20, 23–24, 26, 28, 30 Emerson, Caryl, 214n26, 251, 301, 310. See also Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson emotions, 146, 250, 255–62, 265–66, 268–69, 316 empathy, 245, 249–50, 259–63, 266–67, 271, 281, 319 Empresas políticas. See Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de encounter, 202, 204, 210, 320 England, 4, 17, 19, 24, 73, 344 Enlightenment, 116, 305, 309 environment, shared (Okruzheniye), 203, 267, 251, 256–57, 261, 267, 271 epic, 8, 19, 23, 29, 88 “Epic and Novel.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail epimeleia (care), 298, 308

349

“Epos i roman.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail Erasmus, Desiderius, 12, 214–15n38, 305 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna, Between Philosophy and Literature, 263, 274–75n52 Estrada Palma, Tomás, 100, 109 ethics/ethical philosophy, xi–xii, 41, 46–47, 57, 199, 202, 207–8, 210–11, 243–45, 263, 281, 284–85, 287, 304, 306 Ethiopian History. See Heliodorus ēthos, 298 Euripides, 282 event, xiii; aesthetic, 55, 183; ethical, 183. See also Being-as-event, 210 Even-Zohar, Itamar, 173 everyday life, xiv, 11, 14, 121, 167, 303, 309 Examen de ingenios para las ciencias. See Huarte de San Juan, Juan excess or surplus of seeing, xii, 32, 203, 238, 287, 319 An Exemplary History of the Novel. See Reed, Walter L. experience, xv, 187, 193, 261, 263, 265, 269, 271, 317–18; co-experience, 192, 281, 319–21; dialogic, 257, 259–61, 267, 315; discursive, 315, 317, 319, 322, 330; disjunctive, 326, 328–29; embodied, 184, 193, 243, 261, 265, 267, 330; female, 182–84, 188, 190; first-person/inner/self/ subjective, 238, 241, 245–46, 249, 251, 260, 264, 270–71, 287–88, 316, 318–20; intersectional, 184, 186, 191–92; lived, 181, 183–86, 209, 305, 328; ontology of, 322–23, 326, 328; and openness, 317, 320, 328, 330; and otherness, 319–20, 322, 329–30; phenomenological aspects of, 318, 321, 325, 327; psychological process of, 315–16, 322, 327;

350

Index

relational, 325; reticulated, 324, 328, 330 extopy, 43, 290 fabliaux, 11, 13 Fabriano, Giovanni Andrea Gilio da, 146 fearless speech. See parrhēsia Fearless Speech. See Foucault, Michel Feast of Fools, 115 Felipe II (Philip II) of Spain, 108, 119 feminism, 180, 187 Fernández de Avellaneda, Alonso. See Avellaneda, Alonso Fernández de Fielding, Henry, 8, 11; Tom Jones, 19 field of vision (krugozor), 32, 203 first philosophy, 200–202, 207 First Stylistic Line of the novel, 7, 21–24, 26–27, 98, 221 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby, 167 Flanagan, Martin, 220 Flores Arroyuelo, Francisco J., 97 Folkers, Andreas, 306 fool, 11, 115, 167, 223, 302 formalism/formalists, Russian, 17–18, 44, 47, 87, 90–91 The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. See Medvedev, P. N. formation, 201–3 “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail Foucault, Michel, xiv, 148n11, 295–311; Collège de France lectures, 295, 296, 300; The Courage of Truth, 297, 304, 309, 311; Fearless Speech, 297; The Government of Self and Others, 297 France, 101, 115, 186, 188, 190 Franco, Francisco, 221, 224 Frenkel’, Anatoly, D’Aktil’ (pseudonym), 74

Freudianism: A Critical Sketch. See Voloshinov, V. N. Frog-Footman. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail Frye, Northrop, 21 Futurists, Russian, viii, 41–42, 48–49, 51 Galilean world view, 15–17, 22–23, 29, 30 Gan, Ah, xxi, 224–25, 227–28, 230n16; Tang Ji Kede, xii, 224. See also wuxia genre Garcilaso de la Vega, 105 gender, ix, xi, 69–70, 127, 180–82, 184, 186, 189 Genet, Jean, 172 genre, genre theory, ix, xiii, 3, 6, 19, 45, 183, 187–89, 220. See also dramatic genres; high genres; low genres; Menippean satire/Menippea; novel as a literary genre; novelization; picaresque novel; poetic genres; serio-comical genres; wuxia genre Gergen, Ken, 316–17 Germany, 69 Gibson, James, 237, 246, 249 Gil, Rafael, 221–22, 228, 230nn16, 18; Don Quijote de la Mancha, 220 Gil Blas. See Lesage, Alain-René Gilmore, Leigh, Tainted Witness, 184, 190 Ginés de Pasamonte. See characters from Don Quixote Gippius, Zinaida, 57, 75 Gnedich, Nikolai, 76 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 6, 8, 19, 25–26, 32, 68, 113 Gogol, Nikolai, 25 Golden Age, Spanish literature of the, 91, 223–24

Index

Golden Ass, The. See Apuleius Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 105 Gorky, Maxim, 67 Goryo Hanawa. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Gospel of John, 85 Gouda, Frances, 193 The Government of Self and Others. See Foucault, Michel Granström, Matilda, 74, 76 Gratchev, Slav, ix, 184, 340 The Great Gatsby. See Fitzgerald, F. Scott great time, 30–31, 52 Greek romance, 11–13, 22. See also Sophistic (or Sophist) novel Greenfield, Susan, 240–41 Grimmelshausen, Hans Jakob Christoffel von, 11, 14, 31–32 grotesque, x, 49–50, 53, 115–16, 128, 302, 304. See also grotesque realism; grotesque realism, 14, 115–16, 120–21, 125, 127, 129–30, 137–47, 152n88, 158–62, 166, 173, 302 Gryphon. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Guatemala, 97, 184–85 Gunn, James, Super, 225, 228, 230n16 Gurevich, Aron, 140–41 Guzmán de Alfarache. See Alemán, Mateo Gyulamiryan, Tatevik, 167 Haberman, Hal, and Jeremy Passmore, Special, 225, 230n16 Habermas, Jügen, 307–8 Hanna, Thomas, 248 Hardt, Michael, 300 Harpham Geoffrey, 139, 141 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 208, 282, 325, 328 hegemony, 8, 23, 181–83, 186–7, 190, 204, 268; hegemonic group, 181–82,

