Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin: Reason and Faith (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 9781409462408, 1409462404

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin This book examines the significance of religion in the work of the twentiethcentury philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. Exploring Bakhtin’s contribution to debates on methodology in the study of religion, this book argues that his use of religious terminology is derived from his source material in philosophy of religion and not from his confessional commitment to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Critiquing Gavin Flood’s important work Beyond Phenomenology, Hilary Bagshaw explains how Bakhtin’s work on ‘outsideness’ presents invaluable insights for scholars of religion, particularly pertinent to the contemporary insider/outsider debate. Hilary Bagshaw has undertaken two somewhat daunting tasks: first, establishing the originality of Mikhail Bakhtin in relation to his philosophical sources; secondly, finely calibrating how far this surplus of novelty could help to resolve the dialectic of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ views in the academic study of religion. As she drives towards her highly focused and convincing conclusion, so we find Bakhtin growing beyond the Bakhtin we thought we knew and speaking to us afresh. Bakhtin scholars no less than students of religion will greatly benefit from Bagshaw’s work.  Graham Pechey, University of Cambridge, UK

ASHGATE NEW CRITICAL THINKING IN RELIGION, THEOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES The Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. Headed by an international editorial advisory board of acclaimed scholars spanning the breadth of religious studies, theology and biblical studies, this openended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Other Recently Published Titles in the Series: Cassian’s Conferences Scriptural Interpretation and the Monastic Ideal Christopher J. Kelly Naturalism and Our Knowledge of Reality Testing Religious Truth-claims R. Scott Smith Thomas Torrance’s Mediations and Revelation Titus Chung Dalit Theology and Christian Anarchism Keith Hebden Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities Sustenance and Sustainability Pankaj Jain Piety and Responsibility Patterns of Unity in Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, and Vedanta Desika John N. Sheveland Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness Christopher B. Barnett The Trinity and Theodicy The Trinitarian Theology of von Balthasar and the Problem of Evil Jacob H. Friesenhahn

Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin Reason and Faith

HILARY B.P. BAGSHAW University of Sheffield, UK

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Hilary B.P. Bagshaw 2013 Hilary B.P. Bagshaw has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bagshaw, Hilary B. P. Religion in the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin : reason and faith. – (Ashgate new critical thinking in religion, theology and biblical studies) 1. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975. 2. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975– Religion. 3. Philosophy and religion. 4. Religion– Methodology. 5. Flood, Gavin D., 1954- Beyond phenomenology. I. Title II. Series 197-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bagshaw, Hilary B.P. Religion in the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin : reason and faith / by Hilary B.P. Bagshaw. p. cm. – (New critical thinking in religion, theology, and Biblical studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-6240-8 1. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975–Religion. I. Title. PG2947.B3B34 2013  801'.95092–dc23 ISBN 9781409462408 (hbk)

Contents Abbreviations for Bakhtin’s Works   Foreword   Preface   Acknowledgements  

vii ix xiii xv

1

Introduction  

2

Themes from Philosophy of Religion  

19

3

Myth, Religion and Language  

43

4

The History of Genre and the Secularization of Literature  

65

5

Carnival and Carnivalesque Literature  

83

6

Can Bakhtin’s Work Be Applied to the Study of Religion?  

99

7

Outsideness  

115

8

Conclusion  

131

Bibliography   Index  

1

139 153

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Abbreviations for Bakhtin’s Works

Abb.

Title

Date of writing

Published in Russian

Published in English

A&A A&H

‘Art and Answerability’ ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [The Aesthetics of Verbal Creation] ‘The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism’ ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Tom 2 [Collected Works in Seven Volumes Volume 2] Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Tom 5 [Collected Works in Seven Volumes Volume 5] Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh. Tom 6 [Collected Works in Seven Volumes Volume 6] ‘Discourse in the Novel’ 1941 paper to Institute of World Literature ‘The Novel as Literary Genre’ published in 1975 as ‘Epic and Novel’ ‘From Notes Made 1970–71’ ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ ‘The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art’ Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo [Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art] Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’ ‘The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis’

  1924–27

1919 1979

1990 1990

 

1979

 

AVC B C CW2 CW5 CW6 DN E&N

FNM FPND PCMF PDA PDP PSG PT

 

1986

 

1981

 

2000

 

 

1996

 

 

2002

 

  c. 1941

1975 1975

1981 1981

1970–71 c. 1940

  1975

1986 1981

Probably 1924  

1975

1990

1929

 

  1963    

1984 1986 1986

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin

R&HW The Work of François Rabelais or in Before 1946 1965 the English publication Rabelais and when he defended the His World first version of his dissertation   RQ ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’ S ‘Satire’ An article commissioned for 1940 1996 the Literary Encyclopaedia   TMHS ‘Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences’ TPA c. 1922–23 1986 Toward a Philosophy of the Act ‘Toward a Reworking of the TRDB Dostoevsky Book’   1961 All emphases in quoted passages are in the originals.

1984

1986   1986   1984

Foreword James L. Cox, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, University of Edinburgh

In Reason and Faith, Hilary Bagshaw examines the role of religion in the thought of the Russian philosopher of language and literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). Bakhtin came to the attention of Western scholars relatively late, in the words of David Danow, having ‘emerged in recent decades from virtual obscurity to remarkable prominence as theorist of literature, language, and interpersonal relations’ (Danow, 1991: 3). Bagshaw produces a lucid account of Bakhtin’s contribution not only to literary theory by discussing his analysis of writers such as Rabelais, Goethe and Dostoevsky, but also asks if Bakhtin was writing as a committed Christian and thus as a surreptitious theologian. Bagshaw’s conclusion that Bakhtin used the language of theology metaphorically rather than as an avenue for promoting Christian faith is convincing. It is clear that Bakhtin drew on his background in the Russian Orthodox tradition to interpret literary themes, such as the role of the artist and hero and the nature of carnival in narrative traditions. Yet, this is not the whole picture, as Bagshaw makes clear. The philosophical influences were paramount, firstly from neo-Kantian sources, but also from phenomenology influenced by the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, precisely around ideas of intersubjectivity and empathy. By the time we have reached the end of Chapter 5, we have been led convincingly to the conclusion that Bakhtin approached Christianity through the lens of the philosophy of religion rather than confessional theology. Bakhtin has been brought to the attention of students of religion by the scholar of Hinduism, Gavin Flood, through his highly regarded and influential book, Beyond Phenomenology, published in 1999. Flood’s work was written at a time when critics of the phenomenological method in the study of religion were mounting sustained attacks on its underlying assumptions. From the time the Dutch phenomenologist Gerardus van der Leeuw published his landmark volume, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (English version, 1938) to the 1980s, when Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago had attained enormous influence as an interpreter of religious meaning (Eliade, 1959, 1969; Cox, 2006: 177–87), arguably the phenomenology of religion was the dominant method associated with the study of religion as a subject in its own right. Criticism of phenomenology began to mount through influential articles and books written in the 1980s and early 1990s by key scholars of religion including Robert Segal (1983), Donald Wiebe (1985, 1998) and Ivan Strenski (1993). This censure of phenomenology

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gained momentum throughout the 1990s in the works of other important figures writing in post-modern and post-colonial contexts, such as Russell McCutcheon (1997) and Richard King (1999) and has persisted into the twenty-first century (Tremlett, 2008; Cox, 2010: 146–64). Flood thought he had found in Bakhtin a way out of the increasingly polarized debates at the heart of Religious Studies which by the 1990s had produced contentious arguments about the irreducibility of religion, the study of religion as a discipline sui generis and the ongoing tension, both academically and in university politics, between Religious Studies and Theology (Wiebe, 1984: 401–22). One of the main criticisms identified by Flood, which had been levelled against phenomenologists such as van der Leeuw and later Ninian Smart (1973; 1984: 257–69) and Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1964; 1972; 1981), centred around their claim that by using empathy an observer could enter into specific religious contexts in order to gain a universal understanding of religious experience. According to Flood, this is a problem that the phenomenology of religion inherited from Husserl, who maintained that the individual consciousness is at the same time both particular and universal. In Husserl’s view, the consciousness, although limited to private acts of the ego, such as perception, memory and association, asserts a common understanding of the world with others, or obtains intersubjectivity, through empathy (Cox, 2010: 16–30). In the phenomenology of religion, this same process operates when the subjective observer, in this case the scholar of religion, is able to penetrate into the inner meaning of religious facts. This, on Flood’s analysis, has resulted in the overriding emphasis among phenomenologists on subjective states, conveyed in terms of numinous experience, faith or inner enlightenment. Flood argues that this can be seen clearly in the case of Eliade, where religion is construed in terms of the observer’s ability to feel ‘as if’ one were religious by entering into the mind of the religious person. For Flood, this turns the study of religion into a study of the structure of the religious ‘consciousness’ because it is linked to the idea it imported from Husserl that ‘assumes the universality of the rational subject … who can, through objectification, have access to a truth external to any particular historical and cultural standpoint’ (Flood, 1999: 108). Flood believed that the next stage in the development of the study of religion as an academic discipline would be found not by rehearsing the outworn debates about the relevance of Husserl’s epistemology to the study of religion, but in Bakhtin’s dialogical interpretation as expressed in language or ‘utterance’, which Flood defines as ‘a speech act occurring in a language within a specific social, cultural and historical situation’ (Flood, 1999: 156). On this definition, utterance resides at the very core of what is meant by dialogue. Through Bakhtin’s analysis of utterance, Flood thought the scholar of religion could overcome the problem inherent within phenomenology which grants epistemic privilege to the observer, who intuitively senses meaning for believers in a way that is empirically unverifiable. Flood’s resolution to this problem is rooted in what he interprets to be the ‘dialogism’ of Bakhtin and thus places the future of the academic study of religion in language and narrative rather than in a Husserlian analysis of

Foreword

xi

consciousness. Flood concludes: ‘All knowledge of the human realm … is … dialogical, entailing the subject of dialogue hearing and responding to the voice of the “other” of dialogue, from a particular, embodied location’ (Flood, 1999: 152). It is just at this point that Hilary Bagshaw’s analysis of Bakhtin becomes relevant. The final two chapters of Bagshaw’s book specifically address the issues raised by Flood and thus make a significant contribution to contemporary debates on theory and method in the study of religion. Bagshaw, by the time she reaches the section on Flood and the study of religion, has demonstrated that she is an expert in interpreting Bakhtin’s writings. She confidently disputes Flood’s conclusions by arguing that he has exaggerated Bakhtin’s use of the narrative or utterance as a way of overcoming the insider–outsider problem in the study of religion. In fact, in her excellent final chapter, Bagshaw demonstrates that Bakhtin based his epistemological theory on a concept he called ‘outsideness’, which shows the impossibility of replicating the experience of the other by attempting to get ‘inside’ another’s mind or consciousness. According to Bagshaw, Bakhtin suggested that the outside viewpoint gives a far more complete picture of the object of study than often is appreciated. ‘Outsideness’, however, should not be confused with objectivism, which, when applied to the study of religion, concludes that a scholar can study only outer expressions or manifestations of inner religious life. For Bakhtin, ‘outsideness’ is analogous to the role of an author who knows his or her characters intimately, but at the same time remains separate from them. This analogy, when accompanied by Scheler’s idea of sympathy (Husserl’s empathy), in Bagshaw’s view, can be applied to the study of religion by suggesting that a scholar can represent fairly the experience of the believer without insisting that, as an outsider, the scholar attain an almost mystical union with the adherent. Admittedly, it is a fine line to walk between intuiting subjective states and claims to pure objectivity, but Bagshaw makes the case persuasively that Bakhtin does not relinquish his phenomenological roots by ignoring the epistemological problem of intersubjective consciousness, a fact that is at the very least minimized by Flood. Bagshaw does not end this highly innovative book simply by drawing attention to the limitations in Flood’s interpretation of Bakhtin. She suggests that a new reading of Bakhtin can contribute to resolving the problem (outlined so clearly by Flood) that had been created by phenomenologists of religion who adopted into their methodologies Husserl’s analysis of consciousness with its heavy reliance on Descartes’ detached ego. Bagshaw argues that scholars of religion can go a long distance towards addressing the problem created by the inevitable division between subject and object, not by trying to deny the problem of the impenetrability of the other’s consciousness, but through Bakhtin’s method of ‘outsideness’. In this sense, Bakhtin does not lead the student of religion ‘beyond phenomenology’ in Flood’s sense, but corrects the method itself without dismissing its fundamental principles.

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Preface I first encountered the work of Mikhail Bakhtin when I was taught by Dr Cosimo Zene at The School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) while I was studying for a Master’s Degree in Oriental and African Religions. Like many people I was attracted by the depth and scope of Bakhtin’s work and was motivated to pursue my studies further, and I am very grateful to Dr Zene for his inspiration and encouragement at the start of my exploration. I was attached to the Bakhtin Centre at the University of Sheffield for my doctoral studies, and here I was introduced to a critical approach to Bakhtin, in sympathy with the title of Ken Hirschkop’s work ‘Bakhtin in the Sober Light of Day’ (Hirschkop, 2001). Nurtured by my supervisors, Professor David Shepherd of Keele University, former Director of the Bakhtin Centre, and Professor Craig Brandist, current Director of the Centre, I was encouraged to study neo-Kantian philosophy and phenomenology as routes to understanding Bakhtin. I thank them both for the attention they gave to me, and for their well-balanced capacity to share their knowledge and scholarship, while leaving me scope to develop my own intellectual space. I would like to express my thanks to all the people who have helped and supported me through the time that I have worked on my doctoral studies, and in pursuing the publication of my work. Among the many people to whom I owe thanks, I would like to give special mention to my children, Joanna and Anthony Bagshaw, for their pride in me and sense of humour in times of difficulty, to Professor James Cox for his unstinting encouragement, to Annie Jackson for her professional and personal assistance, to Dr Ana Maria Oliva for her companionship through the ups and down of doctoral studies and to Graham Pechey for his kindness, thoughtfulness and ability to find new ways to consider ideas.

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Acknowledgements The quotations 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 (c) 1990, and The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Copyright (c) 1981 are reproduced courtesy of the University of Texas Press.

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Chapter 1

Introduction Mikhail Mihailovic Bakhtin (1895–1975) was a thinker and writer who has gained an eminent position among philosophers and literary critics of the twentieth century. Linking his work with religion is contentious. At the XIIIth International Bakhtin Conference in London, Ontario, in 2008, Caryl Emerson mentioned the ‘theologist wars’ over his work, referring to rival interpretations of his work, differing on the grounds of the commentator’s stance on the appeal to religion, or absence of it, in Bakhtin’s thought. She was probably overstating the polarization in this debate, but she was locating an arena for discussion, and there is room for more work in this area: a gap that this project aims to fill. On the one hand, it takes a critical approach to interpretations of Bakhtin that regard him as a covert theologian or theologist, unable to publish his thought transparently under the Soviet regime and therefore writing in Aesopian language; on the other hand, the work seeks to address the importance given by Bakhtin to philosophy of religion, and his use of religious metaphor, language and religious images to enhance his expositions. The conclusion falls between the ends of the spectrum of the theologist debate, and I would like to suggest that it is possible to articulate a nuanced approach that can be productive to understanding this complex writer and thinker. The second aim of the research is to seek to assess the extent to which Bakhtin’s ideas have potential to contribute to the study of religion. This area is an interdisciplinary field of studies, having started in the nineteenth century as the history of religions, and in the twentieth century passing through a period when it was known as comparative religion; and it has always acknowledged its interdisciplinary nature and overlapping interests with anthropology, ethnography, sociology and other social sciences. The theoretical model most usually associated with the study of religion in the late twentieth century and into the current one, is phenomenology, adapted from Husserl.1 The important feature bracketed out in the study of religion is agnosticism in the face of the truth claims of the religion studied, while acknowledging the importance and interest of religious phenomena. Gavin Flood (1999) proposed Bakhtin’s work as an alternative theoretical model for the study of religion, one that would have the advantage, he argued, of working around some of the philosophical disadvantages of Husserl’s phenomenology. This work seeks to explore some of the implications of this approach. It must be acknowledged here what some might see as a limitation in this work, that I shall only be covering work published in English. There are, of course, many 1

  For further reading on this topic see, for example, Cox, 2006, and Chryssides and Geaves, 2007.

2

Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin

important and valuable works by Bakhtin and about Bakhtin in Russian, which have not yet been translated into English, and will not be considered. However, Bakhtin has enjoyed such fame in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that the translated texts provide substantial material for discussion. His primary texts are almost all available in English and the scholarly literature on his work in English is extensive. Aleksandr Mihailovic has drawn attention to the difficulties of non-Russian speakers in grasping the nuances of the texts, and he says of some secondary sources on Bakhtin: The language impediment and the indifference of many of these commentators to Russian cultural realia are considerable obstacles to engaging with the issue of Bakhtin’s relation to the traditions – and the often complex and highly varied political manifestations – of Russian spirituality. (Mihailovic, 1997: 3–4)

Mihailovic himself has made a substantial contribution to filling the gap for non-Russian speakers in understanding the theological references and nuanced language in Bakhtin. There are times when an outsider perspective can be valuable and bring different and complementary insights to the discussion, which is what I hope to be able to achieve. I trust that the present work will be a contribution to Bakhtin scholarship despite the language limitation. It is worth noting that there are other Bakhtin scholars, such as Graham Pechey (2001, 2006, 2007), who also work within these constraints. In the introductory section we will cover biographical material on Bakhtin that relates to his religious predilections; and secondary literature concentrating on religious interpretations of Bakhtin’s work. Bakhtin’s language and expressions frequently have religious overtones, and the focus of some of the debate is on whether the intention of his writing was religious, and if not, if the religious flavour of his texts is a consequence of his immersion in German philosophy of religion and the difficulty of translating German philosophical terms into Russian. Brandist (2002: 24) has drawn attention to the lack of established philosophical discourse in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, and to the fact that terms with religious connotations were adapted for general philosophical discussions. The discussion of secondary literature provides an essential ground-clearing exercise which enables the main body of the work to focus on the questions that concern us. This section will finish with a reiteration of the aims of the project and a summary of the structure of the remaining text. Bakhtin’s early interests were in highly abstract philosophical concerns of ethics and aesthetics. He wrote about the individual’s responsibility as a human being and made the often-quoted reference to ‘The fact of my non-alibi in Being’ (TPA: 40). This is a somewhat enigmatic remark but concerns ethical questions of particularity, singularity and the impossibility of replicating any scenario in time and place, and hence the responsibility which is impossible to dodge or avoid if one is to be fully human. He linked his ideas to art and life, and he valued life over art: art being the concretization and deadening of life forms and life

Introduction

3

stories. He explored this theme in an extended phenomenological description of the relationship of the author and hero in aesthetic activity (A&H), which is an extraordinary and original work in the tradition of philosophical exploration of intersubjectivity – relationships between the self and other; but in this case the author is the self and the hero is the author’s other. He develops this idea in such depth that he addresses issues of the embodiment of the self and the implications of the relationships between one embodied self to another that cannot be addressed by Cartesian notions of the disembodied ego. The religious themes in his early work are subordinated to ethical themes, but in some instances become more apparent; one such example is in his interest in confession. Bakhtin had a philosophical interest in confession and repentance derived from Scheler, and this can be seen in his later work on the development of the novel, re-emerging in his interest in confession as a literary genre. His work is made more poignant by his own biography as he himself was interrogated and there is some information about the confession he made in these circumstances. Related to these themes, and as an extrapolation of intersubjectivity to epistemology, is Bakhtin’s work on outsidedness. His phenomenological descriptions led him to place a value on the position of outsideness as an epistemological advantage. The outsider can see more – has a surplus of seeing – over the participant closer to the action. In his very late notes on the human sciences (TMHS) he briefly alludes to this again in a more considered overview. This concept in particular could have purchase in the debates on insider versus outsider perspectives in the study of religion, and this will be discussed in Chapter 7. In his later work, Bakhtin abandons high level philosophizing for a historical approach to human culture, with a strong emphasis on myth and religion as precursors to later cultural forms. There has been much debate among Bakhtin scholars about why he made this turn, with possible reasons being entirely pragmatic ones concerning his access to a limited range of material, the restrictions explicit or implicit to his work in Soviet Russia, or reasons concerning the work itself, and the criticism that his philosophy had come to an dead end from which he could not extricate it, and he moved on to easier fields (see Hirschkop, 2001: 12). There is no doubt however that his work was fruitful and productive including the two major monographs on Dostoevsky and Rabelais that were published in his lifetime. His interest became focused on literature as the development of literary form, but this was not a narrow focus as his view encompassed the whole of human history and the relationship between language and myth as discussed contemporaneously by Ernst Cassirer and Max Mϋller. He is best known for his concept of carnival, a concept elevated from the historical reality of medieval carnival festivals to embrace a role as the receptor and carrier of popular culture, and as the mediating phenomenon that brings art and life together. This work will cover all these broad areas with an agenda of evaluating the significance of religion as a category, and religious imagery and metaphors in the texts. Bakhtin’s texts make challenging reading as they are wordy, complicated, sometimes enigmatic and often in note form. Some were prepared for publication

4

Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin

but others were published by his executors from incomplete manuscripts. The complete works in Russian have been published in part to date, with only Volumes 2, 5 and 6 of the planned seven-volume series available. This offers opportunities for creativity in interpreting the material and for speculative interventions to extrapolate where the texts only give hints, or the notes do not give a full explanation of what the writer intended. Bakhtin addresses issues that express complex ideas crossing disciplinary boundaries, and he uses some words, such as heteroglossia, in a new way, expanding the meaning to encompass a new dimension. Bakhtin asks his reader to work hard to enter this linguistically complex world, and it is no surprise that readers find a multiplicity of meanings in the texts. Bakhtin the Religious Man It is not disputed that Bakhtin was a person of religious faith, brought up in the Russian Orthodox tradition and continuing to practise his religion and to explore innovative and slightly heterodox variants, to the extent that this was possible, during his lifetime. This inevitably raises questions about the impact that his faith had upon his work. We shall briefly rehearse this aspect of his biography for the sake of completeness. The source for this material is the 1984 biography of him by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, although Coates has drawn attention to the lack of documentary evidence on which it is based (Coates, 1998: 3), but it remains the most substantial resource on his biography. The chapter on his religious activities and arrest (Clark and Holquist, 1984: 120–45) starts by stating that he was a religious man with an upbringing in Russian Orthodoxy, but what marks him out as different from many of his contemporaries is that by the 1920s ‘religious thought had become one of Bakhtin’s central interests’ (Clark and Holquist, 1984: 120). Although he was a lifelong believer, his interests lay in the intellectual dimensions of the Russian Orthodox tradition rather than the devotional ones. Clark and Holquist say that ‘he was not interested so much in religion as in the philosophy of religion’ (Clark and Holquist, 1984: 120) and the groups in which he moved were concerned with large philosophical questions. Clark and Holquist emphasize the universalist spirit of their endeavour: they wanted to synthesize all human experience including the religious like Fichte and Schelling. All the evidence suggests that Bakhtin, while educated and culturally immersed in Russian Orthodoxy, was attracted to the ideas, groups and organizations that formed what became known as the Russian Religious Renaissance of the early twentieth century, and that he continued to support these groups and attend occasional meetings in a political environment that became more and more hostile in the 1920s, which culminated in his arrest in December 1928. The key groups that played a part in his life at this point were the Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim, the Josephite schism and the religious group, Voskresenie [Resurrection]. He was not a leader or founder of any of the groups, and even his membership seems to

Introduction

5

be in doubt, but he was an associate of people known to be members and attended occasional meetings.2 It was his interest in teaching that got him into most trouble with the authorities. Bakhtin’s arrest was part of a widespread exercise: he was never a major target but a peripheral player. According to Clark and Holquist (1984: 141), Bakhtin was gathered in as part of a trawl of intellectuals, and possibly as a dry run for a much larger programme which took place in 1930 and 1931. The senior interrogator in the Leningrad OGPU at the time was Stromin, who wanted to make a name for himself in prosecuting intellectuals, and who later made the admission that this was the case. Bakhtin was arrested on the night of 24/25 December 1928 (Coates, 1998: 6) and was interrogated. According to Clark and Holquist, he was charged with being a member of the Brotherhood of Saint Seraphim, a charge which was later dropped; with being included in a list of members of a future anti-Communist Russian government; and that he had been corrupting the young in his private lectures on the pastoral courses in Leningrad. Coates, whose work takes into account more recent sources than Clark and Holquist, states that he was released after a few days but interrogated again in March 1929. His friends appealed for clemency on his behalf and his sentence of five years on the Solovetsky islands was changed to five years’ exile in Kustanai in Kazakhstan. He was released in December and moved to Kustanai in early 1930. We do not have significant evidence of Bakhtin’s religious practice during the rest of his life, and the reports of his death serve to reinforce the ambiguity surrounding his religious faith and practice. The nurse who attended him said that his last words were ‘I go to thee,’ which have been interpreted as a devotional expression indicating that he was going to God, or that he was going to join his wife who predeceased him. Before he died a priest came to the doorway of his room, but Bakhtin waved him away, refusing the last rites. Clark and Holquist say that refusing the last rites was a tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, and their interpretation is that he was always sceptical of formal religious practice, preferring inner spirituality and human communion (Clark and Holquist, 1984: 343). His funeral arrangements were eclectic. His friends made a death mask of him and arranged for his body to be laid out according to the ritual for a monk’s burial, but the ceremony was civil, not religious, and he was buried in Vvedenskoe cemetery next to his wife. Secondary Literature – Religious Interpretations of Bakhtin Bakhtin scholarship has been divided over the significance to give to religion in Bakhtin’s work, and we will cover the most notable examples of literature that is sympathetic to religious readings of Bakhtin, and the writers who focus on 2

  For further reading on the Russian Orthodox church in Soviet Russia see Ellis, 1998, and on the Russian Religious Renaissance, Copleston, 1988.

Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin

6

theological interpretations of his texts published in English. The appeal of this approach to Bakhtin’s work, particularly in the Russian commentary, is drawn attention to by Hirschkop, who notes that the editors of Volume 5 of the Collected Works of Bakhtin published in 1996 add a significant amount of commentary, and ‘much of the commentary is devoted to an unceasing and adventurous search for theological subtexts in the material’ (Hirschkop, 2001: 6). The literature reviewed here approaches Bakhtin from broadly the same angle, but within this framework there are different approaches and perspectives. Some writers focus specifically on Russian Orthodox theology, while others look for parallels with Christian theology on a more general level. In English language works, Aleksandr Mihailovic leads the field in discussing themes from Russian Orthodox theology in Bakhtin’s work, and one of the two reasons he gives for the importance of taking seriously the theological subtext is that ‘it has become a given in Russian interpretations of him’ (Mihailovic, 1997: 5). Mihailovic himself is a mediator of the Russian work, to such an extent that Caryl Emerson, in her (1997) work The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, about the Russian reception of Bakhtin, gives significant attention to Mihailovic’s work (for example pp. 168–72). For these reasons, we shall give most attention to Mihailovic’s work while discussing in somewhat less detail the work of other scholars. The evidence supporting the argument that Bakhtin intended to write more openly about religious issues, but was constrained by the political environment that was hostile to religion, is taken from interviews he gave at the end of his life.3 Sergei Bocharov published details of a conversation he had held with Bakhtin, which took place on 9 June 1970. Bakhtin talked about lack of freedom he had experienced over the past half century, and when questioned about his book on Dostoevsky, he allegedly said: The way I could have written it would have been very different from the way it is. After all, in that book I severed form from the main thing. I couldn’t speak directly about the main questions.

And when asked what the main questions were, he replied: Philosophical questions. What Dostoevsky agonized about all his life – the existence of God. In the book I was constantly forced to prevaricate, to dodge back and forward. I had to hold back constantly. The moment a thought got going, I had to break it off. Backward and forward. (Bocharov, 1994: 1012)

What is clear from this report is that, at the end of his life, Bakhtin was taking a regretful, retrospective view of his work, and pondering on what he might have done differently. It is not necessarily an accurate representation of what he thought 3

  This point is taken as a given by some commentators, for example Coates, 1998: 23 and Coates, 2001: 73.

Introduction

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at the time, but was his recollection in old age of work done decades before, which was undoubtedly coloured by the passage of time and workings of his memory, and reporting by another person. In the strongest interpretation, if his words are to be taken literally, we can interpret Bakhtin’s words to mean that he wished to write a book that addressed philosophical questions about the existence of God, but he was unable to do this and had to restrain himself in order to comply with external censorship. It is worth noting what he does not say in this interview. He does not say that he made an effort to address the questions covertly: he says that he did not address them; and he does not say that even if he had said what he wanted to say, that this would have been a work with theological content, but that he would have addressed the questions philosophically. The evidence shows us that he worked under constraints, and that at the end of his life he regretted that this had been so. Graham Pechey has constructed a form of words to deal with this evidence that we would do well to adopt – that while we do not doubt his sincerity, ‘[w]e might wish to mark down as an act of penitential over-compensation the author’s later remark that in this work he really wanted to write about God’ (Pechey, 2006: 270). The argument that Bakhtin wanted to write more religious content in his work than he actually did is not supported by his biographers Clark and Holquist (1984). They give an account of the last years of his life, when he lived in an apartment in Moscow between 1972 and his death in March 1975. He worked on the manuscripts that had been rescued from his previous home in Saransk, which included ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (A&H), other pieces from the period 1918–20 and several long essays from the 1930s and 1940s. Clark and Holquist (1984: 340) say that ‘he reworked the texts a little, deleting in particular the religious passages’. What are we to make of this information? A possible explanation is that at this late stage in his life he did not want the religious passages included in work for publication. However, this is long after he could possibly have feared for his life or liberty as a consequence of publication, so this reason must be excluded. He possibly thought that the exclusion of religious passages would make his work more publishable in the late twentieth century, but it is also possible that the religious passages were inconsistent with his intentions for the direction of his work. He undoubtedly used religious expressions as rhetorical devices to explain his meaning, and as illustrations and metaphors, and the assessment of this material will be covered in later chapters of this work. Despite his revisions in later life, there are passages in Bakhtin’s writing that have an overtly religious and emphatically Christian tone. One example from ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ is: ‘Hence, in all Christ’s norms the I and the other are contraposed: for myself – absolute sacrifice, for the other – loving mercy. But I–for–myself is the other for God’ (A&H: 56). The tone of this passage can be read as heartfelt to the point of being confessional. But however passionately this speech is delivered, the context in which it appears is almost as a speech, or a quotation in the text, in a completely different voice to the surrounding material. The context is an enumerated list of the constituents of Christianity: Judaism, the idea of the deity becoming human, Gnostic dualism and

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askesis and fourthly the Christ of the Gospels, at which point he launches into the lyrical passage. The following sentence is the prosaic: ‘These are the pertinent components of Christianity’ (A&H: 56). The impression given is of confusion and inconsistency. On the one hand there is the voice of a believer, and on the other the voice of a dispassionate observer. The difficulty is making sense of this as a whole, not taking one voice as the authentic voice of Bakhtin and the other as inauthentic. The position that shall be argued here is that there is no doubt that Bakhtin held a personal faith, but that in his writing his intention was to translate the religious feeling into philosophical constructs that could encompass both the cognitive and non-cognitive sides of consciousness. We shall be arguing that his philosophy in the neo-Kantian tradition was his chosen vehicle for this expression. Two other passages from ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ are cited by Ruth Coates4 to demonstrate that Christianity provides a model for Bakhtin’s thinking, and to reinforce her claim that the Christian paradigm had extraordinary importance in Bakhtin’s early philosophy (Coates, 1998: 39). The first is: It should suffice to recall the inequality in principle between the I and the other with respect to value in Christian ethics: one must not love oneself, one must love the other; one must not be indulgent toward oneself, one must be indulgent toward the other; and in general, we must relieve the other of any burdens and take them upon ourselves. (A&H: 38)

The second passage is: Finally, the idea of grace as the bestowal – from outside – of lovingly merciful acceptance and justification of the given, as of that which is in principle sinful, and, therefore, cannot be surmounted from within itself. This includes the associated idea of confession (total and utter penitence) and absolution. From within my own penitence, there is a negation of the whole of myself; from outside myself (God is the other), there is loving mercy and restoration. In himself, a human being can only repent, and the other can give absolution. (A&H: 57)

The Christian content in these passages is undeniable but the context in which they appear in the text is as illustration of general points Bakhtin is making about ethics and aesthetics. The first passage occurs in Bakhtin’s discussion of the essential difference between the way I experience myself (my own I) and how I experience others, and he appears to be using the familiarity of Christian ethical teaching to illustrate a complicated philosophical point. The second passage occurs in Bakhtin’s historical overview of cultural references to the human body in which he discusses elements of Christianity and refers to the Christian tradition of calling 4

  Coates, 1998: 40. She gives her own translations from the Russian texts, but the quotations here are taken from the English translation 1990.

Introduction

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the church the body of Christ. There is no doubt of the importance of these matters for Bakhtin, but their inclusion does not establish Coates’ argument that God is more than a metaphor in the texts. Coates is careful to say that she does not regard Bakhtin as a theologian but ‘he is rather a philosopher whose work is fed by certain aspects of the Christian vision of and for the world’ (Coates, 1998: 22). She refers to Christian motifs in his work, and it is hard to disagree with this, but not when she makes stronger claims, for example when she writes: There can be no doubt, as I believe any reasonably impartial reader must conclude, that the structures of the Christian kerygma5 are consciously and thoroughly incorporated by Bakhtin both into his phenomenological aesthetics and into the ‘primary philosophy’ of life for which his analysis of art is a model. (Coates, 1998: 56)

The strength of this claim is not supported by her arguments based on the texts. Bakhtin’s phenomenological descriptions of complex interrelationships, whether they be of self and other, author and hero or partners in a dialogue with an unknown superaddressee, have lent themselves to comparison with other nuanced discourses concerning complex interrelationships, with Christian doctrines of the nature of Christ (human and divine) and the Trinity (three persons in one Godhead) prominent candidates. The early Christian church actively debated these issues and the Fourth Council, at Chalcedon in 451 CE, was the forum which came to agreement on a way of understanding the twin natures of Christ. The solution was that the divine and human natures of Christ co-exist immutably, without separation or division,6 and this has come to be known as the Chalcedonian formula. The formula offers a model of a union of diverse types, where each retains the essential nature of the original, in an undivided whole. The idea is close to, but not identical with, the Greek concept of perichoresis, or interpenetration, which is derived from the theology of St Augustine of Hippo (354 to 430 CE). It refers to the relationships between the three persons of the Trinity – the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The three hypostases of the Trinity conserve their autonomy but interpenetrate one another, thus retaining the unity of a monotheistic deity, while keeping a plurality of forms. Both these theological doctrines have a more prominent place in the Eastern tradition of Christianity, including the Russian Orthodox Church, than the Western traditions. Bakhtin’s texts contain many images of unity in diversity and plural forms in community, and the parallels with Russian Orthodox doctrine have been drawn out by some commentators, notably Aleksandr Mihailovic in his monograph Corporeal Words (1997) and his chapter in Felch and Contino’s edited book (2001). 5

  She explains kerygma as ‘the fundamental points emphasised in the proclamation of the gospels’, p. 21. 6   Mihailovic gives the Russian v dvukh prirodakh, neslitno, neprevrashchenno, nerazdelimo, nerazluchimo (1997: 126).

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At his strongest, Mihailovic claims to find a Chalcedonian subtext in Bakhtin’s work (Mihailovic, 1997: 127), but he does temper and qualify his argument as he progresses, and he does state explicitly that he is not arguing that Bakhtin was motivated by his faith, but was using the cultural references of Orthodoxy. He says: ‘The issue is not that Bakhtin actually believes in the religious doctrine of “without division or separation” but that he considers it important enough both as a poetic and structural model to play with and against’ (Mihailovic, 1997: 136). In Bakhtin’s early work we find a number of instances where he uses phrases that recall the Chalcedonian formula or interpenetration, or both. At the beginning of Toward a Philosophy of the Act, he writes: An act must acquire a single unitary plane to be able to reflect itself in both directions – in its sense or meaning and in its being; it must acquire the unity of two-sided answerability – both for its content (special answerability) and for its Being (moral answerability). And special answerability, moreover, must be brought into communion with the unitary and unique moral answerability as a constituent moment in it. That is the only way whereby the pernicious non-fusion and non-interpenetration of culture and life could be surmounted. (TPA: 2–3)

Mihailovic argues that this passage is unquestionably Chalcedonian even though Bakhtin does not use the usual Russian formulation for ‘without separation or division’, and, moreover, that he uses it not merely as a rhetorical device, but to elucidate the relationships he is describing, and that it is ‘a touchstone of truth for a world of souls separated from each other in their custom-made prisons of mutual incommensurability’ (Mihailovic, 1997: 136). Bakhtin was writing a philosophical text, bringing the ethics of personal responsibility to bear on the nature of the act. When careful commentators like Mihailovic draw attention to the language in this passage and others in Toward a Philosophy of the Act,7 the sound of the theological formulation is apparent. But it is by no means clear that Bakhtin’s intention was any more than to use the terms as analogous to the relationships he was elucidating, and so it would be more accurate to say that he was using the terms as a rhetorical device. Bakhtin’s work, particularly at this early stage, was framed in terms of neo-Kantian philosophy, and was directed at establishing objective truths in ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics. He did not need a ‘touchstone of truth’ from a different ideological framework to support his project, as he wanted it to be self-sustaining in its own terms. In Bakhtin’s later work we find that the complex relationships that are both single and plural have moved from the realm of abstraction in Toward a Philosophy of the Act to be grounded in the words of Dostoevsky. He writes that:

7

  ‘a non-fused yet undivided affirmation of myself in Being’ and ‘a non-fused yet individual form’ (TPA: 41).

