The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

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THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION Four Essays by M. M. BAKHTIN Edited by Michael Holquist Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN

Copyright © 1981 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. The dialogic imagination. (University of Texas Press Slavic series; no. r) Translation of Voprosy literatury i estetiki. Includes index.

r. Fiction-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Literature­ Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Holquist, J. Michael. II. Title. ill. Series. PN333I.B2SI3 8or' 953 80-15450 · ISBN 0-292-71527-7 ISBN 0-292-71534-X (pbk.)

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78712. Second Paperback Print-' --

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The publication of this volume was assisted in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency whose mission is to award grants to support education, scholarship, me­ dia programming, libraries, and museums in order to bring the results of cultural activities to the general public. Preparation was made possible

in part by a grant from the Translations Program of the endowment.

Dedication

There is nothing more fragile than the word, and Bakhtin's was almost lost. This translation is dedicated to those devoted Rus­ sian scholars who gave so generously of themselves to Mikhail Mikhailovich the man and to the cause of preserving dialogue.

C O NTENTS

Acknowledgments

[xi]

A Note on Translation Introduction

[xiii]

[xv]

Epic and Novel

[3]

From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse

[41]

Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel [84] Discourse in the Novel Glossaiy

[423]

Index [435]

[259]

A CK N OWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due first of all to the Executors of the Bakhtin A:r.­ chives, Vadim. Kozinov and Sergej Bocorov. Their devotion to Bakhtin is matched only by their generosity toward those who would study him. To I. R. Titunik we owe a special debt of grati­ tude. He read large parts of the first draft of this translation and if, as we hope, there were improvements in subsequent drafts, it is because we constandy had his image before us, the threat of one of his red-penciled "ughs" or "cute, but wrong, utterly wrong" in the margin. The high standard of scholarship as well as translation that he has established in his own work was a con­ stant inspiration to us. He did not see the final version and there­ fore cannot be charged with any inaccuracies, all of which are our own responsibility. Thanks also to the many scholars from vari­ ous departments who helped us in the task of identifying some of Bakhtin's more recherche examples: to Millicent Marcus in Ital­ ian; Robert Hill in French; James Wimsatt, Medievalist, in En­ glish; Robert Mollenauer in German; Michael Gagarin and Carl Rubino in Classics, all of the University of Texas. Thanks also to Vadim Liapunov of the Slavic Department, Indiana University, to whom we turned when all else failed. We are grateful as well to Uya Levin and Sofia Nikonova who played the role of native speakers, with resource and wit. Preparation of the manuscript was particularly complex due to the many languages, two sets of footnotes and so forth. We could not have done it without Elaine Hamilton. The person who has borne with this for three years now and still had the patience and dedication to come in on weekends when it was necessary to re­ type yet another version of some arcane passage is Gianna Kirtley. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the University Research Institute at the University of Texas provided generous grants to support this translation.

(:xii)

ACKN OWLEDGMENTS

This book is also a sponsored activity of the Institute of Mod­ ern Russian Culture at Blue Lagoon, Texas. Thanks as always to Katerina Clark, who was ready to give help whenever it was needed, whether it was a technical term in Rus­ sian or a word of encouragement in English. Thanks to Snugli Cottage Industries. Thanks finally to the anonymous donor whose Medician gesture made not only this book but the whole series in which it appears possible.

A N O TE O N TRA N S LATION

The IPA transcription system is used in this book, except in those cases where a word or a name has entered general English usage via· another system {i.e., Bakhtin, not Baxtin). Bakhtin's footnotes are indicated by superscript numbers; the editor's footnotes are indicated by superscript letters. This book contains four essays that originally appeared in Voprosy-li.t.u.at.u.r.y-t-�. {Mo��_gw, !215 ). Two additional es­ says are not included here, beCaiise they either have already been translated into English or do not bear direcdy on the theme unify­ ing the other four, the novel and its .relation to languase. The 11Translator's Note" to non-Russian versions of Bakhtin's works has become a genre in its own right. More often than not, the peculiarity of Bakhtin's Russian is invoked to justify a certain awkwardness in the translated text. We believe the matter is more complicated . Bakhtin himself provides the best context for perceiving the true nature of the problem in the distinction he draws between 11§tyle" and "language"-especially as it pertains to the 11image of a lang:u��.:.'' We have sought to make a transla­ tion at the level of images of a whole language (obraz jazyka). The translations are complete. Bakhtin is not an efficient writer, but we believe he pays his way. *

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Since junior members of team projects frequendy receive less credit than is their due, I wish to emphasize that this translation is the result of a real dialogue: Caryl Emerson and I went over every word of Bakhtin's text together.