351

185; non-hegemonic group, 180, 182–83. See also discourse Heidegger, Martin, 210, 214n37 Heliodorus, Ethiopian History, 11 Heraclitus, 324 Here Comes Don Quixote: A Spanish Panorama. See Welles, Orson Heredia, José María, 105 hero, 9, 46, 160, 225, 245–46, 249, 273, 286, 319; author and, 32, 45, 52, 57, 183, 251, 284, 286, 321; Don Quixote as world’s greatest literary, 85, 87; heroization, 48–49; as literary man, 160, 163, 226; novelistic, 16, 19, 24, 26, 28, 32 heteroglossia, viii–ix, xii, 3, 7, 13–14, 17, 22–23, 28, 30, 31, 33, 45, 64–65, 68–69, 88, 92, 179–80, 186–89, 191– 92, 308; of character names, 66–67; languages of, 22, 186; of speech in Russian/Church Slavonic, 68–69 Higgins, E. Tory, 258 high genres, 6, 8, 11, 13, 16–17. See also Sophist (or Sophistic) romance Hita, Arcipreste de. See Arcipreste de Hita Holquist, Michael, 25, 27, 117, 265 Holy Trinity Prayer (Trisvyatoe), 68–69 horizon and environment, 238, 241 Huarte de San Juan, Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, 122 human identity, 255–56, 258–59, 261– 63, 269, 273n10. See also humanity; identity humanity, 138, 297, 303, 307. See also Cartesian model of mind/dualism; embodiment; human identity; identity Hume, David, 325 Hume, Martin; Historia de la España contemporánea, 105–6 Humpty-Dumpty (character from Through the Looking-Glass and what

352

Index

Alice Found There), Shaltay-Boltay in Russian translation, 66–67 The Hunting of the Snark, 77. See Carroll, Lewis Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego, 91, 93n28 Husserl, Edmund, 321 hybridization, 7, 22, 45, 191–92, 222–23 I, Rigoberta Menchú. See Menchú, Rigoberta I and other, 202, 210, 237–40, 243, 251, 288, 319–20. See also I-for-myself identity, ix, 65, 76, 99, 103, 168, 183– 86, 190–91, 193, 224–25, 255, 264– 68, 270–72, 326, 328; as ideological/ social construction: 255–56, 267–68; structuralist, 262, 265–67. See also Cartesian model of mind/dualism; embodiment; empathy; human identity; humanity; self ideology, 29, 265, 267–69 The Idiot. See Dostoevsky, Fyodor I-for-myself, 202, 284, 288, 319–20 Il’f, Ilya, and Evgeny Petrov, Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (Twelve Chairs), 71 The Iliad, Russian translation of, 76 image, literary, ix, 28, 30, 125, 158, 203, 301; carnivalistic, 123, 160; of Don Quixote, 30, 85, 98–99, 104, 106, 108–9, 158, 168, 171, 220–21, 223; of a language, 28, 191–92; novelistic, 30, 222, 228; of a person (body, other, outward, self), 182, 185, 203, 238–42, 244, 246–51, 284, 309, 318, 322; philosophical, 328–29; poetic, 44–45, 48, 51, 85; religious, 144–46. See also re-accentuation El Imparcial, 97 Iñárritu, Alejandro, xii, 226, 228, 230n16; Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), 227

Individualism, xv, 283, 285, 296, 330; self-contained, 316–17, 321–22 The Infant of the Mournful Countenance (Urei gao no douji), 157–58, 162–77. See also characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance; The Valley El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. See Don Quixote interanimation of languages, 10, 16, 28 internally persuasive word, 189–91 intersectionality, xi, 180–87, 189, 191–93 intersubjective, 281–82, 289–90, 308–9 Italy, 10, 17 “Iz predystorii romannogo slovo.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail Jakobson, Roman, 67, 90 James, Henry, 13 James, William, xiv–xv, 204, 212n5, 315–16, 322–30; Bakhtin, in relation to, 329–30; Does Consciousness Exist, 323, 327; pluralism, 322; A Pluralistic Universe, 328; Principles of Psychology, 316–17; radical empiricism, 322–29; A World of Pure Experience, 323. See also consciousness; experience Jameson, Frederick, pseudo-couple trilogy, 157, 165, 174n1 Japan, xi, 158, 161–62, 173 Jean Paul, 25 Jefferson, Thomas, 101 Johnson, Mark, 261 Jollien, Alexandre, xi–xii, 199–211; Éloge de la faiblesse (In Praise of Weakness), xi, 205–6, 208 Junemann, Guillermo, 105 Kant, Immanuel, 201–2, 212n8, 213n17, 264–65, 267, 269–70, 285–87, 306,

Index

315, 321–25, 329. See also moral philosophy Kato, Norihiro, 166 Kazakhstan, 44, 47, 92, 338 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 42, 49, 87; Tiran bez T, 67 Kick-Ass. See Vaughn, Matthew Kierkegaard, Soren, xiii, 283–84, 286–90 Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, xiv, 282. Fear and Trembling, 282. See also Abraham and Isaac, story of Agamemnon and Iphigenia, story of Kogito Choko. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Kolyubakin, 90 Kozintsev, Grigori, xii, 228, 230n16; Don Kihot, 222 Kozlov, Ivan, 75 the Kremlin, 339 Kristeva, Julia, 219 Kurono. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Kustanay, 92 La Correspondencia de España, 99 Lakoff, George, 261 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 11 language, ix, xv, 10, 13, 16–17, 19, 22, 28–29, 45, 63, 107–8, 122, 186–87, 191–93, 220, 257, 261, 266–68, 317–22, 330. See also code; Galilean world view; heteroglossia; hybridization; image of a language; interanimation of languages; multilanguagedness; novelistic language; poetic language; Ptolemaic world view; speech diversity; translation to another language La Pícara Justina. See López de Úbeda, Francisco Latin, 10, 16, 70, 117