Introduction

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Dostoevsky’s world is profoundly pluralistic. If we were to seek an image toward which this whole world gravitates, an image in the spirit of Dostoevsky’s own worldview, then it would be the church as a communion of unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous men come together; or perhaps it would be the image of Dante’s world, where multi-leveledness is extended into eternity, where there are the penitent and the unrepentant, the damned and the saved. Such an image would be in the style of Dostoevsky himself, or, more precisely, in the style of his ideology, while the image of a unified spirit is deeply alien to him. (PDP: 26–7)

The image of ‘a communion of unmerged souls’ has a religious resonance, but we can see the context of this phrase, and it is one example illustrating the plurality of Dostoevsky’s understanding of his world, and could be replaced by Dante’s cosmology. Mihailovic quotes from Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky regarding the manner in which other characters penetrate Raskolnikov’s consciousness, becoming mutually penetrable with each other, to reinforce his argument that perichoresical theology can be found in the late work. He does, however, qualify his approach by saying that ‘the theological metaphors in Bakhtin’s work operate more as structural paradigms than as philosophical or piously hortatory precepts’ (Mihailovic, 2001: 125). We can agree that there are theological metaphors in the work, but in arguing that these are structural paradigms, Mihailovic does not consider alternative philosophical structural paradigms which may well be of greater significance. He also says that ‘the Chalcedonian subtext offers the most irrefutable proof of Bakhtin’s engagement in the aesthetic implications of Christological categories’ (Mihailovic, 1997: 127), but again it is not evident that what we find in Bakhtin’s texts is an active, intentional engagement with such categories, rather than a passive and eclectic use of familiar cultural references. Mihailovic admits that Bakhtin was influenced by the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian religious thinkers, Solovyev and Meier, and therefore that his metaphors were funnelled through these more unconventional channels, and that he made his own original use of them. Mihailovic makes a comment about the reception of these ideas by Bakhtin’s contemporaries that is telling: A Russian reader of Bakhtin’s generation would immediately pick up these references [to the Logos, the Trinity and the two natures of Christ] and find them disturbing because the critic aestheticizes the classical theological notions that he relies so heavily upon, reducing them to terminological markers or motifs. (Mihailovic, 1997: 24)

In arguing here that Bakhtin’s use of theological concepts are reduced to motifs, we find Mihailovic’s argument at its most nuanced, and we can have no disagreement with it. Mihailovic does make clear that the conception of interpenetration should not be confused with the Russian concept of sobornost’ which the Slavophile Alexsei Khomiakov formulated as the hallmark that distinguishes Eastern

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from Western Christianity. Sobornost’ indicates a ‘kind of social all-oneness, communality or conciliarism’ (Mihailovic, 2001: 124), and is a highly charged and debated term, but one that Bakhtin never used. Mihailovic argues that Bakhtin is polemicizing against the Slavophile idea of ‘all-oneness’ by concentrating on a limited union of Self and Other through interpenetration. While Bakhtin’s concerns with plurality and self/other relationships have been linked with Russian Orthodox theology, his concern for issues of language, after he made his linguistic turn (Brandist, 2002: 53), have been linked to the theology of Logos/the Word,8 which, like the other doctrines we have been considering, features more prominently in Eastern than Western Christianity. The title of Bakhtin’s work Discourse in the Novel (DN) could alternatively be translated as The Word in the Novel, giving strength to the argument that the Word was a central concern of his. Given the significance of this term, we will briefly cover some background to the Logos, and to nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments in language studies in Russia. The term Logos has a pre-Christian history, and therefore brings with it a rich penumbra of philosophical and theological references that Bakhtin would have fully appreciated. The Greek logos appeared in the fifth century BCE in the writings of Heraclitus as the cosmic principle which gives order and rationality to the world (Blackburn, 2005: 215); and for Plato (c. 429–347 BCE) logos was the certification of truth by reason (Blackburn, 2005: 279), and was opposed to mythos or myth. According to Meletinsky (2000: vii), Herodotus is generally credited with the original distinction between logos as truth and myth as legend, but Meletinsky believes that this reflects an older distinction between fact and story where the two are distinct but interrelated. Myth should not be regarded as falsehood, but as a rich and complex discourse. In the Greek tradition mythos was the word as a decisive or final pronouncement, while logos was the word whose validity could be argued or demonstrated. Logos acquired a new level of significance when harnessed by the writer of St John’s Gospel to describe the nature of Christ. In this gospel the Greek concepts are fused with Christian doctrine, and the Logos becomes the instrument of God’s redemption of the world. The cosmic principle now becomes a divine person, and is called the Word, thereby conveying a sense of language as a mediator of divinity. The theology of the Logos and its manifestations in the Russian context are important in an understanding of Bakhtin’s work. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a fertile period for philosophy of language and linguistics in Russia and the Soviet Union, and the tendency of Russian writers to assign to the word the attributes of self-consciousness, self-reflection, perception and intentionality has been linked to the influence of Russian Orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and Christology, even in writers such as Gustav Shpet who were antipathetic to religion (see Seifrid, 2005). One of most important linguistic theorists in Russia in this period was Aleksandr Afanas’evich   In Russian slovo, which can mean the lexical unit/word, or can be broadened out to mean speech, language or discourse: see Seifrid, 2005. 8

Introduction

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Potebnia (1835–91), professor at Khar’kov University. He is best known for his theory of the inner form of language. Language for Potebnia has three parts: outer form, inner form and content, and he related his theory to the processes of cognition and consciousness. He describes inner form as the relation of the contents of thought to consciousness,9 and thus what inner form reveals is the self-awareness of the speaker of his own thought. The word is not an image of the object, but is reflected through another process of interpretation by the speaker’s consciousness. Potebnia introduces another level of ambiguity, using slovo to indicate particularity, and a discrete entity within which language has a living presence. Seifrid connects Potebnia’s construct of language with the theological tradition of the Logos, and with other philosophical traditions, so that if the word can be a divine self, then it can also be a model for secular selfhood. Potebnia sought to argue that there is unity of the word and the thought behind it, and by extension the word must lead to cognition of essential truths. Seifrid evaluates Potebnia’s contribution as fertile for the philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance (Florenskii, Bulgakov, and to some extent the Symbolists and Acmeists), and also to the nonreligious thinkers and writers such as Shpet, Jakobson and the Formalists. Potebnia’s concerns with language were influential in Russian intellectual circles, and the focus on language can be seen in the work of, among others, the Symbolist Andrei Bely who used terms derived from a theology of the Logos for his metaphysical account of the symbol; Shklovskii, the Formalist, who wrote an essay entitled Voskreshenie slova [The Resurrection of the Word]; and the Futurist poet Gumilev, who wrote a poem in 1921 entitled Slovo [the word]. Set against this background the Word/Logos/Slovo could have held directly theological significance for Bakhtin, but equally could have been used by him in secular mode as a conveyor of truth, reason and consciousness. His direct reference to Logos in St John’s Gospel is not very helpful in explicating the meaning that it held for him. He wrote in ‘From Notes Made in 1970–71’: ‘Metalinguistics and the philosophy of the word. Ancient teachings about logos. John. Language, speech, speech communication, utterance. The specific nature of speech communication’ (FNM: 152). Even Mihailovic who wants to strengthen his argument that Bakhtin’s texts are pervaded by theology from St John’s Gospel admits that this passage is limited in what it reveals about Bakhtin’s attitude to Johannine theology of Logos (Mihailovic, 1997: 17), but he still finds an adaptation of this theology in Bakhtin’s later writings. Mihailovic writes: the influence of Eastern orthodox religious thought on Bakhtin’s work is abundantly evident if viewed from the twin perspectives of Russian intellectual history and textological issues in Bakhtin’s work. Bakhtin’s adaptation of the Johannine logology with its incarnational model and the Chalcedonian and Trinitarian paradigms of unity within diversity are especially evident in his concepts of novelistic discourse and polyphony. (Mihailovic, 2001: 122)   From Potebnia Mysl’ i iazyk translated and quoted in Seifrid, 2005: 37.

9

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin

Although this reads as a strong assertion of the influence of Eastern Orthodoxy on Bakhtin, we must note that Mihailovic describes Bakhtin’s use of theology in terms of his adaptation of it. In a later passage in his book, Mihailovic makes it plain that he regards Bakhtin’s use of the theological terms as metaphors, when he says: The last decade of Bakhtin’s work manifests a renewed interest in Chalcedonian and perichoresical terminology, one first seen in his first extant essay, ‘Art and Answerability.’ As already seen, the actual form that such doctrines took in his work stripped them of their theologically normative meanings, relegating them to the status of metaphors describing human society instead of the cosmos. In a certain sense, the theological paradigms of Bakhtin’s writing become considerably transformed in thorough humanization as features of dialogue and carnival. (Mihailovic, 1997: 234)

The strength of Mihailovic’s case is in drawing out the parallels between Bakhtin’s language and the language of some theological doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church. Mihailovic comes close to arguing that Bakhtin used these concepts deliberately and intentionally to give his work a faith reference, but in the end he stops short of this. Bakhtin’s interest in ethics, aesthetics and literary theory covers ground that exceeds the boundaries of cognitive discourses and enters the affective regions of consciousness. In Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book (TRDB), he makes two notes in close proximity, firstly: ‘Not theory (transient content), but a sense of theory’, and a paragraph later: ‘Not faith (in the sense of a specific faith in orthodoxy, in progress, in man, in revolution, etc.), but a sense of faith, that is, an integral attitude (by means of the whole person) toward a higher and ultimate value’ (TRDB: 294). This phrase ‘sense of faith’ was taken up in a slightly variant translation in the title of the book edited by Susan Felch and Paul Contino, Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith (2001). Felch and Contino in their introduction, and Caryl Emerson in her concluding chapter in the volume, make a distinction between faith and a feeling for faith. Felch and Contino draw on Bakhtin’s writing to clarify faith as ‘an abstract codification of a belief system’ (2001: 1), which is therefore closely allied to institutions, church teaching and authoritative discourse. The feeling for faith is more nebulous, more personal and potentially more subversive. Contino and Felch describe it as ‘both the preparation for personal encounters – the adoption of a proper attitude – and the actual living engagement of persons human and divine’ (2001: 1). The feeling for faith here described lies clearly in the realm of personal ethics, and can be transposed onto generalizations about intersubjective relations. Caryl Emerson makes the point that Bakhtin’s writings on ethics are not a programme for action, or a checklist of values. She says: ‘His writings are not burdened by the ethical imperatives and authoritative statements one might expect when religious truth combines with artistic creation to inspire or regulate human behaviour’ (Emerson, 2001:

Introduction

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177–8). The feeling for faith could be reduced to a humanist concern for personal responsibility, tempered by the Christian motifs and common cultural references that he uses with familiarity in the expectation that his readers will share a similar cultural repertoire. The importance of this discussion is in drawing out the point that Bakhtin had wider religious interests than formal church adherence; and that the territory illuminated by a feeling for faith can be seen in terms of faith in a transcendent God, or as a philosophical concern using religious metaphors but in a context of philosophy, not theology; and moreover these two positions are very close to each other. The Bakhtin Circle and the Disputed Texts Bakhtin was not alone in giving consideration to questions of ethics and aesthetics, language, literature and culture. Before his exile he was involved in discussion groups that have come to be known as the Bakhtin Circle.10 The Circle met in Nevel and Vitebsk during the years 1918 to 1924, and then in Leningrad until 1928. A key figure in the early years was Matvei Kagan, who had studied in Berlin and Marburg, and brought his knowledge of neo-Kantian philosophy to the group. Other members included Pumpianskii, Medvedev, Kanaev, Zubakin, Voloshinov, Iudina and Sollertinskii. Clark and Holquist describe the Bakhtin circle as having a ‘religious orientation’ and ‘conducting private religious-philosophical discussions in Nevel and Vitebsk’ (Clark and Holquist, 1984: 123). A controversy has arisen as a consequence of the closeness of the Circle members over the authorship of some of their publications. Two major works, one published by Voloshinov (1973), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, and Medvedev’s (1978) work, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, plus some smaller works and articles by other authors, were later attributed to Bakhtin and his attitude to this attribution was ambiguous. A full discussion of the issues is given in the Clark and Holquist biography, and will not be rehearsed here. The position taken will be, following Brandist (2002: 9), that the works were written by the authors in whose names they were originally published, while acknowledging that the ideas contained in the works were the product of lively discussions among a number of people. The Themes that Will Structure the Work The work that follows will be a discussion of Bakhtin’s work with two strands of thought counterbalancing each other: the significance of religion in his work and the potential for applying his thought to the study of religion. With reference 10

  For substantial discussion of the Bakhtin Circle see Brandist (2002) and Brandist, Shepherd and Tihanov (eds) (2004).

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to the first strand we will examine the evidence in the texts, and discuss the contextual material that serves to illuminate his meaning. There is a substantial body of scholarship on the sources upon which he drew that contributes clarity to the concepts that are opaque or underdeveloped when considered only from the primary source material. The focus will be on philosophy and history of religion, and will examine the extent to which themes from these areas of study enter into Bakhtin’s work. The work will discuss primary and secondary sources and the aim is to contribute to scholarship through critical selection and examination of material already known to Bakhtin scholars. A study of this kind has to be selective, and this study will give attention to those elements in Bakhtin’s thought where we can show clearly that themes from philosophy and history of religion were significant structuring features of his thought. This has led to a concentration on his connection to neo-Kantian philosophy of culture and the phenomenology of Scheler, but this does not mean that we should ignore other connections, such as his debt to the life philosophy of Simmel and Bergson, and others.11 Chapter 2 will cover the self and other in intersubjective relationships; confession as a literary genre, and Bakhtin’s conception of religion. Some of this material overlaps with the source material discussed by the writers quoted in this introduction but demonstrates a different perspective where the philosophical rather than theological viewpoint is more apparent, and draws out Bakhtin’s original contribution in applying concepts drawn from philosophy of religion to aesthetics. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 we cover material drawn from philosophy of culture together with historical, anthropological and linguistic trends. Moving on from Bakhtin’s early thought, these chapters cover his turn to literature and examine the grand narrative that he developed to explain the historical development of literary genres. Grounded in a neo-Kantian understanding of myth as the primary form of all human culture, and indeed of thought itself, Bakhtin saw the development of culture over time as the progressive dispersal of mythical consciousness and the rebellion against authoritative discourse that has its origin in myth. The mechanism by which myth is dispelled is laughter, and its literary manifestation in parody. Parody and travesty are the ways in which one genre is transmuted into another, and the bubble of self-referential seriousness is pricked, so that literature moves on to another stage. In Bakhtin’s account the novel is the culmination of the developmental process, as the novel is the literary form that can represent the plurality of voices that is found in social life. In developing his ideas on literature, Bakhtin identified carnival as a significant feature of human culture, and he gives carnival such a high value that it becomes a concept divorced from historical roots but given a dynamic role as a carrier of authentic popular culture from early human history to the present. Through carnivalesque cultural forms such as songs, games and folk stories, the consciousness of people of earlier times is recreated in the present, and mythical 11

  For a more comprehensive treatment of Bakhtin’s sources see, for example, Brandist, 2002 and Tihanov, 2000b.

Introduction

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consciousness reappears in a new form. The roots of Bakhtin’s idea of carnival are manifold and have been the subject of scholarly attention, but here we will concentrate on the parallels of Bakhtin’s thought with the ideas of James Frazer and other English anthropologists. Frazer is chosen as one example among many of scholars working in anthropology and ethnography whose work was widely publicized and used as a building block and source of raw material by other writers. Frazer serves as a good exemplar of this trend, and demonstrates that Bakhtin’s idea of carnival was closely related to the work of others, but that Bakhtin took the idea and extrapolated it to an extent that was entirely his own. Chapters 6 and 7 take the discussion in a different direction, led by the second strand of thought: rather than the significance of religion in the work of Bakhtin, these chapters discuss the significance of Bakhtin’s work for the study of religion. The study of religion is an interdisciplinary field of study that has carved out a separate institutional character from theology and anthropology in many universities, and has in the past been called the history of religions and comparative religion. In the last decade or so there have been debates within the field on methodological issues and Bakhtin’s work has been cited (Flood, 1999) as a potential source for resolving some current challenges. Chapter 6 will discuss Flood’s argument, and Chapter 7 will look at productive ways in which Bakhtin’s work may contribute to future studies, particularly with respect to the insider/outsider debate. The discussions in the areas outlined above will demonstrate that religion has a significant presence in the thought of Bakhtin, and enters through philosophy of religion and philosophical history of myth and religion. These themes can be evidenced in his texts and by making use of the scholarship on his sources. While the trend in the academic study of Bakhtin to find parallels in his work to themes in Christian theology is a valid exercise, the close attention to his sources does not support the thesis that his work was intended as theological, but rather as philosophical. His work has been enthusiastically received by many scholars and the example of Flood’s work shows that some aspects of Bakhtin’s work offer productive avenues to follow, but on a modest scale, and that big claims made for his work may be premature.

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Chapter 2

Themes from Philosophy of Religion To start our examination of the significance of religion in Bakhtin’s work we will consider the themes in Bakhtin’s work that come within the domain of philosophy of religion. None of his texts concentrates on religion as the primary focus, and religion enters as a parallel but related discourse to his primary interest in ethics, aesthetics and literary history. Among Bakhtin’s known sources there are very substantial works on philosophy of religion that he may have accessed directly or indirectly, but, given his reluctance to give detailed references, work on his affiliations is still in progress by Bakhtin scholars. Bakhtin’s intellectual sources were numerous and included, among others, Simmel, Bergson, Natorp and Cassirer (Brandist, 2002: 15–23), but we shall concentrate in this discussion on his relationship with the work of Cohen and Scheler as examples of his use of sources that demonstrate both his appropriation of other thinkers’ material, and that he developed the ideas in directions of his own, particularly with respect to the aestheticization of concepts and themes drawn from philosophy of religion. We shall argue that Bakhtin was first and foremost a philosopher in the tradition of Kant, and not a religious writer in the sense of incorporating Christian theology into his philosophy. Both Kant and Bakhtin held religious beliefs but worked within the inner circle of Kant’s two concentric circles (Kant, 1998 [original 1794]: 40): the inner circle holds the philosophical discourse about religion while the outer circle holds revealed religion in its historically contingent manifestations, including philosophical discourse. It was not an easy position to adhere to, but philosophers who followed Kant in the neo-Kantian tradition maintained the stance and demonstrated that the position stood the test of time. Background – Hermann Cohen and Max Scheler Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) was known as the founder of the Marburg school of neo-Kantian philosophy, and wrote substantial works on religion: The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy [Der Begriff der Religion im System der Philosophie], published in 1915 and Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism [Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums], published posthumously in 1919. Bakhtin’s affiliation of Cohen is widely acknowledged to have been mediated through his close friend and associate Matvei Kagan, who studied under Cohen, and who was an influential member of the circle that met for philosophical discussions in Nevel and Vitebsk. Nikolai

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Nikolaev, who characterizes the activities of the Bakhtin Circle from 1918 until about 1927 as ‘the Nevel School of Philosophy’, attests to the importance of Cohen’s philosophy for the group. While acknowledging that our knowledge is incomplete, he identifies Cohen’s work as central. He writes that: All that can be said [of the Nevel School] is that the works of its principal members have in common a frequently declared anti-psychologistic, antimetaphysical and anti-dogmatic thrust, and a determination to pursue pure research in the sphere of philosophical cognition. What is more clearly discernible is a philosophical tradition – the Neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, and above all the philosophical system of its leader, Hermann Cohen. (Nikolaev, 1998: 30)

While Nikolaev may be overstating the importance of the group’s interactions by denoting it a ‘School,’ he correctly draws attention to the affiliation to Cohen. The other significant source on whom we shall be concentrating is Max Scheler (1874–1928), a philosopher in the phenomenological tradition, and a contemporary of Husserl. In his ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Scheler’s work The Nature of Sympathy, Stark characterizes Scheler as ‘a rather independent and self-willed disciple of Husserl’ (Stark, 1954: xiii). Scheler wrote a major work on ethics Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values [Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die material Wertethik], first published in two parts in 1913 and 1916. The work was in a different tradition from Kantian critical idealism, and the subtitle is: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism; and in his later works he addressed phenomenological descriptions and the determination of essences in fields related to emotional and religious areas of human experience. The two works we shall be considering closely are The Nature of Sympathy [Wesen und Formen der Sympathie],1 published in 1913, and On the Eternal in Man [Vom Ewigen im Menschen], published in 1921. Brian Poole has established Bakhtin’s affiliation to Scheler’s work The Nature of Sympathy (Poole, 2001), and pointed to the possibility of his affiliation to the essay ‘Repentance and Re-birth’, published in On the Eternal in Man.2 The work on establishing Bakhtin’s affiliations is a worthwhile enterprise in its own right, but its greater role is in clarifying the meaning of his texts. Bakhtin’s texts, as has been said, are often enigmatic, and some are in note form: the consequence is a wide field for Bakhtinian hermeneutics. Brian Poole says that ‘Bakhtin’s own sources clarify his intentions’ (Poole, 2001: 109), and an examination of their sources gives us a tool for elucidating some of the ambiguities in his texts. Bakhtin’s use of language, in particular his philosophical constructions, for example I-for-the-other as a moment of the act (TPA: 54), are 1

  The literal translation of the German title is ‘the forms and essence of sympathy’.   See Bocharov’s editorial comments in Bakhtin, 2000: 469.

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not self-explanatory, and he does not provide a full explanation as he did not leave a comprehensive exposition of many of his ideas. Without further reading, we can possibly make an educated guess at the ethical framework surrounding I-for-theother, and other constructs, but to enable a deeper understanding we need to know the roots of this and other concepts for Bakhtin, and the substantial philosophical systems out of which his ideas were created. This chapter sets out to elucidate some of Bakhtin’s themes from philosophy of religion, drawing on our knowledge of the ground from which they grew, and starting with an overview of his conception of religion as a category. Religion as an Object Domain of Philosophy3 Bakhtin touches upon religion as a philosophical object domain in his early works Toward a Philosophy of the Act (TPA) and ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (A&H). There is some ambivalence in the works, which display a casual familiarity with religious terminology together with an expressed determination to confine himself to philosophical discourse. He describes his project in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ as ‘strictly secular’ (A&H: 149), but this is in the context of a digression on the subject of praying for the forgiveness of the sins of a dead person, where he appears to be drifting into territory beyond the boundaries he has set for himself, which leads to some ambiguity. His framework is secular, in the Kantian sense of regarding questions about the nature of religion and the nature of God to be questions addressed through philosophical reasoning. This is qualified, as Pechey says in his discussion of Russian Orthodox theology and Bakhtin’s neo-Kantian aesthetics, in that both ‘strategically rationalize that which exceeds rationality’ (Pechey, 2001: 50); therefore, although the content and material of the discourse is not necessarily wholly cognitive, the form and method should maintain the discipline of an intellectual enterprise. At times Bakhtin is more successful than others at maintaining this discipline, but where there are lapses from this framework, some of which are discussed below, it appears that he uses religious terminology and imagery in a manner that suggests they are familiar figures of speech that he expects his audience to recognize without necessarily implying a departure from his philosophical enterprise. In addition to his early works, material has survived that sheds light on Bakhtin’s attitude to religion. Notes taken by Pumpianskii at lectures given by Bakhtin in 1924 and 1925 were published in an article by Nikolaev, and this article was published in an English translation as an appendix to Felch and Contino’s (2001) edited book Bakhtin and Religion. Several people were involved in the translation into English, but the work was extensively revised and annotated by 3

  An earlier working of this theme was included in the paper given at the XIII Bakhtin Conference (Bagshaw, 2008).

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Vadim Liapunov, the translator of Bakhtin’s early works. Liapunov is in no doubt about the importance of the evidence in the work of Bakhtin’s philosophical orientation towards questions of religion. He says in the preface: His [Pumpianskii’s] ‘lecture notes’ published below are unique in one particular regard: they include texts that give us access to Bakhtin’s thinking about religion. Otherwise, in the works known to us until now, Bakhtin (as a philosopher schooled in the Kantian tradition) is careful in observing the limits of philosophical discourse (secular in character) in distinction to either religious or theological discourse. When Bakhtin speaks about religion, he speaks about it as a philosophical problem, that is, as a problem to be made sense of within the bounds of philosophy as a secular discipline. (Liapunov, 2001: 193–4)

In order to establish the strength of Liapunov’s claim we need to make a short detour into the realm of Kantian philosophy of religion. It is well known that in Kant’s critical philosophy, God as an idea is a necessary postulate in the operation of moral reasoning: there must be an idea of God for individuals to be able to establish an end result and purpose to their moral choices. Religion was not reduced to ethics in Kant’s philosophy, but was a necessary outworking of his ethical framework. He wrote in Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason [Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, 1794]: Morality thus inevitably leads to religion, and through religion it extends itself to the idea of a mighty moral law giver outside the human being, in whose will the ultimate end (of the creation of the world) is what can and at the same time ought to be the ultimate human end. (Kant, 1998 [original 1794]: 35–6)

Religion was thus the extension of practical reason into the everyday world of human endeavour where people had to make choices between actions, and to make sense of their lives, but it did not require a divine person, only a conception, an idea, of the divine, or of a higher good. Cohen radically revised Kant’s philosophy of knowledge, but retained Kant’s position of God as an idea that is necessary for ethics. Whereas Kant had given a priori categories and sense impressions roles in cognition, Cohen departed from Kant in that he conceived knowledge as produced by thought, not arising from the synthesis of the categories and intuition. Cohen’s conception was designed to establish the purity of thought and to resist any influence of the idea of thought as representative activity, and therefore of psychological origin. Poma’s commentary on Cohen explains it in this way: It is symptomatic of the already noted special relationship of Logik der reinen Erkenntnis with Kant’s teaching that, in order to sweep aside any psychological, representative interpretation of thought, which still held Kant in its grasp, Cohen used the Kantian term production (Erzeugung). Cohen did this, albeit by means

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of a ‘metaphorical expression’, with the purpose of pointing out the ‘creative sovereignty of thought’. (Poma, 1997a: 82)

The sovereignty of thought is founded in its claim to be grounded in formal incontrovertible principles of logic, and therefore is secure as the generator of objective validity. In Cohen’s late work Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism, he elucidates his idea of God and the relationship between religion and ethics. Like Kant, he established the insufficiency of morality to judge the ends of actions: the idea of God is necessary to perform this role, and God is the guarantor of humanity. He wrote: Let us remain with our own ethics, which, more definitely than any previous one, adopts the idea of God into the content of ethical teachings. Yet the meaning of the idea of God in this ethics wholly corresponds to the concept of man in general. Just as man there signifies humanity, so God permits the completion of the doctrine of humanity only. As man in ethics is merely an example of humanity, so God is only the guarantor of humanity. (Cohen, 1972 [original 1919]: 20–1)

Cohen denied religion independence in his system of philosophy, meaning that there is not a specific direction of consciousness corresponding to it, but characterized it as a modification of the ethical problem, and as an enrichment, expansion and completion of ethics (Poma, 1997a: 163). In his late work, Cohen’s treatment of religion examines in some depth theological concepts such as revelation, sin, forgiveness and redemption, holy spirit and Messianism. It cannot escape the reader that the more closely he addresses the particularities of Judaism, the more he appears to depart from his dry and abstract framework. Poma’s commentary refers to the fact that ‘It is well known that the thesis of the reduction of religion to ethics was abandoned by Cohen in his later writings’ (Poma, 1997a: 161), and the relationship that Cohen developed rested on the peculiarity of religion with respect to ethics. Notwithstanding the direction in which his work developed over his career, there is no question but that Cohen himself regarded his life’s work to be philosophy, which had to take precedence over religious practice or religious feeling, even if this was at some cost to himself, as Poma comments: Opting for philosophical speculation, and not the free expression of personal religious experience, was a definite choice on Cohen’s part, indeed as he himself wrote in a letter dated March 27th, 1907 to Leo Munk, a ‘destiny’: ‘Now I sincerely hope you will be in a fine state of mind on our wonderful holy day. My destiny is of a special kind. If there are men who make the sacrifice of the intellect, I make that of feeling. You know how attached I am, deep in my heart and in the most intimate feelings of my spirit, to the inner life of our religion,

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin but even here my destiny is an abstraction, and only the pure can understand and tolerate me.’ (Poma, 1997: 159)

The letter quoted by Poma reveals both Cohen’s sincerely devotional approach to his Jewish faith, and also his intellectual commitment to separating his devotion from his work. Bearing the example of Cohen in mind, we return to Bakhtin’s work. From the evidence that has survived, we know that Bakhtin followed both Kant and Cohen in adopting a philosophical orientation to questions of religion. In the notes made by Pumpianskii on Bakhtin’s lecture entitled ‘The Problem of Grounded Peace’, Bakhtin reportedly said: ‘Philosophy of religion, inasmuch as it posits problems, must, initially, pose dogma itself as a problem, that is, nondogmatically. But the moment will inevitably arrive when philosophy of religion will itself become dogmatic’ (Nikolaev, 2001: 207–8). In this quotation he is posing dogma as problematic for the philosopher: first of all as a problem to be addressed, but then as a problem of dogma subverting the philosophical enterprise. He is critical of the development of philosophy of religion in a dogmatic direction. There is evidence that his attitude to dogma persisted in Bakhtin’s later work, for example in his work on Rabelais, but this will be discussed later. In the lecture notes, Bakhtin’s references to God are consistent with Cohen’s philosophy. Pumpianskii records Bakhtin saying: What constitutes the subiectum of Revelation is not an especially qualified consciousness, not just a single consciousness, but all consciousnesses in their singularity; the personhood of God and the personhood of all believers is a constitutive feature of religion. (Nikolaev, 2001: 220)

This passage closely follows Cohen, but Bakhtin incorporates his own tradition when he says ‘but at certain moments we will inevitably confront the problem of the incarnated God’ (Nikolaev, 2001: 209). Bakhtin’s discussion of philosophy of religion reflects the concerns of his early works in ethics and aesthetics, and his discussion of content and form in the context of art and life (PCMF). For Bakhtin, artistic form pins down the content of the artwork or text in a concrete material (or written) straitjacket, and separates it from the living events that have been captured as the content. Ethics lie in the lived event, not in the artistic form. In the English translation of his texts, the word that captures his expression of ethics in action is translated as ‘answerability’ (A&A: 1–3), but could be translated as ‘responsibility’. While the two terms have almost identical meanings, ‘answerability’ evokes a sense of dialogue, which anticipates Bakhtin’s later work, but the term ‘responsibility’ is more neutral in this respect (Brandist, 2002: 34). In the same notes as those quoted above, we find references to form: ‘To understand the form of the world in which prayer, ritual, hope … gain validity – this is the task of philosophy of religion’ (Nikolaev, 2001: 207), and ‘The form in which religious consciousness lives is the event, this is the first step

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in defining the position of religious consciousness’ (Nikolaev, 2001: 208). As will be seen below, these quotations mirror his view of the aesthetic consciousness and the aesthetic event, and demonstrate the structure of his thinking. In Bakhtin’s early texts we find references to religion as a philosophical domain, and there are clues to his thought in the manner in which he lists religion alongside other parallel domains. Religion appears often in a list alongside aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics and history, as an equivalent category to the others. Two examples from ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ are given here: The problem of the body as value can be located only on the ethical plane, on the aesthetic plane, and to some extent on the religious plane. (A&H: 47) ‘Expressive’ aesthetic theory is but one of the many philosophical theories (ethical, philosophico-historical, metaphysical, religious) that we would call ‘impoverishing’ theories, because they seek to explain the creatively productive event by reducing its full amplitude. (A&H: 87)

The most significant example of Bakhtin’s categorization is his outline of the larger work of which Toward a Philosophy of the Act forms part. He sets out his plan for an inquiry into the phenomenology of the unique acts out of which being is composed. The fundamental moments of these acts are I-for-myself, the-otherfor-me and I-for-the-other, which we will discuss later in this chapter. Given the importance of this example a long quotation is in order: The first part of our enquiry will be devoted to an examination of these fundamental moments in the architectonic of the actual world of the performed act or deed – the world actually experienced, and not the merely thinkable world. The second part will be devoted to aesthetic activity as an actually performed act or deed, both from within its product and from the standpoint of the author as answerable participant, and [2 illegible words] to the ethics of artistic creation. The third part will be devoted to the ethics of politics, and the fourth and final part to religion. The architectonic of that world is reminiscent of the architectonic of Dante’s world and of the world of the medieval mystery plays (in mystery plays and in tragedy the action is also set into immediate proximity to the ultimate bounds of Being). (TPA: 54)

Bakhtin’s categorization is not to be found in this exact form in the thought of Marburg neo-Kantians, but the framework in which religion has a place in human culture that can be examined though a philosophical or phenomenological methodology that owes nothing to theology or a discussion of the truth claims of any particular religious tradition is a thoroughly neo-Kantian position. There are a number of inferences to be drawn from these references. Religion is a category on a par with ethics, never a subcategory. This is a significant point as it implies a departure from Cohen’s early standpoint in which religion is subsumed

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under ethics; but in this case religion has the same autonomy as the other concepts and is not reducible to any of them. In this Bakhtin is closest to Paul Natorp (1854–1924), Cohen’s colleague at Marburg, for whom religion was sui generis (Saltzman: 1981: 163). Furthermore, religious values are demarcated from ethical and social values, which may appear to be a corroboration of the earlier point. However, this adds another dimension: ethical values are not contingent upon religious values, but are generated independently. Religion appears last on the list on each occasion, which may indicate that it has a lower position in the hierarchy than the other categories, or that it was the most difficult category to address and therefore the one that Bakhtin left until last, or that it was the most important for him. Without more textual evidence, we can only speculate about Bakhtin’s philosophy of religion at this level of generality. However, there is material that is relevant to the topic in some specific areas, the first of which is the relationship of the self and others. Intersubjectivity The uniqueness of the self is a prominent theme in Bakhtin’s early works Toward a Philosophy of the Act and ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’. The self is the actor who performs acts, and is not replaceable by any other self. The implications of this philosophical starting point are worked out through his ethics and aesthetics; and as has been demonstrated in Chapter 1, these implications have been interpreted by some readers in a religious light. In these early works, Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘I’ was the philosophical ‘I’ of discussions about subjectivity, for example in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, but should not be interpreted as Bakhtin writing in the first person, about himself. There are passages in these texts, which will be explored below, where it is possible to construct an interpretation on the basis that Bakhtin is writing a personal account, but it will be argued that his work was of a more abstract nature, and not confessional. The ‘I’ is constructed in relation to others: the existence of the ‘I’, its being, is found in its acts, the unique events that form the continuous timeline of its historical life; and the acts are performed in relation to others. These relationships are profoundly ethical in essence and can be imbued with compassion, empathy and love. Bakhtin begins, in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, by constructing an argument against a theoretical concept of Being, which abstracts from concrete historical instances. Such a concept of Being, he says, would distance Being from concrete events, and although it might have relevance to other theoretical discussions, it is not the direction he wishes to pursue for his philosophy. He writes that: Content/sense abstracted from the act/deed can be formed into a certain open and unitary Being, but this, of course, is not that unique Being in which we live and die, in which our answerable acts or deeds are performed; it is fundamentally and essentially alien to living historicity. (TPA: 8)

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In a similar vein, he rejects a theory of truth that validates only general concepts and replicable situations. He says that: It is an unfortunate misunderstanding (a legacy of rationalism) to think that truth [pravda] can only be the truth [istina] that is composed of universal moments; that the truth of a situation is precisely that which is repeatable and constant in it. (TPA: 370)

In contrast, he argues for a concept of Being that he calls ‘once-occurrent Beingas-Event’ (for example TPA: 10): Being that takes into account an individual’s unique place in space and time. He argues strongly that this conception of Being does not lead to relativism, and that ‘the autonomy of truth, its purity and selfdetermination from the standpoint of method are completely preserved’ (TPA: 10, 37). While making this argument, Bakhtin uses language including ‘I’ that may sound very close to personal statements from himself, in the first person. For example, in criticizing the theoretical concept of Being, he writes ‘for it is not the Being in which I live, and, if it were the only Being, I would not exist’ (TPA: 9). The ‘I’s in this sentence could refer to Bakhtin himself, as one particular example of each individual ‘I’. However, the italicization, particularly the second one, where the ‘I’ alone is italicized, suggests that he wished to give the ‘I’ a particular significance: the individual personal ‘I’ that could be anyone, but expressing the position of the unique subject. Another example is where he writes: Nothing in Being, apart from myself, is an I for me. In all of Being I experience only myself – my unique self – as an I. All other Is (theoretical ones) are not I for me, whereas my own unique non-theoretical I participates in once-occurrent Being: I exist [ego sum] in it. (TPA: 41)

In this quotation we find both italicized ‘I’s and non-italicized ‘I’s. Bakhtin is making a distinction here between the italicized ‘I’s that are being experienced and the non-italicized ‘I’s that are doing the experiencing. However, in no case is the ‘I’ the first person voice of Bakhtin himself. Bakhtin continues with a phenomenological description of the act itself which, as he has established, is unique (once-occurrent). He determines that the moment of the act is the basis of the ethical imperative of answerability, and he calls this an ‘emotional-volitional attitude’: The moment constituted by the performance of thoughts, feelings, words, practical deeds is an actively answerable attitude that I myself assume – an emotional-volitional attitude toward a state of affairs in its entirety, in the context of actual unitary and once-occurrent life. (TPA: 37)

The culmination of Bakhtin’s description of the act is his threefold characterization of the moments of the act: I-for-myself, the other-for-me and I-for-the-other. These

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three moments express the ethical framework of his exposition, and form the building blocks from which he proposes to construct a major enquiry, of which only the first part, on aesthetic activity, was started. He writes: It is this concrete architectonic of the actual world of the performed act that moral philosophy has to describe, that is, not the abstract scheme but the concrete plan or design of the world of a unitary and once-occurrent act or deed, the basic concrete moments of its construction and their mutual disposition. These basic moments are I-for-myself, the other-for-me, and I-for-the-other. (TPA: 54)

He develops the idea of the three moments in Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity, the text which expands his ideas in the domain of aesthetics. There is a passage in the section on the value of the human body in history that relates Christian doctrine to Bakhtin’s three moments. Given the importance of this passage, it is worth quoting it in full: In Christ we find a synthesis of unique depth, the synthesis of ethical solipsism (man’s infinite severity toward himself, i.e., an immaculately pure relationship to oneself) with ethical-aesthetic kindness toward the other. For the first time, there appeared an infinitely deepened I-for-myself – not a cold I-for-myself, but one of boundless kindness toward the other, an I-for-myself that renders full justice to the other as such, disclosing and affirming the other’s axiological distinctiveness in all its fullness. All human beings divide for him into himself as the unique one – and all other human beings, into himself as the one bestowing loving mercy, into himself as the savior – and all others as the saved, into himself as the one assuming the burden of sin and expiation – and all others as relieved of the burden and redeemed. Hence, in all Christ’s norms the I and the other are contraposed: for myself – absolute sacrifice, for the other – loving mercy. But I-for-myself is the other for God. God is no longer defined essentially as the voice of my conscience, as purity of my relationship to myself (purity of my penitent self-denial of anything given within myself), as the one into whose hands it is a fearful thing to fall and to see whom it means to die (immanent self-condemnation). God is now the heavenly father who is over me and can be merciful to me and justify me where I, from within myself, cannot be merciful to myself and cannot justify myself in principle, as long as I remain pure before myself. What I must be for the other, God is for me. What the other surmounts and repudiates within himself as an unworthy given, I accept in him and that with loving mercy as the other’s cherished flesh. (A&H: 56)

The tone of this passage is religious and undoubtedly sympathetic towards the Christian doctrine described; but this is not a devotional text. This passage is contained within a numbered list of components of Christianity, and is followed

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by the sentence: ‘These are the pertinent components of Christianity’ (A&H: 56), and the passage continues prosaically and analytically. Interpreting the text is challenging, and, as has been mentioned in Chapter 1, commentators have interpreted it in a religious light. It must be remembered that Bakhtin did not prepare this text for publication: his rough work has been edited and published by his executors, and therefore the status of the text is insecure. We do not know to what extent Bakhtin would have amended or clarified his intentions in a more complete draft. The long excerpt quoted above is written in a different register from the surrounding framework, and this poses problems. We can neither claim the devotional voice as authentic and ignore the frame nor vice versa, but have to make sense of the inconsistency. Commentators arguing for a religious interpretation of Bakhtin have sometimes extracted this passage to further their argument without reference to the context. Pechey quotes the passage in full and follows this by asking: ‘It is hard to say who is here ventriloquizing whom – Jesus Bakhtin or Bakhtin Jesus? – so completely has this Russian Christian of late modernity identified himself with the founder of Christianity’ (Pechey, 2007: 161). The identification that Pechey finds in this passage is not straightforward. His interpretation requires Bakhtin’s use of ‘I’ to be understood as the first person, which is problematic in itself, and does not address the other difficulties with the text. Wyman uses the passage to demonstrate her characterization of Bakhtin’s understanding of Christian spirituality as ‘a spirituality of turning toward the other, of incarnating and transfiguring oneself in the other and thus inextricably linking one’s own personal becoming with that of another’ (Wyman, 2008: 82). While the passage taken on its own gives some substance to this interpretation, the text as a whole does not support the idea that Bakhtin was writing about spirituality. What were the roots of these ideas for Bakhtin, and can the roots help us to understand the themes that are enigmatic and underdeveloped in his texts? The scholarly work that has been done on Bakhtin’s affiliations sheds light on his meaning. Bakhtin’s construction of I-other relationships has been linked to Cohen4 and to Scheler, and although Liapunov identifies Cohen’s book on ethics as the work to which Bakhtin’s was affiliated, there are ideas in his later work, specifically on religion, where the parallels bear close examination, as we shall explore. Cohen, in the Jewish tradition, gave great emphasis to suffering5 as the first and foremost human experience, and he saw the primary focus of ethics as the motivation to overcome suffering. He wrote: If ethics now sees existence afflicted with suffering then compassion becomes for it only a signpost for the question: How can suffering be overcome? Subjectively, suffering is pain; does compassion abide on one level with pain, or   For Cohen see Nikolaev 1998: 30 and Liapunov’s notes in TPA and A&H; and for Scheler see Poole, 2001: 113. 5   Cohen died in 1918 and therefore did not witness the great suffering of the Jews in the twentieth century, but exile and suffering of the Jews predates the twentieth century. 4

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Cohen’s answer to his own question was that compassion was the correlation of man with his fellow man (Mitmensch), and he made the extraordinary assertion that ‘Man is so much in need of the affect of compassion that suffering is explained through it’ (Cohen, 1972: 17). In his Ethics of Pure Will, Cohen relegates love to a second degree virtue, subordinate to honour, but in his Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, he raises love to a true factor of pure will, by means of his idealization of compassion. Poma, writing of Cohen’s philosophy of religion, explains Cohen’s correlation: In this active correlation, man takes as his own the suffering of the Other, not in Schopenhauer’s sense of the elimination of otherness, but by taking up the task of actually eliminating his suffering. He thus transforms the other man into Mitmensch, into his own You, and at the same time becomes You for the other. (Poma, 1997a: 207)

Poma’s explanation of Cohen brings the parallel with Bakhtin’s three moments into focus. From the foregoing discussion we can see that Cohen characterized intersubjective relationships as correlation, both of man with man, and of God with man, though it must be remembered that God was an idea in Cohen’s philosophy. Bakhtin, focusing on the phenomenology of the act, incorporated Cohen’s correlation into his distinguishing moments of the act, and translated Cohen’s Jewish monotheism into his three-fold model, thus demonstrating both his intellectual inheritance and his own contribution. Cohen’s correlation is one element of Bakhtin’s conceptual framework, but there is also strong evidence that he created a synthesis of Cohen’s critical idealism and Scheler’s phenomenology of empathy to formulate his ideas on how the subjective ‘I’ relates to the other in an ethical relation, and that he subsequently translated this relation into an aesthetic one of the author and hero. Substantial work has been achieved by scholars in establishing the affiliation of Bakhtin to Scheler, but before we come to that we should touch on the work that looks at Husserl and Bakhtin. Hirschkop links Bakhtin’s philosophical structure to Husserl when he writes: Experiencing itself as unique, grasping (perceiving? understanding?) what Bakhtin infamously called its ‘non-alibi in being’, the subject interprets moral requirements in the form of a ‘conscience’ which addresses it and it alone, rather than a law. This stems from the fact that the I lives (as it did for Husserl) in its acts; it presses forward, it regards everything in the light of the future, shapes every object as an element of the ‘horizon’ (another Husserlian term) of its active subjectivity. (Hirschkop, 2001: 14)

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More work has been done on Bakhtin’s affiliation to Scheler than to Husserl, and it is possible that the Husserlian references enter by way of mediation through Scheler’s work. Poole remarks of Bakhtin’s philosophy of the act that it is ‘trenchantly rooted in the reciprocity of the “I” and the “other” (and not in Buber’s “I” and “Thou”)’ (Poole, 2001: 113), but this is transformed in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ into a discussion of ‘the category of the other’ (for example A&H: 52, 53, 59). This leads him into references to a phenomenology of co-feeling of the self and other that has close parallels to Scheler’s work. Scheler’s philosophy of empathy is found in his major work (1913), with the title translated into English as The Nature of Sympathy. It is a work in the phenomenological tradition examining aspects of human relationships that fall outside the rational and logical: fellow-feeling, love and hate. The second edition of the book, published in 1923, was substantially lengthened and including a section on the phenomenology of other minds. This was a radical departure from the current psychological theories which he critiqued. Frings comments: ‘Scheler’s treatment of “the other” was the only one at the time to have a phenomenological basis. It was something quite new vis à vis commonly accepted theories in psychology’ (Frings, 1997: 82). Bakhtin’s wife made extensive notes from the book and these have been published in Volume 2 of the Collected Works (CW2). Scheler’s starting point is fellow-feeling of one person for another, though unlike Cohen he did not entirely focus on pain and suffering as the feelings that might be shared. He developed the four-fold framework well summarized by Poole: 1. The immediate co-feeling with another person on the same occasion of joy or suffering. The commiseration with one another is not the same as their own suffering or joy, but they have knowledge of the other’s feeling because of their own. 2. Sympathetic feeling directed towards another’s suffering, with intention to feel empathy. 3. Infection of feeling where the distinction between one’s own feeling and other’s is lost in a collective feeling, but with no ethical content. 4. Various types of unitary feeling such as total identification/abandonment. These types of feelings can be found in primitive rituals and include ecstatic, mystical or pathological states of abandonment. (See Poole, 2001: 114–15) In Poole’s article ‘From Phenomenology to Dialogue’ (2001), he demonstrates how Bakhtin used Scheler’s categories.6 He writes: Many of Scheler’s precise distinctions of forms of co-feeling are to be found in Bakhtin’s early work. In this sense, Bakhtin’s ‘Toward a Philosophy of the Act’ 6

  In the same article Poole also draws attention to Bakhtin’s affiliation to Nicolai Hartmann, and notes that Kagan studied phenomenology with Hartmann in Marburg in 1914 (Poole, 2001: 123).