MICHAEL HOLQUIST

INTRO D U CTIO N

I Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin is gradually emerging as one of

the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. This claim will strike many as extravagant, since a number of factors have until recently conspired to obscure his importance. Beyond the diffi­ culties usually attending the careers of powerful but eccentric thinkers, there are, in Bakhtin's case, complications that are unique. Some of these inhere in his times: his two most produc­ tive periods occurred during the darkest years of recent Russian history: the decade following 1917, when the country reeled un­ der the combined effects of a lost war, revolution, civil war and famine; and the following decade, the thirties, when Bakhtin was in exile in Kazakhstan, and most of the rest of Russia was hud­ dling through the long Stalinist night. It was in these years that Bakhtin wrote something on the order of nine large books on top­ ics as major and varied as Freud, Marx and the philosophy of lan­ guage. Only one of these I the Dostoevsky book) appeared under his own name during these years. Three others were published under different names (see section ill of this introduction); some were partially lost during his forced moves; some disappeared when the Nazis burned down the publishing house that had ac­ cepted his large manuscript on the Erziehungsroman; some were "delayed" forty-one years in their publication when journals that had accepted manuscripts were shut down, as happened to the Russian Contemporary in 1924; others, such as the Rabelais book, were considered too aberrant for publication, due to their emphasis on sex and body functions I see section II of this introduction). Another factor that has clouded perception of the scope of Bakhtin's activity in the anglophone world,· at least, is the tradi-

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INTRO DUC TI O N

tion in which h e was working. H e was trained as a classicist dur­ ing a period when the German model of philology dominated Russian universities; thus he inherited a certain heaviness of style and a predilection for abstraction that English or American readers, accustomed to a more essayistic prose, sometimes find heavy going. Bakhtin's style, while recognizably belonging to a Russian tradition of scholarly prose, is, nevertheless, highly idio­ syncratic. Language in his texts works somewhat as language does in the novel, the geme that obsessed him all his life: according to Ian Watt ( The Rise of the Novel), "the geme itself works by exhaustive presentation rather than by elegant concentration." The more we know about Bakhtin's life, the clearer it becomes that he was a supreme eccentric, of an order the Russians express better than we in their word cudak, which has overtones of such intense strangeness that it borders on cudo, a wonder. And this peculiarity is reflected not only in the strange history of his texts (why, ultimately, did he publish under so many namesn but in his style as well, if one may speak of a single style for one who was so concerned with "other-voicedness." Russians immedi­ ately sense this strangeness: again and again when we have gone to native speakers with questions about a peculiar usage of a fa­ miliar word or an unfamiliar coinage, the Russians have thrown up their hands or shaken their heads and smiled ruefully. Another difficulty the reader must confront is the unfamiliar shadings Bakhtin gives to West European cultural history. He tends to ignore the available chapterization into familiar periods and -isms. It is not so much Periclean Athens or Augustan Rome that attracts him as it is the vagaries of the Hellenistic age. He is preoccupied by centuries usually ignored by others; and within these, he has great affection for figures who are even more obscure. A peculiar school of grammarians at Toulouse in the sev­ enth century A.D. may appear to others as an obscure group work­ ing in a backwater during the darkest of the Dark Ages; for Bakhtin the work of these otherwise almost forgotten men con­ stitutes an extremely important chapter in the human struggle to accommodate the mysteries of human language. He keeps re­ turning to the Carolingian Revival or the interstitial periods be­ tween the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. When he does cite a familiar period, he often tends to isolate an otherwise obscure fig­ ure within it-thus his focusing on Pigres of Halicarnassus or Ion of Chios among the Greeks, on Varro among the Romans; when