353

Latin America, 100, 109, 182–83, 187 laughter, viii, xiv, 10, 13, 17, 30, 33, 121, 123–25, 138, 143, 161, 167, 295–96; carnival, 13, 33, 130, 303, 310; folk, 11, 17; history of, 90, 138; medieval, 10, 129–30 Lazarillo de Tormes, x, 11, 17, 89, 91, 116, 127 Lázaro Carreter, Fernando, 226 Leary, Mark R., 258, 270 Leder, Drew, 237, 242, 251 Le Goff, Jacques, 140 Lemm, Vanessa, 309 Lent, 117–21, 125, 127, 129 León, Fray Luis de, 105 Lesage, Alain-René, Gil Blas, 11, 24 Levin, Harry, the quixotic principle, 92 Levine, Donald, 287 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 139, 268 linguistics, vi, 200, 220, 266; European, 12, 17, 89, 302; history of, 9, 30, 33; and life, 4, 90; literature, xiii, xiv, 20, 29, 48, 102, 220; medieval, 10–11, 305; modern, 29, 102, 171; post-Chomskyan, 9; power discourse in, 179, 182, 193; Renaissance, 4, 115, 305; Russian, 53, 66–67, 74; Saussurean, 3, 262, 267 Spanish, 91, 100, 105, 107, 109, 219; by women, 179, 188, 192 López de Úbeda, Francisco, 116, 122, 124–25, 127–29; La Pícara Justina, x, 116, 121–30, 126, 132n34, 133n50 l’Orme, Philibert de, 144 Lorris, Guillaume de, and Jean de Meung, Roman de la Rose, 11 Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. See Cervantes, Miguel de Lotman, Yuri, 266 love, 203, 208, 210, 244, 270, 319 low genres, 6, 10

354

Index

Lucian of Samosata, 12, 302 Lukács, Georg, Theory of the Novel, 5, 86–88 Lull, Raymund, 106 Lunes de Aguas, x, 115–16, 119–21, 125, 127, 129, 131n21 Luther, Martin, 142–44 lyric poetry, 8, 28, 44, 46, 48 Maceo, Antonio, 105 Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert), 26, 160 Makihiko. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Malraux André, 141 Mañas Martínez, María del M., 221 Mancing, Howard, viii, 86, 89, 91, 159, 219 Mañero Lozano, David, 122–23 Mann, Thomas, 12, 172 Manrique, Jorge, 105 Maravall, José A., 123–24 March Hare. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland marginalize/marginalization, 122, 124, 158, 161–62, 183–84 María de Portugal, 119 Mariana, Juan de, Tratado contra los juegos públicos, 119 Marinova, Margarita, 340 Marivaux, Pierre de, Le Paysan parvenu, 11 Marshak, Samuil, 66–67, 75, 78 Martí, José, 105 Marxism, 4, 18, 59n49, 222, 267–68, 322 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. See Voloshinov, V. N. masks, 13, 117, 120–21, 223, 245, 297 Matsuo. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Matsuura Hisaki, 158 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, viii, 41–52, 87 McConachie, Bruce, 249–51

McIntosh, Peggy, 180–81, 184 medieval romance, 19, 22–23 Medvedev, P. N., The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 17–18, 91 the Meiji Restoration, 171 Meisuke Kamei. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Melville, Herman, Moby Dick, 167 Menchú, Rigoberta, 183–85, 193; I, Rigoberta Menchú, 180 Menippean satire/Menippea, 4, 12, 26, 33, 301–02, 307 Menippus of Gadara, 8, 301 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri, 57 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 240, 242 metafiction/metafictional, 165–66, 221, 226–27; paradox, 92 #metoo, 179 Metz, Christian, 219, 229n7 Meung, Jean de. See Lorris, Guillaume de, and Jean de Meung Mexico, 97, 107 Meza y Suárez Inclán, Ramón, 100–10; Mi tío el empleado, 100 Middle Ages, 14, 16, 20, 102, 225; vertical worldview, 15, 89 Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. See Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews (M.M. Bakhtin: Besedy s V. D. Duvakinym). See Bakhtin, Mikhail Moby Dick. See Melville, Herman Mock Turtle. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland modernity, 20, 140, 296, 305, 309 Molanus, Johannes, 145–46 Moll Flanders. See Defoe, Daniel Momonakh, Vladimir, 69 monoglossia, 16

Index

monologism/monologic, viii, 4, 7–8, 13, 22–23, 32, 42–43, 49, 52, 191, 221, 223, 302, 308 Montaigne, Michel de, 305 Moore, Thomas, “The Evening Bell,” 75 morality, xii, 272, 306 moral philosophy, vii, 3, 100, 285 Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson, 5–8, 10, 20, 27, 29, 46, 86, 304; Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, 5 multivoicedness, 7, 22, 88 Nabokov, Vladimir, 63, 65–66, 69, 74–75; Ada, 66; Russian translation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 63, 65–66, 74; Sirin, V. (pseudonym), 69, 74 neuroscience, 9, 249, 255, 262, 270 Nicaragua, 97 Nicoli, Carlo, 99 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 137–38, 140, 208, 285, 287, 299, 305 North Caucasus, 66–67 Northoff, Georg, 270 novel: biographical, 11, 24; carnivalistic, 13, 115, 158–60; characteristics of, xii, 28, 33, 226; Don Quixote as prototype of, 6, 22, 24, 27, 32–33, 87, 91, 159, 167; emergence of, 6, 12, 19–21, 23–24, 26, 28, 30, 33; hero of, 11, 16, 19, 24, 26, 28, 32, 45, 52, 85, 160, 183, 226, 284, 286, 321; heteroglossia in, 7–8, 17, 21– 23, 27–28, 30–31, 33, 89, 92, 187, 219; history of, vii, 8–9, 18, 20–21, 24, 26, 31, 50, 86, 89, 98, 159, 200, 220; hybrid, 86; as a literary genre, vii, 5, 7–9, 16–21, 25–26, 23–29, 32–33, 35, 88–89, 158, 160, 168, 219–21, 226; modern, 8, 11–13, 17, 20, 23–24, 26–27, 29, 86–89, 219–21; modern European, viii, 5,