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin and ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ form a catalogue of categories from the excerpts he collected reading Scheler and those who followed in his path. (Poole, 2001: 115)

Bakhtin acknowledged the prominent role of Scheler in his study of Dostoevsky, but not in his early works. Poole’s comment on this is: ‘True, Bakhtin never cites Scheler in “Toward a Philosophy of the Act” and “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”. And yet his critique of “material and formal ethics” already contains the title of Scheler’s mammoth study’ (Poole, 2001: 113). For Scheler and Bakhtin, total identification of the self with another is unrealizable as it is not possible to be in the same position, physically and emotionally, as another person; and moreover, if it were possible, it would be unproductive. There is no value in being in the identical place as value only arises when the two participants are in slightly different places, close enough to communicate and observe what is happening but not sharing the same space. Wyman (2008) has made a detailed comparison of the idea of empathy in Bakhtin and Scheler. She stresses that both held an active conception of empathy and finds them mutually illuminating: Intellectual and spiritual kinsmen occupied by similar ethical concerns and responding to a shared canon of philosophical texts, Scheler and Bakhtin have developed mutually illuminating concepts of empathy. (Wyman, 2008: 89)

The activity in the act of empathizing is the movement of the self towards the other, and the movement is part of the intentional expression of the act, directed towards the other. Wyman identifies the importance of love in Scheler’s conception of empathy. Love frees empathizing from the possibility that the forward-directed act to the other is paternalistic or prurient, and transforms it into an act of ethical efficacy. Wyman writes: Scheler, who at times tends to present empathy and love as consecutive stages of one progressively more spontaneous and morally significant emotional movement, ascribes to empathy the function of granting the other the status of ultimate reality, while crediting love with discovering the true measure of his otherness. (Wyman, 2008: 71)

In Bakhtin’s work, we find that he uses the insights from Scheler to inform his aesthetics. The creative act of the self loving an other is translated into the loving creation of the hero by the author. He writes: Aesthetic form is founded and validated from within the other – the author, as the author’s creative reaction to the hero and his life. As a reaction, that is, which produces values that are transgredient in principle to the hero and his life and

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yet are essentially related to the latter. This creative reaction is aesthetic love. (A&H: 90)

In aesthetic love the author affirms the otherness of his hero and actively empathizes with the hero in his dilemmas and his achievements. And over and above what the author might do for his real life friend, the author gives form to the hero’s life, seeing it from start to finish and shaping it in its aesthetic moment. As Hirschkop puts it: And the author can do something for this other which the other can’t do for itself: it can love it, which means, for Bakhtin, affirming it as a whole, beyond any particular good or bad, admirable or despicable qualities, it might have. The ‘outsidedness’ which we maintain in relation to others is ‘the bud in which [artistic] form slumbers, and whence form unfolds like a blossom’ (AH, p. 27/24).7 The act of grasping and shaping a life in an aesthetic work is therefore for Bakhtin the paradigmatic act of love. (Hirschkop, 2001: 15–16)

Bakhtin’s originality lies in the direction which he gives to the ideas he appropriated from his philosophical sources. His conception of aesthetic love and translation of intersubjective relations and empathy into the domain of the aesthetics of verbal creation is a demonstration of his creative endeavour. But understanding what he was creating demands an understanding of the philosophical groundings of the ideas he used. Unfinalizability We turn now away from consideration of the ‘I’ in relation to other to concentrate on the ‘I’ for itself, in its own self-development. A significant theme that developed though Bakhtin’s career concerned remorse for past deeds, confession and redemption. He gave considerable attention throughout his career to the idea of confession in various guises, including personal confession in a religious context and confession as a literary genre. This is the direction we will follow, but as a first step we shall consider the concept of unfinalizability. In itself the concept is not confined within the scope of philosophy of religion, but Bakhtin connects unfinalizability with personal repentance and redemption, so we will explore the roots of the concept, as a preamble to consideration of the later developments. In Bakhtin’s phenomenological enquiry, unfinalizability refers to the perspective of the individual subject on his or her own life, where the subject never knows the end of the story, as he or she cannot see his or her life as a whole in the same way that someone can make an assessment of the whole of the life of another person 7

  This is Hirschkop’s form of referencing his own translations from ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’.

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after that other person has died. The following passage from ‘Author and Hero in Aestheic Activity’ demonstrates his idea: In the life I live and experience from within myself, my own birth and death are events which I am in principle incapable of experiencing; birth and death as mine are incapable of becoming events of my own life. (A&H: 104)

Unfinalizability then becomes transformed into a concept in aesthetics where unfinalizability in life is contrasted with the finalizing effect of artistic form. The hero in the novel is Bakhtin’s exemplar of the finalized person: his life is known from start to finish, all his achievements are realized and he will have no further opportunity to rectify faults or make good unfulfilled promises. Unfinalizability in contrast offers hope for opportunities yet to come, promises of a future as yet unknown and a spectrum of choices not yet narrowed down to the unique path of the lived life. The open-endedness is attractive, optimistic and organic. Nikolaev draws attention to the terms used by Bakhtin and his associates derived from the philosophy of Cohen and used among them with an acceptance that required no clarification. Among these terms Nikolaev’s translator includes ‘“unconsummatedness” (of cognition)’ (Nikolaev, 1998: 31), a rather ugly term that could also be rendered as ‘unfinished’ or ‘incomplete’, which would relieve it of the burden that ‘unconsummatedness’ evokes.8 Consummation, or lack of it, brings to mind the sexual consummation of marriage, or other highly charged emotional or religious moments. In Cohen’s philosophy, cognition was produced by rational processes of thought, so the act of thinking constitutes the content of thought: what is thought (the content) is not independent of the thinking process. Poma refers to the Marburg school’s ‘genetic concept of knowledge, where the object is the result of production of the subject, but not of its emanation or creation’ (Poma, 1988: 61). The subject, however, is only able to produce the object imperfectly, and the production of it is an infinitely prolonged process of ever closer approximations. In Poma’s words: ‘There is correlation, not identity, between subject and object, so much that the object is an infinite task for the subject’ (Poma, 1997a: 61). In this framework, the object is never completely known, there is always the possibility of further knowledge, and so it is unfinished or unfinalized. If it is possible to discern the affiliation between Bakhtin’s unfinalized self and Cohen’s unfinished cognition, there is also another possible source for Bakhtin’s ideas. This idea appears in the work of Max Scheler, in particular his (1921) essay ‘Repentance and Rebirth’, where he reflects on the course of an individual’s life. Scheler explains his thought using mathematical terminology to describe a person’s life as events in a time series. Events that happen earlier in the series have effects on later events. He writes: 8

  For a discussion of translation issues see Brandist, 2002: 3–4.

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Since, however, the total efficacy of an event is, in the texture of life, bound up with its full significance and final value, every event of our past remains indeterminate in significance and incomplete in value until it has yielded all its potential effects. Only when seen in the whole context of life, only when we are dead (which, however, implies ‘never’, if we assume an after-life), does such an event take on the completed significance and ‘unalterability’ which render it a fact such as past events in nature are from their inception. Before our life comes to an end the whole of the past, at least with respect to its significance, never ceases to present us with the problem of what are we going to make of it. (Scheler, 1960 [original 1921]: 40)

Scheler here is focusing on a phenomenological description of an individual’s life and his or her ethical assessment of it from a completely different perspective from Cohen’s dry philosophy of cognition. However, both perspectives share the positive valuation of open-endedness, and the necessity of the continuing process of perfecting an imperfect project. Bakhtin confidently transforms Cohen’s unfinished cognition and Scheler’s indeterminate and incomplete personal life to create the finalized aesthetic object in a synthesis of his own making. Bakhtin’s conception of the production of the aesthetic object paralleled Cohen’s idea of thought as the outcome of the productive activity of the mind, and demonstrates Bakhtin’s capacity for translating complex ideas into his aesthetics. Confession and Redemption9 For Bakhtin, confession and redemption play important roles in the ethical development of both the lived life of the self, and by analogy, in the life of the hero. Over the course of his career we can trace a greater interest in confession as a literary genre, and we can find roots for this interest in his earlier years. In Bakhtin’s study of Dostoevsky, confession features as a prominent example of the novel’s discourse where more than one voice can be determined. In the case of confession the voices are those of the person confessing and the other person to whom the confession is made, although when the confession is made in the form of a soliloquy, the other person is not actually present. The confession is made with the possible reactions of the other person in mind whether the other person is present or not. He writes that: Dostoevsky’s works astound us first of all by their extraordinary diversity of types and varieties of discourse, types and varieties, moreover, that are present in their most extreme expression. Clearly predominant is vari-directional doublevoiced discourse, in particular internally dialogized discourse and the reflected 9

  An earlier working of this section was given in a paper at the XII Bakhtin conference, Bagshaw, 2005.

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin discourse of another: hidden polemic, polemically colored confession, hidden dialogue. In Dostoevsky almost no word is without its intense sideward glance at someone else’s word. (PDP: 203)

In the confession the speaker’s words are not entirely his own, they are framed in anticipation of what the hearer might say. Bakhtin says of the confession by the Underground Man in Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name: ‘from the very first sentence the hero’s speech has already begun to cringe and break under the anticipated words of another, with whom the hero, from the very first step, enters into the most intense polemic’ (PDP: 227–8). Bakhtin’s interest in confession as a literary genre in Dostoevsky is anticipated in his early work. In ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, he refers to confession as a means of accounting to oneself for one’s own acts. In confessing, a person is giving form to his or her past life, by giving an account of it, in both the sense of taking responsibility for it, and the sense of constructing a narrative from it: Remorse is translated from the psychological plane (chagrin) to the creativeformal plane (repentance, self-condemnation), thus becoming a principle that organizes and gives form to inner life – a principle of seeing and fixating oneself axiologically. Wherever there is an attempt to fixate oneself in repentant tones in the light of the ethical ought-to-be, the first essential form of verbal objectification of life and personality (a verbal objectification of personal life, that is, without abstracting from the bearer of that life) arises: confession as an accounting rendered to oneself for one’s own life. (A&H: 141)

Confession does not necessarily have to have religious connotations, as this passage makes clear, but Bakhtin continues by describing the ‘restlessness and unconsummatedness’ (A&H: 143) of confessional self-accounting, which leads the self to seek out a religious solution: The negation of any justification in this world is transformed into a need for religious justification: confessional self-accounting is filled with the need for forgiveness and redemption as an absolutely pure gift (an unmerited gift), with the need for a mercy and grace that are totally otherworldly in respect to their value. (A&H: 143)

Bakhtin postulates a transcendent other as the recipient of the confession; and makes clear that confession is not possible as a solo activity: Pure self-accounting – that is, addressing oneself axiologically only to oneself in absolute solitariness – is impossible; pure self-accounting is an ultimate limit which is balanced by another limit – by confession, that is, the petitionary advertedness outward from oneself, toward God. Petitionary tones, the tones of prayer, intertwine with repentant or penitentiary tones. (A&H: 143–4)

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The role of God in Bakhtin’s exposition is completely consistent with Cohen’s philosophical approach, but could also be read from a devotional perspective. There is some evidence that Bakhtin relied on Scheler’s work in his conception of confession, repentance and redemption, and the evidence is drawn, ironically, from accounts of his own confession, not in a religious context, but under interrogation. In late December 1928 and early January 1929 Bakhtin was interrogated by the Leningrad OGPU (secret police), and it is from the records of his interrogations that we learn that he gave lectures on Scheler’s ideas of confession and resurrection. His first interrogation was on 26 December (Coates, 1998: 6), and on 28 December 1928 Bakhtin was interrogated for a second time, and the entire protocol of the confession is quoted in Konkin and Konkina (1993: 181–5). In Brian Poole’s translation, Bakhtin admitted that from 1924 to 1928 he gave two lectures on Max Scheler: The first lecture was on confession. Confession, according to Scheler, is the revelation of one’s self before an other which makes social (‘word’) that which has striven to its asocial and extra verbal border (‘sin’) and was an isolated, unlivedout foreign body in the inner life of the individual. The second lecture concerned resurrection. In brief: life is not resurrected for its own sake, but for the sake of the value which is revealed in it by love. (Poole, 2001: 110)

The editors of Bakhtin’s Collected Works also refer to this in the preamble to the editorial commentary on Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art: Note 126, p512: refers to an issue (1922, no 1) of Mysl’ [Thought], the journal of the Petersburg Philosophical Society, which contained V. Sezeman’s article ‘Esteticheskaia otsenka v istorii iskusstva’ (‘Aesthetic Evaluation in the History of Art’) and a review of Scheler’s Vom Ewigen im Menschen that contained a brief exposition of the ideas in his article on ‘repentance and new birth’ that was probably the source of M.M.B.’s oral synopsis of the idea of confession in Scheler. (Bakhtin, 2000: 468)10

Bocharov then makes the link between Bakhtin’s reliance on Scheler and his sociology in the late 1920s. He refers to the 28 December 1928 confession protocol, saying that Bakhtin: gave evidence about two synopses of Max Scheler that he had read in a domestic circle: The first was about confession. Confession, according to Scheler, is the revelation of self before another, a revelation that makes ‘social’ (‘the word’/’discourse’) that which aspired to its asocial extra-verbal/extra-discursive extreme (‘sin’) and was an isolated, uneliminated foreign body in the inner life of the person. (Bakhtin, 2000: 469) 10

  Translation by D.G. Shepherd in a personal communication, 8 February 2005.

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If this is an account of Scheler’s position, then it is an account within Bakhtin’s own coordinates. […] As can be seen from a comparison with the probable source (thanks to Brian Poole for pointing out this source). Scheler’s article ‘Repentance and New Birth’ […] Sin and word/discourse are two extremes of a social model according to which sin is asocial (and extra-verbal/extradiscursive), while word/discourse is social. But the social event of eliminating sin via word/discourse is confession. (Bakhtin, 2000: 469)

There are methodological problems in using this evidence. On the one hand, we cannot take the evidence from the protocol of Bakhtin’s confession under interrogation as a straightforward account of his activities, but on the other hand, this does not necessarily render his account untrue. He did not do himself any favours by admitting to his lectures, and following his second interrogation he was formally charged on 4 January 1929. He was interrogated for a third time on 13 March 1929 when, according to Konkin and Konkina, he ‘confirmed that his flat was the venue for meetings of a theology group not mentioned in previous interrogations’ (Konkin and Konkina, 1993). In his second interrogation he was therefore not giving a complete account of his activities, but there is no reason to believe that the information he gave was erroneous, as opposed to partial, so with caution we should accept that he did give lectures on Scheler’s ideas of confession and resurrection. The second set of methodological problems concerns the collected works and the editorial input from Bocharov and Melikhova. The editors regard Bakhtin as the author of the disputed texts and therefore conflate Bakhtin’s thought with Voloshinov’s. Voloshinov’s work on Freudianism contains references to Scheler’s works and Bocharov quotes Voloshinov’s evaluation of Scheler as ‘the most influential German philosopher of our day’ (Bakhtin, 2000: 527). Bocharov connects the lengthy notes on The Nature of Sympathy made by Bakhtin’s wife to the stated intention of Voloshinov to devote a separate chapter to Scheler in his projected book on philosophy in the West. But as Shepherd writes of this passage: ‘However, the fact that Voloshinov refers to Scheler is significant, since Bakhtin would of course have known Voloshinov’s work; and it is clear that the Circle must have discussed it’.11 The work which delineates Scheler’s views on confession, and to which Brian Poole drew attention, is the essay entitled in English, ‘Repentance and Rebirth’. This was published in the volume On the Eternal in Man, and is one of a collection of short essays published with the major work entitled ‘Problems of Religion’ which is devoted to a phenomenology of religious experience. ‘Repentance and Rebirth’ was first published in a journal in 1917, but his widow and editor of his papers was not able to establish whether or not he edited it for inclusion in the book published in 1921 (Scheler, 1960 [original 1921]: 451). It appears to be the only 11

  Personal communication from D.G. Shepherd, 8 February 2005. References to Scheler in M.M. Bakhtin Collected Works Vol II.

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work Scheler wrote covering this topic in his published and unpublished papers that have survived, but the essay itself does not lend itself to the sociological interpretation given in Bakhtin’s account. This is the work where Scheler develops the ideas of the indeterminate and incomplete personal life discussed earlier, and in that context confession is a means of redeeming the unsatisfactory past. The essay refutes current theories of repentance, characterized as the Feartheory (fear of divine punishment) and the Revenge-theory (self-punishment as an act of revenge upon oneself), and puts forward a much more positive conception of repentance as the neutralization of guilt and reassertion of the possibility of moral regeneration. He writes: But what may Repentance accomplish in its attack upon guilt? Two things – of which it alone, and nothing else is capable. It cannot drive out of the world the external natural reality of the deed and its causal consequences, nor the evil character which the deed acquires ipso facto. All that stays in the world. But it can totally kill and extinguish the reactive effect of the deed within the human soul, and with it the root of an eternity of renewed guilt and evil. (Scheler, 1960 [original 1921]: 55)

and a little further on: Repentance is the mighty power of self-regeneration of the moral world, whose decay it is constantly working to avert. (Scheler, 1960 [original 1921]: 55)

For the individual person repentance is an act of memory. It brings into the present the cumulative effects of past deeds, and while the deeds themselves cannot be altered, the accumulated guilt from bad deeds can be reconfigured, something that Scheler expresses as ‘repenting is equivalent to re-appraising part of one’s past life and shaping for it a mint-new worth and significance’ (Scheler, 1960 [original 1921]: 41–2). However, for Scheler repentance can only fulfil its potential in the context of a religious framework, and he asserts even more strongly that repentance can be the main driver of a religious faith, for he believed that: ‘Even if there were nothing else in the world from which we might create the idea of God, Repentance alone could draw our attention to God’s existence’ (Scheler, 1960 [original 1921]: 61). He continues with an examination of repentance as an inward communication, but this is insufficient to the power inherent in it, and he asserts that the act of confession and the new strength received as a consequence leads to an understanding of a transcendent deity who is ‘an eternal and infinite judge, an eternal and infinite mercy, an infinite might, an eternal source of life’ (Scheler, 1960 [original 1921]: 61). He says that this is not a specifically Christian understanding of the deity, but he concludes that Christianity and the Roman Catholic practice of contrition (making a confession to a priest) are the highest forms of religious practice that accord most closely with his understanding of repentance and rebirth.

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In this reading of the Scheler essay, confession is first an internal act of memory, bringing into consciousness the repercussions of past acts, and secondly a confession to a deity that may be expressed internally or externally but which does not involve another person. If a confessor is involved it is as a mediator of the deity, but not as a primary actor, and it is only in his reference to the practice of contrition that a confessor is implied. This does not match with an understanding of confession as making the sin social. For Scheler in this essay is not concerned with sin, and the past deeds themselves, but only with the consequential guilt, which is the residue that is carried forward from the past into the present. It is only in his extrapolation of individual confession to collective responsibility and collective guilt that he would appear to be making the sin social. We cannot be sure if Bakhtin had direct access to Scheler’s essay, or, if not, if he had indirect access by way of mediation through another source. However, there is a clear association of ideas between his discussion of confession and repentance in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, and Scheler’s work. His later work, particularly his book on Dostoevsky, shows how he was able to advance his thinking and use the phenomenological description of repentance to inform his theory of discourse in the novel and genre theory. Divine Grace For Scheler and Bakhtin, grace is the means by which redemption occurs, but in Bakhtin’s texts the references to grace are enigmatic. Bakhtin drops the reference to grace into his text with complete familiarity and freedom, and with no complex discussion of its philosophical or religious meaning: there is an assumption that the reader shares with him a common understanding of his phrase, and that it requires no further elaboration. In ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, Bakhtin uses grace as a metaphor to enrich his descriptions of intersubjective relationships, and the affirmation that a person (or an author) can give to another. Two examples are given here: And, similarly, there is an equally profound difference between my inner experience of my own body and the recognition of its outer value by other people – my right to the loving acceptance or recognition of my exterior by others: this recognition or acceptance descends upon me from others like a gift, like grace, which is incapable of being understood and founded from within myself. (A&H: 49) Similar to the aesthetic relationship of the author to the hero, or of form to the hero and his life, are such relationships as the following: the relationship of an unmotivated valuation to an object of such valuation (‘I love him, whatever he may be’, and only after this act of valuation comes the active idealization, the

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gift of form), the relationship of a confirmative acceptance to the one accepted and confirmed; the relationship of a gift to a need; of an act of freely granted forgiveness to a transgression; of an act of grace to a sinner. (A&H: 90)

In these passages, Bakhtin refers to grace without elaboration, but what is implied is divine grace, from a divine source, outside the recipient. In each case the example of grace given to the sinner is not the primary focus of the text, it is an addition, giving an extra layer of explanation to a concept. In the first quotation, the attributes of grace are closer to the acknowledgement and recognition he is discussing than the gift, which is his first metaphor. In the second quotation he is explicitly listing similar but non-identical relationships and therefore implying a semantic content to the ‘act of grace to the sinner’ which is not reducible to the other relationships. The first quotation makes clear that the grace given comes from outside, from another person, while in the second the familiar phrasing of the act of grace to the sinner is suggestive of a religious context. A further example demonstrates again Bakhtin’s propensity for translating religious concepts into an aesthetic context. In his discussion of the example of creating a painting of a cliff, Bakhtin writes: The external image of the imaged cliff will not only express its soul (its possible inner states: stubbornness, pride, steadfastness, self-sufficiency, yearning, loneliness), but will also consummate this soul with values transgredient to its possible self-experience: aesthetic grace will be bestowed upon it – a lovingly merciful justification of its being that is impossible from within the soul itself. (A&H: 66–7)

Here Bakhtin uses grace as a metaphor in a different context: by referring to aesthetic grace he is transferring the gracious action from a religious setting to an aesthetic one, and so removes the action from any connection with divinity. Grace in this case is being bestowed by the contemplator of the painting, and in doing so completes the aesthetic event. Bakhtin as Philosopher In Bakhtin’s early thought the strands of ideas stemming from philosophy of religion are evident, and as his work moved on traces of these strands remain. Bakhtin’s later work on literary history and genre and his examination of language in the novels of Dostoevsky all demonstrate continuity with his early thought, and a development of his thought into his chosen domain of the aesthetics of literature. Confession is the most notable example of his translation of a religious theme into an aesthetic one, but he also used concepts such as divine grace to convey his meaning in the context of artistic creation.

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Bakhtin’s three moments of the act are at the crux of the debate over his intentions – theological or philosophical. He uses the threefold image and illustrates it with remarks drawn from his familiarity with Christian motifs. But if we take these textual references as guidance we ignore their pragmatic and dry philosophical context, and his stated intention to work on a secular project. The neo-Kantian tradition on which he drew so heavily provided him with the model for separating reason from faith. In the following chapters we will be focusing on the themes from the history of religion that can be identified in the development of Bakhtin’s work. Separating the philosophical and historical themes can appear artificial but it offers an organizing framework for discussion of issues in his work. There are important overlapping considerations, particularly Bakhtin’s affiliation to neo-Kantian theories of culture, which straddle philosophy and history.

Chapter 3

Myth, Religion and Language In the previous chapter we discussed issues of philosophy of religion in relation to Bakhtin’s ideas and writing; in this chapter we move on to consider the significance of the history of religion in his work. This move is associated with the development of Bakhtin’s career, and the work we shall concentrate on in relation to Bakhtin’s ideas on myth and language is Discourse in the Novel, written in 1934–35. Bakhtin’s affiliations to Cohen and Scheler were discussed in connection with philosophy of religion; but moving on to historical themes, his affiliations to neo-Kantian philosophers of culture, especially Cassirer, will be explored, and this will entail a considerable detour into neo-Kantian philosophy of myth and religion. Cassirer’s work provides a fine example of Bakhtin’s affiliation to the work of other scholars and focuses attention on the importance that Bakhtin gives to myth and mythical consciousness. The grand narrative of Bakhtin’s later works is the history of literary genres and the development of the novel as the culmination of artistic representation of human life in its fullness and plurality. Myth plays a significant part in this narrative as an archaic form of consciousness and source of authority from which language must be liberated if it is to fulfil its potential. Since Bakhtin’s references to myth and mythical consciousness are slight, and his explicit connections to other people’s work and ideas sometimes casual, it is important for understanding his use of concepts such as myth and mythical consciousness to examine the work of his precursors and thus to illuminate his meaning. As discussed in Chapter 2, understanding Bakhtin’s sources enables the reader to gain a fuller understanding of his work. Bakhtin engaged with the general ideas of primordial thought, mythical consciousness and the systemic intertwining of myth and language. His conception of authoritative discourse in, for example, religious teaching, and the power exercised by language, over and above the content, derives from his conception of the unconscious influence of myth within the discourse. The power he identified is that aspect of language that engenders a response of acceptance and submission because of who the speaker is, or the context in which the language is used. It is not the power of argument, but an inequality of the relationship between speaker and audience that Bakhtin locates within language rather than other socio-political influences, or as a proxy for them. In this chapter we will cover Bakhtin’s ideas of myth and language and his concept of authoritative discourse. The next chapter will discuss his ideas about how language liberates itself from myth, ideas that he developed in relation to the history of genre, and the secularization of literature. Chapter 5 will look at Bakhtin’s affiliation to nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury English anthropologists, and his idea of carnival. There is considerable

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overlap in the material considered in these three chapters, all of which broadly cover Bakhtin’s ideas on the historical development of literature and the significance of the history of religion within that narrative. Most of the work on Bakhtin’s affiliation to the Marburg neo-Kantians will be considered in this chapter, and affiliations to other writers in the following two chapters. Myth and Mythical Consciousness It was in Bakhtin’s work in the 1930s that his ideas concerning the nature of mythical consciousness, and his appropriation of the confluence of Hegelian and neo-Kantian ideas in Cassirer’s work, became apparent. Brandist (2002: 117) identifies the essay written in 1934–35 (published 1975), and published in English in 1981 as ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (DN), as the first occasion when we encounter a developed idea of mythical consciousness. In Bakhtin’s conception, myth was the earliest form of culture and represented the first steps made by our ancestors in creating an environment that was more than a herd existence similar to other animal species. Myth was the cultural creation of an embryonic society, and it was a collective, social form of culture. Bakhtin refers to this period as a prehistorical and necessarily hypothetical past (DN: 369), thereby freeing himself to speculate about early human history. Religion, language, art and other cultural forms developed from myth, but in Bakhtin’s account, myth retains a hold on culture and reappears in later cultural forms. As shall be demonstrated in this chapter, when Bakhtin refers to mythical consciousness, he is not referring to a characteristic of human consciousness only found in ancient history, he is referring to the presence in contemporary culture of forms of thought that still adhere to archaic ways of thinking, and which prevent some more flexible and responsive ways for people to express themselves collectively and individually. Words and ideas are bound together in mythical thinking in a way that is unchallengeable and which does not do justice to human plurality and diversity. Mythical consciousness, while having an explanatory role in the development of consciousness in cultural forms subsequent to myth, was a negative influence on culture for Bakhtin. It was aligned with the negative pole in the bi-polar opposition of monologic and dialogic consciousness, as Brandist says in his discussion of Bakhtin’s essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’: mythical consciousness is aligned with poetic genres, monologue, unitary language, objective culture and officialdom, while critical consciousness is aligned with the novel, dialogue, discursive plurality, ‘life’ and ‘the people’. (Brandist, 2002: 117)

This bi-polar opposition is a component of Bakhtin’s later thought and pervades his work on language and literary genres. He values the novel above other literary forms because of its closeness to the cluster associated with life.

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The ideas of myth and mythical consciousness become significant in Bakhtin’s ideas of language development. The questions we need to address concern the derivation of these ideas, both from his cultural milieu and from more specific affiliations. We will discuss the extent to which he appropriated the ideas that were current at the time, and the extent of his own contribution. Russian Literary Science In discussing Bakhtin’s affiliations it is sometimes tempting to overstate the extent of his reliance on sources from Western European scholarship, perhaps because the intellectual milieu in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Russia was one that valued Western European learning. Andy Byford characterized Russian intellectuals’ approach to Western academia as regarding it as ‘implicitly superior, remote, and somewhat abstract’ (Byford, 2007: 39); and exposure to, and interest in, European ideas and scholarly texts were the norm for intellectuals. Until the middle of the nineteenth century Russian culture was regarded as inferior from an academic point of view, but from the 1860s there were developments to support the study of Russian humanities, such as the establishment of professorial chairs, and as the academic field grew in confidence, scholars felt the need to distinguish their work from that of their Western counterparts and develop a ‘Russian science’ (Byford, 2007: 38–9), but as an addition to the canon of European science, not a replacement of it. In the field of literary studies or ‘literary science’, Byford regards the turn of the twentieth century as the ‘Golden Era of Russia’s literary academy’ (Byford, 2007: 2), and cites the figures of Aleksandr N. Veselovskii (1838–1906) and A.A. Potebnia (1835–91), among others, as influential not only in the academic environment but also in journalistic and broadly intellectual circles. In late twentieth-century Soviet and Russian retrospective assessments of Russia’s literary scholarship, it was the norm to divide the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into four overlapping schools of thought (Byford, 2007: 3–5). The first was the ‘mythological school’ from the 1840s to the 1860s. The scholars of this school were influenced by Joseph Grimm, and took a special interest in Slavic folklore and mythology. Scholars such as Miller and Afanas’ev sought to reduce literature to its primeval mythical foundations in the national spirit. The ‘cultural-historical school’ replaced the ‘mythological school’ in a drive for modernization and lasted until the end of the century. The defining characteristic of this school was the idea that literature was an inherent part of socio-historical processes, and its proponents opposed their historical approach to an aesthetic one. From the 1880s the ‘comparativehistorical school’ arose in parallel to the ‘cultural-historical school’. This school emphasized literary development across international boundaries and the evolution of poetics. The most prominent member of this school was Aleksandr Veselovskii, whose major work was a study of the historical evolution of literature, which he called historical poetics; and his brother Aleksei (1843–1918) is also accounted

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a member of the school. The ‘comparative-historical school’ was in circulation into the 1920s, but from the turn of the century the ‘psychological school’ gained attention. The school’s proponents were disciples of Potebnia, who had died in 1891, and whose work was centred on language and folklore. The school was also influenced by contemporary ideas about the psychology of artistic creation and reception. While recognizing that it remains a useful tool for the historian, Byford urges caution in giving significance to the division into ‘schools’: a division that only partially reflects the approaches and self-definitions of the scholars, and may distract attention from the continuities between the schools. Bakhtin’s exposure to literary science would have coincided with the final period of this sequence of schools, but no doubt would have included retrospective attention to the great figures of the late nineteenth century. If discussions concerning the early history of human culture and the origins of language and literature were widespread in late imperial Russia, the changing political landscape in the early twentieth century affected the nature and scope of intellectual debate but did not extinguish it. A sociological approach was adopted by academics working in sociolinguistics, including the influential Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, who drew on a wide range of academic sources. His book, published in English in 1969 as Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology [Teoriia istoricheskogo materializma] was first published in 1921, and rapidly became the basic textbook for party cadres, enjoying widespread dissemination, availability and status (Brandist, 2002: 54). Bukharin devotes considerable attention to the evolution of art forms, language, thought and religion, and relates their development to the economic and material conditions of society. He discusses the ideas of Wilhelm Wundt, the early social psychologist, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the French anthropologist. Both these writers have been identified as sources for Bakhtin’s work (Brandist, 2002: 114, 137) either directly or through the mediation of other writers. In his discussion of the early development of thought, Bukharin covers in a brief summary the development of myth as an expression of ideas about causation, and the subsequent development of theistic religions where mythical causation is superseded by ideas of a supreme deity. He writes: Causality, as found among savages, is not our causality, but an animistic causality, the result of the inclination of the savage to seek a spiritual, divine or daemonic principle operative in all situations. All things that come to pass have been ‘ordained’ by someone: cause seems identical with a command emanating from a superior spirit. The law of causal succession becomes the whim of the Supreme Being, the spiritual ruler (or rulers) of the universe. Therefore, while the tendency to seek causes seems to be present in man, savage man seeks causes of a specific kind, causes emanating from a certain higher power. Of course, this type of thought is also related with a certain social order. It is typical for a society that already shows the presence of a hierarchy in production and social polity. (Bukharin, 1969 [original 1921]: 207)

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Bukharin’s work offers a methodological model for the treatment of myth and religion in a discussion of the evolution of human culture and institutions, arguing strongly for the connection between cultural superstructure and economic conditions. His use of European ethnographic and anthropological sources indicates their contemporary availability, and Bukharin’s role as mediator of these ideas to specialists and non-specialists. Bakhtin’s Affiliation to the Marburg Neo-Kantians We can assume some elements of Bakhtin’s intellectual background from material that was generally available, but for specific affiliations we need more evidence, which we have in the case of Cassirer, whose ideas acted as a bridge from critical philosophy to a Hegelian synthesis (Brandist, 2002: 109).1 Bakhtin’s depiction of the close relationship between myth, religion and language is a core element of his inheritance of the neo-Kantian history of culture, but despite his references to this material it is not the central theme of any of his works and he devotes a very small proportion of his work to a discussion of it. However, the material provides the context for his thesis regarding the evolution of literature from mythical origins to the slow elimination of mythical residues. Ideas about myth are foundational to Bakhtin’s conceptions, as they form the starting point for all forms of thought – there was no kind of thought prior to mythical thought, and all forms of thinking, rational and irrational, have sprung from the seminal material of myth; and later more sophisticated cultural forms have developed but with mythical thinking providing the structures and archetypes. Cassirer’s work is detailed, thorough and well researched, and we shall make a considerable detour into this material in order to clarify the intellectual canvas that provided the background for Bakhtin’s ideas and grand narrative – a narrative of the unfolding of literary genres that gradually dispense with authoritarian aspects of mythical consciousness while retaining in popular forms traces of archaic modes of thought. In most of his work Bakhtin makes no mention of the extent of his use of the work of any of the Marburg neo-Kantian philosophers (Hermann Cohen (1842– 1918), Paul Natorp (1854–1912) and Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)); although in the manuscript of ‘Discourse in the Novel’ he cited the second volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, this reference was removed before publication (Poole, 1998: 546). In the two footnotes to Bakhtin’s discussion of myth and language in ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (DN: 369) he makes reference to Steindhal, Lazarus, Wundt and others as treating the problem of the interrelationship of language and myth on the psychological level with an orientation towards folklore; and he says that in Russia Potebnia and Veselovskii demonstrated the fundamental 1

  For detailed work on the philosophical influences on Bakhtin see Brandist, 2002: 15–23 and Tihanov, 2000b: 268–71.