INTRODUC T I O N

(:xvii)

dealing with the nineteenth century, it is the relatively un­ familiar Wezel or Musaus he cites. Bakhtin throws a weird light on our received models of intel­ lectual history. It is as if he set out to camivalize-to use a verb that has become modishly transitive due to his own work on Rabelais-the normal periods and figures we use to define the re­ lay of culture. Clearly, one could make such a perverse undertak­ ing pay its way only if possessed of two prerequisites: enormous learning and a theory capable of sustaining a balance between such an aberrant history and more conventional historical models. Of Bakhtin's preternatural erudition there can be no doubt-he belongs to the tradition that produced Spitzer, Curtius, Auerbach and, somewhat later, Rene Wellek. Many times when we have consulted specialists in the various fields from which Bakhtin so easily draws his recherche examples, it was only to be told that such and such a work did not exist, or, if it did, it was not "charac­ teristic." A few days later, however, after some more digging or thinking, the same specialist would call to say that indeed there was such a work, and, although little known even to most ex­ perts, it was the most precisely correct text for illustrating the point Bakhtin sought to make by invoking it. He has, then, a knowledge of West European civilization de­ tailed enough to permit him to use traditional accounts as a di­ alogizing background to sustain the counter-model he will pro­ pose. And that counter-model is motivated by a theory that can rationalize not only its own subversions, but the effects of main­ stream traditions as well. I say theory and not system-the two do not always go hand in hand-because Bakhtin's motivating idea is in its essence op­ posed to any strict formalization. Other commentators, such as Tsvetan Todorov in a forthcoming book devoted to Bakhtin, have seen this as a weakness in his work. They have come to this con­ clusion, I believe, because they bring to Bakhtin's work expecta­ tions based on the kind of thinking characteristic of other major theorists who engage the same issues as Bakhtin. Bakhtin is constantly working with what is emerging as the central preoccupation of our time-language. But unlike others who have made substantial contributions to our understanding of language in the twentieth century-Saussure, Hjelmslev, Ben­ veniste and, above all, Roman Jakobsen (all of whom·are system-

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INTRO DUCTI O N

atic to an extraordinary degree)-Bakhtin is not. If you expect a Jakobsonian order of systematicalness in Bakhtin, you are bound to be frustrated. This does not mean, however, that he is without a peculiar rigor of his own. It is rather that his concept of lan­ guage stands in relation to others lof the sort that occupy lin­ guists) much as the novel stands in opposition to other, more for­ malized genres. That is, ��Ju.wel-as Bakhtin more than anyone else has taught us to see-do_es not lack its organizing princi�, bJJ.! th.�!-��of a_Q!tf�J,:e�� O!� from those regulating so�ets� odes. It may be said Jakobson works with poetry because lie has a Pushkinian love of order; )B"iltl in, on the contrary, loves novels because he is a baggy monster.J At the heart of everything Bakhtin ever did-from what we know of his very earliest !lost) manuscripts to the very latest I still unpublished) work-is a J&ghly.Jll_�.tinctive c.oncept 9f la�guage. The conception has as its enabling a priori an almost Manichean sense of opposition and struggle at the heart of existencefaceaseless battle between centrifugal forces that seek to keep things apart, and centripetal forces that strive to make things cohere. ; This Zoroastrian clash is present in culture as well as nature, and in the specificity of individual consciousness; it is at work in the even greater particularity of individual utterances. The most complete and complex reflection of these forces is found in human language, and the best transcription of language so und�r­ stood is the novel. Two things must immediately be added here. First, while lan­ guage does serve to reflect this struggle, it is no passive stuff, no mere yielding clay. Language itself is no less immune from the effects of the struggle than anything else. Its nature as a system is even more fraught with the contest, which m� be why it oc­ cupies so central a place in the activity of mind \J:Sakhtin, need it be said, is not working in this dichotomy of forces with the kind of binary opposition that has proved so important in structuralist linguistics land so seductive to social scientists and humanists lusting for a greater degree of systematicalness). That opposition leads from human speech to computer language; it conduces, in other words, to machine Bakhtin's sense of a duel between more widely implicated forces leads in the opposite direction and stresses the fragility and ineluctably historical nature of lan­ guage, the coming and dying of meaning that it, as a phenome­ non, shares with that other phenomenon it ventriloquates, man. \