355

8, 20, 24, 27, 86; openendedness of, 16–17, 28, 30; unfinalizability of, 16, 30, 32. See also Baroque novel; Bildungsroman; chivalric novel (romance); dialogic line of European prose; First Stylistic Line of the novel; Menippean satire/Menippea; novelistic discourse; novelization; novel-romance distinction; pastoral novel (romance); picaresque novel; polyphonic novel; prehistory of the novel; Renaissance novel; rise of the novel; romance; Second Stylistic Line of the novel; Sophist (or Sophistic) novel; theory of the novel, Bakhtin’s Novelas ejemplares. See Cervantes, Miguel de novelistic discourse, 6–7, 9–10, 23–29, 31–32, 41–45, 47, 50–51, 57, 89, 165–66, 160, 180, 187, 191, 219, 322; internally dialogized, 25, 89, 219 novelistic language, 42, 160, 165–66, 191 novelization, viii, 9, 17, 29–30, 33, 45, 50, 301 novellas, 10, 18, 139 novel-romance distinction, viii, 7, 11, 21–23, 26, 33 novels of the First Line. See First Stylistic Line of the novel novels of the Second Line. See Second Stylistic Line of the novel objectify/objectification, 182, 188 The Odyssey, 76 Oe Kenzaburo: Football in, 1860 (Man’en gan’nen no futto boru), 165; Good-bye, My Books! (Sayounara, watashi no hon yo!), 157, 172; How to Make a Novelist Like Me (Watashi to iu shosetsuka no tsukurikata), 161; In Late Style (Ban’nen yoshiki

356

Index

shu), 172; Letters for Nostalgic Years (Natsukashi toshi eno tegami), 165; The Method of the Novel (Shosetsu no houhou), 167, 171; Somersault (Chugaeri), 157; The Substituted Child: The Changeling (Torikaeko, chenjiringu), 157, 165, 166, 169. See also The Infant of the Mournful Countenance; Ose Village (Uchiko Town, Kita District, Ehime Prefecture) Olson, David R., 20 openended present/openendedness, 16–17, 28, 30 oppress/oppression, xi, 14, 138, 181, 184–85, 187, 192, 267–68, 307 Orel, 335 Orlovskaya, Dina, 75 Ose Village (Uchiko Town, Kita District, Ehime Prefecture), 161, 162, 163, 164 outside/outsidedness, xii, 32, 46, 203, 237–38, 244, 247, 270, 281, 284–90, 310, 318 Pabst, Georg W., xii, 221, 228, 230n16;Don Quichotte, 222 Padre Putas, 120–21, 129–30 Paleotti, Gabriele, 145 Palissy, Bernard, 144 Palmer, Alan, 259 Parker, A. A., 125 parody/parodic, viii, 10–11, 13, 26–27, 30, 33, 64, 73–77, 87, 122, 167, 305 Parr, James A., 26, 88 parrhēsia (fearless speech), xiv, 295–98, 300–301, 303–4, 306–8, 310. See also Foucault, Michel Parzival. See Wolfram von Eschenbach “Pasión de historia.” See Vega, Ana Lydia Pasternak, Boris, 57, 75, 87 pastoral novel (romance), 22, 221

pathos, 13, 24, 48, 223 patriarchal, 116, 179, 192 Paul, character from “Pasión de historia,” 187–91 Paysan parvenu, Le. See Marivaux, Pierre de Pechey, Graham, 25 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 212n5 periphery, 161, 173, 174 Peru, 97, 107 Peter, 169–70. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Peter the Great, 75 Petronius Arbiter, Gaius, The Satyricon, 8, 12, 25, 302 Petrov, Evgeny, See Il’f, Ilya, and Evgeny Petrov, Dvenadtsat’ stul’ev (Twelve Chairs) pharmakon, 128–29 phenomenology, xv, 200, 315–16, 321–22 philosophical anthropology, xi, 199–204, 210–11 picaresque novel, x, 11, 24, 27, 115–16, 122, 224–25, 127–29, 224–25, 130n5, 133n50 pícaro, x, 9, 122, 127 Piers Plowman. See Langland, William Pisk, Litz, 247 Pius IV, pope, 146 Plato, 8, 12, 128–29, 199, 206, 212n7, 214n33, 295, 297–99, 302, 305, 309 Platonov, Sergei F., 69 poetic genres, 13, 44, 282 poetic image, 45, 85 poetic language/discourse, viii, 17, 41–61, 90 poetics, xiv, 8, 42, 47, 57 poetic symbol, 30, 45 poetry, 13, 28, 41–51, 53, 55–57, 64, 73, 76–78, 139, 339 polis, 298 Pollard, Rachel, 264 polyglossia, 7, 10, 20, 31, 63, 69