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relationship between the problems of the interrelationship of language and myth and concrete problems in the history of language consciousness. Bakhtin’s inheritance of Cassirer’s work has been uncovered by Bakhtin scholars, as Bakhtin himself was notoriously cavalier in acknowledging his sources. The links have been established both as direct appropriations (Poole, 1998: 548), and in the modifications to Hegelian philosophy that Cassirer made, which Bakhtin followed, as identified by Brandist: ‘there seems a wealth of evidence to suggest that behind the eclecticism of Bakhtin’s theory lies a unifying feature: Hegelian philosophy as modified by the work of Ernst Cassirer’ (Brandist, 1997: 20). In an interview with Viktor Duvakin recorded in 1973, Bakhtin himself acknowledged that he was familiar with Cassirer’s ideas and had read the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (see Poole, 1998: 566 and note 120 pp 577–8). Brandist claims that the influence of Cassirer on Bakhtin can be traced in the concept of the sign and the way the periods of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are conceived, as well as the theory of the novel. He says: ‘While Bakhtin’s own terminology differs significantly from that of Hegel and Cassirer, the structural features common to their works are too pervasive to be passed off as one influence among many’ (Brandist, 1997: 20). Bakhtin adopts Cassirer’s revisions of Hegel, for example in his criticism of interpretations of Dostoevsky’s novels that do not differentiate Hegel’s linear development of unfolding spirit from plural independent voices in Dostoevsky’s novels. Bakhtin is valuing the autonomous voices, as Cassirer values the autonomous symbolic forms, and resisting the Hegelian impulse to unification. In another example given by Brandist, he quotes Bakhtin: Heteroglossia ‘in-itself’ becomes, in the novel and thanks to the novel, heteroglossia ‘for itself’: languages are dialogically implicated in each other and begin to exist for each other (similar to exchanges in a dialogue). It is precisely thanks to the novel that languages are able to illuminate each other mutually; literary language becomes a dialogue of languages that both know about and understand each other. (DN: 400)

Brandist continues: ‘this extraordinary recasting of the Hegelian dialectic was based upon a crucial amendment made to Hegel’s system by Cassirer in 1923: the insistence that “philosophical awareness arises only in and through language”’ (Brandist, 1997: 21). Bakhtin is not the only figure identified as using Cassirer’s work. Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895–1936) was a close associate of Bakhtin and has been accused by Brian Poole of plagiarizing Cassirer. Poole writes: Linguistic dialogism has philosophical sources which can be identified and dated. Cassirer was one important source. Among the members of the ‘Bakhtin Circle’, who all specialised in the field, Voloshinov was the first to plagiarise Cassirer. He continued to do so throughout his publications. (Poole, 2001: 126)

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Lähteenmäki has looked in detail at the work of Voloshinov and concludes that the accusation of plagiarism does not hold up although ‘Vološinov obviously benefited from Cassirer’s richly detailed work on language’ (Lähteenmäki, 2002: 122). While he was a doctoral student, Voloshinov worked on a Russian translation of the first volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms [Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Cassirer, 1923–29] and therefore he and his close associates in the Bakhtin Circle must have had a close knowledge of Cassirer’s work on language and the structure of his conception of symbolic forms. Myth as a Symbolic Form In order to understand Bakhtin’s ideas about myth and religion we need to consider Cassirer’s ideas in some detail. Cassirer’s work was extensive and included volumes on modern physics and the theory of relativity but his greatest achievement was in developing a philosophy of culture that outgrew the bounds of the Marburg school, and in the opinion of some commentators owed more to Hegel than to Kant. His Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was published in three volumes between 1923 and 1929: the first on language, the second on mythical thought and the third a phenomenology of knowledge. A fourth volume on the metaphysics of symbolic forms was published posthumously from unpublished manuscripts (Verene, 2001: 4). His philosophy of culture is a project on a grand scale, making large claims to explain how cultural forms have developed over the course of known human history, and to establish a highly systematic theoretical framework that brings together his exhaustive and diverse material. Cassirer frames his theory in the terms of Kantian critical philosophy, the formative structure of Bakhtin’s ideas. His task is to explore the conditions of the possibility of the formation of culture, and while Kant’s explanation of cognition is located in the individual and in single, personal processes of understanding, Cassirer’s attention to culture brings him into the arena of collective acts of understanding, and his philosophy is an alternative to psychological and sociological theories and explanations of cultural phenomena such as myth. He affirms his Kantian conception of knowledge of objects occurring through acts of consciousness, and he says: It is one of the first essential insights of critical philosophy that objects are not ‘given’ to consciousness in a rigid, finished, state, in their naked ‘as suchness,’ but that the relation of representation to object presupposes an independent, spontaneous act of consciousness. (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 29)

In his work on symbolic forms Cassirer aims to broaden Kant’s ideas to encompass a wide range of cultural formations. The symbolic forms of culture are created through human consciousness: he says they are ‘made possible only by specific acts of objectivization, in which mere impressions are reworked into

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specific formed representations’ (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 29). His schema is comprehensive in its coverage encompassing language, myth, art, religion, history and science, and he regards these as corresponding to different functions of consciousness. Myth corresponds to the expressive function of consciousness, language to the representational function and science and theoretical thought to the significative function. For Cassirer, mythical thought is the earliest form of thought, and is the precursor and generator of all subsequent forms of thought, including philosophy. Given that philosophical thought did not have an origin independent of myth, its earliest developments were set against a background of mythical thought: Long before the world appeared to consciousness as a totality of empirical things and a complex of empirical attributes it was manifested as an aggregate of mythical powers and effects. (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 1)

In contrast to mythical thought Cassirer identifies empirical thought as theoretical acts directed towards the world around us. This form of thinking involves performing an intellectual operation to make sense of what we see, hear, taste and smell around us, by performing operations such as differentiation, identification, comparison and coordination. In forming these operations we become aware of stable relationships that are repeated, which then can be constituted as laws which generalize the particular instances of sense impressions, and these laws, for Cassirer, constitute the framework of objectivity: Thus, in this form of thought, the mere particular is apprehended in accordance with a concept of law. The particular reality or occurrence is and exists; but what secures its existence is that we think it and must think it as an instance of a universal law, or rather of a sum or system of universal laws. (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 32)

In addition, all empirical thinking is inherently dialectical, involving a dynamic of ongoing synthesis of oppositions. The construction in thought of objective laws is a constant work in progress in a unity of combination and differentiation, synthesis and analysis. He expresses this in an explicitly Hegelian form: The apparent circle of dialectical thinking is merely an expression of the perpetual cycle of empirical thought itself, which must operate at once analytically and synthetically, progressively and regressively, which must break down the particular contents into their constitutive factors, in order to re-create them genetically. (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 33)

Scientific thinking and empirical thinking are the same process of thought, they are not fundamentally different operations, but different only in degree. In scientific

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experience, distinctions that are present in perception are raised to the form of knowledge by the stability of their concepts and judgement. For Bakhtin, as we shall see, an important aspect of myth is the powerful hold it has over the imagination. In Cassirer’s account the hold derives from the direct connection between powerful natural phenomena, such as storms, and their mythical cause. In mythical thinking the phenomenon and the myth are identical: the storm is the demon or the mythical beast. Mythical thinking does not create knowledge in the sense of adding explanation or understanding to empirical facts, and in myth objectivity is constituted in the world of pure forms which it regards as ‘objectivity pure and simple’ (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 35). Mythical explanations for phenomena rely on outside forces, which may be gods, demons, totemic animals or other powerful agents, but the agency is not constituted as a law, it is present in itself. Myth is entirely centred in the moment, and cannot generalize or imagine extending the moment into the future: Myth lives entirely by the presence of its object – by the intensity with which it seizes and takes possession of consciousness in a specific moment. (Cassirer 1955 [original 1925]: 35)

In mythical consciousness there is no distinction between something and its representation, and this has the effect of empowering images and representations of gods and demons with the sense of the immediate presence and characteristics of the deity or demon: The ‘image’ does not represent the ‘thing’; it is the ‘thing’; it does not merely stand for the object, but has the same actuality, so that it replaces the thing’s immediate presence. (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 38)

The image or object, in mythical thinking, has the same power over natural forces, or over the fate of human beings, that its mythical counterpart – the deity, demon or spirit – has, without any sense of disconnection between image and mythical being. A key characteristic of mythical thinking is in the conception of causality – one of the points picked up by Bukharin – which proves to be significant for the development of the human capacity to reason. Mythical thinking is imbued with notions of causality, the idea that events have causes, and although the nature of the causal explanations has in most cases long been superseded, the concept of causality is one of the most fundamental to empirical and scientific thought, and can be traced back to its origins in mythical thinking. In myth no single causal factor is isolated, but rather every factor that is present forms part of the cause: The isolating abstraction, which singles out a specific factor in a total complex as a ‘condition,’ is alien to mythical thinking. Here every simultaneity, every

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spatial coexistence and contact, provide a real causal ‘sequence.’ (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: 45)

In mythical thinking there is no restriction on the possibilities of causation as metamorphosis can occur between any two objects. Cassirer contrasts scientific thinking as characterized by law and necessity with mythical thinking characterized by arbitrariness and contingency, but with the qualification that in the mythical worldview nothing happens by accident, everything has a conscious purpose. In empirical apprehension the whole consists of the parts that can be identified and categorized. In mythical thinking there is no difference between the whole and the parts, and this has consequences in the application of myth to magical rites. In sympathetic magic one small element of a man, such as his saliva, can be used to exert influence as if it were the man himself, because a part of the person, however small, is identical to the whole person and can expose the whole person to vulnerability. Bakhtin’s reception of Cassirer’s work led him to develop his ideas on myth and language, a theme to which Cassirer had paid a great deal of attention. Although the first volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms had been devoted to language, he also developed his work on mythical thought and language in his work entitled Language and Myth [Sprache und Mythos]. This was published in 1925, the same year as Volume 2 of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and it had the subtitle A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of Gods [Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Gőtternamen], clearly positioning the study as a follow-up to the work of Hermann Usener, the teacher of Paul Natorp (1854–1912),2 Cassirer’s colleague at Marburg University. Cassirer’s ideas of culture, cast in a neo-Kantian framework, claim continuity with Usener, but an opposition to the more radical idealist position of historians of religion such as Max Műller (1823–1900), who regarded the origin of myth to be in language. In Műller’s account myth arises out of correspondences in language where words are similar, and a mythical account of their similarity arises, even when the words are not connected in any other way. In 1880 he wrote that ‘it is the 2

  Natorp was a student and later a colleague of Cohen’s at Marburg, but prior to his move to Marburg he studied under Usener at Bonn University. Hermann Usener (1833– 1905) was a German classical philologist and historian of religions, and he wrote a major work on the history of divine names (Usener, 1896). The study, based mainly on Greek and Roman gods, reconstructed a history of mythic ideas and concluded that there have been long periods in human history when people were working towards thought and perception but before these faculties were fully developed. The development of language was the crucial step enabling people to conceive of class concepts – generalizations of individual instances. Before this insight was gained, only the immediate reality could be conceived and abstract thought was not possible. Natorp was influenced by Usener’s thought to the extent that Willey has identified a ‘permanent ambivalence in his thought’ (Willey, 1978: 118) as a consequence of his shift from studies of mythology to neo-Kantian critical methodology.

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essential character of a true mythe [sic] that it should be no longer intelligible by a reference to the spoken language’ (Műller, 1880: 73). He regarded myth as a defect of language, and called myth the dark shadow that language throws upon thought (Cassirer, 1946: 3). In this view knowledge can never reproduce the true nature of things, it can only be framed in concepts which are creations of thought. Concepts, therefore, do not give us the true form of objects but give us the form of thought itself. In Cassirer’s critical account of this position he says: Consequently all schemata which science evolves in order to classify, organize, and summarize the phenomena of the real world turn out to be nothing but arbitrary schemes – airy fabrics of the mind, which express not the nature of things, but the nature of the mind. (Cassirer, 1946 [original 1925]: 7)

Cassirer’s response is a neo-Kantian solution. In his philosophy of culture, the categories are replaced by cultural forms that are spiritual and symbolic. Their importance lies in their function as a gateway to enable us to gain knowledge, and without these forms we would be unable to know anything. The symbolic forms are significant in having a generating capacity: they create the cultural world within which we can apprehend the world that we perceive. Cassirer writes in Language and Myth: From this point of view, myth, art, language and science appear as symbols; not in the sense of mere figures which refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings, but in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own. In these realms the spirit exhibits itself in that inwardly determined dialectic by virtue of which alone there is any reality, any organized and definite Being at all. Thus the special forms are not imitations, but organs of reality, since it is solely by their agency that anything real becomes an object for intellectual apprehension, and as such is made visible to us. (Cassirer, 1946 [original 1925]: 8)

The Hegelian influence is evident in the conception of the spirit and its internal dialectic. This conception of reality almost gives it a life force of its own, as a creation of spirit. It has dynamism, and Cassirer uses the metaphor of organs, like the vital organs of the human body, to reinforce the picture of culture as a growing organism. Cassirer constructed a bi-polar opposition where myth and language together are opposed to logic, rationality and theoretical modes of thought. He writes: What holds these two kinds of conception, the linguistic and the mythical, together in one category, and opposes both of them to the form of logical thought, is the fact that they both seem to reveal the same sort of intellectual apprehension, which runs counter to that of our theoretical thought processes. (Cassirer, 1946 [original 1925]: 31–2)

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In Cassirer’s model it is the propensity of mythical thinking to stay in the present, and focus only on the immediate object of sensory experience, that distinguishes it from theoretical thinking. Mythical thinking responds directly to sensory experience, and goes no further than the direct representation of that experience. He writes: For in this mode [mythical thinking], thought does not dispose freely over the data of intuition, in order to relate and compare them to each other, but is captivated and enthralled by the intuition that suddenly confronts it. It comes to rest in the immediate experience; the sensible present is so great that everything else dwindles before it. (Cassirer, 1946 [original 1925]: 32)

In theoretical thinking connections are made between experiences which lead to generalizations and the development of categories. It is concerned with relationships and therefore one step removed from immediate experience. The dichotomy between mythical and theoretical thinking was particularly important for Bakhtin. Cassirer and Hegel Before moving to look in more detail at how Bakhtin used Cassirer’s work on myth, we shall look briefly at the discussion on the extent of Cassirer’s credentials as a Hegelian philosopher, as this aspect of Cassirer’s work has been noted as a key element of Bakhtin’s reception of his work (Brandist, 2002: 109). Lipton describes the reorientation of Cassirer’s ideas that took place between 1919 and 1922 as leading him to become ‘a Kantian with a distinct Hegelian bent’ (Lipton, 1978: 73). Verene goes further when he argues that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms ‘is derived from Kant only in a broad and secondary sense and that its actual foundations are in Hegel’ (Verene, 1969: 33–4). Lipton explains Cassirer’s movement away from the established Marburg ground to be motivated by his desire to consider the human being in the whole of his existence, including his passions, emotions and practical activities, and therefore the totality of the study must include rational activities such as philosophy as well as the non-rational activities such as myth, language, art and religion. Cassirer makes explicit reference to Hegel in the general introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and in the introduction to each separate volume. He regards Hegel’s work as the most recent attempt to formulate a concrete system of the human spirit, but one suffering from the difficulty of making logic the prototype of all forms of the human spirit, and Cassirer’s philosophy is an attempt to overcome this problem. In the preface to Volume 2 Mythical Thought Cassirer states that Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes is the basis for his theory of myth, and that Hegel’s distinction between science and sensory consciousness is analogous to his own distinction between knowledge and mythical consciousness.

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Cassirer quotes Hegel at length, from the preface to the Phänomenologie des Geistes. It includes the line: Knowledge as it is at first or spirit in its immediacy is the spiritless, the sensory consciousness. To become true knowledge, or to produce the element of science that is its pure concept, it must struggle a long way.

Cassirer continues: These sentences in which Hegel characterizes the relation of science to the sensory consciousness apply fully and precisely to the relation of knowledge to the mythical consciousness. For the actual point of departure for all science, the immediacy from which it starts, lies not so much in the sensory sphere as in the sphere of mythical intuition. (Cassirer, 1955 [original 1925]: xvi)

In this preface Cassirer says that, like Hegel, he wishes to offer a ladder to ascend from the most rudimentary to the higher forms of consciousness. Hegel begins with things of the empirical world, but Cassirer wants to take the ladder one step lower and begin with myth. All symbolic forms arise out of myth, and all symbolic forms have to be liberated from their common origin. Verene and Lipton both agree that the major Hegelian influence on Cassirer was his incorporation of the dialectic into his philosophy. Lipton writes: What Cassirer was able to use most effectively from Hegel was his general dialectical orientation – his evolutionary view of human knowledge and existence, together with his understanding that an interest in the totality of human activities was the essential precondition for a true understanding of mankind. When Cassirer mixed Hegel’s evolutionary and holistic vision with Kant’s logistic analysis of knowledge and existence he at once realized that a complete grasp of the various life forms (for example, language and myth) required a transcendental study (Kantian) of the gradual unfolding (Hegelian) of each of these forms. (Lipton, 1978: 75–6)

Cassirer conceives of all symbolic forms as standing in dialectical relation to each other and as developing through dialectical oppositions beginning in myth. Cassirer’s dialectical oppositions are free-floating as he does not order the symbolic forms into a metaphysical logic of categories, but they remain as autonomous functions. Symbolic forms exist in opposition to each other, and human culture is the totality of these oppositions, while philosophy’s task is to elucidate the oppositions, showing both the divisions and the overall harmony and unity. Over a long period of human history, myth goes through dialectical stages to become religion, and each symbolic form develops according to a dialectic of its own mode of symbolism beginning in myth.

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The three stages of consciousness stand in dialectical relationship to one another. The expressive function is the simple unity of symbol and object; the representational function is a stage of disjunction or severance of symbol and object – the symbol is wholly other than the object. The conceptual function is the stage where the separation is overcome and the object is a construction of the symbol, becoming a symbol of a different order. This corresponds to Hegel’s stages of phenomenology: consciousness, self-consciousness and mind. In both systems each stage is a cancellation and preservation of the preceding stage. Within each successive stage Cassirer characterizes the development of individual symbolic forms as respectively mimetic, analogical and symbolic. Within each symbolic form these represent a progression from unity, disjunction and reunification. However, he does not regard this as a smooth progression but one that may undergo reversals and oppositions. The symbol is internally dialectical, comprising both a particular content and a universal meaning in a functional bond. In his metaphysics of symbolic forms ‘He [Cassirer] sees spirit (Geist) and life (Leben) as dialectically related, such that these principles of reality are in dynamic tension with each other: life continually transforming itself into spirit and spirit constantly renewing itself in the immediacy of life’ (Verene, 2001: 22). Cassirer departs from Hegel in several important respects. Cassirer’s symbolic functions develop in parallel from their origins in mythical consciousness and are not resolved into a higher unifying synthesis, as Krois identifies (1987: 79): ‘for Cassirer, the different symbolic forms of culture enjoy an autonomy that Hegel’s panlogism does not permit.’ Verene lists three major differences of Cassirer’s phenomenology as compared with Hegel’s: its conception of the fundamental stage of consciousness and consequent alignment of succeeding stages; the method of describing each stage; and the lack of a terminating stage (Verene, 1969: 20). In his 2001 introduction to Cassirer’s metaphysics of symbolic forms, Verene adds Cassirer’s difficulty with Hegel’s ‘propensity to resolve all other forms into that of logic’ (Verene, 2001: 20). Brandist (1997: 21) sees Cassirer replacing Hegel’s logic with the law of symbolism which underlies the development of symbolic forms. In the same article, Brandist refers to Cassirer following Hegel in shifting the concept of ‘culture’ from the aesthetic sense it has in Kant’s writing to an anthropological sense; and a shift in political theory from problems of ideology to questions of hegemony (Brandist, 1997: 21). Myth and Language in Bakhtin As we have seen, Cassirer’s thought was well developed, with a comprehensive, rigorous structure. Bakhtin’s approach was more organic, with less attention to exposition of the foundations of his thought and more attention to the higher levels to which his thought led him. He was candid about his priorities in this respect, for example saying that ‘we cannot here engage in depth in the problem of the interrelationship of language and myth’ (DN: 369 footnote). The lack of exposition

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does not hide the implicit structure, however, and we find a close alignment between Cassirer’s philosophy and Bakhtin’s. For Bakhtin, as for Cassirer, culture is formed or produced through the vehicle of human consciousness, and myth is the starting point for all human culture. Language has its beginnings in myth and continues to retain some of the power inherent in myth after the mythical element has fallen away. Mythical thinking, for Bakhtin, has a structure and function that is qualitatively different from subsequent forms of thought. This kind of thinking is expressed in language, as language retains the echoes of historic uses of words alongside current usage. Bakhtin’s account of the emergence of novelistic discourse parallels Cassirer’s account of the dialectic emergence of language and its progressive removal from the world of the immediately given. Language becomes dissociated from ideological meaning, which is the defining characteristic of magical and mythical thought. Traces of the mythical origins of language remain in poetry, openly emotional language and the language that Bakhtin characterizes as authoritative discourse. Authoritative discourse establishes its power by tracing is origins to a mythical past that was better and higher than the present, and it demands a response of passive obedience not critical rejoinder. While Bakhtin finds myth and language to have a circular relationship, generating and reinforcing each other, Cassirer finds the origins of language and myth in the same human impulses: they have a common origin, from which they gradually separate. The originating impulse is ‘radical metaphor’ (Cassirer, 1946 [original 1925]: 87), which performs a transformation on experience. One experience is translated into another form, and in his account this occurs when an experience is communicated through language, and when a mythical form is elevated to holiness. He describes it in this way: Indeed, even the most primitive verbal utterance requires a transmutation of a certain cognitive or emotive experience into sound, i.e., into a medium that is foreign to the experience, and even quite disparate; just as the simplest mythical form can arise only by virtue of a transformation which removes a certain impression from the realm of the ordinary, the everyday and profane, and lifts it to the level of the ‘holy,’ the sphere of mythico-religious ‘significance’. (Cassirer, 1946 [original 1925]: 87–8)

In Cassirer’s exposition, myth and language originate in parallel but similar processes, with a common origin. He finds that mythical influence can still be felt in language because of the common starting point: The original bond between the linguistic and the mythico-religious consciousness is primarily expressed in the fact that all verbal structures appear as also mythical entities, endowed with certain mythical powers, that the Word, in fact, becomes a sort of primary force, in which all being and doing originate. In all mythical cosmogonies, as far back as they can be traced, this supreme position of the Word is found. (Cassirer, 1946 [original 1925]: 44–5)

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Cassirer finds that mythical power is retained in the ‘Word’, which he clearly does not confine to Christian readings of the term. Bakhtin follows Cassirer in finding mythical power continuing to take hold of language, but unlike Cassirer he sees a continuing relationship between myth and language, not merely a shared starting point. In Bakhtin’s work in the 1930s, mythical thinking is linked to and dependent upon the interrelationship between myth and language: a complex relationship where myth and language are mutually constitutive. A fundamental feature of myth is the ‘absolute fusion of word with concrete ideological meaning’ (DN: 369). Myth has no place for nuance or sophisticated hermeneutics. This absolute correspondence determines the development of mythical images and also leads to particular ways of expressing ideas in language, which Bakhtin calls ‘a special feeling for the forms, meanings and stylistic combinations of language’ (DN: 369). However, there is a circular relationship between myth and language: But language too is under the power of images of the sort that dominate mythological thinking, and these fetter the free movement of its intentions and thus make it more difficult for language categories to achieve a wider application and greater flexibility. (DN: 369)

In this account, language is inhibited by the operation of mythical images, but mythical consciousness is created within language. Language generates a mythical reality, which has its own internal consistency and legitimacy derived from myth and which then reinforces the myth. Language here becomes the creator of reality, and the medium for the substitution of mythical reality for ‘reality itself’ (DN: 369), a reality grounded in the material world, not the world determined by myth. Among the characteristics of language associated with the monologic, mythical pole is the tendency to unification of language, which Bakhtin attributes to centripetal forces in language development. Centripetal forces bring language together, enforcing uniformity over the plurality of vernacular languages, dialects and modes of speech. Among the causal influences for this tendency Bakhtin names ‘the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval church, of “the one language of truth”’ (DN: 271). The implication here is that the language of religious institutions is a contributory factor to centralization and unification of language; and it is not only the institutional language but the language of spiritual leaders such as St Augustine which contributes to this direction. The strength of this tendency is magnified because language has a powerful influence over ideology and perception. There is more to Bakhtin’s concept of unitary language than the enforcement of uniformity. One of his significant contributions is his concept of ‘internal dialogization’ (DN: 284) of words. Words used in living language capture within them the contexts and meanings of previous uses of the word, and its history in active debates. For Bakhtin words are jostled by other words and other speakers, and he writes that: ‘The word lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own

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context and another, alien, context’ (DN: 284). Unitary language, then, is language from which the vital, dynamic, process of exchange with other words has been removed, and it is a defining characteristic of poetic discourse for Bakhtin. He describes the language of the poetic genre as ‘a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed’ (DN: 286). In poetry, the poet is using his own language, and asserting his capacity to assign meaning to it, without compromise (DN: 285). In contrast to the inflexibility of poetic unitary language, Bakhtin poses heteroglossia, the characteristic of language of representing multiple speakers with a plurality of contexts, backgrounds and points of view. Heteroglossia as a description of language in social contexts, and the observation that groups of people develop their own jargon was not new, and was summarized by Bukharin in his book on historical materialism. He wrote: It would lead us too far afield to point out in detail that the character, the style of a language also changes with the conditions of the social life; but it is worth while to mention that the division of society into classes, groups, and occupations also impresses its mark on language; the city-dweller has not the same language as the villager; the ‘literary language’ is different from ‘common’ speech. (Bukharin, 1969: 205, original 1921)

Bakhtin takes this further, into the realm of his discussion of discourse in the novel. The novel can represent diversity of speech, language and genre in a manner that poetry is unable to do. The author of the novel, unlike the poet, necessarily uses language where multiple voices are present. Bakhtin writes that: Heteroglossia,3 once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intention but in a refracted way. (DN: 324)

Heteroglossia, for Bakhtin, reveals ‘the decisive and distinctive importance of the novel as a genre’ (DN: 332), because it is through heteroglossia that each character in a novel can be represented as a speaking person. Within Bakhtin’s ideas on the history and development of literary genres we can find strands of thought on myth and religion derived from his sources. In the distinction between poetic and novelistic discourse we saw the contrast between 3

  The English translations of Bakhtin’s texts tend to translate as ‘heteroglossia’ two different Russian words raznoiazychie and raznorechie. Karine Zbinden draws attention to this. Raznoiazychie concerns the existence of several languages within one culture ‘in the sense of the same socio-ideological horizon’ (Zbinden, 2006: 69), and Zbinden confirms that ‘heteroglossia’ is the appropriate English translation. Raznorechie, which is translated as ‘heteroglossia’ in this passage could be designated ‘heterology’ (Zbinden, 2006: 23), meaning the internal diversity within a language.

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the powerful voice of authority of the poet compared with the more muted, negotiated voice of the author of the novel. Bakhtin expands on the theme of authoritative discourse, and it is here that we can see Bakhtin apply the conception of mythical consciousness to language and literature. In Bakhtin’s account, language, infused with mythical thinking, becomes a source of authority in its own right: Bakhtin calls this authoritative discourse, or authoritative word. It has a power independent of the content, a power derived from its source, which is in the mythical past. The discourse is inherited from the past, bringing with it the implied affirmation of people in the past, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of challenging it: 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; we encounter it with its authority already fused to it. The authoritative word is located in a distanced zone, organically connected with a past that is felt to be hierarchically higher. It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse. (DN: 342)

The reference to the word of the fathers resonates with the references to St Augustine, one of the fathers of early Christian theology. The study of these early theologians is known as patristics, a reference to the fathers. In the quotation above he connects the word of the fathers to an authority that is higher and more distant than the present; and linking the authoritative word with a hazy, undefined past establishes it as unchanging over time. The distance of the authoritative word from its recipient can also be due to the difficulty in comprehending it. Words in foreign languages, especially foreign language sacred texts (DN: 343 footnote), acquire mythical authority by virtue of their unfamiliarity. According to Bakhtin the authoritative word cannot be represented successfully in art as it becomes deprived of authority and ceases to be part of a living discourse. He writes: Authoritative discourse can not be represented – it is only transmitted. Its inertia, its semantic finiteness and calcification, the degree to which it is hard-edged, a thing in its own right, the impermissibility of any free stylistic development in relation to it – all this renders the artistic representation of authoritative discourse impossible. […] If completely deprived of its authority it becomes simply an object, a relic, a thing. (DN: 344)

This is one of Bakhtin’s most negative passages concerning authoritative discourse, and there is no doubt that he regards the authoritative word as a negation of life and creativity. His negative evaluation extends to poetic genres because they are formed through mythical consciousness, and are inherently authoritative. The poet makes claims to knowledge through artistic insight, and

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there is no room for debate or negotiation over this artistic truth. In the following passage on the language of poetic genres, Bakhtin makes references to religious institutions and to mythical cosmology: As a consequence of the prerequisites mentioned above, the language of poetic genres, when they approach their stylistic limit, often becomes authoritarian, dogmatic and conservative, sealing itself off from the extraliterary social dialects. Therefore such ideas as a special ‘poetic language,’ a ‘language of the gods,’ a ‘priestly language of poetry’ and so forth could flourish on poetic soil. (DN: 287)

In referring to the ‘language of the gods’, Bakhtin is using a familiar term that could be associated with the Olympian heights of the Greek gods, or other mythical deities. The term is invoked again in another passage where Bakhtin characterizes the distinction between poetic art and the art of prose. Poetic language is removed from everyday life, and when he calls it a language of the gods, he is giving it distance from normal human experience, a sense of eternal verity, unquestionable, unchallengeable and given in perfect form for all time. Prose art, in contrast, is provisional, messy, laden with ambivalence and contested meanings, and unique in time and place: If the art of poetry, as a utopian philosophy of genres, gives rise to the conception of a purely poetic, extrahistorical language, a language far removed from the petty rounds of everyday life, a language of the gods – then it must be said that the art of prose is close to a conception of languages as historically concrete and living things. The prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with hostile intentions and accents; prose art finds discourse in this state and subjects it to the dynamic unity of its own style. (DN: 331)

Here Bakhtin’s attractive description of prose characterizes it as close to us, familiar, tolerant and imperfect, unlike poetry. In the novel, unlike other literary forms, language is liberated from myth. Language in the novel is no longer unitary, and can now express multiple meanings and emotional tonalities. The language is no longer authoritative, and so has no power beyond what is immediately present. He writes: What is involved here is very important, in fact a radical revolution in the destinies of human discourse: the fundamental liberation of cultural-semantic and emotional intentions from the hegemony of a single and unitary language, and consequently the simultaneous loss of a feeling for language as myth, that is, as an absolute form of thought. (DN: 367)

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Bakhtin makes a big claim for his thesis of the evolution of literary discourse: that in moving towards novelistic discourse people liberated themselves from authority; but the claim he makes only applies to the world of literature – he did not claim that liberation in literature led to, or caused, liberation in social spheres. Laughter is the mechanism through which the emancipation takes place, as we shall see in the next chapter. Myth and Religion In Bakhtin’s work there is no qualitative difference between myth and religion. At times he merges the terms, for example when he refers to ‘the realm of religious thought and discourse (mythological, mystical, and magical)’ (DN: 351). In the same passage, where his focus is on the discourse of a speaking person, he makes no distinction between mythical and religious figures, and uses ‘mythological thought’ and ‘religious thought’ as interchangeable. He writes: The primary subject of this discourse is the being who speaks: a deity, a demon, a soothsayer, a prophet. Mythological thought does not, in general, acknowledge anything not alive or not responsive. Divining the will of a deity, of a demon (good or bad), interpreting signs of wrath or beneficence, tokens, indications and finally interpretations of words directly spoken by a deity (revelation), or by his prophets, saints, soothsayers – all in all, the transmission and interpretation of the divinely inspired (as opposed to the profane) word are acts of religious thought and discourse having the greatest importance. (DN: 351)

There is no indication in Bakhtin’s thought that he makes a distinction between mythical explanations of phenomena and later religious explanations of causation through the operation of supernatural deities. In this Bakhtin follows Cassirer for whom there was continuity between myth and religion. In his Essay on Man (1944) Cassirer considers the argument that the failure of magic led to a subsequent development of religion, but he did not find empirical evidence to support it. Cassirer’s contention is that religion, like other symbolic forms, developed out of myth, and fulfilled a social function from earliest times. Cassirer finds unity in religious activity, despite its diverse form: Even the ethical ideals of different religions are widely divergent and scarcely reconcilable with each other. Yet all this does not affect the specific form of religious feeling and the inner unity of religious thought. (Cassirer, 1944: 73)

Bakhtin’s conception of the enduring power of myth gives myth a more substantial place in contemporary culture than does Cassirer, for whom myth lies in the past. For Bakhtin, religious texts are prime examples of the use of authority derived from myth, and in his book on Rabelais we find a strong anti-clericalism.

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Myth is a fundamental structuring conception in Bakhtin’s thought that provides foundations for the development of his thesis about literary development. Over the long periods of historical time encompassed by his perspective, myth is ever-present, often unrecognized and usually in popular and vernacular genres, and myth continues to exert an influence over people’s minds. In the next chapter we shall trace Bakhtin’s work on the history of literary genres, and the necessary process of secularization that accompanied the development. In the development of literature, old sources of cultural authority, founded on mythical thinking, are overthrown and myths are dispelled through laughter and parody.

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Chapter 4

The History of Genre and the Secularization of Literature This chapter considers Bakhtin’s ideas on the history of literature and its place in the philosophy of culture, building on his adoption of Cassirer’s conception of myth as the fundamental starting point of cultural consciousness, and looking forward to the development of his idea of carnival. Bakhtin took a panoramic view of historical development and his scope embraced the earliest antecedents of cultural forms to the contemporary literary scene at the end of his life. His focus was on stylistics, or the changes in genre over time, and he wrote that: ‘stylistics must be oriented toward a metalinguistic study of large events (events that take many centuries to accomplish) in the speech life of the people’ (FNM: 133), indicating his ambitious time frame and the scope of his interest from the minutiae of popular speech through linguistic theorizing to a higher level of abstraction in metatheory. Among the dimensions of Bakhtin’s conception, the secularization of literature was a key structural element, and hence one of the primary categories in his analysis was religion: the domain that enables a distinction between sacred and secular to be made. Myth and mythical consciousness were the early precursors of religion, followed by religions as organized bodies of thought and with institutional structures. The incremental secularization of society was accompanied by a secularization of literature – this was the key formative characteristic of the development of literary genre, and it involved what he referred to as the ‘the centuries-long process of expunging the other’s sacred word’ (C: 133). This process contributed both to the development of the novel and the formation of modern languages. Bakhtin showed his awareness of importance of religion in the development of literature in his work written in 1940, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ (FPND), published in English in 1981 in the volume entitled The Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin, 1981d). Some of the late texts published in English in the volume Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986) present a more reflective, retrospective approach, and in these texts the appeal to secularization is more explicit. The late texts have limitations as they are not fully developed arguments and merely provide notes and hints to Bakhtin’s thinking at the end of his career, and in projecting an element of his late thought onto his earlier texts it may appear that the changes that took place in his ideas during his career are underestimated, and his ideas are presented with a presumption of consistency that is not reflected in the primary material. Where there are significant changes in his thought, these will be brought to the reader’s attention; however, in pursuing this argument

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the overall thesis that the significance of religion has been underestimated in Bakhtin scholarship hitherto is reinforced. Why Did Bakhtin Turn to Literature? Before continuing with the discussion of the substance of Bakhtin’s thought we need to address briefly the question of why he changed direction. Bakhtin’s work from the 1930s onwards was directed towards literature rather than philosophy, a turn which has intrigued his commentators and requires some explanation. His early works were grounded in the phenomenology of the act, but even so, his key work discussing intersubjectivity, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (A&H), was obviously and explicitly located in the aesthetics of verbal creation, so a drift into the history of literary genre might seem a natural progression. Commentators have felt the need to explain his turn as a response to the social and political circumstances of his life. He was exiled to Kazakhstan in 1930 and worked as a teacher. If he had wished to continue working in an idealistic theoretical framework, he would have found difficulty in publishing his work under the Soviet regime and his life and liberty would have been compromised by so doing. His turn to literature was accompanied by an attempt to incorporate sociological and socio-linguistic concepts into his work, and some elements of Marxism, which were more likely to be acceptable to the authorities. One school of thought, represented by Nikolaev (1998, 2001), presents his turn as a purely pragmatic response to conditions, while an alternative view is presented by Hirschkop (2001), who sees his turn as evidence that his earlier work had proved unproductive. The pragmatist case rests on the difficulties of working and publishing in the Soviet Union. To give one example: the journal Ruskii sovremennik was due to publish an excerpt of Bakhtin’s work on aesthetics but ceased publication in 1924 (Hirschkop, 2001: 11). Nikolaev is among Bakhtin scholars who regard Bakhtin himself as the author of the disputed texts (see Chapter 1, page 15), and who interprets these texts as Bakhtin’s attempts to write his own ideas disguised in Marxist terms. This school of thought sees Bakhtin as a modern Aesop, writing coded texts in a Marxist idiom. Most scholars now do not regard Bakhtin as the author of these texts, although they were probably the product of lively discussions in which he took part, but this undermines the argument, and the undisputed texts have far less Marxist content (see Brandist, 2002: 4). Hirschkop attributes Bakhtin’s departure from ethical philosophy to internal problems within the scope of his philosophy. Bakhtin was unable to continue his direction because it was not fruitful, and there was not a productive avenue to follow: ‘Maybe Bakhtin didn’t finish his “ethical” philosophy because he couldn’t finish it, historical circumstances having defeated it not from the outside but from the inside’ (Hirschkop, 2001: 12). Hirschkop reviews the succession of Bakhtin’s texts and says:

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If we cast our eye over Bakhtin’s career, we observe not a smooth development or the careful cultivation of various fields, but an endless, almost compulsive, dwelling on a few key problems. The usual interpretation of this obsessiveness is that Bakhtin had a moment of glorious philosophical insight which, for political reasons, he then transposed into a variety of disciplinary idioms. But the actual succession of the texts implies something else: that Bakhtin kept going because he couldn’t solve the problem or exorcise the trauma which started him off. (Hirschkop, 2001: 13–14)

Hirschkop defines the trauma which initiated Bakhtin’s work as the dramatic changes brought about by 1914–18 war, the Revolution and the civil war, and the loss of an old moral order. There may well be an element of truth in both explanations; and they are not mutually exclusive. Both internal and external factors may have influenced him. It must also be said that the turn identified is not a complete reversal of direction. It is possible to identify continuities with his earlier work. He was undoubtedly focusing on the combination of ethics and aesthetics in his early work, but in concentrating on literature he was not abandoning these themes. Brandist (2002) identified Bakhtin’s 1929 book on Dostoevsky, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (PDA), which has not been translated into English, as the point at which Bakhtin began to incorporate philosophy of language into his phenomenological framework inherited from Scheler. His move from consideration of a single author to consideration of the novel as a genre led to some theoretical difficulties for Bakhtin, which Brandist describes in the following terms: This move [to consideration of genre] led to a series of difficulties for Bakhtin because, while not abandoning his elaborate phenomenology of authorship, he was compelled to deal with impersonal, or suprapersonal, bodies of discourse that interacted within generic structures with their own history. For all of Bakhtin’s inventiveness in combining different ideas, he was faced with an impossible task: how to apply a synchronic method in consideration of a diachronic problem. The effect was to break apart the coherence of Bakhtin’s theory, but in so doing it led to Bakhtin’s most important work. (Brandist, 2002: 104)

By moving his vision from one author to many, he was in all likelihood following a natural progression of his ideas while also encouraged by pragmatic factors to pursue that course. The fact that the course presented him with challenges was not a barrier to pursuing it. Letting Go of Myth As we saw in the last chapter, Bakhtin followed the tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy of culture in considering that literature evolved out of the earliest

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forms of mythical consciousness. Myths were born out of early human desires for stories and narratives to explain the natural world, and to provide order and form to the chaos of sense impressions encountered by human beings. Creation myths supplied mythical explanations for the cosmos, and sometimes for the social environment and hierarchy; and mythical consciousness was dramatized by supernatural forces that held power and authority over human beings. Over time literature has cleansed consciousness of myth’s authoritarian hold but in doing so has dispensed with the dramatic coloration and emotional engagement that myth provides, leading to the culmination of the process of secularization found in the novel after the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinking was a strong driving force toward the elimination of mythical thinking, but in Bakhtin’s account it was accompanied by losses which were to be mourned as well as opportunities to be grasped. Bakhtin’s characterization has a regretful, ambivalent tone which grieves for the loss of a richer, better-populated cosmos. The reality of Enlightenment thinking is colder and greyer than its predecessor: As a result of Enlightenment criticism, the world, as it were, became qualitatively poorer in the most immediate way; there turned out to be much less that was actually real in it than was previously thought; it was as if the absolute mass of reality, of actual existence, had been compressed and reduced; the world had been made poorer and drier. But this abstract negative criticism of Enlightenment thinkers, by dispersing the residue of otherworldly cohesion and mythical unity, helped reality to gather itself together and condense into the visible whole of the new world. New aspects and infinite prospects were revealed in this condensing reality. (B: 44–5)

The pain of letting go of mythical consciousness had to be acknowledged, otherwise its erstwhile force could not be given sufficient recognition, but the reward was a more solid grasp on reality. The quoted passage comes from the fragment of Bakhtin’s work on the Bildungsroman, in which he praises Goethe as ‘one of the high points’ of the Enlightenment. All that remains of the text are the notes from the manuscript he wrote in 1936–38, but which was never published because it was accidentally lost when the publishing house Sovietskii pisatel’, which was to publish his work, was blown up in the early months of the German invasion (Holquist, 1986: xiii). The essays published in English as ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ (C) and ‘The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism’ (B) are both parts of the remaining fragments of this work. The end point of the journey is in the clarity of Europe in the eighteenth century, but the starting point is in very shadowy eras of prehistory about which little is known for certain. Bakhtin’s knowledge was derived from scholars who worked in fields where philosophy of culture overlapped with anthropology, sociology, social psychology and classics. In ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ (FPND), Bakhtin discusses the very early elements which form the ingredients out of which the novel emerged, and he emphasized the importance of folk culture:

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Novelistic discourse has a lengthy prehistory, going back centuries, even thousands of years. It was formed and matured in the genres of familiar speech found in conversational folk language (genres that are little studied) and also in certain folkloric and low literary genres. (FPND: 50)

His understanding of the novel’s development emphasized the popular roots of literature, and the survival through the centuries of earlier forms. The novel has not grown out of an élite high culture but out of commonplace vernacular language, expressions, jokes and stories. Despite the strong element of continuity, progress toward the flowering of the novel has been achieved though a succession of struggles. Human history has been made through political and social conflicts, often expressed in war and occupation of territory, and languages have been casualties of the process. But Bakhtin’s contention is that language retains signs of the struggle, and the signs can be read in order to understand the history that created contemporary use of language. He says: ‘During its germination and early development, the novelistic word reflected a primordial struggle between tribes, peoples, cultures and languages – it is still full of echoes of this ancient struggle’ (FPND: 50). The novelistic word, or the word in the novel, is a vehicle for carrying complex meanings, not all necessarily in harmony or coherent. Words carry various meanings because of the ways they have been used in the past, the contexts of past uses, and links back to even more distant uses and nuances. The ancient struggle may have been resolved, with one party victorious and one party defeated, but language still retains traces of both sides. Bakhtin’s essays on the novel and his work on Dostoevsky develop his conception of the novelistic word’s capability to carry multiple voices within it, in polyphony or double-voiced discourse, and in this form of writing the multiple voices are apparent to the reader. In his writing about the development of genre, Bakhtin believes that uncovering the various different voices is a special task that may require extraordinary sensitivity, but believes that it is possible to disentangle the separate sets of voices that may be found in literary language. In his ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’ (RQ), a much later piece written in 1970, Bakhtin makes reflective observations about the long-term development of literature and the nature of semantic phenomena contained in literary texts. Bakhtin asserts that both the trends and the semantic content are not visible to the naked eye, so to speak. They are not disclosed to a superficial examination, but require an approach which relates literature to the history of culture and does not separate literature into a separate domain. He writes: The so-called literary process of the epoch, studied apart from an in-depth analysis of culture, amounts to a superficial struggle of literary schools, and in modern times (especially the nineteenth century), amounts essentially to an uproar in the newspapers and magazines, exerting no essential influence on the great and real literature of the epoch. The powerful deep currents of culture (especially the lower, popular ones), which actually determine the creativity of

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writers, remain undisclosed, and sometimes researchers are completely unaware of them. (RQ: 3)

In order to clarify Bakhtin’s meaning it is helpful to consider the work of other thinkers, whose ideas were widely known to Soviet scholars. Even where the influence on Bakhtin’s work cannot be conclusively established, their areas of interest overlap considerably with Bakhtin’s. Marrism In marking out the undercurrents of cultural creativity as special territory that can only be fully understood by the initiated, Bakhtin is making oblique reference to the work of Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr (1865–1934), an idiosyncratic but influential thinker who prospered under the Soviet regime. Marr’s work was widely known, and Bakhtin’s ideas were affiliated to Marr’s directly and also indirectly through the work of Izrail’ Frank-Kamenetskij and Ol’ga Freidenberg, whose work is discussed later in this chapter (see Brandist 2002: 109–11, and 2011: 53). Marr developed his theories within a materialist framework, where the stages of language development were linked to social and economic development. He held important positions in academic institutions covering the wide range of his interests: archaeology, language, anthropology and social sciences,1 and his work was widely disseminated. His work was influential in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and Matthews identifies Marr’s theory as the derivation of the new linguistic doctrine formulated in the 1930s that was ‘the corner-stone of Soviet linguistics’ (Matthews, 1948: 172). After his death, his ideas suffered mixed fortunes. A gradual decline was followed by a revival in 1949 when, among other measures, the Praesidium of the Academy of Sciences decided to reissue Marr’s works and his biography, and establish a Marr Commission on the Languages and Scripts of the Peoples of the USSR (see Slezkine, 1996: 856). The revival came to an abrupt halt in June 1950 when Stalin published a denunciation of his work in Pravda. Marr is best known for his theory of language development. He distinguished the languages of the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East, in their derivation from the four sons of the biblical character, Noah. The Semitic languages derived from Noah’s son Shem, and the Japhetic from Japhet, while 1

  Full member of the Russian Academy from 1912, Dean of the Department of Oriental Languages of the University of St Petersburg from 1911 to 1918, first Dean of the Department of Social Science of Petrograd University, Director of the Institute of Archaeology 1918 to 1919, founder and President of the State Academy for Material Culture from 1919 to 1934, founder and President of the Japhetic Institute 1921 to 1931, and of its successor the Institute of Language and Thought 1931 to 1934, and head of the Section of Materialist Linguistics of the Communist Academy (Slezkine, 1996: 830).