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INTRODUCTI O N

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Secondly, language must not be understood in these essays in the restricted sense in which it occupies professional linguists. As Bakhtin says lin "Discourse in the Novel"), "At any given mo­ ment . . . a language is stratified not only into dialects in the strict sense of the word ji. e., dialects that are set off according to formal linguistic [especially phonetic] markers), but is . . . strat­ ified as well into languages that are socio-ideological: languages belonging to professions, to genres, languages peculiar to particu­ lar generations, etc. This stratification and diversity of speech [ raznorecivost'] will spread wider and penetrate to ever deeper levels so long as a language is alive and still in the process of becoming." The two contending tendencies are not of equal force, and each has a different kind of reality attaching to itt cent�..!�:K�Jorce�7are clearly more powerful and ubiquitous-theiis is the r�W-�f ac­ tual articulation. They are always in praesentia; they determine the way we actually �xperience language as we use it-and are used by it-in the dense particularity of our everyday lives. Uni­ fying, centripetal forces are less powerful and have a complex on­ tological status. eir relation to centrifugal operations is akin to the interworking that anthropologists nominate as the activity of culture in modeling a completely different order called nat� As Bakhtin say.s jagain in "Discourse"): "A unitary language is not something that is given [dan], but is in its very e�sence some­ thing that must be posited [zadan]-at every momen,t in the life of a language it opposes the realities of heteroglossia [ raznorecie], but at the same time the [sophisticated] ideal [or primitive delu­ sion] of a single, holistic language makes the actuality of its pres­ ence felt as a force resisting an absolute heteroglot .state; it posits definite boundaries for limiting the potential chaos of variety, thus guaranteeing a more or less maximal mutual understanding. .. ." The term Bakhtin uses here, "heteroglossia" [ raznorecie), is a master trope at the heart of all his other projects, one more funda­ mental than such other categories associated with his thought as "polyphony" or "carnivalization." These are but two specific ways in which the primary condition of heteroglossia manifests itself. Heteroglossia is Bakhtin's way of referring, in any utter­ ance of any kind, to the peculiar interaction between the two fun­ damentals of all communication. On the one hand, a mode of transcription must, in order to do its work of separating out texts, be a more or less fiXed system. But these repeatable features, on

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I N T R O DUC TI O N

the other hand, are i n the power of the particular context in which the utterance is made; this context can refract, add to, or, in some cases, even subtract from the amount and kind of mean­ ing the utterance may be said to have when it is conceived only as a systematic manifestation independent of context. This ext!aor�� �en!!tivity to the immense pJ�ality of_g­ ence more than anything else distinguishes Bakhtin from o er modems who have been obsessed with language. I empha­ size experience here because Bakhtin's basic scenario for model­ ing variety is two actual people talking to each other in a specific dialogue at a particular time and in a particular place. But these persons would not confront each other as sovereign egos capable of sending messages to each other through the kind of unclut­ tered space envisioned by the artists who illustrate most receiver­ sender models of communication. Rather, each of the two per­ sons would be a consciousness at a specific point in the history of defining itself through the choice it has made-out of all the pos­ sible existing languages available to it at that moment-of a dis­ course to transcribe its intention in this specific exchange. The two will, like everyone else, have been hom into an en­ vironment in which the air is already aswarm with names. Their development as individuals-and in this Bakhtin's thought paral­ lels in suggestive ways that of Vygotsky in Russia (see Emerson, 1978) and Lacan in France (see Bruss, in Titunik's translation of Volosinov's Freudianism, 1976)-will have been prosecuted as a gradual appropriation of a specific mix of discourses that are capa­ ble of best mediating their own intentions, rather than those which sleep in the words they use before they use them. Thus each will seek, by means of intonation, pronunciation, lexical choice, gesture, and so on, to send out a message to the other with a minimum of interference from the otherness constituted by pre-existing meanings (inhering in dictionaries or ideologies) and the otherness of the intentions present in the other person in the dialogue. Implicit in all this is the notion that all transcription systems­ including the speaking voice in a living utterance-are inadequate to the multiplicity of the meanings they seek to convey. My voice gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact, constantly expressing a plenitude of meanings, some intended, others of which I am unaware. (There is in this obsession with voice and speech a parallel with the attempts of two important recent

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I N T R O DUC T I O N

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thinkers-both in other ways very different from Bakhtin-to come to grips with the way intimacy with our own voice conduces to the illusion of presence: Husser! in the Logical Investigations and Derrida in his 1967 essay "Speech and Phenomenon/') It is the need to confront this multiplicity in a principled way that impels Bakhtin to coin some of his more outre terms !the word "heteroglossia" itself, "word-with-a-loophole,""�­ with-a-sidewards-glance�' "intonational quotation marks" and so forth). He uses these rather than the more conventional terminol­ ogy we associate with a linguistic concern for language first of all because traditional linguistics has taken little heed of the prob­ lem of alterity in language. Bakhtin, like_Aystin jHow to Do Things with Words, 1962),�� ( Speech Acts, 1969) and par­ ticularly Grice jthe legendary but still unpublished 1967 James lectures O'ii'fu� !9tow:l�d� qf.philo�gp);l,y, �spe