Index

polyphonic novel, viii, xii, 5, 31–33, 88, 221–22, 228; semi-polyphonic novel, 88, 93n1 polyphony, viii, xii, 3, 7, 22, 31–33, 44, 88, 92, 179, 184, 192 Popova, Iraida, 65 Portugal, 119 Possevinus, Antonius, De Poesi et Pictura, 146 postcolonial/postcolonialism, 104, 180, 182, 187–88, 190–91 postmodernism, 187, 174–75n52 Pourbus, Pierre, 145 power, ix–x, 101, 116–18, 120, 161–62, 179–82, 184–89, 193, 208, 268, 283–85, 300, 306–7; discourse of, xi, 125, 180; regenerative, 158–59, 166–67, 171 prehistory of the novel, viii, 5, 8–12, 14, 17, 20, 23, 48 printing press, 17, 89, 144. See also book in the modern sense privilege, xi, 50, 115, 180–87, 189, 191–3; male, 180–81, 185, 191 “The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art. See Bakhtin, Mikhail Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. See Bakhtin, Mikhail Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo. See Bakhtin, Mikhail Propp, Vladimir, 90 prostitution, x, 116, 118–21, 127, 129, 131n21 Protestantism, x, 106, 142–46, 151n86 Provoost, Jean, 145 Ptolemaic world view, 15–16, 30, 144 Puerto Rico, 97, 186–87, 190 Pushkin, Alexander, 25, 42, 45–46, 66, 73–75; Eugene Onegin, 74; Poltava, 75; Tsygany, 74–75 Putnam, Samuel, 157

357

Queen of Hearts. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Quevedo, Francisco de, El Buscón, x, 11–12, 24, 116, 130n6 Quiché, 184 quixotic parodies: Birdman, 226; Crimson Bolt, 226–27; Defendor, 226–27; Kick-Ass, 225–26; Special, 226; Tang Ji Kede, 225–26 quixotism/quixotic, 104, 167; characters, 168, 171; end, 157–74; films, xii, 219–28. See also Levin, Harry Rabelais, François, viii–x, xiv, 4, 6, 11–15, 17, 20, 24–25, 27, 31, 47, 51, 86, 89, 93, 115–16, 137–41, 143–44, 151n74, 159, 166, 219, 237, 303–5, 322, 329; Pantagruel and Gargantua, 14, 25, 116, 161 Rabelais and His World. See Bakhtin, Mikhail race, xi, 102, 180–82, 184, 186, 189 racism, 180–81 re-accentuation, viii–ix, xii, 3, 30, 93n1, 103–4, 158, 163, 220–25, 228; of gender, 69–70; of the novelistic image of Don Quixote, ix, 30, 85, 98–99, 104, 106, 109, 158, 167–68, 220–23; in translation, 63–77; translation as, 63–65, 67, 69–78 Red Russian revolution, 87, 93n6 Reed, Walter L., xi, 24–25, 159, 219; An Exemplary History of the Novel, 24 Reeves, Clara, 21 Reformation: Catholic, x, 142, 145–47; Protestant, x, 142, 144, 147 regeneration, principle of, 158–59, 168–74 Remisova, Anna, 90 Remizov, Alexei, 75 Renaissance, xiv, 4, 14–17, 89–90; equal to the sixteenth century, 14–15; fundamental break with the past, 14–16; horizontal worldview, 15,

358

Index

17, 23, 89; novel, viii, 5–7, 10, 17, 20, 23–25, 27, 33, 89, 93. See also speech diversity; interanimation of languages; openended present rhythm, 46, 49, 282–83, 287–90, 318, 325, 327 Richardson, Samuel, 13 Rico, Francisco, 110n2 Riley, E. C., 22 rise of the novel, 4, 19, 24 Rivero, Nicolás, 99 Robert, Marthe, 160, 174n13 Roberts, Mathew, 43–44 Rochel, Clemente, 105 Rodin, Auguste, The Thinker, 101 rogue, 11, 116, 118, 223, 302 Rojas, Fernando de, La Celestina, 17, 105 Roman Catholic Church, 141–42, 145 romance, 22–23, 28, 85–86, 89. See also First Stylistic Line of the novel; Greek romance; medieval romance; novel-romance distinction; Sophist (or Sophistic) novel; Spanish Renaissance prose romance of chivalry Le Roman comique. See Scarron, Paul Roman de la Rose. See Lorris, Guillaume de, and Jean de Meung Roman novel, 12–13, 21 Rose. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12 Rozhdestvenskaya, Robert Ivanovich, 68 Rubinstein, Anton, 90 Rugevich, Vladimir, 90 Russian Formalists. See formalism/ formalists, Russian Russian Futurism. See Futurists, Russian Russian Symbolists. See Symbolists, Russian Russia/Soviet Union, vii, 4, 56–57, 69, 71, 75, 78, 85, 90, 92, 337 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de, Empresas políticas, 122, 129

Saco, José Antonio, 105 Said, Edward, On Late Style, 172, 176n57 El Salvador, 97 Sancho Panza. See characters from Don Quixote Sánchez de Bustamante, Antonio, 99–100, 109 Sansón Carrasco. See characters from Don Quixote Saransk, 338–39 Saransk Pedagogical Institute, 338 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 191, 206–8, 210 Saturnalia, 48, 115 The Satyricon. See Petronius Arbiter, Gaius Scarron, Paul, Le Roman comique, 11 Schack, Count von, 105 Scheler, Max, 200, 212n5 Schlegel, Friedrich von, 5 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 216n60 Schmidt, Rachel, 18, 26 Schönherr, Julius, 270 Schwänke, 11, 13 Second Stylistic Line of the novel, ix, 7, 21–28, 30–31, 98 Sedakova, Olga, 76 self/selfhood, xv, 49, 53–54, 56, 118, 182–83, 207, 210, 238, 245–46, 251, 255–62, 267–71, 288–89, 295, 298–99, 301, 306, 308–10, 319; aesthetic self-activity, 249, 319; the experiencing self, 245, 251; and other, 238, 256, 290, 319; self-activity, 248–49, 288; selfconsciousness, 28, 32, 286, 290, 320, 327; self-criticism, 158, 165; self-directed, 239, 241, 248; selfdiscipline, 300, 306; self-knowledge, 245, 257–59; self-understanding, 267–70; sense of, 50, 52, 256–57, 260–61. See also I and other semiotic-filmic studies. See Metz, Christian semiotics, 9, 229