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both families of languages pre-date Indo-European languages. His interest in languages may well have been generated by his early experiences. He was born in Georgia to a Scottish father and Georgian mother, and his first studies of language were in Georgia where he was determined to prove that the Georgian language was related to other languages, English and Turkish being his first candidates (Slezkine, 1996: 831). In pursuing this project he was championing the underdog in the context of a cultural and linguistic battleground, as the Georgian language was a language of popular culture, folklore and song, but not a language of high culture like the Indo-European languages such as Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. In 1908 he published his proof that Georgian was related to Semitic languages and was the most characteristic representative of the Japhetic branch. He studied other languages of the Caucasus and found them all to be Japhetic. His linguistic studies posited that all languages can be reduced to four original elements: sal, ber, yon and rosh, and not only did this relate to the living languages he studied but through the use of these elements and his methodology which he called linguistic palaeontology, he claimed to have established the origins of language itself. Writing in a manner reminiscent of creation myths, Marr wrote of Japhetic languages that: The modern Japhetic languages carry within themselves exceptionally striking relics of all three periods. Touching the skies with their head (national psychology) like the mythical hero Atlas, the Japhetides, while capable of thinking, speaking, and creating at the level of all epochs of the cultural history of mankind, including even our own modernity, are firmly attached with their trunk (the morphological structure of speech) to the soil of prehistory. In fact, they have their feet deeply rooted in that soil, preserving, through an unbroken chain of transformations spanning a number of periods, a bond with the state of the same language on the verge of the humanization of animal speech. (From Marr’s five-volume Izbrannye raboty, quoted and translated in Slezkine, 1996: 839)

This passage demonstrates his concept of the stages of language development: from the prehistoric embryonic language, through structured speech to national languages. This was the Marrist adaptation of Cassirer’s blueprint of the development of symbolic forms through various stages (Brandist, 2002: 109). Lawrence Thomas (1957) published a comprehensive critique of Marr’s methodology and also studied the influences that can be traced in his work. Marr finds the origin of language in the cries and articulations of early human beings when engaged in ritual and magical activities, songs and dances, and in this he closely follows the Russian scholar of comparative literature, Veselovskii (Thomas, 1957: 115). Other major influences on Marr were Ernst Cassirer and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, whose ideas of prelogical thought and theory of participation Marr adopted. In his later work Marr incorporated Marxism into his theory, insisting on the socioeconomic basis for language development, and on changes in the technology of

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production that produced effects on social structures and hence language. Slezkine writes with an ironic tone that: Marr probably noticed, in other words, that some theoretical formulations were better regarded and better funded than others; and even if he did not, A.V. Lunacharskii, M.N. Pokrovskii, and V.M. Friche were quite blunt about which formulations of the Japhetic Theory they found appealing. (Slezkine, 1996: 841)

The resulting theory found that language was a phenomenon of the superstructure, and changes in languages were consequent upon changes in economic conditions. The stadial development of language was a product of stages in economic development, but languages retain the elements of the earliest language, which can be traced within them. Bakhtin’s sources, to the extent that we know them, closely overlap with Marr’s, and we know that he directly accessed the work of Cassirer and LévyBruhl. In his work on the ancient past he is evidently drawing on the work of these writers, but when he alludes to methodology, and the need to mine the layers of language to uncover the hidden traces of archaic forms, he is in harmony with the ideas of Marr’s palaeontological method. The idea that contemporary language contains within it evidence of its past usage and origin is essentially, although not exclusively, Marrist. Bakhtin did not incorporate Marr’s materialism into his conceptual framework. For Bakhtin, following Cassirer, culture was the product of the human consciousness, an activity of the mind, not the consequence of economic and social structures. While Bakhtin’s concern with language is well known, language itself is not the building block of Bakhtin’s account of literary development: the base unit is the literary genre. Genre is the medium though which semantic content is encapsulated and transmitted through time; and each new genre brings with it the echoes of earlier genres. The long-term developments and processes by which one genre becomes transformed into another Bakhtin calls metalinguistics (FNM: 133), and he writes in ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’: Genres are of special significance. Genres (of literature and speech) throughout the centuries of their life accumulate forms of seeing and interpreting particular aspects of the world. For the writer-craftsman the genre serves as an external template, but the great artist awakens the semantic possibilities that lie within it. (RQ: 5)

His work uses metalinguistic analysis of genre to parallel Marrist analysis of language, and with the same ambitious claim to connect contemporary literary forms with the earliest types of human creativity and earliest forms of thought. Works of literature contain within them earlier genres, which can be identified and analysed by scholars. He uses the example of Shakespeare to demonstrate how a great literary artist can use what he calls the ‘semantic treasures’ in language.

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Shakespeare did not create his language on a blank canvas, rather he used language that carried with it the echoes and nuances of earlier usages. His creations were framed in structures that had a long history, and, according to Bakhtin, the genres and plots structures can be traced back to preliterary cultures of ancient times: The semantic treasures Shakespeare embedded in his works were created and collected through the centuries and even millennia: they lay hidden in the language, and not only in the literary language, but also in those strata of popular language that before Shakespeare’s time had not entered literature, in the diverse genres and forms of speech communication, in the forms of a mighty national culture (primarily carnival forms) that were shaped through millennia, in theater-spectacle genres (mystery plays, farces, and so forth), in plots whose roots go back to prehistoric antiquity, and, finally, in forms of thinking. (RQ: 5)

Carnival is one of the carriers of popular culture, providing continuity of cultural form through historical time, and this will be discussed in Chapter 5. Secularization Bakhtin’s metalinguistic project worked both backwards in time to establish early forms in later works, and forwards in time to formulate a thesis that literary development was characterized by secularization. The most explicit reference to the secularization of literature is found in From Notes Made 1970–71, where Bakhtin writes that ‘literature has been completely secularized’ (FNM: 132). Secularization involves the eradication of mythological thinking and the authoritarian sacred word, it frees the author from being bound by a certain genre, and it culminates in the novel, the genre which accommodates all other genres, while not being bound to any one of them. Secular literature is literature with a free choice of genre, but also with no particular genre of its own, and therefore needing to borrow and reuse other and sometimes multiple genres. He says that ‘the novel, deprived of style and setting, is essentially not a genre; it must imitate (rehearse) some extraartistic genre: the everyday story, letters, diaries, and so forth’ (FNM: 133). He contrasts this with the singer at ancient feasts, the court poet, the tragedian (Dionysian Priest) among others, who did not have this choice, and so the process of secularization in literature has led to a diversification of genres. On the journey from myth to novel, the sacred word, the word given power by religious authority, has a prominent role to play. In Bakhtin’s thought the sacred word has profoundly negative connotations being associated with lifelessness and repression of creativity: Because of its sacrosanct, impenetrable boundaries, this [sacred] word is inert, and it has limited possibilities of contacts and combinations. This is the word that retards and freezes thought. The word that demands reverent

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The outcome of the long-term development of literature was the novel freed from the inhibitions imposed by the life-denying sacred word, and Bakhtin had a well-developed thesis to explain how this happened. Genres develop and change through power struggles of the voices operating within genres. A later genre may incorporate an earlier one, not necessarily in a harmonious, uncritical fashion, but in a manner which contains it as a separate voice. He offers as examples of these genres stylization, parody and polemics, all of which retain an original voice and offer an alternative, within the same text. Of these, parody is the genre to which he devotes most attention, and which is the key to his explanation of how literature moves with the times. He refers to the struggles in expelling the sacred word from modern languages ‘with the help of parodic antibodies’ (FNM: 133). Parody operates as a challenge to the original form, but it is an indirect challenge that harnesses laughter to the task and undermines the ability of the original to maintain its position of authority. The late texts quoted above demonstrate Bakhtin’s retrospective assessment of his work as a metalinguistic project, but the ideas were well developed in his work in the 1940s. In ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ (FPND) Bakhtin identifies laughter as one of the two factors of decisive importance in the development of the novel, the other being polyglossia, the use of multiple types of language discourse normally found in everyday speech, that only the novel can capture. He writes that: The most ancient forms for representing language were organized by laughter – these were originally nothing more than the ridiculing of another’s language and another’s direct discourse. Polyglossia and the interanimation of languages associated with it elevated these forms to a new artistic and ideological level, which made possible the genre of the novel. (FPND: 50–1)

Laughter, it becomes clear, is harnessed for the task of literary development through parody, which Bakhtin sometimes refines as parodic travesty. Parody mimics the original for comic effect, but his inclusion of travesty in the description brings with it a clarification of the intentions behind it. In travesty the intention is to debase and to make a grotesque caricature of the original which is not always the case in parody. Parodic travesty made it possible for people to laugh off the embrace of mythical thinking and move towards a revitalized discourse: These parodic-travestying forms prepared the ground for the novel in one very important, in fact decisive, respect. They liberated the object from the power of language in which it had become entangled as if in a net; they destroyed

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the homogenizing power of myth over language; they freed consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed the thick walls that had imprisoned consciousness within its own discourse. A distance arose between language and reality that was to prove an indispensable condition for authentically realistic forms of discourse. (FPND: 60)

The concept of the distancing of language and reality that he touches on here appears counterintuitive, but he explains this within his framework. The direct word, where language and reality are closely matched, is the word in epic, lyric and tragic literature, where the author relates the narrative using the language, myth and traditions of the genre in a straightforward way without giving additional meaning to the language by adding another voice. Bakhtin claims that in consciousness in the mode of parodic travesty this is completely different: It, too is oriented toward the object – but toward another’s word as well, a parodied word about the object that in the process becomes itself an image. Thus is created that distance between language and reality we mentioned earlier. Language is transformed from the absolute dogma it had been within the narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality. (FPND: 61)

The counterintuitive element in this construction is the assertion that distance is required for the representation of reality, and that the closer language is to the object the more unreal it is. Language carries the power of myth, and this must be challenged within language itself for the challenge to be successful; and while comedy and laughter may appear to be a by-road of cultural development, in Bakhtin’s formulation they form the main route to the next stage of the journey. The important element of mythical and authoritarian thinking that was being shaken off in this way was the religious language of Christian institutions and the sacred texts they revered. This is the most significant element of medieval European culture in Bakhtin’s assessment, and the one to which parody and travesty were directed. It was so pervasive that in some instances it became almost impossible to tell if parody was intended, or the irony so marked that it could be confused with piety. He also touches on the question of the extent to which parody was tolerated and even permitted: The primary instance of appropriating another’s discourse and language was the use made of the authoritative and sanctified word of the Bible, the Gospel, the Apostles, the fathers and doctors of the church. This word continually infiltrates the context of medieval literature and the speech of educated men (clerics). But how does this infiltration occur, how does the receiving context relate to it, in what sort of intonational quotation marks is it enclosed? Here a whole spectrum of possible relationships toward this word comes to light, beginning at one pole with the pious and inert quotation that is isolated and set off like an icon,

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin and ending at the other pole with the most ambiguous, disrespectful, parodictravestying use of a quotation. The transitions between the various nuances on this spectrum are to such an extent flexible, vacillating and ambiguous that it is often difficult to decide whether we are confronting a reverent use of a sacred word or a more familiar, even parodic playing with it; if the latter, then it is often difficult to determine the degree of license permitted in that play. (FPND: 69–70)

Bakhtin discusses at some length a series of parodic works that date from the early Middle Ages, which constitute a genre of sacred parody or parodia sacra. One, which is well known according to Bakhtin, is Cena Cypriani or Cyprian Feasts. The work uses all the central figures in the biblical narratives such as Adam and Eve, Christ and the Apostles and creates a picture of a grand feast at which they all eat, drink and make merry. Bakhtin observes that ‘in this work a correspondence of all details to Sacred Writ is strictly and precisely observed, but at the same time the entire Sacred Writ is transformed into a carnival, or more correctly into Saturnalia’ (FPND: 70). Bakhtin comments that scholars have interpreted this work in a variety of ways. It has been regarded as an innocent device to aid learning, or alternatively as a blasphemous parody. Bakhtin himself is in no doubt that it is parody or more precisely parodic travesty. He assigns a highly significant role to parody in his account of how the novel came into being. He says that: ‘in the Middle Ages the role of parody was extremely important: it paved the way for a new literary and linguistic consciousness, as well as for the great Renaissance novel’ (FPND: 71). He considers that parody in the Middle Ages had grown out of ancient ritualistic parody, ritual degrading and the ridiculing of higher powers. Bakhtin gives an account of the role of laughter in the Middle Ages and he associates laughter strongly with holidays and feast days which were both associated with the Christian church’s calendar. He provides some detail, although he continues to assert that these facts are well known: The parodic travestying ‘Holiday of Fools’ and ‘Holiday of the Ass’ are well known, and were even celebrated in the churches themselves by the lower clergy. Highly characteristic of this tendency is risus paschalis, or paschal laughter. During the paschal days laughter was traditionally permitted in church. The preacher permitted himself risqué jokes and gay-hearted anecdotes from the church pulpit in order to encourage laughter in the congregation – this was conceived as a cheerful rebirth after days of melancholy and fasting. No less productive was ‘Christmas laughter’ (risus natalis); as distinct from risus paschalis it expressed itself not in stories but in songs. (FPND: 72)

He makes the point that this holiday laughter was sanctioned and permitted by the church. In his discussion of the Latin parodia sacra he begins to be more analytical. He characterizes the parody as a dialogue between languages, the

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sacred word which is the original and the vulgar word as the backdrop. The text of the parody is the outcome of the interaction of the two other languages. He writes: But let us return to the Latin ‘parodia sacra.’ It is an intentional dialogized hybrid, but a hybrid of different languages. It is a dialogue between languages, although one of them (the vulgar) is present only as an actively dialogizing backdrop. What we have is a never-ending folkloric dialogue: the dispute between a dismal sacred word and a cheerful folk word. (FPND: 76)

Parody for Bakhtin was the most significant dynamic force in popular culture, one that enabled cultural forms to change and to respond to popular influences. He regarded it as having declined over time and ancient and medieval parody as far more influential than parody in his own time. He contrasted ancient parody with parody in modern times and found that the functions of parody were narrow and unproductive: ‘parody has grown sickly, its place in modern literature is insignificant’ (FPND: 71). There is a tone of regret and nostalgia about this assessment. He yearned for the red-blooded parody of earlier times when the challenges were greater and the laughter more uninhibited. Parallel Work by Other Scholars The scholarship working on identifying Bakhtin’s sources is ongoing in this area as in other aspects of his work already covered, and even if direct appropriations of others’ work cannot be conclusively claimed, there is interest in exploring some of the work done by others that had a close bearing on the subject matter of Bakhtin’s work. We shall focus on the figures of Izrail’ Frank-Kamenetskij (1880–1937) and Ol’ga Freidenberg (1890–1955), his close associate, because both wrote about the development of literature, synthesizing the ideas of Cassirer, Marr and others, and both of whom have been the subject of speculation that their work was a contributory influence on Bakhtin’s. Frank-Kamenetskij was an Egyptologist and biblical scholar who studied in Germany before returning to Russia and holding academic positions in Irkutsk, Moscow and Petrograd. Brandist’s 2011 article introduces Frank-Kamenetskij’s work to an anglophone audience, and serves to rehabilitate him from his association with Marrist ideas by demonstrating his critical approach. Brandist observes that Frank-Kamenetskij’s training in German biblical scholarship ‘inoculated him against the extravagances of Marrism’ (Brandist, 2011: 52). Brandist speculates on the possible influence of Frank-Kamenetskij on Bakhtin in relation to an article written by Frank-Kamenetskij in 1929 on Cassirer’s work on language and myth. Frank-Kamenetskij suggests that Cassirer’s work provides the philosophical basis for considering that myth and mythical thinking are stages in the development of all human thought and language, not specific to particular racial or ethnic groups. This, Brandist says: ‘may well also have provided an indication of how Cassirer’s

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ideas could be applied to literary history for Bakhtin when he was working on his essays on the novel in the 1930’s’ (Brandist, 2011: 53). Frank-Kamenetskij’s interests developed in the direction of literature, particularly in relation to myth and plot development. He contributed to a collective study of the plot of the legend of Tristan and Isolde edited by Marr and published in 1932 (Brandist, 2011: 56). Frank-Kamenetskij’s contribution to the study was concerned with the ‘semantic clusters’ of the myth – the plot features of the story – that were found in stories in the classical world, Egypt (in the goddess Ishtar), ancient Far East and the Caucasus. Through palaeontological methodology he established that the transformation of significant features of the plot was linked to transformations in society from matriarchy, patriarchy and feudal societies (Brandist, 2011: 56). In Frank-Kamenetskij’s work we can find parallels to Bakhtin’s focus on the historical development of literature, but for parallels with the attention he gives to parody as the catalyst for change we turn to the work of Freidenberg, the classical scholar who worked on similar fields of study to Bakhtin from a materialist perspective. Bakhtin makes one reference to Freidenberg’s work in a footnote in the introduction to his book Rabelais and His World (R&HW: 54), where he commends her book The Poetics of Plot and Genre [Poetika siuzheta i zhanra] for its wealth of folklore material, but distinguishes his own work from Freidenberg’s by its concentration on the culture of folk humour. Tihanov lists this work among many others as sources that Bakhtin used for his book on Rabelais (Tihanov, 2000b: 265), and Brandist (2002: 135), drawing on the work of Osovskii (2000: 133), notes that Bakhtin’s copy of The Poetics of Plot and Genre had at least one highlighted passage, indicating its importance to him. The book was published in May 1936 with an edition of 5,300, but three weeks later it was confiscated, and in September a critical review was published in Izvestiia (Moss, 1997: 6), so the work was not given approval at a political level. Freidenberg was supported by Marr early in her academic career, and was closely associated with him, although she was not an uncritical adherent of his ideas; however, when Marr was denounced in 1950, Freidenberg’s career suffered and she retired the following year. In retirement she wrote a number of works without recourse to scholarly materials, but using her memory of classical literature, and the work that she had already completed, to inform her writing. These works were found in a suitcase by her executors in 1972, and a number of publications of her works in Russian followed, and in English, one major work, Image and Concept, in 1997. These late works were published after Bakhtin’s death in 1975, but he could have had access to the approximately 30 articles that were published in her lifetime. Her first publication was an article on ‘The Idea of Parody’ in 1926 (see Moss, 1997: 2), evidence that her interests and Bakhtin’s overlapped from an early date, and his silence on referencing most of her work cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that he was not influenced by it. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that Bakhtin influenced Freidenberg. Moss discusses the affiliation between the two and notes that Freidenberg wrote an entry in her diary in 1949 or 1950 describing an encounter with Voloshinov. She wrote: ‘This was Voloshinov, an elegant young man and

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esthete, the author of a linguistics book written for him by Blokhin’ (Moss, 1997: 21–2), and Moss observes that her distortion of Bakhtin’s name indicates that she did not know him personally. We therefore have grounds for ruling out any crossfertilization of ideas between them on an informal basis. Little of Freidenberg’s work is available in English, but in 1974 ‘The Origin of Parody’ was published in a collection (Freidenberg, 1974). Moss calls this piece ‘a programmatic rough draft’ of her article ‘The Idea of Parody’ (Moss, 1997: 2), and we can see her ideas taking form. She stresses the dualistic element of parody and links it to the inseparable duality of tragedy and comedy – it is not possible to have one without the other. But more importantly from the perspective of our focus on religion is her insistence that parody starts in the religious arena: Observation of examples of parody shows that its connection with religious rituals and words, or its coincidence with religious feasts is no accident; for what was originally parodied was precisely what was most sacred – the gods and worship; the transfer of parody to ‘the powers that be,’ to kings, rulers, and the popular assembly (the parliament), the judges, and to all the major civil forms was secondary. (Freidenberg, 1974: 276).

Like Bakhtin, in his discussion of religious parody, Freidenberg finds the earliest forms of parody directed towards religious authority figures, sacred rituals and acts of worship. Parody was directed toward authority and in so doing was instrumental in breaking down the authority. Freidenberg reiterates the dualism of tragedy and comedy in ancient literature in The Poetics of Plot and Genre, in the passage highlighted by Bakhtin, which Brandist translates (Brandist, 2002: 135–6). She again stresses the early origins in myth and religion, and says that this can still be found in folklore today: parody in itself has a sacral origin and this lives on in folklore right up to modern times: its very cultic-folkloric forms bring to us both tragic elements, in the form of public worship and passion [strast’], and comic [elements] in the form of farces and obscenity. (Freidenberg, 1997b: 275 in Brandist, 2002: 136)

She continues with a discussion of festivals where the festival mood of hilarity is fostered by parody, and she describes features of the festivals that we also find in Bakhtin’s descriptions of carnival, which is the subject of the next chapter. One of the features she identifies as typical is eating: And the main image is alongside the act of eating. Characteristic in this regard is the medieval ‘liturgy of gluttons’, which permeated the church during public worship: the clergy greedily ate sausage right in front of the altar, played cards right under the nose of the priests conducting a service, threw excrement into the censor and made a stink with it. (Freidenberg, 1997b: 275 in Brandist, 2002: 136)

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Bakhtin’s examples of sacred parody share the same concentration on eating, together with laughter and overturning norms of behaviour; and the Festival of Fools and Festival of Asses are mentioned here as in Bakhtin. Freidenberg’s work influenced Bakhtin’s idea of carnival; however, our concern here is with the implications of his understanding of parody for the development of literature – the implications for his idea of carnival will be considered later. Brandist and Moss both stress that Bakhtin and Freidenberg had common intellectual predecessors in Lévy-Bruhl, Cassirer, Marr and others, and that they shared an interest in early literary forms: parody, popular folk humour, Menippean satire and Saturnalia. The shared intellectual world in itself explains much of the similarity in their ideas, but differences may still be distinguished. Moss contrasts Freidenberg and Bakhtin in their conceptions of parody. He finds that Bakhtin’s approach is to see parody as opposing the original in a critical revolutionizing spirit, while Freidenberg see parody as encompassing multiple functions, some of which affirm the original. He writes of her approach: As usual, she warns us against taking for granted that the interpretation of parodic forms was everywhere and at all times the same. The formal identity between the parody and its official double may function not through the absence of content as a negation of the official form, but through strengthening of content as its affirmation. Freidenberg’s point is supported by the fact that ritual parodies were often sanctioned by the official authorities: they were performed by the practitioners of the official cult in its very sanctuaries. (Moss, 1997: 21)

The official sanction of parody is an important point to make, and in socio-political terms, can be interpreted as a social safety valve for the expression of opposition to official culture in a relatively contained environment, but this was not Bakhtin’s main concern. His interest lay in the role of parody in the creation of new literary forms, a point to which Moss gives insufficient attention. Moss sees evidence of Freidenberg and Bakhtin holding opposing views when he writes: For Bakhtin parody is opposed to its original; for Freidenberg it is a shadow, but it affirms the same values. For Bakhtin parody is revolutionary, liberating, the epitome of free speech; for Freidenberg it reaffirms the status quo. (Moss, 1997: 22)

Bakhtin’s position is more nuanced than Moss gives him credit for, as his conception of parody is one which acknowledges that laughing at something is a different way of opposing than outright repudiation or hostility. In comedy, satire or parody, something of the original is retained with varying degrees of affection. Laughter liberates specifically from the authoritarian requirement to take something seriously, but laughter enables the retention of links, which opposition cannot maintain. The links are significant in providing a channel for continuity within changing literary forms.

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On another level, Bakhtin and Freidenberg can be distinguished philosophically. As we saw in Chapter 3, Brandist has drawn attention to Bakhtin’s use of Cassirer’s symbolic forms, and says that Bakhtin adapted Freidenberg’s work according to his neo-Kantian predilections and restored a neo-Kantian theory of knowledge which the Marrists had rejected: Parodic forms are, for Bakhtin, evidence of the growth of critical consciousness evident in the unfolding of symbolic forms, and the ‘semantic clusters’ that endure have the character of a priori elements necessary for thinking as such. Bakhtin’s populist dialectic of official and popular forces could also find a correspondence in the Marrist idea of a primordial unity of all people. (Brandist, 2002: 137)

Freidenberg’s theory was that logical and conceptual thought developed out of mythological thinking, which was characterized by unity in mythological images expressed in concrete metaphors. Folklore was part of the earliest cultural forms, and it is in folklore that the early images can be found. Conceptual thought led to emerging literary forms within which mythological images are sometimes incorporated as content, and can be traced in names, plot structures and motifs. Following Cassirer, Freidenberg saw myth as the origin of culture, out which other cultural forms including art, religion, science and so on sprang. In a discussion of how art and religion came to diverge, she sees Greek literature as a turning point: The greatest riddle is the fact that Greek literature, in spite of its connection with cult, became the first art in the world, that is, managed to set off on a path toward overcoming if not religion itself, then at least subjection to it, and gained independence by means of its aesthetic qualities. (Freidenberg, 1997a: 33)

She identifies, at this early stage, the need for art to free itself from subjection to religion in order to pave out a separate cultural path, and in this framework religion continues in parallel. Bakhtin’s Contribution Bakhtin’s secularization thesis owed much to his intellectual precursors, and cannot be attributed entirely to his original creativity. He borrowed from others more than he acknowledged; however, he must still be credited for the work he did and for his original contribution. He carved out the development of literature as his own domain, and within that he synthesized the work and ideas of others and applied them to his task. His framework was a neo-Kantian philosophy of culture incorporating Cassirer’s Hegelian turn, as discussed in Chapter 3. The symbolic form of literature unfolds over periods of time measured in centuries, and because

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of literature’s capacity to retain traces of its genetic material, it also provides a key for looking backwards towards the origins of thought. In Bakhtin’s thought myth is the earliest form of consciousness and myth recurs in religion and art. The authority of religious language derives from the influence of myth and the urge of the unfolding of literature is to overcome mythical authority while retaining some of its content. The most significant means by which new literary forms emerge is through parody or parodic travesty, and by this means, secularization is achieved. In the next chapter we will consider Bakhtin’s concept of carnival, which we have touched upon here. Religion had a significant role in structuring the concept, which we will discuss, and focus on one example of his affiliations – to the anthropology of Frazer and his popular work The Golden Bough.

Chapter 5

Carnival and Carnivalesque Literature We have seen in previous chapters that in Bakhtin’s account of the development of literature, myth and mythical consciousness exerted a stranglehold on consciousness and language from which it was necessary to escape. But this is not quite the whole story as, despite the historical progress of the liberation of consciousness from myth, myth reappears in complex ways throughout later cultural developments. In the previous chapter we saw how the development of literature was characterized as secularization, and the role played by parody in this development. We stay with the theme of philosophy of laughter, but now turn to the concept many people consider to be Bakhtin’s most significant contribution: his understanding and exposition of carnival, which he initiated in his study of Rabelais, and developed in his later work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. The link to the previous section is that laughter is the mechanism through which literature moves from myth towards life and from poetry to prose, and according to Bakhtin, Rabelais is the central exponent of the liberation. Laughter in Rabelais draws on millennia of traditions of satire, parody and folk and popular festivals which have provided an undercurrent of parallel cultural genres that keep alive a literature which is authentically aligned with life. The material discussed in this chapter is not new to Bakhtin scholars; however, we will be focusing on the significance of religion in his work to a greater extent than has previously been the case. We will be foregrounding the place of religion in Bakhtin’s narrative and emphasizing the significance of religion in Bakhtin’s intellectual worldview. Bakhtin scholars have identified a wide range of sources for Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival (for example Tihanov, 2000b: 265–8), but we shall select a narrow focus for this discussion to demonstrate by example Bakhtin’s close parallels with others’ work, and the use he made of it. We shall be looking closely at the work of James George Frazer (1854–1941) who wrote extensively on myth and religion, and whose work was widely disseminated in Russia. Frazer’s work covers carnival and Saturnalia as does Bakhtin’s, but the concentration on Frazer should be taken to indicate neither that Frazer’s work was more important to Bakhtin than others’, nor that Bakhtin was particularly original in using his work. However, the parallels between Frazer and Bakhtin give a clear demonstration of the centrality of the themes of myth and religion to both. Bakhtin’s thought on carnival developed in his work in the 1930s and 1940s. The text F. Rabelais and the History of Realism was written and submitted as his dissertation for a candidate’s degree to the USSR Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Literature. He submitted it in 1940, but it was not until 1946 that he had the opportunity to defend it at a meeting of the Institute’s Academic Council, and

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it was a further six years before he was awarded his degree. The text was published in Russian in 1965 and in English, with the title Rabelais and His World, in 1984. His work on Dostoevsky started much earlier, with Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art published in 1928, and again in 1929, but is only in the revised and enlarged text Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, published in English in 1984, that we find his mature thought on carnival. Bakhtin’s carnival is a broad and generous idea embracing popular festivals, uninhibited pleasure-seeking, challenges to official culture and a celebration of the material, physical body, especially in its grotesque modes. The idea of carnival, its descriptive ally, the carnivalesque, and dynamic partner, carnivalization, are now generally acknowledged to be distanced from the historical reality of medieval European society (see Humphrey, 2000); and there have been a variety of responses to carnival in scholarly literature. Bakhtin describes carnival as ‘syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort’ (PDP: 122), a description which encompasses the nature of carnival as acted out by people in a community setting, with links to ritual acts and a complex history. What he calls the ‘problem of carnival’ (PDP: 122) is ‘its essence, its deep roots in the primordial order and the primordial thinking of man, its development under the conditions of class society, its extraordinary life force, and its undying fascination’ (PDP: 122). The singularly attractive characterization of carnival and the permeability of its boundaries have made Bakhtin’s concept widely known and discussed, and have included religious interpretations of carnival. Caryl Emerson reviewed secondary literature on Bakhtin in The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (1997), and she gives considerable attention to literature on carnival. Although much has been published since this review it can still act as a useful reference point, and she usefully divides the responses to carnival between those finding it to be a religious phenomenon, a demonic one or an analytic category, and these divisions correspond to the positions of pro-carnival, anti-carnival and neutral. While she concentrates on the Russian reception of carnival, she does include the work of some non-Russian scholars. The first group of commentators she calls ‘redeemers and integraters’ (Emerson, 1997: 172), who held a positive and optimistic view of carnival and for whom the appeal of carnival to Bakhtin was spiritual rather than social; and most associate the spirituality with the Russian Orthodox tradition. The scholar, Charles Lock (see Lock, 2001), is included in this group, who drew parallels between carnival and Orthodox doctrine of the incarnation where distinctions between body and mind are irrelevant. Also included is Alexandar Mihailovic (see Mihailovic 1997, 2001), whose work was discussed in Chapter 1and who also aligns Bakhtin’s work with Russian Orthodox theological motifs. Emerson comments on the trend in Russian commentary, after the end of state-sponsored atheism, to mine Bakhtin’s texts, and the texts of other dissident Russian authors, for Christian subtexts. She remarks that: In assimilating Bakhtin, Russian theology proved itself marvellously elastic. Carnival emerges as a sort of ‘church in reverse’, an Orthodox site for

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metamorphosis and miracle in opposition to the Latin heresy of hierarchies, military orders, and corrupt officialdom. (Emerson, 1997: 175)

The elasticity of interpretation of Russian Orthodox theology that Emerson identifies is mirrored in interpretations of carnival, as she rightly points out the diametrically opposed positions that commentators have taken on the subject. In addition to the tradition of religious interpretation she identifies an ethnographic tradition linking carnival to pre-Christian holiday periods, naming Grigory Pomerants as an example. Emerson’s discussion provides us with a context of the reception of Bakhtin’s idea of carnival in twentieth-century academia, but we will be concentrating on the roots of the idea of carnival, and in particular on the affiliation of this idea to work done by ethnographers, anthropologists and folklorists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Roots of Carnival in English Anthropology We need to explore the philosophical roots of carnival: where did Bakhtin get his ideas from and what questions was he asking? Tihanov has identified an extensive range of sources for Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais (Tihanov, 2000b: 265– 8) which he divides into three groups: the co-terminous scholarship in Russia and Germany; philosophical sources including Hegel, Simmel, Bergson, Lipps and Cassirer; and Russian and German literature, particularly the German Romantics. We have already covered Bakhtin’s adherence to neo-Kantian theory of culture and touched upon his affiliation to philosophies of laughter, and cannot cover the field comprehensively. These sources are undoubtedly of paramount importance in Bakhtin studies; however, from the perspective of tracing the significance of religion in Bakhtin’s thought, we shall select another strand of thinking as a contributing factor to the roots of carnival. We shall look at ethnographic traditions from the nineteenth and early twentieth century upon which Bakhtin drew either directly or through the mediation of other writers. There is evidence that he did so in some of the questions he was addressing, as he was interested in the very earliest roots of culture, and the earlier the better in terms of authenticity and value. The influential figure Marr, whose ideas were discussed in the previous chapter, was interested not only in how language developed, but also in how it originated in earliest times, and Bakhtin’s work reflects Marr’s preoccupation with origination in his references to primordial origins and primordial thinking as key aspects of carnival. It is not just the origins of language that are important but the origin of thought itself, the development of conceptual thinking, of ideas about causation and the development of myth and ritual as the first products, shared in a social context, of human thought and hence social activity. A key debate among late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century anthropologists was the question of whether myth or ritual had come first in a chicken and egg dilemma about origination of cultural phenomena. William

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Robertson Smith (1846–94) asserted the primacy of myth while Frazer argued that myth was the script for ritual in early religions. These kinds of questions were common currency among academics in the human sciences in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century and many key texts were translated into Russian soon after publication, and widely discussed in Russian intellectual circles. This was an intellectual milieu with which Bakhtin would have been familiar. It was not only the content of the ethnographic texts and the questions of origin that they addressed that influenced Bakhtin but also the methodology. Many ethnographers relied on other scholars’ raw data and proceeded through a speculative discussion to extrapolate from known facts, either historical or current facts about people in less developed nations, backwards in time to uncover the primordial past. The assumption shared by most anthropologists and ethnographers was that the so-called primitive people of contemporary times revealed the social world of the precursors of the developed world – that social development was a linear process and the evidence available could be located at points on the line, with deductive analysis filling in the gaps between the known points, and imaginative speculation providing the material to take over from evidence-based knowledge, in earlier eras. In late nineteenth-century scholarship a thesis was developed that came to be known as the doctrine of survivals, the idea that within contemporary culture, even in developed societies, evidence could be found in practices, stories, songs and children’s games that might be inexplicable in their own terms but could be explained as survivals of behaviour from earlier times, when the practice had been entirely explicable. The doctrine therefore established that in contemporary culture, for a scholar who had the skills to interpret the material, there could be found the evidence of how early or primitive people behaved. Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) was one of these scholars. He published his Researches into the Early History of Mankind in 1865, but his most famous work was Primitive Culture, first published in 1871. By the time of its second edition in 1873 it had already been published in German and Russian, and therefore would have been available to Bakhtin. Tylor’s starting point and the bedrock of his theory is that what he calls the ‘laws of the mind’ are constant uniform principles on a parallel with scientific laws, which operate in human societies at whatever stage of development they happen to be. He says that: It is no more reasonable to suppose the laws of mind differently constituted in Australia and England, in the time of cave dwellers and in the time of the builders of sheet iron houses, than to suppose that the laws of chemical combination were of one sort in the time of the coal-measures, and are of another now. (Tylor, 1903: 158–9)

His project in the work is to establish the laws of intellectual movement or the process of development; and he regards human nature as uniform, specifically stating that he does not explain differences in culture on the basis of race or

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heredity, but on the basis of the stage of civilization of society. He located his work in the tradition of rational ethnography. His explanation of the doctrine of survivals is stated as follows: Among evidence aiding us to trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed is that great class of facts to denote which I have found it convenient to introduce the term ‘survivals’. These are processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they then remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer one has evolved. (Tylor, 1903: 16)

His model of the development of civilization was a dynamic one that included revivals as well as survivals. He says that ‘Progress, degradation, survival, revival, modification, are all modes of connexion that bind together the complex network of civilization’ (Tylor, 1903: 17). Civilization is a multilayered network of accumulated material, not all visible on the surface. The interest in folklore as a repository of survivals from earlier epochs was followed up by other scholars including Frazer, Robertson Smith and Andrew Lang (1844–1912), who was known for his interest in and authorship of fairy tales. Frazer’s best known work was The Golden Bough which was first published in 1890, and went through several enlargements and revisions, but among his other works was a study of folklore in the Old Testament, published in 1918. He also characterized his methodology as scientific, with obvious reference to contemporary evolutionary theory, and called his method the comparative method, which he described in this way: The instrument for the detection of savagery under civilization is the comparative method, which, applied to the human mind, enables us to trace man’s intellectual and moral evolution, just as, applied to the human body, it enables us to trace his physical evolution from lower forms of animal life. (Frazer, 1918: viii)

The doctrine of survivals is a significant feature in subsequent anthropological and ethnographic studies, and is evident as an element in the work of Marr. His exploration of the roots of human language is predicated on the idea that it is possible to find evidence in contemporary languages that enables conclusions to be drawn about their origins and developmental stages. This notion underpins Bakhtin’s concept of carnival to the extent that he asserts its historicity, but his ideas are developed into the realms of literary theory, and in this exercise in abstraction, the links between the historical reality of carnival and carnival’s place in theory become extenuated. Bakhtin writes: But even in its narrow sense carnival is far from being a simple phenomenon with only one meaning. This word combined in a single concept a number of

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local feasts of different origin and scheduled at different dates but bearing the common traits of popular merriment. This process of unification in a single concept corresponded to the development of life itself; the forms of folk merriment that were dying or degenerating transmitted some of their traits to the carnival celebrations: rituals, paraphernalia, images, masques. These celebrations became a reservoir into which obsolete genres were emptied. (R&HW: 218)

The survivals that interested Bakhtin are the survivals of literary genres, and in the quotation above we see Bakhtin likening carnival to a repository of discarded items. Ancient genres of comedy, satire, parody and public shared celebrations involving mockery, abuse and licence from accepted standards were left behind and only the remnants remained in carnival festivals and carnivalized literature. But what has this to do with religion? The answer lies in the debates about cultural survivals which were bound up with anthropological studies of religious practice among less developed contemporary people and speculation about early religion. Frazer’s work links carnival to religious festivals, more particularly to the Roman festival of Saturnalia, named in honour of the Roman god, Saturn. Frazer was not the only anthropologist with an interest in magic, myth and early religious practices, but we shall concentrate on his work and the parallels we find between his work and Bakhtin’s because they give a good illustration of Bakhtin’s affiliations. There can be no doubt that Bakhtin must have been familiar with Frazer’s popular work The Golden Bough. The first edition was published in 1890 in two volumes, and it was twice revised and expanded with a 12-volume edition published between 1911 and 1915 and a 13th volume added in 1936. The ideas contained within the work were well known and discussed among Russian intellectuals from the time of its first publication, but the first Russian publication may have been as late as 1928 when a translation was made from the French version.1 Sokolov, writing about Russian folklore in 1938, makes enthusiastic reference to Frazer, and he says: In 1890 Frazer published his famous book, The Golden Bough in twelve huge volumes. This book occupies one of the most prominent places in contemporary

1

  I am indebted to Ray Scrivens, Slavonic and East European Specialist at Cambridge University Library for this information. The earliest edition of The Golden Bough in Russian translation which he was able to trace was published in Moscow in 1928 under the title Zolotaia vetv, and was apparently translated from a French version. This edition is referred to at the end of the article on Frazer in the first edition of the Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, as well as in a footnote on p. 52 of Gogol from the Twentieth Century: Eleven Essays, selected by Robert A. Maguire, 1976, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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world folkloristics. Around it, especially among us in the USSR, fervent discussions have been waged. (Sokolov, 1971, orig. 1938: 98)

His comment reinforces the view that Frazer’s ideas were well known. Detailed attention to the Russian reception of Frazer’s Golden Bough has been given by Rachel Polonsky in her 1998 work English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance. She identifies Evgeny Anichkov, a scholar with a particular interest in folklore studies, as a key figure in the transmission of Frazer’s ideas, influencing among others, Symbolist poets. Anichkov studied under Aleksandr Veselovskii at the Historical-Philological Faculty at St Petersburg University from 1886 to 1892. He was influenced by Veselovskii’s method of studying ancient literary-historical phenomena with reference to folk life and ritual and he was evidently motivated to establish links with English scholars who shared his interests. He was admitted as a reader to the British Museum Library in September 1893, the first of many annual visits (Polonsky, 1998: 46); and in 1894 he gave a paper to the English Folk-Lore Society and was elected a member. In 1904 he defended his dissertation on ‘Spring Ritual Song in Western Europe and Among the Slavs’ in which he named Frazer as one of the influences upon him. Polonsky’s account of Anichkov’s work contrasts the influences of Nietzsche and Frazer, and she remarks that ‘unlike Nietzsche’s, Frazer’s influence in Russia was submerged’ (Polonsky, 1998: 54), but both these sources directed Russian scholars to seek out what was distinctive and original in Russian culture, away from the influences of Western European culture. In Frazer’s framework, magic was the earliest attempt by human societies to explain and control the world around them. The thinking behind magic was logical in that it relied on cause and effect. Certain actions or words would lead to desired outcomes, and if the desired outcome did not occur this was because the actions had not been performed properly, not because the causal link was defective. Magic was determined by laws, and Frazer finds an overriding law of sympathy governing most magic, one that links magical powers to objects or actions which are in some way similar to the object to be influenced by the magic. He divides sympathetic magic into two classes: homeopathic magic governed by a law of similarity; and contagious magic, governed by a law of contact, that is to say that items that have been in contact with the object to be influenced will have power to influence it. Frazer supported the coherence of this type of thinking and was keen to avert criticism or ridicule of it. He championed the thought of early people as rational attempts to find explanations and develop hypotheses, some of which were later found to be erroneous; and in a humble acknowledgement of his own place in the history of ideas, he says: Therefore in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth, and to give them the benefit of that indulgence which we ourselves may one day stand in need of. (Frazer, 1922: 264)

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Religion superseded magic as early people began to lose faith in their own ability to control events, and looked for the explanation of changes in the world around them in the intervention of external deities. Frazer writes: In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he discovers his mistake, when he recognizes sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in the acuter minds magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power. (Frazer, 1922: 711)

As time went on, human beings became sceptical about the powers of deities and the search for explanations continued. Frazer gave an intriguing twist to his account by aligning science with magic. As religious interpretations of the world were overwritten by scientific explanations, Frazer suggests that this was a return to an earlier magical way of thinking. In science, as in magic, explanations rest on laws of behaviour which it is possible for people to understand, and in the light of their understanding to make interventions that may be beneficial to themselves. This applies to both magic and science but not to religion, the intermediate mode of thinking between the two. Frazer’s description of the process of development from religion to science is given below: Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly. In short, religion, regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced by science. (Frazer, 1922: 712)

Frazer’s account has the advantage of its satisfactory completeness and comprehensibility. Other writers took issue with him and gave more nuanced accounts but his still serves as a good example of late nineteenth-century theorizing in this area, and it is this sequence from magic or myth to religion, and then to science, that we saw summarized by Bukharin in Chapter 3. We turn now to some of the detail of Frazer’s work to draw out the parallels between his work and Bakhtin’s.

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Kingship and Carnival The evidence of Bakhtin’s affiliation to anthropologists and ethnographers with a focus on religion and myth is shown dramatically in the significance he ascribes to kingship. The most important element in carnival is the crowning and uncrowning of kings, acts which have symbolic meaning as the overturning of authority, and reinforcing the power of the crowd, but at a deeper level as symbolic of death and rebirth, and of the cyclical fertility of the seasons. The theme of the death and rebirth of the king is a central theme running through Bakhtin’s exposition. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics he writes: The primary carnivalistic act is the mock crowning and subsequent de-crowning of the carnival king. This ritual is encountered in one form or another in all festivities of the carnival type: in the most elaborately worked out forms – the Saturnalia, the European carnival and festival of fools (in the latter, mock priests, bishops or popes, depending on the rank of the church, were chosen in place of a king); in a less elaborated form, all other festivities of this type, right down to festival banquets with their election of short-lived kings and queens of the festival. Under this ritual act of decrowning a king lies the very core of the carnival sense of the world – the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal. Carnival is a festival of all-annihilating and all-renewing time. (PDP: 124)

The overarching narrative of The Golden Bough is shaped by Frazer’s journey to find an explanation for the ritual at the sacred grove and lake of Aricia in Italy. The priest and guardian of the grove protected the sacred tree at the centre of the grove, and held the office until he was killed by his successor. The priest held the title of the King of the Wood. The dating of the ritual is sketchy from Frazer’s account but he attributes it to classical antiquity. Frazer’s explanatory account covers a wide-ranging territory of magic, myth and ritual with examples of practices from all over the world which he brings together in a speculative narrative that suggest that the ritual was, like many others, a fertility ritual of killing the king, or kingsubstitute, in order that the crops would grow and cosmic order be maintained. He also finds the tree to be a mistletoe-bearing oak tree, and speculates that the golden bough in Vergil’s epic poem the Aeneid, which enabled Aeneas to enter the underworld unscathed, was mistletoe. He finds in early pastoral societies kings who were held to be divine; and in order to preserve the strength and power of the god, the human king had to be killed or deposed and the new king instated to re-invigorate the god. Particularly germane to our discussion of Bakhtin’s affiliation to Frazer is Frazer’s coverage of popular carnival festivals, and the practice of parading effigies representing the carnival, which were burned or otherwise killed at the end of the carnival on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras). He includes these festivals

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to demonstrate that ceremonies with ritual killings of divine or supernatural beings were evident in agricultural societies, not merely pastoral ones. He is seeking to increase the probability that his argument concerning the killing of the priest of the sacred grove was a ritual killing symbolizing the death and renewal of the divine spirit; and he describes a number of Italian, Spanish and French customs of this type. One of them was found in Frosinone between Rome and Naples. The last day of the carnival was the festival of the radica, or root, and it incorporated the parade of a vast figure representing the carnival mounted on a cart drawn by a horse. He writes: ‘mounted on the car is a huge chair, on which sits enthroned the majestic figure of Carnival, a man of stucco about nine feet high with a rubicund and smiling countenance’ (Frazer, 1913 pt III: 222). After singing and exuberant throwing of aloe leaves and cabbages, the crowd with the monstrous carnival effigy proceeded to the sub-prefecture where civic dignitaries joined the procession. At the rear of the procession was a cart carrying barrels of wine, and it was the task of policemen to distribute this to the crowd amid ‘a copious discharge of yells, blows, and blasphemy’ (Frazer, 1913 pt III: 223). The final moments of the festival were the stripping of the effigy and burning it on a pile of wood. This account shares so much of Bakhtin’s characteristics of carnival including the co-option of authority figures, intoxication, curses and verbal abuse that it is highly likely that this forms primary material from which he worked. The surprising addition is the merging of the figure representing carnival itself with the grotesque body, and parodying double of the king. Frazer’s survey continues with examples of festivities celebrated in the middle of Lent where death itself is the figure that is carried in the procession and burned. In Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais’ novel Gargantua and Pantagruel, Frazer’s motifs are visible, but Bakhtin uses them to construct a concept of carnival in literature that transcends Frazer’s material and simultaneously shifts the focus from anthropology to literature and broadens the scope by making universal claims for carnival as the key to authentic experience of reality. He explains the overriding significance of carnival in this passage: True, the system of popular-festive images was developed and went on living over thousands of years. This long development had its own scoria, its own dead deposits in manners, beliefs and prejudices. But in its basic line this system grew and was enriched; it acquired a new meaning, absorbed the new hopes and thoughts of the people. It was transformed in the crucible of the people’s new experience. The language of images developed new and more refined nuances. Thanks to this process, popular-festive images became a powerful means of grasping reality; they served as a basis for an authentic and deep realism. Popular imagery did not reflect the naturalistic, fleeting, meaningless, and scattered aspect of reality but the very process of becoming, its meaning and direction. Hence the universality and sober optimism of this system. (R&HW: 211–12)

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It would be hard to overestimate the significance Bakhtin gives to carnival images if they are to be windows on the process of becoming. This gives carnival an immensely powerful influence, but at such a level of abstraction that it is hard to grasp. Bakhtin fleshes out what the meaning and direction of the process of becoming might be in his lengthy passages on carnival as the vehicle for overturning old truth and authority. There is a strong polemical element to this discourse, which has made it attractive to his readers: old institutions, particularly of the church and officialdom, are mocked and their claims to superiority and authority derided and emasculated in popular-festive genres. Laughter and comic genres are brought to bear upon old forms and new forms come into being. We find references to that familiar figure, the carnival dummy, in the images Bakhtin uses to describe the process: ‘Time has transformed old truth and authority into a Mardi Gras dummy, a comic monster that the laughing crowd rends to pieces in the marketplace’ (R&HW: 213). In describing an episode where Master Janotus, a senior member of the Sorbonne, is reduced to a drunken, senile old man, Bakhtin’s comment is ‘the Sorbonnite dummy is mocked’ (R&HW: 217). Some of the parallels with Frazer’s work are more straightforward. Bakhtin identifies two uncrownings of kings in Rabelais’ novel: King Pirochole in the first book and King Anarchus in the second. Pirochole was defeated in a battle and fled, but killed his horse because it slipped and fell. He tried to replace the horse by stealing an ass from a miller but was caught by the miller, who thrashed him, removed his robes and clothed him in a smock. The fate of King Anarchus is similar: he is defeated by Pantagruel who turns him over to Panurge. Panurge dresses him in a clown’s costume, sends him out to sell greensauce (the lowest step in the social hierarchy), weds him to a grumpy old hag who abuses and thrashes him. For Bakhtin there are no better examples of carnivalized literature. The uncrownings are central, and he associates thrashings and abuses with uncrownings, even when there is no monarch involved (R&HW: 197). Thrashing and recovery from thrashing are parallels to uncrowning and crowning, death and resurrection: the extension of the concept of uncrowning goes further when Bakhtin applies it to the removal of bells from the belfry, when Gargantua has to steal the bells of Notre Dame to adorn the harness of his giant mare. Bakhtin identifies the crowning and uncrowning of a king or king-substitute as the most significant characteristic of carnival. This motif is strongly aligned with Frazer’s material, though Bakhtin utilized and developed the ideas in his own way. The parallels between Bakhtin’s and Frazer’s work also appear with reference to the Roman Saturnalia, which we turn to in the next section. Carnival and Saturnalia In The Golden Bough, Frazer discusses Roman Saturnalia in the context of adducing evidence that the practice of putting to death a human person who

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represented a god was known and practised in ancient Italy in places other than Aricia. He refers to Saturnalia, a festival which was celebrated for a week in December, as the best known of a type of popular festival occurring at times of sowing or harvest which was accompanied by unusual levels of licence of behaviour, when norms of social restraint and social barriers were abandoned. He describes them as times when: The whole population give themselves up to extravagant mirth and jollity, and when the darker passions find a vent which would never be allowed to them in the more staid and sober course of ordinary life. (Frazer, 1913 pt IV: 306)

The festival of Saturnalia celebrated the Golden Age of the reign of the god Saturn, a fertility god of agricultural people, whose rule was marked by harmony, peace and common ownership of land and property. The traditional celebrations at altars to Saturn were alleged to have been sites of human sacrifices, which in later times were substituted by effigies. Frazer (1913 pt IV: 307) calls the festival ‘this carnival of antiquity’ and remarks on the temporary suspension of slavery which occurred during the period, and in some cases led to an inversion of ranks where master and slave exchanged places. There was also an election of a mock king who was able to make playful commands to his people. Frazer speculates that the mock king was intended as a representation of Saturn himself, as the period of festivity was a temporary revival of the reign of Saturn. Frazer confirms his interpretation by reference to a Greek work published by Professor Cumont of Ghent. The work is an account of celebrations by Roman soldiers stationed on the Danube in the reigns of Maximian and Diocletian. Their practice was to choose from among themselves one of them to be king for 30 days, and to indulge in as much pleasureseeking as possible during that time. He dressed as Saturn but at the end of the period cut his own throat on the altar of Saturn. In 303 CE a Christian soldier Dasius was chosen but he refused to perform the role and was beheaded, leading to his status as a martyr of the early Christian church. Frazer’s argument is that the practice of choosing a person to represent Saturn for a period must have predated a holiday mock version of this event, and he speculates that the custom of crowning and subsequently killing a king was universal practice associated with the worship of Saturn. He continues his exposition by suggesting that European carnivals are the survivals of the earlier religious ritual. Frazer makes a comparison of Saturnalia with carnival, and says: The resemblance between the Saturnalia of ancient and the carnival of modern Italy has often been remarked; but in the light of all the facts that have come before us, we may well ask whether the resemblance does not amount to identity. We have seen that in Italy, Spain, and France, that is, in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise

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destroyed, to the feigned grief or genuine delight of the populace. If the view here suggested of the Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other than a direct successor of the old King of the Saturnalia, the master of the revels, the real man who personated Saturn and, when the revels were over, suffered a real death in his assumed character. The King of the Bean on Twelfth Night and the medieval Bishop of Fools, Abbot of Unreason, or Lord of Misrule are figures of the same sort and may perhaps have had a similar origin. (Frazer, 1913 pt IV: 312)

The association of Saturnalia and carnival is made by Bakhtin throughout Rabelais and His World, and more sparingly in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. In describing the essence of carnival, he describes the freedoms enjoyed during carnival and the revival and rejuvenation felt by the participants. He writes: It was most clearly expressed and experienced in Roman Saturnalia, perceived as a true and full, though temporary, return of Saturn’s golden age upon earth. The tradition of the Saturnalias remained unbroken and alive in the medieval carnival, which expressed this universal renewal and was vividly felt as an escape from the usual official way of life. (R&HW: 7–8)

In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics there is a similar passage: Festivities of a carnival type occupied an enormous place in the life of the broadest masses of the people in ancient times – in Greek and even more in Roman life, where the central (but not the sole) festival of the carnival type was the saturnalia. These festivals had no less (and perhaps, even more) significance in medieval Europe and during the Renaissance, where they were in part a direct living continuation of Roman saturnalia. (PDP: 129)

This appears to be an unacknowledged borrowing from Frazer, which would be hard to explain in any other way than direct or indirect transmission of Frazer’s ideas. Material on Saturnalia alone might well come from a different source, but the association of Saturnalia and medieval carnival together is strongly suggestive of affiliation to Frazer. Bakhtin picks up, and reinforces, the idea taken from Saturnalia, that the festive period is a time when the political order is overturned, slavery was temporarily abolished and hierarchies may have been inverted. Bakhtin writes of the politics of carnival: The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socio-economic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity. (R&HW: 255)

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Politics takes a minor role in Bakhtin’s discussion, in deference to folk culture and literature, but the undercurrent of popularism and a suggestion of Marxist influence is apparent here. Bakhtin and Frazer share a certain stylistic freedom. Both writers exude energy and enthusiasm for their material, and do not hold up the flow of the text with academic conventions. Frazer’s multi-volume edition of The Golden Bough is fully referenced, but the abridged version contains few references as if the writer is telling a story all his own. The classical scholar Mary Beard has written on the enduring popularity of Frazer’s Golden Bough, and deals with some of the criticism levelled at his work. She defends him against allegations of plagiarism in the context of normal practice among nineteenth-century scholars that would be judged plagiaristic by today’s standards (Beard, 1992: 206), but also says that ‘a large proportion of The Golden Bough is inadequate, as well as irrelevant and (at least in the third edition) monstrously prolix by any reasonable standards of accuracy’ (Beard, 1992: 206). Furthermore, she continues her trenchant criticism of the work: ‘Frazer’s arguments are elegantly stated and, at first sight, seducing. Closer examination, however, reveals serious inconsistencies, misinterpretations and errors’ (Beard, 1992: 208). These comments could equally be made of Bakhtin’s work in relation to carnival. It has been established, as mentioned above, that the idea of carnival is not aligned with historical evidence of medieval festivals. Bakhtin’s slippage between accounts of historical events, images of carnival in Rabelais’ novels, carnivalization of literature, and the universal claims made for carnival as the site of becoming lead to uneasiness in the reader that the construction does not support the claims made for it. However, despite these doubts, both writers have been immensely popular. The abridged edition of The Golden Bough has been continuously in print since publication and it has achieved classic status. Beard’s explanation for its popularity is its ‘daring comparative framework’ (Beard, 1992: 220) and the strength of the narrative. It offers a story of travel and exploration, taking the reader away from known and comfortable territory and bringing the reader back home again at the end. Bakhtin’s work has also had immense appeal, perhaps not to such a widespread audience as Frazer, but to students and scholars in literature and the humanities. Carnivalesque Literature Bakhtin’s concept of carnival moves beyond Frazer’s, as he lifts carnival out of ethnographic data collection and Frazer’s speculation about the symbolism of the carnival dummy. Bakhtin identifies features of carnival and the carnivalesque in popular folk culture: songs, games and especially stories. Carnival carries folk traditions through historical time so that they can reappear as living remnants of the past and can invigorate contemporary narratives. Bakhtin’s work in the 1930s was, as we know, concerned with the evolution of literary genres, and he identifies the carnivalization of literature as central to this theme.

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According to Bakhtin, carnival influences can be traced in early seriocomical genres of Ancient Greek literature, and have since then continued to emerge and re-emerge in literature, most notably in Dostoevsky’s novels. In his view, the tradition of Mennipean satire, named after the philosopher Menippus of Gadara in the third century BCE, and most fully represented in the satires of Lucian (PDP: 113), was the earliest literary genre which embraced a carnival spirit and became ‘carnivalized’ (PDP: 122). He writes that ‘Menippean satire became one of the main carriers and channels for a carnival sense of the world in literature, and remains so to the present day’ (PDP: 113). Carnival images in literature are dualistic and ambivalent – for example birth and death, youth and old age, face and backside; and can involve eccentricity and reversals, such as clothes inside-out, impersonations and elements of slapstick. The previous chapter discussed the importance of parody in Bakhtin’s narrative, and he writes that: ‘in antiquity, parody was inseparably linked to a carnival sense of the world’ (PDP: 127). Carnival itself requires active participation: Bakhtin says that it is ‘a pageant without footlights and without division into performers and spectators’ (PDP: 122); but carnivalization is the influence of carnival on literature and literary genre. In placing such a forceful emphasis upon carnival in his historical account of the evolution of literature, Bakhtin verges on the creation of myth himself. His idea of carnival is very loosely associated with historical events and he attempts to create a structuring concept out of historical material to assist his account of the development of the novel. Ken Hirschkop has drawn attention to the difficulties that this creates for Bakhtin: Bakhtin wants to grasp the philosophical meaning of his historical material, but the history he takes as his object leaks into the philosophical tools themselves, and the result is the ineluctable unevenness, the constant shuttling between registers which is the hallmark of Bakhtin’s prose style. (Hirschkop, 1999: 53–4)

Carnival becomes an elastic concept in Bakhtin’s hands, and he uses it to cover all that is vital and valuable in the popular history of folk culture. He is uncritical of violence and intolerance that may also be elements of carnival; and ignores the fact that laughter may be unpleasant (see Averintsev, 2001: 85). In identifying Dostoevsky’s literature as carnivalized, Bakhtin is staking a claim to archaic roots in Dostoevsky’s novels, and in doing so he is claiming mythical authority for them, as if the value of the novels themselves was enhanced by this claim. The idea of carnival was the culmination of Bakhtin’s synthesis of material garnered from his philosophical, historical and anthropological sources, and his creative application of rich veins of work to the history of literature. Having covered this ground, we turn next to the application of Bakhtin’s thought to the study of religions: an interdisciplinary field of study. As we shall see, Bakhtin’s work has been proposed as a productive approach to address some

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methodological challenges, but we will suggest that the proposal by Gavin Flood was optimistic. However, modest appropriations of some elements of Bakhtin’s work, such as outsideness, may well be productive.

Chapter 6

Can Bakhtin’s Work Be Applied to the Study of Religion? Bakhtin’s work, as we know, started in the fields of ethics and aesthetics, and continued by moving into the field of the history of literature, but his ideas have been claimed by writers to have applications in diverse corners of the humanities. In the interdisciplinary field of study that constitutes the study of religion (Sutcliffe, 2004: xvii), Bakhtin’s work has been championed by Gavin Flood as offering a potential way forward to new methodological paths. Flood’s work entitled Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion, published in 1999, offers Bakhtinian dialogism as a solution to problems of methodology in the study of religion that follow from its current reliance on phenomenology adapted primarily from Husserl.1 This chapter will discuss Flood’s argument, which starts with the problematics of Husserl’s phenomenology, and continues by making the distinction between philosophies of consciousness and philosophies of the sign. Flood characterizes Bakhtin as a philosopher of language and the sign, and suggests that dialogism could provide an epistemological framework to overcome some of phenomenology’s disadvantages. There are other interpreters of Bakhtin, such as Michael Holquist, whose work supports the idea of using Bakhtin’s dialogue as epistemology. The claims made for the application of Bakhtin’s work at a generalized level of epistemological theory are problematic, and the arguments made reflect the optimistic tone of the reception of Bakhtin’s ideas in Western Europe (see Shepherd, 2001: 136; Zbinden, 2006: 3). Flood’s book was published in 1999, and the first edition of Holquist’s Dialogism in 1990. The claims made must now be reviewed in the light of more recent scholarship and, as will be demonstrated, Bakhtin’s work cannot live up to the high expectations that many people held of it. However, there are still productive avenues that some aspects of his work may offer that will be covered in Chapter 7. The reception of Flood’s work has been muted, and few scholars have engaged directly with his thesis. Flood’s work is mentioned in passing (for example Sutcliffe, 2004: xxiii), and his contribution to the debate explained (for example Cox, 2006: 211–15; Chryssides and Geaves, 2007: 231–2), while Allen briefly describes the argument and responds briefly with the criticism that ‘Flood greatly exaggerates the impact of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology on 1

  An earlier working of this theme was included in the paper given at the 2007 BASR Conference (Bagshaw, 2007).

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the study of religion’ (Allen, 2005: 204), but there is no sustained theoretical assessment. Flood himself has not continued to publish work on this theme, and in his subsequent work on asceticism (Flood, 2004) he makes only slight references to Bakhtin. In empirical studies, Bakhtin’s ideas have been used, though without reference to Flood’s work: Dwyer (2001) used Bakhtin’s ideas of carnival and the chronotope in her study of the Gujarati poet Dayārām; and Zene (2002) engages with Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue in his study of the Rishi of Bangladesh. While the quiet reception of Flood’s work may be seen as a missed opportunity, it may also be a sign that the translation of Bakhtin’s ideas into a workable and theoretically sustainable project is still quite a long way ahead. The study of religion as an academic discipline in the UK has at times been known as ‘history of religion’, ‘comparative religion’ and ‘religious studies’, and it continues to engage in conversations regarding the nature of its boundaries, particularly with respect to theology as university departments are quite commonly designated ‘Theology and Religious Studies’ (Sutcliffe, 2004: xix). The idea that theology was the appropriate field for discussion of the absolute value of religion, and that the study of empirical facts about human behaviour in connection with religious activities and beliefs was appropriately studied by similar methods to other social investigations was agreed by a resolution passed at the Congress of the Association for the History of Religions in Marburg in 1960 (Cox, 2006: 215). The debates were not settled, however, but continued, and some of the central figures of twentieth-century scholarship, Gerardus van de Leeuw, Mircea Eliade and Ninian Smart, have been criticized for incorporating their own religious or theological standpoint into their studies of other religions (Cox, 2006: 218). More recently Fitzgerald has argued (2000) for a strong version of the divide. He argues that the objects under investigation in the study of religion are cultural phenomena and should be studied alongside other phenomena of the social sciences. As long as the study of religion claims a different form of methodology from other social sciences, it is making claims for the distinctiveness of its objects from other cultural phenomena. This can only be defended if the researchers wish to take a theological view of the material and adopt a stance that gives theological value to the deities, beliefs and practices under consideration. The debates continue but the study of religion remains a vigorous field in its own right. Flood is a scholar in the study of religion and his work grapples with metatheory – addressing methodological approaches on philosophical grounds and offering a critique of them. He argues that research in the field has a theoretical framework whether or not this is fully articulated, and that this framework can be elucidated and criticized: Through metatheoretical analysis we can attempt to unravel the underlying assumptions inherent in any research programme and to critically comment upon them; a metatheoretical perspective is a critical perspective. (Flood, 1999: 5)

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Flood regards much of the current work in the field as under-theorized and reliant upon the researcher’s empathy with the subject to form the basis for collection of ethnographic data. With a reference to Ninian Smart who adopted a Native American proverb when he described empathy as the ability to walk a mile in another man’s moccasins, Flood argues for a more rigorous approach: There has been a decided lack of enthusiasm for metatheory within the subject area and this book hopes to contribute to redressing the imbalance. Moccasin walking or empathy does not provide a sufficiently rigorous theoretical basis on which to build an academic discipline. (Flood, 1999: 4)

Flood’s focus on methodology and his willingness to problematize current theoretical underpinnings of much of the work in the field is welcome. Flood’s project is to reveal the unhelpful aspects of current theoretical models and to argue for an alternative metatheory. He engages with post-modern critiques of Cartesian epistemology, including the problems that have been raised with the Cartesian self: its abstract and disembodied nature, and the difficulty of knowing other selves – the problem of intersubjectivity. The issue that Flood addresses is to find a way forward to enable the study of religions that seeks to build critical approaches, and on the one hand avoids reductive explanations that subsume religion under psychology or sociology, and on the other hand avoids the empathetic history or phenomenology of religion. He looks for an answer in a position which is critical and dialogical. He says of it: It desires both to understand and to offer explanations of religion or religious practices as completely embedded within other cultural practices, but reflexively recognizes the embodied/embedded, narrative nature of the enterprise. In this way it draws upon postmodern critiques of modernist, overarching rationality, but recognizes that any embodied narrative draws upon cultural values which it inevitably articulates, and, at least in the late modern world, is sensitive to the human reasons as to why people elect certain cultural practices. (Flood, 1999: 148)

Flood draws on a wide range of post-modern theorists, and poses the challenge to find a metatheoretical approach that is dialogical, that is to say, necessarily interactive with the people, objects, texts and narratives that are being studied; reflexive, drawing on the work of Bourdieu; and critical. A further key aspect of his desired approach is indeterminism – the recognition that knowledge of human culture is provisional, not absolute: there will always be more to know and other viewpoints from which to gain a perspective. He regards the idea that there is no certainty in knowledge as ideas can be falsified but not proved to be true as ‘fallibilism’. He says that this does not lead to scepticism but ‘indeed, fallibilism, whose origins are in Peirce, is akin to Popper’s idea that theories can never be verified, only falsified, and that science is contingent upon the social communities in which it is embedded’ (Flood, 1999: 144).

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Flood refers to the hermeneutic tradition (Flood, 1999: 9) as a route for mounting a critique of phenomenology, and it worth noting in passing the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. The work of Dilthey, Schleiermacher, and Heidegger provides a background to this tradition, but it is the work of HansGeorg Gadamer (1900–2002) whose work is most closely associated with it. His major work Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode] was published in 1960 and establishes that understanding is universal, something that people do all the time, and not a special preserve of scientists, either natural or human (see West, 1996: 105–16). Dialogue provides a strong theme in Gadamer’s work, as it does in Bakhtin’s. However, we shall restrict this discussion to Flood’s critique of phenomenology and his reception of Bakhtin’s work. Flood’s project is to explore the theoretical possibilities that post-modern critiques of theory have opened up, and to examine their potential for productive application to the study of religion. In order to discuss how he sees Bakhtin’s work fitting into this scheme, we must first look in more detail at the problematic area of phenomenology in the study of religion, to see where the problems lie. Phenomenology in the Study of Religion Flood identifies the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) as one of the main influences on methodology in the study of religion and this is supported by Cox who writes that: ‘Husserl’s philosophy must be regarded as one of its major formative influences, alongside theology and the social sciences’ (Cox, 2006: 9–10). They both acknowledge that phenomenology predated Husserl, and that there have been other key figures subsequent to Husserl who have made their mark on how phenomenology has developed in this field, but Husserl’s work stands out as the most significant. Husserl’s philosophy changed and developed over his career, with his turn to intersubjectivity following from his earlier work, but we shall concentrate in this brief summary on the concepts that have the closest bearing on Flood’s argument. What Husserl tried to achieve, in the words of Jaako Hintikka, was ‘to find the basis of our conceptual world in immediate experience’ (Hintikka, 1995: 82). While taking perception in the mind as his material for philosophical analysis, his purpose was to establish a philosophical basis for understanding that was not psychological or subjective. He studied under Franz Brentano at the University of Vienna, and from Brentano he adopted the idea of the intentionality of consciousness. Consciousness is always directed towards something, whether this is material or immaterial experiences, hopes, fears, plans and so on, and Husserl regarded the contents of consciousness as the appearances in the mind of those experiences or external objects. He first called the objects available to consciousness phenomena and later noemata (Hintikka, 1995: 79), and it is these that are the subject matter of phenomenological investigation. However, as Hintikka points out, a distinction must be made between phenomenalism, which

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holds that consciousness can only access phenomena not material reality or the Kantian ‘thing-in-itself’, and phenomenology. Phenomenology holds that the world of the immediately given can be apprehended through phenomenological investigation, and ‘any sharp contrast between the realm of noemata and the world of mind-independent realities ultimately has to be loosened up in Husserl’ (Hintikka, 1995: 82). Husserl’s philosophy does not follow a strong version of the idealist path that regards ideas as all that can be apprehended, but a qualified version that permits some access to material reality. The difficulty arises in distinguishing the appearance in the mind of the objects and their objective truth or existence. Husserl calls the normal everyday acceptance of the objective truth of the world around us, the ‘natural attitude’, but in order to conduct a phenomenological investigation the natural attitude must be bracketed out, that is to say, it must be put aside as if it was unnecessary to experience and understanding. This operation is called the phenomenological reduction, or the transcendental reduction, and reduces the object to a pure form of what is immediately given. Hintikka explains it as follows: This reduction is not tantamount to merely bracketing the object of an act and leaving the noema there as the sole object of a phenomenologist’s attention. It also involves bracketing everything in the noema which is not given to us in immediate experience. It separates what is intended from what is given and seeks to reduce the former to the latter. (Hintikka, 1995: 85)

In performing the reduction, and suspending the natural attitude, the phenomenologist is staking a claim to objectivity which is unavailable when experiences are considered in their raw state. The operation of bracketing is also known as époché, and Flood describes the advantages it grasps: Through époché there occurs the complete suspension of judgement concerning the objective world which thereby disallows both solipsism and scepticism and allows for the certainty of the ego and its objects of consciousness. (Flood, 1999: 95)

The transcendental reduction however is insufficient to complete the understanding of the contents of consciousness. In Husserl’s framework, a further reduction must be undertaken, called the eidetic reduction, which reduces each noema to its essence (eidos). The reduction to essences is performed through intuition, and involves the use of the imagination to construct all possible perceptions and arrive at an understanding of the essence. Husserl gives the example of a table, and the intuition of the essence of the table by imagining all possible angles of view of it in a method he calls ‘free variation’ (Flood, 1999: 96). The eidetic reduction is fundamental to phenomenology’s claim to access universal laws. The essences that intuition can reveal are not changed when a different observer performs the phenomenologist’s actions, and this has profound consequences. Cox writes that:

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Phenomenology thus claims to provide tools for founding scientific enquiry on a secure footing. Husserl’s phenomenology was open to the criticism that it was solipsistic, only acknowledging the consciousness of the subject but not other consciousnesses, and he addressed the relationship with others in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, published in 1931. I, as the subject, can never enter fully into the consciousness of another person, but I am aware of other consciousnesses as different from other phenomena. I can enter into an intersubjective consciousness through transcendental empathy: by starting from my own experience I can imaginatively enter into the experience of the other, but not in the natural attitude, only after the objective reality of the other has been bracketed out. Cox describes it this way: through empathetic self-reflection, by interpolating the other into the self, by understanding the alter ego in the light of the ego, the transcendental reduction produces a genuine intersubjectivity that establishes, as far as is possible, the basis for positing universal essences. (Cox, 2006: 30).

By establishing the consciousness of other minds and the concept of the shared life world in which consciousnesses have their being, Husserl opened the way for phenomenology to be used as the basis for studying social and cultural phenomena. Although some have doubted that there is more to the relationship between phenomenology of religion and philosophical phenomenology than a superficial resemblance, and others have seen a closer relationship to Hegel’s phenomenology than Husserl’s (Flood, 1999: 97), most scholars in the field see Husserl’s phenomenology as the foundation of phenomenology in the study of religion. Cox lists certain key characteristics of Husserl’s phenomenology as: rejecting the natural attitude, employing the technique of époché, allowing the objects of perception to present themselves in new and fresh ways in the state of the transcendentally reduced consciousness, seeing or intuiting essences and establishing objectivity on the basis of an empathetic rendering of intersubjectivity. (Cox, 2006: 30)

Cox continues by finding that these characteristics have had a formative influence in the phenomenology of religion. The study of religion interprets Husserl’s époché or bracketing as the suspension of judgement on the truth claims of any religious tradition, and places a strong emphasis on empathy as the central component of intellectual enquiry and understanding. For Flood époché is central:

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The bracketing of questions of objective truth, which Van der Leeuw calls ‘intellectual suspense’, can be taken to be a defining characteristic of the phenomenology of religion. (Flood, 1999: 92)

The researcher, when conducting fieldwork, suspends judgement about the belief systems under consideration and in the words of Marion Bowman seeks for ‘accurate, judgement-free reporting’ (Bowman, 2004: 13). This is not the full account, because the researcher also aims for empathetic entering into the religious beliefs and practices in order to understand and describe them: Similarly ‘empathy’ has accompanied the idea of bracketing; that bracketing allows empathy or the ability to enter into the life of another. (Flood, 1999: 93)

The methodological use of empathy will be discussed in the next chapter in relation to the insider/outsider debate in the study of religion, but for the moment we need to register its place in the study of religion’s adoption of phenomenology. The Critique of Phenomenology Flood critiques phenomenology at a fundamental level and identifies conceptual problems in the study of religion that have entered via the route of philosophical phenomenology. To summarize Flood’s argument: the philosophy of consciousness posits an ego that is independent and autonomous, and is able to know its object it its entirety. This leads to a conception of religion as an essentialist category, whereby the essence of religion can be determined and by extension, religions can be compared and contrasted. He says: I shall argue that the phenomenological method alone is inadequate for understanding religions because it entails a particular philosophy of consciousness, and that description needs to be located within narrative (and so disallows a reduction to essences). (Flood, 1999: 91)

Flood identifies three sets of problems regarding phenomenology and we shall cover each in turn: issues of representation and language; subjectivity and bracketing; and intersubjectivity. Flood identifies two major problematic areas in relation to representation and language: the separation of meaning and being in language and the question of whether language expresses meaning totally. It is only possible to address these complex issues briefly in this discussion. Flood draws on Derrida’s critique of Husserl in his discussion of the problematic nature of bracketing out the natural attitude in relation to language, and he notes that Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze all have a critique of Husserlian phenomenology as their point of departure (Flood, 1999: 101). Flood takes up Derrida’s criticism of Husserl’s work that it is logocentric,

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‘privileging cognition over affect, and of speech over writing’ (Flood, 1999: 101); and supporting the view that ontology, or being, cannot be eradicated from language. He also supports the corollary to this argument that language expresses meaning without remainder. He says that: ‘objects within the world are determined through the web of linguistically and culturally constructed meanings, grounded in history, rather than through pre-existing distinctions’ (Flood, 1999: 101). In the phenomenological reduction, the coherence of existence and meaning in language is broken: language is separated from existence but retains meaning, and this is a difficult position to hold for the phenomenologist of religion. The researcher is agnostic to the truth claims made in the religious statements under review, and the truth claims are claims to existence. Flood gives the example of a Hindu text ‘to worship Śiva one must become Śiva’ (Flood, 1999: 102), which involves an existence claim for the devotee, both as to the existence of Śiva, and the nature of the bond between the worshipper and the deity in the act of devotion. The choice for the researcher is the insider perspective which accepts the link between meaning and existence, or an outsider perspective which denies the link. The phenomenological reduction argues for agnosticism about the link, but this leaves the researcher in the same position as the outsider, and is an implicit denial of the existence claim. Furthermore, the phenomenological, agnostic, approach brings with it the high valuation of rationality in the tradition of Enlightenment modernity, and the denigration of myth: the phenomenology of religion becomes another competing discourse about religion, containing within it a particular view of consciousness and subjectivity, and the implicit values of Enlightenment reason which critiques myth as error. (Flood, 1999: 103)

This position is problematic for Flood who looks for a means to represent religious phenomena in a way that retains the ‘tradition-specific reality’ (Flood, 1999: 104) and keeps the connection between existence and meaning. Flood considers the concept of the subject in Husserl’s philosophy to be a source of difficulty. Husserl’s subject derives from the Cartesian ego and is ‘a particular but universal, detached but rational ego, who partially receives experiences in the stream of cogitationes and who partially constructs them’ (Flood, 1999: 106). This leads to a concentration on the subject’s experience as the focus of phenomenological enquiry rather than collective, social acts, events and ‘intersubjective performance’ (Flood, 1999: 108). Flood adopts the critique of the Husserlian ego that posits that we are intersubjective before we are solitary thinking egos. He describes this as a position ‘which moves from consciousness to language and culture and which sees the observer as integrally bound up in the dialogical process of understanding’ (Flood, 1999: 107). He regards the phenomenological claim to objective truth, external to the observer, to be untenable, as subjects are always constructed within both their own narratives and wider historical and contextual ones.