Index

Sennett, Richard, 237, 246–49 serio-comical genres, 12–13, 23 Sethi, Rumina, 183 Seung, Sebastian, connectome, 271 Sewell, Byron W., 73 sexism, 181, 190 sexual assault, 179 Shakespeare, William, 15, 116, 171, 30–32, 51, 76, 89, 116 Shaltay-Boltay. See Humpty-Dumpty Shklovsky, Viktor, 90–91; “The Construction of the Story and Novel,” 18; “How Don Quixote Is Made,” 18 sign, 72, 229n7, 268, 284, 290 Sirin, V. See Nabokov, Vladimir Sitdykova, Güzӓl, 71 Sloterdijk, Peter, 296–97, 299, 305–6; Critique of Cynical Reason, 297, 309 “Slovo v romane.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail social bonds, 257–59 social construction, 255, 317 Socrates, 206, 285, 298–99, 307 Socratic dialogue, 12, 33, 205–6, 298, 307 Solovyova, Poliksena, Allegro (pseudonym), 74 Sonia. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Sophistic (or Sophist) novel, 11, 22. See also romance Sorel, Charles, L’Histoire comique de Francion, 11 soul, 49, 53, 126, 140, 171, 263, 287– 90, 296, 298, 303, 309, 318, 322 Spain, 17, 24, 97, 99–102, 105–9, 116, 118–19, 121, 123, 129, 187, 219, 224, 227 Spanish Renaissance prose romance of chivalry, 11, 22, 24, 98, 223 Special. See Haberman, Hal, and Jeremy Passmore speech diversity, 16–17, 22, 31, 89 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. See Bakhtin, Mikhail

359

Stalin, Joseph, 54, 92, 103, 139 Stallybrass Peter, 139 Stam, Robert, 220, 224 Stebbings, Peter, Defendor, 225, 230n16 Stel, Mariëlle, 260 Stendhal, 11 Sterne, Laurence, 25; Tristram Shandy, 160 St. Louis World’s Fair, 101–02 St. Nicholas, 67 Stoics, 297–98 Strana Chudes, Russian name for Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, 67 structural coupling, 249, 257 structuralism, 4, 9, 265–66, 268–69, 274–75n52, 316 struggle, 203–4, 206, 208, 210 subiectum, 446, 53, 282, 286, 290 Super. See Gunn, James superhero, 225–28; 232n42; films, xii, 225–28 Surok. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland surplus of seeing. See excess or surplus of seeing Swift, Jonathan, 11 Switzerland, 205 Symbolists, Russian, 54 Mr. and Mrs. Tabe. See characters from The Infant of the Mournful Countenance Tainted Witness. See Gilmore, Leigh Tallis, Raymond, 237, 241–42 Tang Ji Kede. See Gan, Ah task, 140, 200–3, 206, 208, 210, 288 Tenniel, John, 73 testimony, 180, 182–84, 188, 192–93 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 11 theology/theological, x, 137, 141–46 theoreticism/totalizing theories, 4, 32, 200, 204, 212n5; theoretical intoxication, 90 Theory of Prose. See Shklovsky, Viktor

360

Index

theory of the novel, Bakhtin’s, viii–ix, 3–33, 47, 85–86 Theory of the Novel. See Lukács, Georg The Thinker. See Rodin, Auguste Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (TTLG), translations of, 67 Tihanov, Galin, 5 Timofeevna, Galina, 340 TTLG. See Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There Todorov, Tzvetan, 4–8, 219 Tolstoy, Leo, 8, 25, 52 Tomashevsky, Boris, 18 Tom Jones. See Fielding, Henry Tondro, Jason, 225 Torres, Luc, 123 Toward a Philosophy of the Act. See Bakhtin, Mikhail transgredient/transgredience, xiii, 32, 282, 286–87, 290, 320, 330 translation. See Carroll, Lewis transpositions, 30, 48, 222, 224 Tratado contra los juegos públicos. See Mariana, Juan de travesty, 10, 77 Trilling, Lionel, 92 Trisvyatoe. See Holy Trinity Prayer Tsvetaeva, Anastasia, 66 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 57, 66–67 Turgenev, Ivan, Asia, 66 Turgeneva, Anna Alekseevna (Asia), 66 Turkisms, in Russian language, 66–67 “The Two Stylistic Lines of Development in the European Novel.” See Bakhtin, Mikhail two stylistic lines of the novel, Bakhtin’s, 27 Tynyanov, Yury, 87, 90 Ulloa Bustinza, Iván A., 225 Unfinalizability. See novel University of Havana, 100–109 utterance, xiii, 191, 220–21, 266, 281, 322, 229–30

the Valley, 157–58, 162–65, 168–69, 171, 173 Varona, Enrique José, 100, 105, 108–09 Vaughn, Matthew, Kick-Ass, 225, 227, 230n16 Vega, Ana Lydia, 180; “Pasión de historia,” 186–92 Vega, Lope de, 30, 105, 125 Vela, Vincenzo, The Last Days of Napoleon I, 100 Venezuela, 97 Vengerova, Zinaida, 75 Vesalius, Andreas, 122 El viaje al Parnaso. See Cervantes, Miguel de Vida política de todos los estados de mujeres. See Cerda, Juan Luis de la Vilma, character from “Pasión de historia,” 186–91 violence, 138, 186, 228; gendered, 179– 80, 192–3; intersectional, 180, 182 Visconti, Luchino, 172 visual arts/visual media, 33n26, 142, 144 Vives, Juan Luis, The Education of a Christian Woman, 118, 124 Vladimirovich, Grand Duke Andrei, 69 Voloshinov, V. N., 91; Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, 18; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 18 Volshebnaia skazka (A Magic Tale). See Charskaia, Lidia Vonk, Roos, 260 Vvedenskoye cemetery, 341 Watanabe Kazuo, 161 Watt, Ian, 24 Weaver, Warren, 64 Weber, Lynn, 181–83, 186 Weimer, Christopher B., 225 Weinstein, Harvey, 179 Welles, Orson, xii, 224, 226–28, 230n16; Don Quijote de Orson Welles, 230n16; Here Comes Don