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Husserl’s conception of intersubjectivity comes under fire from Flood. Husserl’s subjects understand each other through inference and intuition, but Flood regards this as a poor representation of the world where others are immediately apprehended. Apprehension of other people does not occur in the rarefied atmosphere of phenomena reduced from the world of the natural attitude, but takes place in a shared world. The objectivity of the understanding arrived at through phenomenology makes claims to being universal and ahistorical, but it takes place in unique situations within culturally constructed settings. Dialogism as a Solution Flood critiques Husserl’s phenomenology and suggests that dialogue, based on Bakhtin’s work, can replace it. Flood is very optimistic about the value of Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’, and he says that it is: more than merely a description of human interactions or interactions with the diverse voices of texts. It is a theory of knowledge and a theory of language as understood in its historical specificity: knowledge arises within language through the dialogical encounter. (Flood, 1999: 158)

Flood is looking for a metatheoretical solution to the problems he finds with Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness, and although there is considerable value in his criticism of phenomenology and his desire for a contextualized subject, the high level claims for dialogism as epistemology cannot be sustained. He arrives at Bakhtin via post-modern critiques of Enlightenment rationalism including philosophies of language and narrative theory. Flood draws on trends in continental philosophy that construct a criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology on the basis that it embraces a philosophy of consciousness, and that a movement toward a philosophy of language, or a philosophy of the sign, can be helpful. He makes some broad distinctions between these two fields: in philosophies of consciousness, understanding takes place through the actions of the disembodied ego, while in philosophies of the sign, understanding takes place within language, is sensitive to the cultural context and is located within narrative. Philosophies of consciousness strive for ahistorical objectivity while philosophies of the sign acknowledge the historical situatedness of the observer and the observed. Flood refers to the work of Derrida, Habermas and Apel in developing this general outline, but concentrates his discussion on narrative theory. The place of narrative in the construction of meaning is of key importance for Flood’s position, and he writes that: ‘the shift to the sign deprivileges consciousness, experience and inner states, and places religion squarely within culture and history, that is, within narrative’ (Flood, 1999: 118). He distinguishes three approaches to narrative theory: narrative realism, that stories are lived; narrative constructivism, that stories are told; and narrativism,

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that stories are lived and told. He finds value in the realist and constructivist positions, and holds to the narratavist position as a synthesis of both. Narratives are essentially sequential, describing events in chronological sequence, even when the time frame is mythological or fantastical; and through the selection and course of events, narrative gives meaning to those events and to the actors and actions out of which the narrative is composed. Narratives are expressed in genres of oral traditions, musical traditions and written texts, as well as in individual informal communication. For Flood, narratives are central to understanding, to such an extent that he claims that: ‘there is no lived reality external to or unmediated by narrative’ (Flood, 1999: 118). Narratives find expression within a context, and do not make universalist claims, so the individual or the researcher finds himself or herself receiving multiple narratives as well as being formed by the narrative of his or her own history, academic tradition and cultural context. For Flood these narratives can be competing or complementary (Flood, 1999: 118), and understanding takes place where the narratives meet. Dialogue comes into play as the relationship that characterizes the meeting place and interplay between narratives. It is a necessary relationship of intersubjectivity, when each subject is regarded as situated, embodied and located in its historical and cultural context. Flood says that: The positioned subject is the embodied subject. All understanding is dialogical, by which I mean the situation of subject and ‘object’ or ‘other subject’ is one of dialogue. (Flood, 1999: 145)

In everyday human interactions this is a commonplace observation, but it is more demanding in a research context. Flood understands the research enterprise as an investigation of other people and other traditions and as a mutual interrogation of researcher and researched, which may not always be the case, as the relationship is likely to be asymmetrical. In dialogue both parties are participants, even though there may well be inequalities in the relationship, but in principle it is a relationship of negotiation between free agents, not an overwhelming action by one active member towards a passive one. Flood turns to Bakhtin as a theorist of dialogue, and although he is aware that Bakhtin’s work was focused first on ethics and aesthetics and later on literary theory, he claims that ‘dialogism’, a term that he says that Bakhtin never used (Flood, 1999: 150),2 is widely applicable beyond the confines of these domains. He says that: The model which Bakhtin presents of understanding discourse through dialogical encounter has implications and applications beyond those of literary 2

  In saying that Bakhtin never used the term dialogism, Flood follows Holquist (1990: 15), but in fact Bakhtin did use the term (PT: 119) where he refers to ‘the problem of the inner dialogism’. I am indebted to Craig Brandist and David Shepherd for drawing this to my attention.

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history to which Bakhtin largely devoted himself. Dialogism can become a model for understanding wider cultural processes and for the social sciences. (Flood, 1999: 159)

Flood pays attention to three aspects of Bakhtin’s work in coming to this assessment: intersubjectivity, the utterance and live-entering. Flood’s reception of Bakhtin’s ideas on intersubjectivity conflates his early work, which was discussed in Chapter 2, concerning the three moments of the act (I-for-myself, I-for-the-other and the-other-for-me), with his later work where language and discourse feature more prominently. Flood’s summary is as follows: In the relationship between the ‘I’ and ‘other’, the ‘I’ is invisible as an abstraction or transcendental subject, but, by contrast, is visible in performance and in the body: the ‘I’ is constructed in relationship. There are therefore three co-ordinates within the dialogical encounter, the ‘I’, the ‘other’ and their relationship. (Flood, 1999: 151–2)

Flood makes an appeal to dialogical theory that is coherent, but is only loosely based upon Bakhtin’s work. His reference to three co-ordinates does not correspond to Bakhtin’s three moments but is Flood’s construction of a dialogic encounter. His reference to the visibility of the ‘I’ in the performance of an act and in its physical, bodily manifestation, refers back to Bakhtin’s phenomenology of the body in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (A&H), but now linked to dialogical discourse. Flood speaks of the self–other relationship being constructed in language (Flood, 1999: 154) that we do not find in Bakhtin’s early work where his ideas on self–other relationships are developed, and it appears that Flood is developing his own theory, which has its own appeal, but is not grounded in Bakhtin’s work in the way that Flood claims that it is. Flood discusses the concept of the utterance, and Bakhtin’s conception of liveentering, and here his reception is less contentious, although he does not refer to Poole’s work on the derivation of Bakhtin’s ideas. He quotes from Volosinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language: ‘Any true understanding is dialogic in nature’ (Volosinov, 1973: 102) to reinforce his theme and which leads him to conclude: Dialogism is therefore more than merely a description of human interactions or interactions with the diverse voices of texts. It is a theory of knowledge and a theory of language as understood in its historical specificity: knowledge arises within language through the dialogical encounter. (Flood, 1999: 158)

Flood’s view of the potential of language appears to be aspirational – he wants to find a theoretical solution to the problem he has identified, but Bakhtin’s work is only a partial solution, and Flood misrepresents Bakhtin’s work to the extent that

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he presents it as a coherent whole with wide application, when the primary sources would only support a moderated and qualified version of this conclusion. Flood is not alone, however, in his position, and would find some support from Michael Holquist. Flood includes Holquist’s book Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World in his bibliography, but does not quote directly from the text. Holquist says that dialogism is not a systematic philosophy (Holquist, 1990: 16), but despite this he describes Bakhtin’s work as ‘a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge’ (Holquist, 1990: 15) and as one of several modern epistemologies that ‘seek to grasp human behaviour through the use humans make of language’ (Holquist, 1990: 15). Holquist locates Bakhtin’s philosophical roots in nineteenthand twentieth-century responses to post-Newtonian physics, and draws a parallel between Bakhtin’s self as a self always in relation to another self and relativity theory in physics: he even goes as far as to say that ‘dialogism is a version of relativity’ (Holquist, 1990: 20). For Holquist, dialogue is the motif that serves to explain Bakhtin’s work throughout his career and that provides the ‘master key’ (Holquist, 1990: 15). In Holquist’s reception of Bakhtin, dialogue has three elements: an utterance, a reply and a relation between the two, and he focuses on the necessity of simultaneity in the dialogue. Both partners must be active together, at the same time, though not in exactly the same place; and it is through dialogue that the self is constructed. For Holquist, dialogue and dialogism have complex meanings, and in his reception of Bakhtin’s thought, dialogism is raised to a significant philosophical status. Critique of Dialogism as Epistemology The critique of Flood’s argument must start by challenging the dichotomy between philosophy of consciousness and philosophy of the sign, and his characterization of Bakhtin as a philosopher of the sign. Bakhtin has a claim to be a philosopher of consciousness like Husserl, as much of Bakhtin’s work was in the phenomenological tradition, owing much to Scheler, as discussed in Chapter 2. Brandist, when writing about the philosophical antecedents of the Bakhtin Circle, says that ‘the slogan of the [phenomenological] movement, “to the things themselves”, undoubtedly underlies the Bakhtin Circle’s preoccupation with “concreteness”’ (Brandist, 2002: 18). Bakhtin himself, while undoubtedly focusing on phenomenological concerns was critical of the nature of the ego in Husserl’s phenomenology. He says in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ that ‘idealism is a phenomenology of my experience of myself, but not of my experience of the other’ (A&H: 110), and the work itself is a phenomenology of the experience by the self, from the position of an embodied person, of other people in their own situations, unique and unreplicable in place and time. Poole characterizes this work of Bakhtin as ‘a treatise against idealism and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology’ (Poole, 2001: 117), but he may be making the point too strongly here as the evidence does not support a claim as emphatic as this.

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Bakhtin’s ‘I’ is derived from the Cartesian ego through European philosophical traditions, as discussed in Chapter 2. He conceives the ‘I’ in connection with others, the ‘I-for-the-other’ and ‘other-for-me’ in relationships of reciprocity and mutual recognition, but the ‘I’ remains as the singular point from which, and to which, the relationships are directed. The ‘I’ is contextualized and surrounded by others, and the walls around it may be permeable but they still constitute its boundaries. In ‘Author and Hero Aesthetic Activity’ Bakhtin provides a phenomenological description of the embodied ‘I’ in relationship with others, but far from diminishing the separateness of the self in relationship, his focus on embodiment serves to reinforce the individuality and uniqueness of the self. Bakhtin reflects that the self cannot occupy the same space as anyone else, and its viewpoint is always unique and unrepeatable. In Bakhtin’s work, following his linguistic turn, he can be described as a philosopher of the sign because he focuses on language, but this descriptor does not point to a fundamental shift in his conception of the self and other, only a shift of attention to other spheres, so it would be more accurate to describe him as both a philosopher of consciousness and the sign. Bakhtin’s work has been challenged on grounds of consistency and coherence. Wall has called him a ‘broken thinker’ and argues that ‘the fragments of his thought are strewn in virtually every direction’ (Wall, 1998: 669); and his conclusion is that we need to understand Bakhtin ‘not as a whole, but as a variously disjointed and juxtaposed set of fragments’ (Wall, 1998: 682). Brandist points out that the members of the Bakhtin Circle were influenced by neo-Kantian ideas as well as phenomenology and that these were incompatible ‘and the Circle was often trapped in a difficult position between these two trends’ (Brandist: 2002: 20). Hirschkop is another commentator who critiques Bakhtin’s ideas, and expresses his views quite trenchantly in comments such as this one: The conceptions for which Bakhtin is most renowned aren’t really conceptions at all, but signs of problems unsolved. It’s entirely legitimate to dream of their solution. In the sober light of day, however, one has to confront the problems themselves. (Hirschkop, 2001: 23)

Flood desires Bakhtin’s work to provide him with sound theoretical underpinnings on which to found his own dialogical methodology, but Bakhtin does not meet this requirement. It may be that dialogical theory could do what Flood asks of it, but the work to demonstrate this has still to be done. It is the notion of dialogue as epistemology that is most problematic. To say that understanding is founded in dialogue (PT: 119) has an inherent attractiveness and a common-sense application in everyday life, where it is usual to find out information and seek clarification through questioning and response, but the claims made for dialogue are of a higher order than this. The claim is that all understanding is a partnership process and cannot take place where one isolated self is learning on his or her own. Hirschkop points out that dialogue has to be more than a scripted exchange of utterances:

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For true dialogue to take place one has to exchange not only statements or sentences but something else – ideas, positions – and one has to do so with a willingness to take on board those proffered by one’s interlocutor. (Hirschkop, 1998: 185)

This makes it clear that for true dialogue to take place the model must be of a single individual in communication with another or a group of others who can in some way speak with one voice.3 Both parties must have the capacity to change, and they must therefore be human beings not things. This model does not embrace the reader in a library or scientist in the laboratory. In the case of a researcher, studying a religious tradition, it is not at all clear how the dialogue is to take place except in one-to-one communication. Flood characterizes the work done by the researcher in the field of the study of religion as dialogue: Research within the many fields which comprise religious studies is in the end conversation with texts and persons. The researcher is entering into a dialogue with a text or person and herself becoming a part of an intersubjective and intertextual matrix in which all understanding – and explanation – arises. (Flood, 1999: 35)

This is viewing the interaction only from the point of view of the researcher, who is entering into a process and knows that it may result in a change in his or her views, knowledge and understanding, and hopes that it will do so. But the other human participant(s) in the interaction may not reciprocate, and would certainly have different expectations at the outset. Where the interaction is with texts, the metaphor of dialogue is stretched beyond a meaning that it can carry, as the text does not change during or after the encounter. Bakhtin describes the act of understanding a work of art as one of ‘co-creativity’, and asserts that this form of understanding ‘supplements the text’ (FNM: 142) and reveals something new in the work, which is understandable in terms of the critical appraisal of the work of art. He continues by saying that ‘in the act of understanding, a struggle occurs that results in mutual change and enrichment’ (FNM:142), which commentators such as Pechey (2007:141) have interpreted with respect to understanding in general. Bakhtin’s use of dialogue covered several different meanings, none of them making the claims of Flood and Holquist. In Bakhtin’s work, the internally dialogic nature of words is a different matter from all understanding being dialogic. He shows how a text (such as a novel) can incorporate within it the voices of others, other texts, other people, dissenting voices or the characters’ second guessing of what other people might think. This he calls ‘double-voiced discourse’ (DN: 324), 3

  In his article ‘Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry’, Volsinov discusses the social context of real life discourse, and the necessity of contextual information for understanding words uttered in conversation (Volosinov, 1983: 12).

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or, when elevated to the status of genre, ‘polyphonic’ (PDP: 3), and gives examples such as: Comic, ironic or parodic discourse, the refracting discourse of a narrator, refracting discourse in the language of a character and finally the discourse of a whole incorporated genre – all these discourses are double-voiced and internally dialogized. (DN: 324)

The dialogue occurs within the text when different speakers, different texts and other genres interact to give depth and colour to the story and complexity to the author’s intentions. Incorporating the voices of others is not only found in literature but also in academic discourse. In ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (DN) Bakhtin discusses the different ways in which words are treated in different academic disciplines. In mathematical and natural sciences, the discourse itself – the discussion of the words and meanings of the subject matter – is not part of the scientific endeavour, except in terms of locating the topic within the academic and institutional framework. He says that: The entire methodological apparatus of the mathematical and natural sciences is directed towards mastery over mute objects, brute things, that do not reveal themselves in words, that do not comment on themselves. (DN: 351)

He contrasts this with the humanities where ‘there arises the specific task of establishing, transmitting and interpreting the words of others’ (DN: 351). This characterization fits the study of religion well, particularly in relation to field studies where ethnographic material is reported, and where the exercise of collecting material is an engagement with other people about their beliefs. A good example is Marion Bowman’s study of Newfoundland women’s devotion to St Gerard, where she writes: Women generally seemed pleased to share their experiences with an interested listener, such as one who started ‘Oh yes, we had a miracle here a few years back’ with the same aplomb and much the same tone as describing what they had had for lunch. (Bowman, 2004: 8)

The text is explicitly dialogical in Bakhtin’s sense of incorporating, in an engaging way, the voices of both the Newfoundland woman and the researcher, and demonstrates the value of this approach. Bakhtin directly addresses the dialogic nature of religious texts, meaning that canonical texts of most world religions, such as the Bible and the Vedas, record the doings and sayings of beings, human and divine. The passage is worth quoting in full:

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The student of religion can make use of Bakhtin’s insights to understand religious texts as complicated, multi-layered cultural phenomena. There are multiple voices within the text, and as they are often some of the oldest texts of human history they are associated with long traditions of diverse interpretations of them, and motifs from them have been widely borrowed in world literature. To understand the multiple voices as ‘dialogic’ is to acknowledge the complexity of the texts and the history of their reception, and dialogue is a metaphor for the author’s or authors’ representation of the discourse. Bakhtin’s work can offer insights to students of religion as there are aspects of his thought that can provide new ways of looking at the material. When Flood says that Bakhtin’s work is ‘particularly relevant to the study of religion in involving a critical enquiry into utterance and in showing the centrality of narrative in culture’ (Flood, 1999: 150) he is right. The lessons that have been learned from his work to date concern the general need for reflexivity by the researcher, and for an acknowledgement of the situated nature of research (Bocking, 2004: 107), but Bakhtin’s work does not support a claim to overturn philosophical phenomenology with an epistemology based on language.

Chapter 7

Outsideness Within the field of study that constitutes the study of religion there is a thread of debate known as the ‘insider/outsider problem’ (McCutcheon, 1999): a problem that is essentially epistemological and concerns whether or not a person can learn about a religion if they are not a believer in that faith tradition. McCutcheon expresses it very concisely: ‘In a nutshell the problem is whether, and to what extent, someone can study, understand, or explain the beliefs, words, or actions of another’ (McCutcheon, 1999: 2). The problem itself can be identified in other fields of the humanities, but is acute in the study of religions, where the belief system, not just the associated behaviours and cultural manifestations, is under scrutiny. Studying beliefs requires capturing the believer’s account of his or her beliefs, the researcher’s response in the context of his or her conceptual framework and personal approach, and a mediation of the two. It is the mediation, and whether the ensuing synthesis is tilted towards one or other end of the insider/outsider scale, that is at issue. One of Bakhtin’s conceptions is ‘outsideness’, and while this term cannot be elided with ‘outsider’, the similarity gives cause for optimism that outsideness might have a productive application to the problem. The concept of outsideness in Bakhtin’s work has attracted attention for its unusual counterintuitive and intriguing notion that the outsider sees more than the insider. It is connected to his ideas about intersubjectivity and aesthetic creation, and owes a debt to Scheler’s phenomenology of empathy. Caryl Emerson included a substantial review of the Russian literature on outsideness as the ethical dimension of art in her book The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Emerson, 1997), which is a valuable resource and covers a number of Russian scholars’ contributions in detail. The significance of the concept of outsideness in Bakhtin’s aesthetics is attested in the secondary literature on Bakhtin. Brandist says that ‘outsideness is central to Bakhtin’s aesthetics and its importance is asserted in various forms, throughout his work’ (Brandist, 2002: 46). In Emerson’s review of the Russian literature, she summarizes the Russian commentators’ views and reports on the attention drawn to Bakhtin’s lack of interest in conventional aesthetics such as rules of symmetry and harmony: Russian scholars who have worked on this idea [outsideness] (Volkova, Makhlin, Gogotishvili, Bonetskaia) properly see it as the common denominator between Bakhtin’s ethics and his aesthetics; it is also the concept often held responsible for Bakhtin’s negligent attitude toward traditional aesthetic concerns. (Emerson, 1997: 207–8)

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Outsideness provides an element of continuity in Bakhtin’s work throughout the changing focus of his attention from ethics and intersubjectivity to aesthetic creativity; and has proved to be one of his conceptions that has stood the test of scrutiny from scholars. Outsideness appears early in Bakhtin’s work as an ‘excess of seeing’ (A&H: 22), and is related to his ethical approach to others, and to aesthetic acts of creation. Bakhtin affirms the position of the author as outside the hero, and it is only from this position that the author can perform the task of completing, and giving form, to the hero: For sometimes it is difficult to take up a stand outside one’s partner as well as outside one’s antagonist in the event of life; not only being inside the hero but also being axiologically beside him and against him distorts seeing and lacks features that can render him complete and consummate him. (A&H: 15)

Being too closely engaged with the hero is a pitfall for the author in Bakhtin’s view. Even when the creation is an autobiography, the author tries to reflect the judgements that others make of his or her life, either judgements of episodes, or judgements of the whole of the author’s life (A&H: 16), so the author is attempting to find an observer’s view of his or her own life. Bakhtin expresses his argument even more strongly when he says that all creative events, ‘the onceoccurrent and inconvertible events that bring forth something new’ (A&H: 87), require ‘two consciousnesses that never merge’ (A&H: 86). The consciousnesses must be in a relationship of otherness, not simultaneity or coincidence, in order that their interaction can be productive, and something fresh and different can emerge. Pechey finds that Bakhtin’s aesthetic event has as its paradigm the religious event: in both, there is this same strict non-coincidence of constituent consciousnesses; ritual or prayer then differ from the art work as acts only in that the author is not just any other (human) other but the (divine) Other or Author of all of us. (Pechey, 2006: 276)

There is a clear parallel, to which Pechey draws attention between the religious event and the artistic event, but to call the religious event ‘a paradigm’ suggests that it provides the pattern, and that the religious event is the earlier and possibly more fundamental prototype of the artistic event. Bakhtin does not make this assertion but the observation demonstrates the possible interpretations of his work as discussed in Chapter 1. In Bakhtin’s mature work we find the concept, outsideness, applied much more generally to knowledge of a foreign culture, and the passage from ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’ is worth quoting in full for its relevance to this discussion:

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There exists a very strong, but one-sided and thus untrustworthy idea that in order better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one’s own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture. This idea, as I said, is one-sided. Of course, a certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture, the possibility of seeing the world through its eyes, is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but if this were the only aspect of this understanding, it would merely be duplication and would not entail anything new or enriching. Creative understanding does not renounce itself, its own place in time, its own culture; and it forgets nothing. In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one’s own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space and because they are others. (RQ: 6–7)

Bakhtin comes down firmly on the side of the position from outside, and asserts the value of the creative synthesis of the perspective of observer, who is always unique and situated, with those of the people under observation. The insider perspective would, in his view, amount only to a duplication of understanding and not contribute a creative addition that is only available when the outsider is present. We will discuss the approaches that have been developed in the study of religion to address the epistemological problem: the insider, the outsider and the agnostic, before returning to Bakhtin’s conception of outsideness, and a discussion of how Bakhtin’s work, particularly the attention he gives to empathy, can contribute to methodological debates in the study of religion. The connection between ‘outsideness’ and the insider/outsider debate has been touched upon by scholars but not developed. Flood brings outsideness into his discussion of the practice of fieldwork in religious studies (Flood, 1999: 214), and he makes a reference to it in his 2006 article when he speaks of: a Religious Studies that incorporates both traditions’ self-representations and critical social studies is necessarily dialogical in Bakhtin’s (1986) sense of each party partially stepping into the ‘object’ of inquiry while maintaining ‘outsideness’. (Flood, 2006: 55)

In her contribution to The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, Knott picks up Flood’s earlier work when she says: Flood offers us an alternative, a strategy for reconfiguring critical distance, ‘outsideness’ and situated observation which depends not upon modernist notions of objectivity and the phenomenological assertion of non-confessionalism, but rather upon a dialogical and reflexive engagement between scholars and the religious people they study. (Knott, 2005: 255)

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Flood is transparent about his application of Bakhtin’s ideas, but neither Flood nor Knott discuss the Bakhtin’s conception in any detail, a gap which this chapter aims to fill. The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion The mid-1980s is identified by Knott as the time at which the insider/outsider dichotomy became an acute issue in the study of religion (Knott, 2005: 244), although the different perspectives had been noted before. The crux of the debate was over Sikh studies, and a post-colonial critique was developed of previously published Western accounts of Sikhism, with primacy given to insider accounts and a challenge mounted to outsider perspectives. The debate broadened and included a critique of a movement, termed ‘the modernist turn’, from religious to secular thinking, which had the effect of making insider critiques of Western scholarship appear to be coming from traditionalist, if not fundamentalist, religious positions (Knott, 2005: 255). Not limited to Sikh studies, the debates have ranged over theology, the politics of identity, the ethics of research practice, the limits of what can be known and many other questions, and remain a lively area of inquiry (see Chryssides and Geaves, 2007: 231). Russell McCutcheon has published an excellent introduction to the debates on the insider/outsider problem together with extracts from the writing of key figures (McCutcheon, 1999). Among the themes that he has drawn out are three that will be useful in this exposition: the autonomy of religious experience that underlies most insider accounts; the outsider position and reductionism; and agnosticism and empathy. But before we address these divisions, we need briefly to introduce two terms that are useful in this area of study, but not commonly used in other fields. A key tool in the methodological apparatus for the study of religion, one that predates the Sikh studies controversy by some margin, is the distinction between emic and etic accounts. The terms were coined in 1967 by the anthropologist Kenneth Pike who derived them from the words ‘phonemic’ and ‘phonetic’: phonemic being concerned with the internal structure of words, and phonetic with the structure of language. By analogy, he used emic accounts to denote insider accounts of religious experience and etic accounts to be observer accounts. Emic accounts are not, however, to be confused with first-hand, primary source material such as diaries, letters or autobiography – rather they are accounts authored by a researcher or observer, but using the insider’s point of view as authoritative. Pike values both approaches and likens them to quantitative (etic) and qualitative (emic) research methods. He says the value of the emic approach is that: it helps one to appreciate not only the culture or language as an ordered whole, but it helps one to understand the individual actors in such a life drama – their attitudes, motives, interests, responses, conflicts, and personality development. (Pike, 1999 [original 1967]: 32)

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The distinction has been helpful to scholars in the field, and provides a structure for categorizing approaches. Insider Position – the Autonomy of Religious Experience The central core of the problem under discussion is whether or not it is possible to know the interior life of another person – their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and motivations. For scholars holding strong positions on both the insider and outsider ends of the spectrum, the answer is generally negative: either that it is not possible to know what it feels like to be an insider unless you are an insider, or that it is impossible to know anyone’s interior life at all, and that all that can be known are the exterior manifestations that are open to scientific enquiry in the same way as other matters. The intermediate positions cover varying epistemological positions, with those favouring the insider view looking for understanding of the participants’ beliefs, and those favouring outsider views looking for explanations of religious behaviour. Views that uphold the insider’s perspective are underpinned by theoretical perspectives that emphasize the autonomy of religious experience (McCutcheon, 1999: 65), and support an anti-reductionist view of religion – that religion cannot be reduced to other human factors or phenomena and the study of religion cannot be subsumed under psychology or anthropology. McCutcheon traces this tradition back to Friedrich Schleiermacher in the late eighteenth century, who reacted against the rationalist development of the Enlightenment and argued for the emotional character of religious feeling. Schleiermacher defined religion as a highly personal feeling, and a consciousness of dependence on something other than oneself (McCutcheon, 1999: 68). The tradition has been continued by leading figures such as Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), Joachim Wach (1898–1955) and Mircea Eliade (1907–86). The identification of a special, essential and unique character of religion is found in the work of both Otto and Eliade. Otto’s best known work is The Idea of the Holy [Das Heilige], published in 1917, and he identifies the character of holiness as an essential part of all religions. He describes it as complex, but containing a moment that is inexpressible – impossible to articulate in words, and not part of a cognitive and rational consciousness. Holiness, however, also has ethical connotations of goodness for Otto, and he developed the term ‘numinous’ as the name for the construct of holiness stripped of ethics while retaining its religious significance (Otto, 1999 [original 1917]: 77). Eliade takes Otto’s work as his starting point and develops a strong dualistic model of human experience into the sacred and the profane. He writes in the introduction to his work that: ‘the reader will very soon realize that the sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of history’ (Eliade, 1959: 14). Both writers carve out a separate space for religion that does not overlap with other aspects of culture but which sets religion apart.

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The special nature of religion in this tradition does create problems for scholars in accessing, describing and interpreting this domain of human experience. Joachim Wach expresses the position quite mildly when he argues for the researcher to ‘grasp with understanding’ the details of the foreign religion he is researching. Writing of Religionwissenschaft [the scientific study of religion], he says: It will seek to grasp the actual meaning of the religious intention, out of which spring all these: otherwise, and this it knows well, it will have only empty shells to tinker with. (Wach, 1999 [original 1935]: 92)

The danger, Wach sees, is that explanations without understanding of insider meanings will miss the essential features of the phenomena studied. Eliade presents a stronger view when he says that the researcher must get inside the culture that is being studied. His position reflects the one criticized by Bakhtin in the long passage quoted on page 117, when he says: There is no other way of understanding a foreign mental universe than to place oneself inside it, at its very center, in order to progress from there to all the values that it possesses. (Eliade, 1959: 165)

However, the most extreme view comes from Otto who excludes all those who do not experience religious feelings themselves from studying religion: The reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this, whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested to read no farther; for it is not easy to discuss questions of religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social feelings, but cannot recall any religious feelings. (Otto, 1999 [original 1917]: 78–9)

The extreme position of Otto suggests that the study of religion cannot be part of public discourse and studied productively by students of any faith persuasion, or none: a position that presents obstacles to academic study. Emic (insider) studies of religion can face difficulties, particularly in the area of contextualizing the work, but the value of such studies has been championed (see Chryssides and Geaves, 2007: 231). The point has also usefully been made that insider accounts may have access to limited information about their own tradition. Kumar (2008: 201) points out that in Orthodox Hindu families, women are not permitted to know some of the traditions, and therefore their accounts cover material within the limits of their knowledge.

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Outsider Accounts and Reductionism At the other end of the scale we have scholars who take the view that religious phenomena can only be studied in the same way as other social and cultural phenomena without any privileged status and not charged with a special religious aura. Donald Wiebe argues a strong case for a study of religion pursued in a positivist tradition when he says: The only ‘academic study of religion’ that is appropriate in the context of the modern research university, therefore, is a scientific study that is wholly emancipated from religio-theological, humanistic, moral, and socio-political agendas. (Wiebe, 2008: 477)

Wiebe’s position emerges from his critique of post-modern criticism of scientific method and scientific endeavour that he regards as abandoning reason, and sometimes looking to reproduce reality rather than explain it (Wiebe, 2008: 474); and his concern is to re-establish scientific values in research. The stakes in this debate are high since they concern the essential nature of religion and religious discourse, and whether it is sui generis – with a unique nature of its own – or whether it can be reduced to other matters. Reductive explanations of religion explain it in terms of other human features, drives or capabilities that are in some way more basic, more fundamental, to being human. Examples of such reduction are the explanation in terms of psychological drives, in psychoanalytic theory, or by social forces in Durkheim’s sociology. Champions of a non-reductionist approach challenge the idea that religion can be explained away by contextual factors and believers feel threatened by the idea that their choice to believe is not an act of free will. The threat posed to individuals has been termed ‘ontological reductionism’ while the academic debate centres on ‘theoretical reductionism’, which Pals defines as ‘the claim that religion can be explained without any help from theories unique to the field of religious studies’ (Pals, 1999 [original 1986]: 182–3). The case for reductionism has been argued strongly by Robert Segal (1983). He targets Eliade’s work on the irreducibility of religion and finds Eliade’s arguments inconsistent and circular. For example he regards Eliade as trying to hold together both the consideration of believers’ ideas in their own terms, and the idea that the researcher can evaluate a position of the truth of the claims, not in terms of the existence of supernatural beings, but in terms of the truth of whether or not what the believers say they believe is what they actually believe, which is inconsistent. He finds circularity because he asserts that Eliade’s arguments for irreducible religion rest on belief. Segal’s case has been subjected to scrutiny by Pals (1999, original 1986) and found wanting. Pals concludes that: there is nothing inevitable or de jure about recourse to reductive explanations, or for that matter irreducible ones. The case for reduction, like the case to be made

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin against it, will have to stand on the evidence. If we judge by that standard, and by it the present state of the opposition, the doctrine of irreducible religion is in no immediate danger. (Pals, 1999 [original 1986]: 193).

The debate has not been settled and but continues to challenge scholars and students. Agnosticism and Empathy The difficulties faced by the researcher in the study of religion have been addressed by some scholars by trying to find a middle way between the poles of outside and inside, and attempting to retain the advantages of each, but the attempts have not been without their critics. The most prominent figure to strike this path was Ninian Smart (1927–2001) who had a significant influence in the twentieth century (see Cox, 2006: 159–60). He endeavoured to combine an etic approach to the context of religious beliefs and practices with an emic approach to the meanings ascribed to them by the practitioners. He said that: It is not enough for us to survey the course which the religious history of mankind has taken: we must also penetrate into the hearts and minds of those who have been involved in that history. (Smart, 1971: 11)

While he is best known for his attention to insider accounts, he stressed that they had to be viewed in their context, and acknowledging his focus on the phenomenology of religious belief, he said that: ‘this does not imply that the scientific study of religion should neglect explanations’ (Smart, 1973: 110). Among the characteristics of Smart’s approach was his commitment to what he called ‘methodological agnosticism’ (Smart, 1973: 57) that he used to describe the position of the researcher with respect to the beliefs of his research subjects. The agnosticism was directed towards the faith reference of the religion, and he clarified this as ‘agnosticism about the existence or otherwise of the main foci of the belief system in question’ (Smart, 1973: 54), requiring the researcher to keep his or her sympathy with the faith, or scepticism of it, in abeyance for the purposes of the research project. Smart was the first phenomenologist of religion to identify the phenomenological époché with his agnostic approach (Cox, 2006: 160), and his use of bracketing (époché) covered a wide scope. Cox summarizes Smart’s interpretation of the phenomenological method: whereby every theory, idea, doctrine, ethical assumption or story, which is observed as manifesting or expressing the Focus of faith, including the feelings they induce among believers, is placed in brackets, making it possible for the scholar to attend solely to the phenomena themselves without distinguishing between what is real or apparent. (Cox, 2006: 162)

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Smart’s emphasis on bracketing, and the suspension of judgement about so much of the material under review by the researcher has been influential in guiding researchers in the study of religion into detailed descriptions of phenomena, described by Bowman as ‘accurate, judgement-free reporting’ (Bowman, 2004: 13). The aspect of Smart’s phenomenology to which we shall give most attention is the role he gives to empathy, as this will be our route through which Bakhtin’s work may prove productive. Smart regards empathy as a necessary construct for enquiry into any of the human sciences, and uses the now well-known analogy of moccasin-walking: When we come to the human sciences, however, there is a difference of a profound kind: for it is no longer a mute nature that addresses us, but living and communicating beings. Empathy becomes important. And that means somehow adopting the American Indian proverb: ‘Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins’. Or rather: ‘Never describe a man until you have walked a mile in his moccasins’. (Smart, 1986: 211)

His use of the word ‘somehow’ indicates that he acknowledges the difficulty that walking in someone else’s shoes presents. It is not possible actually to walk in someone else’s shoes at the same time and place as the shoes’ owner, and therefore some approximation has to take place. Smart harnesses the imagination of the researcher to overcome the inevitable gap between the believer’s perception and the researcher’s. He calls the researcher’s concern with the inner intentions and attitudes of his or her participants ‘the principle of inwardness’ (Smart, 1986: 197), and he requires the researcher to use his or her imagination creatively to achieve a position where he or she is almost in the same situation. He says of the researcher that: He may not belong to the group that he studies, but the encounter with people and his own imaginative capacities can lift him from the condition of not belonging to a position of imaginative participation. (Smart, 1986: 197)

The use of imagination in this way leads to some difficulty in holding the study of religion within the scope of the social sciences, which Smart is concerned to do, and to upholding a tradition of scientific method. Using the imagination makes it difficult to know if one researcher will have the same experience as another, and compromises any claim to objectivity when the method is subjective. Smart’s solution is to claim a synthesis of science and art in the methodology, where both methodical rigour and imagination can play a part: But though there may be difficulties in our appreciating fully the content and quality of prophetic, mystical and other forms of language, there is a sense in which we can deal with them objectively. That is, we can describe these inner events and meanings without prejudice and with sympathetic understanding.

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin The study of religions is a science, then, that requires a sensitive and artistic heart. (Smart, 1971: 12–13)

The synthesis that Smart seeks to construct is founded in phenomenological methodology, and it leads him to make a distinction between ‘the Phenomenological Method’ and ‘Typological Phenomenology’ (Smart, 1986: 211). The former is his descriptive, imaginative method of entering into the belief world of other people, and the latter he describes as: ‘an attempt to anatomize the forms of religion in a comparative manner’ (Smart, 1986: 211), or describing and classifying types of religious phenomena. But he continues to develop the former approach and insists that it includes not only the imaginative entering but also knowledge of background, including religious narratives, traditions and social and economic structures. To this end he terms the ‘Phenomenological Method’, ‘Structured Empathy’ and says: ‘so empathy has to be more than imaginative feeling: it has to include a delineation of structures’ (Smart, 1986: 212). The empathy described here is one that pulls two ways: it pulls towards the emic approach when it is directed towards imaginative entering, but at the same time, it pulls towards an etic approach, when it encompasses a more distanced view of the contextual background. The nuances of Smart’s synthesis have not always been carried forward in the application and continuation of his ideas: for example in Knott’s contribution to the Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, she captures the empathetic spirit of the phenomenological method, but as a one-way pull towards an insider approach. She says: The underlying aim of the phenomenological approach was to understand – by empathetic and imaginative re-experience – the insider position while refraining from forming a judgement about its truth or falsity (that being the domain of the theologian or philosopher). (Knott, 2005: 245)

This is not to say that researchers in the field ignore contextual background – they evidently do not – but that phenomenology has become synonymous with empathetic, non-judgemental description. Smart claimed that methodological agnosticism and empathetic entering were a means of understanding insider views without judging them, and therefore this was objective in relation to the insider position. But this has been criticized by Cox who has described methodological agnosticism as ‘surreptitious theology’ (Cox, 2004: 260). Cox builds on Fitzgerald’s critique developed in The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000) that religious studies has developed religion as an essentialist category that cannot be reduced to other social phenomena, and that a prerequisite for founding this category is theology, therefore negating any claim that methodological agnosticism makes to have suspended judgement on questions of faith. Fitzgerald finds that there is a theology of religions that can be identified within the tradition, and the theology can be characterized as:

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a liberal ecumenical theology, with a strong tendency toward monotheism though combining with a genuine scholarly interest in non-Christian languages and institutions, for example Sanskrit and Pali. (Fitzgerald, 2000: 54)

The criticism of the agnostic approach to the study of religion suggests that this method is in fact an insider approach, since it supports the idea of the existence of transcendent beings. The criticism is far-reaching and extends much further than just the questions of methodology that we have been discussing. Cox goes so far as to say that it has generated a crisis in the academic study of religions ‘by forcing scholars of religion either to embrace theology quite transparently, or to admit that they actually study cultural practices’ (Cox, 2004: 261). The crisis identified by Cox is one of a number of factors that have led some scholars of religion to become critical of the field in substantial ways, and Flood’s search for new methodological approaches, discussed in the previous chapter, is one of them. The call for scholars to be reflexive, grounded and self-aware is now widespread, and for some the response is to look for a more nuanced approach to traditional methods rather than a radically altered one. Allen looks for ‘a more self-critical and modest phenomenology of religion’ (Allen, 2005: 206), and Cox looks for a radical empathy: I would argue in response [to Flood] that so long as the rules by which academic research is conducted are applied, the best that can be achieved by the scholar is a kind of radical empathy, rooted in self-reflexivity, but which acknowledges the fundamental distinction between the ‘self’ (the researcher) and ‘the other’ (the objects of research). (Cox, 2006: 233–4)

Cox’s empathy is now a more distanced version that seeks not to enter into the other, but to maintain the distance, and this recalls us to Bakhtin and his concept of outsideness. Outsideness in Bakhtin’s Ethics and Aesthetics It is worthwhile at this point to revisit Bakhtin’s ideas and recapitulate the forms of empathy that he adopted from Scheler, as this is where the interface between his work and the debates in the study of religion may be felt most keenly. The starting point is the manner in which Bakhtin envisages the constitution of the self, as discussed in Chapter 2, and we need to remind ourselves of the significance of the other as an outsider. In his earliest work we find the three moments of the act: I-for-myself, I-for-the-other and the-other-for-me (TPA: 54), and the moments are distinguished by the variant relationships between the self and the other who is outside, and who is the antithesis of the self. The ‘I’ on its own can accomplish little, but intentional acts are directed towards something else, something other, and often some other person. For the three moments to come together in the act

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there must be a plurality of persons present, and persons that are dissimilar so that I-for-myself is different from I-for-the-other. His theme is followed in more detail in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ with extensive discussions of what it means to be the self in relation to others emotionally and physically, where I have an interior view of myself but only see others from their exteriors. In the section on ‘The Spatial Form of the Hero’, Bakhtin discusses the phenomenon that I can see things about another person that he cannot see himself: The ever-present excess of my seeing, knowing and possessing in relation to another human being is founded in the irreplaceability of my place in the world. For only I – the one-and-only-I – occupy in a given set of circumstances this particular place at this particular time; all other human beings are situated outside me. (A&H: 23)

The position I have in relation to others gives me access to knowledge about them or their surroundings that is not available to the other person, and vice versa. In Bakhtin’s early texts, the interrelationship of I and other is emotionally charged, and he says that: ‘I love another, but cannot love myself; the other loves me, but does not love himself’ (TPA: 46), and this reciprocal inequality leads to the corollary that the other’s place is his ‘own place’ (TPA: 46), and not my place, reinforcing the distance between us and the fact that the difference between us enables the bond to be forged. The loving action of the other in constituting the self is raised to a higher level in ‘Author and Hero in Aestheic Activity’ where he introduces the soul as an emotionally charged aesthetic category, brought into being by the loving attention of another: Such is the aesthetically valid whole of a human being’s inner life – his soul. The soul is actively produced and positively shaped and consummated only in the category of the other – in the category which enables us to affirm presenton-hand being positively independent of meaning or the ought-to-be. The soul is the self-coincident, self-equivalent, and self-contained whole of inner life that postulates another’s loving activity from outside its own bounds. The soul is the gift that my spirit bestows upon the other. (A&H: 132)

The other’s loving activity produces my soul as a completed or partially completed creation in the way that an author creates a hero and envisages the whole of the hero’s life in a complete and final state. We know that Bakhtin drew on the work of other thinkers in developing his ideas, and Brandist identifies Simmel’s work on culture and Cohen’s conception of love as transformative in creating beauty (Brandist, 2002: 44) among the source materials. But it is Scheler’s phenomenology of empathy that concerns us most closely: the link with Bakhtin was established by Poole (2001) as discussed in Chapter 2. Scheler developed a fourfold typology of fellow-feeling that structured his account of empathy (Scheler, 1954 [original 1923]: 12). The first is immediate

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community of feeling, feeling the same as another person because both people stand in the same relation to the cause, and the example he gives is of two parents grieving for their dead child, where each parent feels acute sorrow, and they can share the feeling with each other. The second is fellow-feeling about something, but not acutely felt in the same way. So his example is a friend who joins the grieving parents and feels a secondary or vicarious sorrow on their behalf. His other two categories form the less helpful or ethical forms of empathy: one he calls ‘mere emotional infection’ (Scheler, 1954 [original 1923]: 12), where people take on the emotion of others without knowing the cause or sharing it in any cognitive way. This can be in a high-spirited party atmosphere or in an atmosphere of melancholy, but it is not a genuine fellow-feeling with others. Lastly he names true emotional identification, and this form can be pathological when the person identifies so completely that his or her selfhood is submerged into that of the other person. Scheler cites as examples the work of Lévy-Bruhl and the identification of people with totems, and more modern examples of a person under hypnosis and various types of psychological disorder. Bakhtin takes up Scheler’s last type and includes it in his account of ‘impoverishing theories’ in relation to aesthetics (A&H: 87). He strongly argues the disadvantages of identification, and the prevention of enrichment that identification brings with it. He speculates about another merging with himself, and says: And what would I myself gain by the other’s merging with me? If he did, he would see and know no more than I see and know myself; he would merely repeat in himself the want of any issue out of itself that characterizes my own life. Let him rather remain outside of me, for in that position he can see and know what I myself do not see and do not know from my own place, and he can essentially enrich the event of my own life. If all I do is merge with the other’s life, I only intensify the want of any issue from within itself that characterizes his own life, and I only duplicate him numerically. (A&H: 87)

Bakhtin’s focus is not so much on the pathology of identification but the unproductive consequences of it. Being in the same position as someone else adds nothing to the sum of knowledge or artistic creation, and the artist’s ability to donate artistic form on the object or hero requires an unmerged perspective. The positive side of Bakhtin’s account of empathy is his conception of vzhivanie, translated as ‘living into’ or ‘live-entering’. Wyman (2008) compares Bakhtin’s and Scheler’s ideas and has summarized Bakhtin’s helpfully into a series of steps: Vzhivanie consists of: (1) the moment of mental projection (pure empathizing); (2) a return into oneself with the newly acquired knowledge of the other’s inner world; and (3) the ‘consummation’ of the other (zavershenie), which consists in the creative use of both the external and the internal points of view on the subject

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Religion in the Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin of active empathy. This ‘programme’ should not be viewed as a chronological sequence of separate stages, Bakhtin warns. Rather it should be interpreted dynamically, as a series of synchronic, often virtually inseparable ‘moments’ of one continuous emotional process. (Wyman, 2008: 74–5)

The steps are helpful for understanding the process in separate elements, but they are not necessarily sequential, and thus the empathy is enacted in a reaching out towards the other but with restraint, so that the return to oneself is not compromised. The element of love we saw incorporated into Bakhtin’s interpersonal ethics is retained in his work on aesthetic creation. He writes that: Lovelike sympathy accompanies and permeates aesthetic co-experiencing throughout the entire duration of the act of aesthetic contemplation of an object. (A&H: 82)

Brandist comments on Bakhtin’s affiliation to Cohen in his incorporation of love into the act of drawing aesthetic boundaries (Brandist, 2002: 44), and he also draws attention to the unhelpful sexist element in Bakhtin’s approach; and Wyman identifies love as the ingredient that enables empathy to move beyond a passive response, in both Bakhtin’s and Scheler’s work (Wyman, 2008: 74). Love in this context is a philosophical abstraction, providing a language for non-cognitive positive emotion to be included in the academic discourse. At the end of Bakhtin’s career we have the text quoted on page 117, where we find the ideas he has developed in relation to ethics and aesthetics applied to the larger canvas of the human sciences. The outside is the position of epistemological advantage, and the place where creativity can be applied to knowledge and understanding. Outsiders can see the situation as a whole, and bring their understanding to bear on it. The outsider gives form and completeness to the drama in which insiders are actors: he or she is not a passive observer but a creative producer. Revising Empathy Through Bakhtin Coming back to the approaches to the study of religion, we have seen how all different angles have been subjected to well-argued criticism, and that the position now in this field of study has been described as in crisis. Can Bakhtin help to resolve the crisis? The answer is that his work can make a contribution to a more nuanced version of the empathy and non-judgemental description that characterizes many empirical studies, and may enhance the idea of radical empathy suggested by Cox. To apply Bakhtin’s empathy to religious studies, it has to be stripped of most of its aesthetic content – which is the original contribution of Bakhtin – so what remains is the Schelerian empathy, mediated through the work of Bakhtin. Bakhtin and Scheler’s work draw attention to the potential for empathy to be unhelpful and possibly pathological, so researchers are cautioned that empathy can

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get too close, leading neither to an advance in knowledge nor to a healthy relationship for either researcher or participants in the research. Healthy, productive empathy rests on the ability of the researcher to retain his or her grasp of the self, and this comes close to the situated, reflexive stance argued for by Flood. But the disengaged outsider is not the position to adopt: for Bakhtin’s live-entering to be achieved, the researcher needs to be an empathetic, engaged observer. The emphasis on love in the work of both Scheler and Bakhtin does present a difficulty. Love is part of the discourse of philosophy but not of professional research in any social sciences, and would be considered an inappropriate transgression of professional boundaries if loving interpersonal relationships were advocated. So love has to be translated from one discipline to another to avoid misinterpretation, and Bakhtin’s aesthetic turn may be helpful. Bakhtin interprets love as a necessary emotional-volitional element of the creative process, and the aesthetic creation is formed through loving action and the use of the imagination. Here we have love in a productive context, outside of private life, but attentive, emotional and contributing a non-cognitive side to creative endeavour. Ninian Smart’s moccasin-walking metaphor suggests warmth, affection and tolerance that could be interpreted in a simliar light. Radical supporters of either the insider or outsider positions will not be convinced that Bakhtin’s work can help resolve the crisis in the study of religion. However, for those looking for a creative synthesis of approaches, his work offers new ways of looking at empathetic understanding of insiders’ beliefs and behaviours. The work challenges the idea that entering-in should be the goal of empathy and affirms the possibility that the outsider’s viewpoint is valuable and constructive.