Index

Quixote: A Spanish Panorama (original title), 227 White, Allon, 139 White Rabbit. See characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland whole of meaning, 238 wholeness (of the human body), 50, 238–39, 241, 246–48, 251 Williamson, Edwin, 26 William the Conqueror, 69 Windelband, Wilhelm, 212nn5, 7 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 23 Wonderland, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 67 wuxia genre, 225–26

Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 12, 23 Yeats, William Butler, “Sailing to Byzantium,” 158, 171, 173 Yeh, Yei-Y., 261 Yermolovich, Dmitry, 71 Yesenin, Sergei, 87 Yurievna, Irina, 339 Zafra, Enriqueta, 118 Zahavi, Dan, 259 Zakhoder, Boris, 71–72 Zhukovsky, Vasilii, 74–76 Zimmermann, Antonie, 64, 68 Zöller, Günter, 264 Zwingli, Huldrych, 142

361

About the Contributors

Slav N. Gratchev is associate professor of Spanish at Marshall University. He is the author of The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky (2017); he also coedited Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero, with Howard Mancing (2017), and Dialogues with Bakhtin: The Duvakin interviews 1973, with Margarita Marinova (forthcoming in 2019). In addition, he has published over a dozen articles and essays on Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Bakhtin, and other subjects in a variety of books and in journals such as Cervantes, College Literature, The South Atlantic Review, Comparative Literature and Culture, The Russian Review, and The Nabokovian. Howard Mancing is emeritus professor of Spanish at Purdue University. He is the author of The Chivalric World of Don Quijote: Style, Structure, and Narrative Technique (1982) Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”: A Reference Guide (2006), and The Cervantes Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (2004); he also coedited Text, Theory, and Performance: Golden Age Comedia Studies (1994), with Charles Ganelin; Theory of Mind and Literature (2011), with Paula Leverage, Jennifer Marston William, and Richard Schweickert; Don Quixote: The Re-accentuation of the World’s Greatest Literary Hero (2017), with Slav N. Gratchev. In addition, he has published over sixty articles and essays on Cervantes, Unamuno, Lazarillo de Tormes and the picaresque novel, narrative theory, comparative literature, the canon, the teaching of literature, academic administration, cognitive approaches to the study of literature, and other subjects in a variety of books and in journals such as Anales Cervantinos, Cervantes, Estudios Públicos, Europe, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Hispania, Hispanic Review, MLN, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, and Semiotica. 363

364

About the Contributors

At the present time he is working on three books: one on cognitive science and literary theory, one on the theory and history of the novel, and one on Miguel de Cervantes as a fictional character. Pablo Carvajal is a young scholar from Spain. He is a member of the Cervantine Studies Group (GREC) of the University of Oviedo (Spain). Recently by the Spanish Ministry of Education he has been granted the prestigious four-year scholarship that will allow him to complete his doctoral dissertation on Don Quixote and the development of the literary theory in England. His main lines of interest are centered on Cervantes’s work, novel theory, and studies between literature and cinema. His recent publications are: “De los refranes de Sancho a los latinajos de Partridge: un caso de intertextualidad derivada” (“From Sancho’s Proverbs to Partridge’s Latin Phrases: A Case Study of Intertextuality”) (Cuadernos de Estudios del Siglo XVIII 26, 2016); “Superhéroes quijotescos en el cine contemporáneo” (“Quixotic Superheroes in Contemporary Cinema”) (Hipogrifo. Revista de literatura y cultura del Siglo de Oro). As well, he is a coeditor (with Professor Emilio Martínez Mata) of the multiauthor book Recepción e interpretación del “Quijote” (Reception and interpretation of “Don Quixote”), that came out in 2017. Ricardo Castells was born in Cuba and has lived in the United States since the age of six. He received his PhD in Romance Languages from Duke University in 1991 and is currently a Professor of Spanish at Florida International University. He is the author of Calisto’s Dream and the Celestinesque Tradition (University of North Carolina Press), Fernando de Rojas and the Renaissance Vision (Penn State Press), and some fifty articles and book chapters on Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. James Cresswell is an associate professor and program chair in psychology at Ambrose University (Calgary Canada). His work is largely influenced by the philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin and cultural psychology. Of special interest is Bakhtin’s work on aesthetics in relation to language and how it can enhance current work in education, philosophy of mind, cognitive science of religion, and immigration. His work has been supported by organizations such as the Social Science & Humanities Research Counsel, Templeton Foundation, and Murdoch Charitable Trust. Michael Eskin is award-winning author, translator, publisher, and cofounder of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. Michael Eskin has taught at Rutgers, Cambridge, and Columbia universities. His many publications on cultural, literary and philosophical subjects include: Nabokov’s Version of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1994); Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel’shtam, and Celan (2000); Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein,