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Chapter 8

Conclusion When Kant writes of the concentric circles of religion (Kant, 1998 [original 1794]: 40),1 revealed religion practised by believers is the wider circle, and the pure religion of reason – the philosophical abstraction – is the smaller circle, within its own narrow boundaries but part of the wider conception. Kant says that philosophers keep within the inner circle, and thereby restrict themselves to rational, cognitive discourse, with an awareness of the context of their discourse that is the potentially chaotic, not-wholly-cognitive, world of belief and practice in human societies, past and present. Kant gives a twist to the insider/outsider positions discussed in Chapter 7, but here Kant’s insider is the philosopher restrained within a subset of the religious domain, and the outsider inhabits the diverse regions of religion as a cultural phenomenon. Bakhtin was a philosopher in the Kantian tradition, and restricted his work to the inner circle of cognitive discourse, while maintaining an active appreciation of the wider circle of the religious world. In his private life he was a religious man, in the same way that Kant, Cohen, Scheler and many other thinkers and philosophers were religious men and women, but his intention, when he addressed religion, was to keep his project secular (A&H:149). It was not always an easy task: as we have seen there are passages in his work published posthumously that he never prepared for publication, where the tone and content appear to be written in different registers and give an overall impression of inconsistency. To help in the task of elucidating Bakhtin’s work and of understanding what he meant we have to look at his sources, and to draw upon the considerable scholarship that has uncovered his debts to other thinkers that he did not acknowledge in his texts. His affiliation to Cohen’s work is central to this project, and Bakhtin in general followed Cohen’s model of subordinating his devotional interests to intellectual enquiry, although there are lapses into casual religious references in some of the texts that were not prepared for publication. The central focus of this work is the appropriate place of religion in the work of Bakhtin. My argument plots a middle course between those who would neglect and   ‘Since, after all, revelation can at least comprise also the pure religion of reason, whereas, conversely, the latter cannot do the same for what is historical in revelation, I shall be able to consider the first as a wider sphere of faith that includes the other, a narrower one, within itself (not as two circles external to one another but as concentric circles); the philosopher, as purely a teacher of reason (from mere principles a priori), must keep within the inner circle and, thereby, also abstract from all experience.’ (Kant, 1998 [original 1794]: 40). 1

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disregard any reference to religious themes in the texts as irrelevant to a basically secular enterprise, and those who would read the texts as theological at their foundation, and as coded essays on the nature of God and His relationship with persons. In this work I have retraced the well-known path of Bakhtin’s affiliation to Marburg neo-Kantian philosophers, to phenomenology and life philosophy, to Freidenberg, Marr and others, and I do not claim to have unearthed any new sources or established new or stronger ties. However, religion plays a central part in Bakhtin’s philosophical outlook, and this was something he found complex and problematic. He struggled with religion in a philosophical framework and his resolutions were not always consistent or systematic. His own religious disposition was neither rigorously and comprehensively excluded, as there are occasions when casual religious references are inserted, nor is it deliberately included to give substance to his philosophical categorizations in a theological framework. The case for a theological interpretation of Bakhtin’s work is made in the English language texts primarily by Mihailovic (1997, 2001) and Coates (1998, 2001). At the strongest, the claims made are that Bakhtin incorporated Christian doctrine into his ethical and aesthetic philosophy, but on closer examination neither of these writers sustains the claims at their strongest, but both qualify and temper the claims. Coates talks of metaphors and motifs, as does Mihailovic, and the latter also finds that Bakhtin adapts theology to his own purposes. The strength of the case lies in Bakhtin’s use of Christian terminology in his early writing, for example when he says that ‘in all Christ’s norms the I and the other are contraposed’ (A&H: 56), and passages that have a devotional tone and ring about them. But to pick out these passages alone, and neglect the context and the stated intention to embark on a secular project is to misinterpret them. Bakhtin’s early texts are complex documents, and the task of interpreting them must acknowledge their complexity and multiple voices. The case against a theological interpretation is grounded in scholarship that has uncovered Bakhtin’s affiliations, and for his early work the affiliation to the work of Marburg neo-Kantian philosophy is well founded. Bakhtin’s conception of the three moments of the act as I-for-myself, I-for-theother and the-other-for-me lends itself to comparison with the three persons of the Christian Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, but they have an alternative genesis in Cohen’s intersubjective philosophy. Mihailovic has argued for the influence of Russian Orthodox theology particularly with respect to the doctrines of the interpenetration of the three persons of the Trinity (perichoresis), the co-existence of the divine and human natures of Christ without separation or division (the Chalcedonian formula) and the Logos of St John’s Gospel. He also draws attention to the barriers faced by non-Russian commentators in understanding the nuances of Russian culture. However, while it is important to note the difficulties, it is also important to face the argument that there were other factors at work in forming the building blocks of Bakhtin’s philosophy, and that there was a strong strand that was both Jewish and German in that formation. Bakhtin’s considerable contribution was his appropriation of ideas derived from philosophy of religion and his incorporation of them into aesthetics. He built

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on the conception of the unfinalizability of life as experienced by an individual, in contrast to the finalized, completed life of the hero in the novel. The aesthetic creation in the novel gives form to the hero’s life, and fixes it forever in that construction. A person’s real life, as it is lived, always possesses a range of future possibilities and a certain amount of open-endedness. In these ideas Bakhtin drew on both Cohen’s philosophy of intersubjectivity, and Scheler’s phenomenology: both philosophers came to value open-endedness from different perspectives but both related this open-endedness to ethical concerns. Bakhtin departed from them in his move into aesthetics, and further developed his aesthetic theory by using ideas on confession and redemption to inform his project on the development of literary genre. The concept of divine grace as an unmerited gift from an outside source is used by Bakhtin as an analogy to aesthetic grace bestowed by an observer to an aesthetic object, as part of an aesthetic moment created in that instant. In his later writings Bakhtin turned to literature and the history of literary genre that had been an important theme for the Formalists. Bakhtin’s starting point was the origin of thought itself, and, using the material uncovered by anthropologists and philosophers of culture, he drew upon the speculative history that posited myth and mythical consciousness as the earliest forms of thought, social interaction and culture. Institutional religion formed a later stage that accompanied social and economic development and featured deities with incomparable powers, unlike mythical powers which could be influenced by magic and ritual. The latter stages of cultural development have been dominated by a secularization of culture, as scepticism about religion and religious ideas gathered strength. Bakhtin’s interest lay in the stages of literary development that accompanied broader cultural shifts and he identified the writers Rabelais (1494–1553) and Goethe (1749– 1832) as markers of the cultural change engendered by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment respectively, translated into the sphere of literature. In Bakhtin’s account, however, there were limits to the scope of secularization as mythical consciousness and mythical forms of thought never disappeared altogether. They can be found buried in literary forms, especially popular vernacular forms such as folk tales and children’s rhymes. The traces of these forms are also carried in more canonical works, such as Shakespearean drama, because the writers made use of plot lines, comic and tragic scenarios, and structures that had a long history of previous usage and a strong hold on popular imagination. In this historical narrative change takes places in literature as one genre replaces another, culminating in the triumph of the European novel as the end result of a metalinguistic transformation taking place over centuries, if not millennia. In the dynamic process of the metamorphosis of genres, laughter, parody and travesty have a significant role to play. Genres decay when they are parodied, lose authority and gravitas and are replaced by modernizing, critical new genres. The strength of this exposition lies not only in its common sense appeal to plausibility, but also in its explanation for the retention, in subordinated forms, of older genres within the younger ones. If literary development took place through pendulum swings of opposing movements, it could be expected that a later genre would

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reject the norms of the earlier one it replaced, until a revisionist swing in the opposite direction reversed the poles. Instead Bakhtin’s explanation, building on the work of others especially Marr, Frank-Kamenetskij and Freidenberg, allows for the possibility of cumulative development. Parody or parodic-travesty uses the original text or drama, and in addition poses a critical, humorous alternative resulting in a synthesis of both. Early forms of culture were founded in myth that had a stranglehold over language, binding language to unchallengeable truths. In the development of literature old sources of cultural authority, founded on mythical thinking, were overthrown and myths were dispelled through laughter and parody. However, the traces of the founding elements of myth could be found through palaeontological analysis of the language and especially rich sources were folk tales, songs and popular dramatic forms. Religious themes feature prominently in Bakhtin’s narrative, most obviously in the example of clergy as perpetrators of authoritative discourse. Religious institutions were bastions of mythical thinking, translated into the authority given to sacred texts, and activities sanctioned by religious authorities. Parody and travesty formed a channel through which religious authority could be challenged and new ways of thinking, writing and speaking could be formulated. In the grand narrative the development of literature was a process of secularization, moving away from authoritative discourse to more flexible approaches that allowed for a plurality of voices. The themes on which Bakhtin focused in his examination of cultural history came together in his extensive discussions of carnival and his appropriation of carnival in his scheme of literary development. Carnival entered a new era of significance in Bakhtin’s hands as the revitalizing force of popular culture that endured through time, and brought elements of archaic life into contemporary cultural forms. Mythical consciousness is present in carnival as a creative force, but one that was subordinated in élite culture and only emerges in folk customs. Carnival is characterized by crownings and uncrownings, reversals, verbal and physical abuse and all possible expressions of the physical body especially at its most grotesque. In the development of his ideas Bakhtin drew upon anthropological and ethnographic sources that were widely available, and we concentrated here on the example of his affiliation to the work of Frazer in The Golden Bough. Bakhtin develops his theme with a discussion of the carnivalization of literature, which becomes carnivalesque in this process, and he determines that the novels of Dostoevsky are a significant example of carnivalesque literature. What makes them carnivalesque is not just the canvases on which they are painted – socially deprived areas of cities, taverns, hovels and so on – but, more importantly, Dostoevsky’s skill at incorporating multiple voices into the text. Dostoevsky’s heroes are full of anxiety and constantly refer to the possibility of other people’s opinions in their own expressions. The narratives are not told in the single voice of a narrator but in the Babel of multiple voices, jostling to be heard. In Bakhtin’s account this is the highest achievement of literary development marking the closest point at which literature can represent life.

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While religion has a significant role to play in Bakhtin’s work, this work has a twofold strategy and the second part is to look at the opportunities that Bakhtin’s work offers in the field of the study of religion. His work has been put forward as a building block for constructing new methodological approaches in the study of religion, but the claims made for Bakhtin’s work appear to be over-optimistic. Flood (1999) develops a serious and well-argued critique of methodology in the study of religion – methodology that relies on phenomenology adapted from Husserl. Other scholars in the study of religion support Flood’s contention that Husserlian phenomenology is one of the most influential strands in the theoretical underpinnings of much contemporary work. Flood’s fundamental criticism is that Husserl was a philosopher of consciousness in the Cartesian tradition, and within phenomenology there is no escape from a Cartesian ego that is singular, disembodied and makes claims to speak for all other egos. Flood posits an alternative tradition of philosophers of language, or of the sign, for whom understanding is located in language, not in an individual, and for whom cultural context and the specificities of each individual cannot be brushed away under an assumption of uniformity. Flood presents Bakhtin’s work as a solution to the problem. He refers to Bakhtin’s ideas as ‘dialogism’ and holds a view that Bakhtin’s work presents a consistent whole that can offer firm foundations for methodological applications. Flood fails to appreciate Bakhtin’s affiliations to Husserl’s phenomenology, and that Bakhtin’s claim to be a philosopher of consciousness is just as strong as his claim to be a philosopher of the sign. Flood wants to found an epistemology on dialogism but it will not carry the weight. Bakhtin’s discussions of dialogue were in a very large part directed towards literary form, and covered different varieties of multi-voiced texts. He developed the concept of polyphonic discourse in the novel, as novels can incorporate a multiplicity of voices and can also include inserted genres (diaries, letters and so on) within the novel. He also drew attention to the fact that the creation of literature relies on a vast hinterland of earlier literature that the author responds to both consciously and unconsciously. Dialogue necessarily describes discourse among human beings, and as a metaphor is stretched beyond its limits if it is used to describe interactions with objects and texts. If Bakhtin cannot provide theoretical solutions on a large canvas, his work can provide productive opportunities on a smaller scale. His concept of outsideness has been established as a central concept in his aesthetics and Flood refers to it in his work as of relevance to the study of religion. In his discussion of outsideness, Bakhtin refers back to Scheler’s ethics, where empathy felt by someone at a slight distance is more valuable than someone identifying totally with another’s feelings. Bakhtin translates this into an aesthetic scenario where the author, at a distance, gives form to the hero in an act of loving creativity. The full force of this insight is felt in his late text addressing the whole of the human sciences, when he says: In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding – in time, in space, in culture. (RQ: 7)

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For Bakhtin, the distance between the person understanding and the phenomena to be understood is central to creativity and the production of something new out of the interaction. Bakhtin’s ideas can be helpful in the current debate within the study of religion on the respective values of insider and outsider positions. The debate centres on the epistemological question of whether or not it is possible to know the interior life, thoughts, feelings and beliefs of another person, and in this case whether, in order to understand a set of religious beliefs, the observer has to be a devotee of that religion, an insider. Despite his concentration on the outsider, Bakhtin cannot be included among the social scientists taking a strong position on the outsider end of the spectrum, for whom religion can only be studied in the same way as other social phenomena through observations of behaviour. Bakhtin was interested in the interior life, as his lifelong focus on aesthetics and literature demonstrates; and his concept of outsideness contains within it empathy on Scheler’s model. Outsideness is an empathetic orientation towards the other in order to understand the other, while retaining the observer’s situated and contextual status. Bakhtin’s outsideness can be used to refine the position originally known as methodological agnosticism, following the work of Ninian Smart. Smart was the first scholar of religion to align the époché of Husserlian phenomenology with agnosticism about the truth claims of a religion under investigation. In his later work he called his method ‘Structured Empathy’ and included in it both imaginative, empathetic entering into the lives of believers with knowledge of social context, traditions and religious texts. Smart’s work has continued to be influential in the study of religion, and the phenomenological method has been characterized in the 2005 Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion as empathetic and imaginative re-experiencing of the believers’ position without making a judgement about it (Knott, 2005: 245). Bakhtinian outsideness asks for imaginative entering, followed by withdrawal and the formation of a creative synthesis from which new knowledge is formed. The concluding synthesis does not preclude making a judgement about the claims of the believers, but it does preclude harsh, unpleasant or prejudicial judgements. Bakhtin’s synthesis is an act of love and therefore incorporates emotional engagement and a positive affect towards the other. In this respect Bakhtin’s work is located within a philosophical discourse where love can be discussed without difficulty, but translating this discourse into the social sciences presents some challenges. The challenges can be overcome through the use of appropriate language, as the need for emotional warmth and respect is well established in Smart’s methodology. Does Bakhtin’s outsideness offer anything in addition to the empathetic relationship already established in methodological agnosticism? The key element added through Bakhtin’s work is the high value given to the position of the outsider as the starting point. This is a significant change of emphasis, and a contrast to a neutral, or even an apologetic, stance. Bowman’s (2004) study of Newfoundland women can be used to illustrate this point, taken from her account in the chapter in Religion: Empirical Studies. She characterizes the phenomenological method

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as ‘accurate, judgement-free reporting’ (Bowman, 2004: 3), and tends to efface herself, a key actor in the research process, from the account of her fieldwork. The impression that she gives is that she wishes to remain neutral, not only about the truth claims of the women who believe in the efficacy of St Gerard to help them in child-birth, but also about her relationships with the participants; and she remains silent on her own faith reference, her own experience of child-birth and her feelings about her research project. She does champion the value of folk religion, and her work is a contribution to strengthening the case for including folk religion alongside canonical religion in academic studies. However, her account of her fieldwork suggests that she was an engaged researcher, able to build relationships of trust with her participants, and establish her credibility with them. She comments on her experience when an older woman tried to cross her with a St Gerard medal and that the young Redemptorist priest, also subject to this attempt, ‘actively squirmed’ (Bowman, 2004: 11). She does not reveal how she responded in this situation, but the implication is that she did not squirm, and so did not reveal any inward discomfort in outward behaviour. Bowman’s account stresses her neutrality, but she could have been emboldened by Bakhtin’s outsideness to celebrate her ability to enter into empathetic relationships and to step back again to her own ground to make her professional contribution on the basis of her research. Outsideness leads to an affirmation that the distance between the researcher and research participants does not lead to inauthenticity but to fruitfulness. To implement outsideness in fieldwork could be seen as close to answering the call for the researcher to be situated and reflexive. Researchers need to be selfaware, and their own histories may lead to blind spots as well as novelty in their approaches. But taking on Bakhtin’s outsideness would mean that they need not be apologetic about their situation and context but willing to face it openly and offer their own contributions to the public domain. In the normal manner of academic discourse the work is then open to review by another researcher starting from a different point. Bakhtin’s interests lay in big themes related to the history of literature, the nature of mythical consciousness and how to identify it in contemporary culture. He paid attention to the detail of phenomenological description in the unusual field of aesthetics and this is where we find insights. However, his descriptions were more fruitful than his ability to construct theory. Some of his commentators have credited him with offering dialogue as epistemology, but this makes a claim that does not stand up to scrutiny. The failure of ‘dialogism’ to fulfil its promise does not negate the possibility that some of Bakhtin’s more detailed insights can be helpful. Bakhtin’s work is complex and the hermeneutical task of understanding him is not assisted by his casual referencing of his sources. Scholars have uncovered multiple connections between his work and that of other writers, and as Poole says ‘Bakhtin’s own sources clarify his intentions’ (Poole, 2001:109). The rich texture of Bakhtin’s ideas leads to the conclusion that there is more work to be done in this

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field and that in the future scholars will be able to shed more light on Bakhtin’s intentions and the meaning of his work through the establishment of other links. Understanding his texts will also be assisted by more editorial work becoming available and the completion of the publication of the Collected Works. Bakhtin reminds us that religion and art are closely related. In Cassirer’s model of symbolic forms they are parallel cultural forms that arose out of myth, and both still retain traces of mythical consciousness. Bakhtin was able to appropriate concepts from philosophy of religion and to aestheticize them – to apply them by analogy to art. He used the concept of divine grace as the model for the gift of aesthetic grace to a work of art by its beholder, in the aesthetic moment when the person and the artwork come together. Students of religion could perhaps consider the possibility that the process could work the other way, and that aesthetics might have insights to offer the study of religion. The study of religion has close associations with social sciences such as anthropology and ethnographic studies that are helpful in studying manifestations of religious behaviour. However, for studying belief systems and religious experience, that is to say aspects of religion that are not wholly cognitive, aesthetics might offer an alternative avenue of approach.

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Index

Aeneid (Virgil) 91 aesthetics 25, 28, 133, 138 aesthetic grace 40–41 aesthetic love 32–33 outsideness see outsideness agnosticism 1, 106, 122–25, 136 Allen, Douglas 99–100, 125 Anichkov, Evgeny 89 answerability 10, 24, 27 anthropology 85–90 art 2–3, 81, 138 artistic form 24, 33, 34 ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ (Bakhtin) 7–8, 66 aesthetic love 32–33 Christian motifs 7, 8 confession 36 grace 40–41, 41 the ‘I’ 111 love 128 outsideness 116, 126, 127 phenomenology 110 religion as philosophical domain 21, 25 self and other 8, 31 self, uniqueness of 26 three moments of the act 28 unfinalizability 34 Bakhtin and Religion (Felch and Contino, eds.) 14, 21 Bakhtin Circle 15, 20, 48, 110, 111 Bakhtin, Mikhail arrest 5 death 5 interrogations by secret police 37–38 later writing and revisions 7 overview of works 2–4 as philosopher 41–42 religion of 4–5

and Russian Religious Renaissance 4–5 turn to literature 66–67 Beard, Mary 96 Being 26–27 Bely, Andrei 13 Beyond Phenomenology (Flood) 99 bi-polar opposition 44, 53 ‘The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism’ (Bakhtin) 68 Bocharov, Sergei 6, 37–38, 38 Bowman, Marion 105, 113, 136–37 Brandist, Craig Bakhtin Circle 110, 111 Bakhtin’s affiliation to Cohen 128 Bakhtin’s mythical consciousness 44 Bakhtin’s outsideness 115 Bakhtin’s philosophy of language 67 Cassirer 48, 56, 77–78 Frank-Kamenetskij 77 Freidenberg 78, 79, 80 parodic forms 81 Russian philosophical discourse 2 Brentano, Franz 102 Bukharin, Nikolai 46, 46–47, 59 Byford, Andy 45, 46 carnival 3, 73 Bakhtin’s work 16–17, 83–85, 87–88, 134 carnivalesque literature 96–97 kingship 91, 92–93 Saturnalia 95–96 in English anthropology 85–90 Frazer’s work 88–89, 89–90, 91–92, 93–95, 96 and kingship 91–93 in literature 96–98 and Saturnalia 93–96 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl) 104

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Cassirer, Ernst 3, 43, 47, 48, 48–49, 71 causality 51–52 concepts 53 dialectical orientation 55–56 empirical thought 50–51 Frank-Kamenetskij’s writing on 77–78 Hegel’s influence on 54–56 influence on Bakhtin’s work 48 myth and language 57–58 myth and religion 62 mythical thought 50, 51–52, 53–54 phenomenology 56 stages of consciousness 56 symbolic forms 49–50, 53, 55–56, 138 causality 46, 51–52 Cena Cypriani 76 Chalcedonian formula 9, 10, 11, 14, 132 Christ dual nature of 9, 11, 132 as three moments of the act 28 Christian terminology 14 Bakhtin’s use of 7–9, 13–14, 28–29, 132 dual nature of Christ 9–12 to illustrate philosophical points 8–9 Logos/Word 12–13 in parodic travesty 75–76, 76 Trinity 9–12 Clark, Katerina 4, 5, 7, 15 Coates, Ruth 5, 8–9, 132 Cohen, Hermann 19–20, 22–24, 29–30, 34–35, 47 influence on Bakhtin’s work 29–30, 34, 126, 128, 131, 133 compassion 26, 29–30, 30 The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (Cohen) 19 confession 3, 8, 33, 35–40, 133 consciousness 13, 24, 49–50, 56, 102–4, 116 mythical see mythical consciousness in parodic travesty 75 philosophies of 105, 107, 110 sensory 54–55 Contino, Paul 14 Corporeal Words (Mihailovic) 9 Cox, James L. 102, 103–4, 104, 122, 124, 125

culture 3, 57, 72, 85, 86–87, 116–17, 134 Derrida, Jacques 105 The Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin) 65 dialogism 48, 135 critique of Flood’s argument 110–14 Flood’s argument for 107–10 Dialogism (Holquist) 99, 110 discourse 134 academic 113 authoritative 43, 57, 60–61 mythical/religious 62, 113–14 novelistic 35–36, 57, 59–60, 61, 68–70, 74 parodic 74–75, 75–76, 113 poetic 59–60, 61 see also dialogism ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (Bakhtin) 43, 47 authoritative word 60, 61 dialogue 112–13 heteroglossia 48, 59 internal dialogization 58–59 language and myth 56, 58, 114 myth and religion 62 mythical consciousness 44 poetry vs. prose 61 treatment of words 113 unitary language 58 the Word 12 doctrine of survivals 86, 87–88 dogma 24 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 6 Bakhtin’s works on Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art 37, 67, 84 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics 11, 35–36, 83, 84, 91, 95, 97 Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book 14 carnival 91, 95, 97, 134 confession 35–36 plurality 10–11 Duvakin, Viktor 48 Dwyer, Rachel 100 Eliade, Mircea 100, 119, 120, 121 Emerson, Caryl 1, 6, 14, 84–85, 115 emic approach 118, 120, 124

emotional-volitional attitude 27 empathy 30, 31–32, 104, 105 Bakhtin’s work 32, 33, 125–29 Cox’s work 125 Scheler’s work 31, 32, 126–27 Smart’s work 122–24, 136 English Literature and the Russian Aesthetic Renaissance (Polonsky) 89 Enlightenment 68 époché 103, 104–5, 122, 136 Essay on Man (Cassirer) 62 ethics 2, 8, 10, 14, 24, 29–30 and God 22, 23 Ethics of Pure Will (Cohen) 30 etic approach 118, 122, 124 F. Rabelais and the History of Realism (Bakhtin) 83–84 faith 4, 8, 14–15 Felch, Susan 14, 21 festivals 79–80, 91–92 Saturnalia 88, 93–96 see also carnival The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin (Emerson) 6, 84, 115 Fitzgerald, Timothy 100, 124–25 Flood, Gavin 1, 99, 99–100 dialogism 107–10, 135 critique of Flood 110–14 indeterminism 101 metatheory 100–101 outsideness 117, 135 phenomenology 103, 104–5, 105–7, 135 folklore 81, 87, 89, 134, 137 carnival 88, 96 novelistic discourse 68–69 parody 77, 79 form 24–25 Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Scheler) 20 Frank-Kamenetskij, Izrail’ 70, 77–78 Frazer, James George 17, 83, 86, 87, 88–90, 96, 134 kingship and carnival 91–92, 93 Saturnalia and carnival 93–95 Freidenberg, Ol’ga 70, 77, 78–81

Frings, Manfred S. 31 ‘From Notes Made in 1970–71’ (Bakhtin) 13, 65, 72, 73, 73–74, 112 ‘From Phenomenology to Dialogue’ (Poole) 31–32 ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ (Bakhtin) 65 folk culture 68–69 laughter 74 parody 74–75, 75–76, 76, 77 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 102 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais) 92, 93 genres, history of 65, 72–73, 74, 133–34 God in Bakhtin’s work 7, 8, 24, 28, 36–37 in Cohen’s work 23, 30 in Kant’s work 22 in Scheler’s work 39 and self-other relationships 7, 8, 28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 68, 133 The Golden Bough (Frazer) 87, 88–89, 91, 93–94, 96, 134 grace 8, 40–41, 133, 138 Grimm, Joseph 45 Gumilev, Nikolay 13 Hegel, Georg W.F. 48, 54–56 Heraclitus 12 hermeneutic tradition 102 Herodotus 12 heteroglossia 48, 59 Hintikka, Jaako 102, 103 Hirschkop, Ken 6, 30, 33, 66–67, 97, 111–12 Historical Materialism (Bukharin) 46 Holquist, Michael 4, 5, 7, 15, 99, 110 Husserl, Edmund 1, 30–31, 99, 102–7, 135 the ‘I’ 26–33, 109, 111, 125–26 see also outsideness ‘The Idea of Parody’ (Freidenberg) 78, 79 The Idea of the Holy (Otto) 119 The Ideology of Religious Studies (Fitzgerald) 124–25 Image and Concept (Freidenberg) 78 insider/outsider problem 115, 118–19, 136

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agnosticism and empathy 122–25 insider position and autonomy 119–20 outside position and reductionism 121–22 and outsideness 117–18 through Bakhtin’s empathy 128–29 interpenetration 9, 10, 11–12, 132 intersubjectivity 3, 26–33, 101, 104, 107, 108, 109 Kagan, Matvei 15, 19 Kant, Immanuel 19, 22, 49, 131 Khomiakov, Alexsei 11–12 kingship 91–93 Knott, Kim 117, 118, 124 knowledge Bakhtin’s dialogism 107, 109 Bakhtin’s outsideness 126, 128 Cassirer’s work 51, 53, 55 Cohen’s work 22–23 Flood’s work 101 Hegel’s work 55 Marburg school’s concept of 34 Krois, John Michael 56 Kumar, P. Pratap 120 Lähteenmäki, Mika 49 Lang, Andrew 87 language Bakhtin’s use of 20–21 development of 69, 70–72 heteroglossia 48, 59 internal dialogization of words 58–59 and myth 43, 47–48, 52–54, 56–62, 134 philosophy of 12–13 polyglossia 74 and reality 74–75 and representation 74, 105–6 unitary 58–59 see also dialogism; discourse Language and Myth (Cassirer) 52, 53 laughter 16, 74, 76–77, 80, 83, 134 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 46, 71, 127 Liapunov, Vadim 22 Lipton, David R. 54, 55 literary science, Russian 45–47 literature

Bakhtin’s turn to 3, 66–67, 133 carnivalesque 96–98, 134 and cultural history 69–70 and freedom 62 genre 72–73 history of 45–46, 81–82, 133–34 and religion 65 secularization of 65, 73–77, 81–82, 134 live-entering (vzhivanie) 109, 127–28 Lock, Charles 84 Logos/Word 11, 12–13 love 8, 30, 32–33, 126, 128, 129, 136 magic 52, 62, 89–90 Marburg neo-Kantians 19, 47–49, 132 Marr, Nikolai Iakovlevich 70–73, 78, 85, 87 Marrism in Bakhtin’s work 72–73 Marxism and the philosophy of Language (Volosinov) 109 Matthews, W.K. 70 McCutcheon, Russell T. 115, 118, 119 Meier, Aleksandr 11 Meletinsky, Eleazar M. 12 Melikhova, L.S. 38 Mennipean satire 97 metalinguistics 13, 72–73 Mihailovic, Aleksandr 2, 6, 84 Bakhtin’s use of the theological terms 9–10, 11–12, 13–14, 132 Moss, Kevin 78–79, 80 Müller, Max 52–53 myth 12, 65, 67–68 Bakhtin’s work 44–45, 82, 133 myth and language 43, 47–48, 56–62, 75, 134 myth and religion 62, 114, 134 Bukharin’s work 46–47 Cassirer’s work 49–54, 54–55, 57–58 Freidenberg’s work 81 Müller’s work 52–53 and ritual 85–86 mythical consciousness 43, 44–45, 51, 56, 133, 134, 138 and language 58, 60–61 secularization of 67–70, 133 narrative theory 107–8 Natorp, Paul 26, 47, 52

The Nature of Sympathy (Scheler) 20, 31 Nikolaev, Nikolai 19–20, 21, 34, 66 the novel 16, 44, 67, 73, 74 emergence from folk culture 68–69 heteroglossia 48, 59 language liberated from myth 61–62 novelistic discourse 35–36, 57, 59–60, 61, 68–70, 74 parody 76 polyglossia 74, 135 struggles of human history 69 On the Eternal in Man (Scheler) 20, 38 ‘The Origin of Parody’ (Freidenberg) 79 Otto, Rudolf 119, 120 outsideness 3, 115–16, 125–28, 135–37 in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ 116 and insider/outsider debate 117–18 in ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’ 116–17 Pals, Daniel 121–22 parody 16, 133–34 Bakhtin and Freidenberg compared/ contrasted 80–81 Bakhtin’s work 74–77, 82, 97 Freidenberg’s work 78–80 patristics 60 Pechey, Graham 7, 21, 29, 116 Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hegel) 54–55 phenomenalism 102–3 phenomenology 1, 31, 102–7, 122–24, 135 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer) 47, 48, 49, 54 Pike, Kenneth 118 Plato 12 plurality 9–12 The Poetics of Plot and Genre (Freidenberg) 78, 79 poetry 57, 58, 59, 60, 60–61 Polonsky, Rachel 89 polyglossia 74 Poma, Andrea 22–23, 23–24, 30, 34 Poole, Brian 20, 31, 31–32, 48, 110, 137 Potebnia, Aleksandr Afanas’evich 12–13, 45, 47–48 Primitive Culture (Tylor) 86

‘The Problem of Grounded Peace’ (Bakhtin) 24–25 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (Bakhtin) 37, 67, 84 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin) 11, 35–36, 83, 84, 91, 95, 97 Pumpianskii, Lev 21, 22, 24–25 Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin) 78, 84, 87–88, 92, 93, 95 Rabelais, François 83, 93, 133 redemption 12, 33, 35–40, 133 reductionism 121–22 religion 1, 4 and art 81, 138 and carnival 88 development of 46, 65, 90 Kantian philosophy of 22–24 Kant’s concentric circles 131 and magic 90 and myth 62 as object domain of philosophy 21–26 and parody 79 as philosophical domain 25–26 study of 1, 99–100 dialogism 107–14 insider/outsider problem see insider/outsider problem phenomenology 102–7, 135, 136–37 sociological vs. theological 100 see also myth Religion (Bowman) 136–37 Religion of Reason (Cohen) 19, 23, 30 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant) 22 Religionwissenschaft (Wach) 120 repentance 3, 33, 37, 38–40 ‘Repentance and Rebirth’ (Scheler) 34–35, 38–39 Researches into the Early History of Mankind (Tylor) 86 ‘Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff’ (Bakhtin) 69–70, 72, 73, 116–17, 135 responsibility 2, 10, 24 ritual 31, 76, 79, 80, 85–86

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see also carnival Robertson Smith, William 85–86, 87 The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion (Knott) 117, 124, 136 Russian Orthodox theology 6, 9–10, 13–14, 84–85, 132 Russian Religious Renaissance 4–5 Saturnalia 76, 83, 88, 91, 93–96 Scheler, Max 20 Bakhtin’s lectures on 37 confession and repentance 37, 38–40 empathy 31, 32, 126–27, 128–29 influence on Bakhtin’s work 31–33, 37–40, 133 unfinalizability 34–35 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 119 science 54–55, 90, 104, 113 Segal, Robert 121 Seifrid, Thomas 13 self-other relationships 7, 9–12, 109, 110–11 Cohen’s philosophy 29–30 confession 36–37 Cox’s construction 125 empathy 31–32, 126–27 Flood’s construction 109 and God 7, 8, 28 grace 40–41 Husserl’s phenomenology 104 love 8, 32–33, 126 outsideness see outsideness Scheler’s philosophy 31, 126–27 three moments of the act 20, 25, 27–29, 30, 42, 125–26, 132 Shakespeare, William 72–73 Shklovskii, Viktor 13 Shpet, Gustav 12 sign, philosophies of the 48, 99, 107, 110, 111 Slezkine, Yuri 72 slovo 12, 13 Smart, Ninian 101, 122–24, 136 sobornost’ 11–12 Sokolov, Y.M. 88–89 Solovyev, Vladimir 11 Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Bakhtin) 65

St Augustine of Hippo 9 stylistics 65 subjectivity 26, 30, 106 suffering 29–30, 31 theology 11, 12, 13–14, 84–85, 100, 124–25 see also Christian terminology; religion Thomas, Lawrence 71 three moments of the act 20, 25, 27–29, 30, 42, 109, 125–26, 132 Tihanov, Galin 78, 85 Toward a Philosophy of the Act (Bakhtin) Being 26, 27 Chalcedonian argument 10 emotional-volitional attitude 27 ethics 2 religion as philosophical domain 21, 25 self, uniqueness of 26 three moments of the act 28, 125 truth 27 Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book (Bakhtin) 14 travesty 16, 74–76, 133–34 the Trinity 9, 132 truth 12, 27 Truth and Method (Gadamer) 102 Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett 86–87 unconsummatedness 34, 36 unfinalizability 33–35, 133 unity in diversity 9–10 Usener, Hermann 52 utterance 109 Verene, Donald Philip 54, 55, 56 Veselovskii, Aleksandr N. 45, 47–48, 71, 89 Veselovskii, Aleksei 45–46 Volosinov, Valentin Nikolaevich 15, 38, 48–49, 78–79, 109 vzhivanie (live-entering) 109, 127–28 Wach, Joachim 120 Wall, Anthony 111 Wiebe, Donald 121 Word/Logos 11, 12–13

words authoritative 60–61 internal dialogization of 58–59, 112–13 novelistic 69–70 in parodic travesty 74–75

sacred 73–74 treatment of 113 Wundt, Wilhelm 46 Wyman, Alina 29, 32, 127–28, 128 Zene, Cosimo 100