About the Contributors

365

Brodsky (2008); The Bars of Atlantis: Selected Essays by Durs Grünbein (as editor; 2010); and The Wisdom of Parenthood: An Essay (2013). His translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Sport 40, and World Literature Today, among other venues. Victor Fet is professor of biology at Marshall University, West Virginia; he teaches genetics, evolution, biogeography, and general biology, and has over hundred publications on animal systematics and evolution. Dr. Fet edited and translated from Russian several books on biology. He published five books of poetry in his native Russian, as well as literary reviews and essays; he is especially interested in the work of Vladimir Nabokov. He also published translations of poetry by Lewis Carroll and Roald Hoffmann. His poetry appeared in many expatriate Russian journals and almanacs in Europe and the United States. Michael E. Gardiner is professor of sociology, with a joint appointment at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism, at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Some of his current research interests include the political economy of affective life, the everyday, and utopianism. He is author of numerous articles that have appeared in such journals as Theory, Culture & Society, Theory and Society, and The European Legacy. His most recent books include Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism (Peter Lang, 2013) and Boredom Studies Reader: Frameworks and Perspectives, coedited with Julian Jason Haladyn (Routledge, 2017). Melissa Garr is assistant professor of Spanish at Florida Southern College in Lakeland, Florida. She earned her PhD in Spanish literature at Purdue University, and her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century peninsular literature, particularly genre fiction, and examining literature through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin. Her publications include “Dreaming the Impossible Dream: Finding Don Quixote in the Seventh Seal” and “(Un) Masking Barcelona: Recontextualizing Urban Interactions in Eduardo Mendoza’s El misterio de la cripta embrujada, El laberinto de las aceitunas, and La aventura del tocador de señoras.” Her ongoing research includes recovery work on early Portuguese detective fiction and metafictive dialogism in the post-Franco novel. Andrés Haye is associate professor at the School of Psychology, Pontíficia Universidad Católica de Chile, and associate researcher of the interdisciplinary research platforms Normalcy, Difference & Education and the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research. His areas of interest are social psychology, philosophy, and social theory, doing empirical research about memory, cultural aspects of intergroup and political attitudes

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About the Contributors

comparing generations, and biographical discourse both among the youth and the elder—theoretically and methodologically inspired by both M. Bakhtin and W. James. Margarita Marinova is associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia. In 2014, Marinova’s translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s play Don Quixote (coedited with Scott Pollard) was published in the MLA’s Texts and Translations series. The translation was nominated for a PEN award. Her book Transnational Russian-American Travel Writing came out in 2011 (London and New York: Routledge). She has published articles about Russian and Soviet literature and culture, contemporary Bulgarian literature, and travel studies in journals such as the Slavic and East European Journal, Studies in Travel Writing, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Yelena Mazour-Matusevich is a professor of French at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She earned her PhD in French and Medieval Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Yelena is an author of two books: Saluting Aron Ya. Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Related Studies, coauthored with A. Korros (Brill, 2010); and Le siècle d’or de la mystique française: de Jean Gerson (1363–1429) à Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (1450?– 1536) (Paris-Milan, Archè-SARL, 2004), and also about forty scholarly articles and essays. Her Bakhtin-related articles are: “Nietzsche’s Influence on  Bakhtin’s  Aesthetics” in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature & Culture, and “Some Aspects of Aron Gurevich’s Dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin on Medieval Popular Culture” in Saluting Aron Ya. Gurevich. Dick McCaw is senior lecturer in theater at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has edited and introduced The Laban Sourcebook (Routledge 2011) and authored Bakhtin and Theatre (Routledge 2016) and The Actor’s Body—A Guide (forthcoming by Bloomsbury Methuen). He is currently working on Understanding the Actor’s Body—A Neurophysiological Approach for Methuen books. Apart from his books, he has written many articles and chapters on actor training, physical theater, and movement for actors. He is a contributing editor of Theatre and Dance Performance Training (Routledge) and New Theatre Quarterly (Cambridge University Press). Steven Mills is an associate professor of Spanish at Buena Vista University. His research focuses on twentieth-century Spanish literature with an emphasis on cognitive approaches to literature and culture. He has researched eugenics, social thought, and censorship during the Franco dictatorship, and has most recently presented on embodied cognition and contextualized identity as an alternative to Cartesian Dualism when engaging subjectivity and

About the Contributors

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posthumanity in literature. His most recent article “Reflective Mindreading: Theory of Mind and the Search for Self in Machado’s Soledades” was published in Hispania journal. Greg M. Nielsen is professor of sociology at Concordia University; he publishes in the areas of social and cultural theory as well as media studies. He is the author of numerous articles on Bakhtin and of The Norms of Answerability: Social Theory between Bakhtin and Habermas  (SUNY PRESS, 2002) and Le  Canada de Radio-Canada:  Sociologie  critique et  dialogisme  culturel. (GREF, 1994). He is s coauthor of Mediated Society: A Critical Sociology of Media (Oxford, 2011); and coeditor of Acts of Citizenship (Zed Books: 2008), Revealing Democracy: Religion  and Secularism  in Liberal Democratic States (Peter Lang 2014), and Poverty and Journalism: Transformative Practices? (On Journalism/Sur le journalisme, Forthcoming). His current research includes  dialogical critiques of contemporary journalism coverage of immigration and poverty in several North American cities. Brian M. Phillips is assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages at Jackson State University. His research focuses on the use of the medical/illness metaphor as a language of power in the literature and society of early modern Spain and Europe. He is a recent winner of the Northeast Modern Language Association’s Summer Fellowship and his scholarly work can be found in publications with GRISO’s projects on Recreaciones quijotescas y cervantinas en la narrativa (2013), and Recreaciones quijotescas y cervantinas en las artes (2016). His recent work includes a forthcoming chapter of a book edited by Stephen Hessel with Juan de la Cuesta (2018), and a coedited volume of essays under consideration for publication with Hispanic Issues titled Confined Women: Emparedadas, Malcasadas and the Walls of Female Space in Inquisitorial Spain. Yumi Tanaka is assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Cultures at Japan Women’s University. She earned her MA in Comparative Literature at Brown University in 2008, and her PhD at University of Tokyo in 2014. Currently, she is working on her first book A Comparative Study of Anti-Romantic Receptions of Don Quixote in American and Japanese Contemporary Novels. Her other publications are “Faulkner’s Quixotism: Gavin Stevens and Morality,” in Hikaku Bungaku (Comparative Literature, 2009), and “The Fat Don Quixote: Reading John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy Dunces” in Sekai Bungaku (World Literature, 2016).