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Mikhail Bakhtin’s Discourse Typologies: Theoretical and Practical Considerations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Lewis Bagby
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Extract

All layers seemed to hover near the surface, dark ghosts scratching through the faded blush of roses.

The Lynchers, John Wideman

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1898-1975) is currently one of the most respected thinkers in Soviet literary criticism of the twentieth century. His compendious knowledge of world literature, his sensitivity to difference and historical continuity in art, and his ability to formulate precisely the opaque relationships between the author, his text, and his reader indicate a genius that is enviable and perhaps inimitable.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Spring 1982 , pp. 35 - 58
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1982

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References

1. For a discussion of Bakhtin's influence on the Prague School of linguistics and structuralism, see I. R. Titunik, “The Formal Method and the Sociological Method (M. M. Bakhtin, P. N. Medvedev, V. N. Voloshinov) in Russian Theory and Study of Literature,” Voloshinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka and Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, Inc., 1973), pp. 175–200 Google Scholar; I. R. Titunik, “M. M. Baxtin (The Baxtin School) and Soviet Semiotics,” Dispositio: Revista Hispanica de Semiotica Literaria, 1, no. 3 (1976); V. V. Ivanov, “The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin's Ideas on Sign, Utterance, and Dialogue for Modern Semiotics,” Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, ed. Henryk Baran (White Plains, 1976), pp. 310-67; and Dmitri, Segal, Aspects of Structuralism in Soviet Philology, Papers on Poetics and Semiotics, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv, 1974), p. 1974 Google Scholar.

2. An examination of the competence of Bakhtin's discourse typologies in practical terms is presented in Lewis Bagby, “Narrative Double-Voicing in Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time,” Slavic and East European Journal, 22, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 265-86. In this article I expand the test of competence beyond the finite discourse of one text (Lermontov's novel) to incorporate selected passages from the entire corpus of one author (a significantly greater quantity of material than in Lermontov's novel, nonetheless finite in its own right).

3. Bakhtin, M. M., Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad, 1929)Google Scholar. This study became internationally recognized as a major contribution to scholarship on Dostoevskii upon its reedited publication under the title Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Moscow, 1963). This volume appears in English as Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis Press, 1973). All excerpts are from the translation.

4. The Bakhtin School was headed by Bakhtin and its “membership included P. N. Medvedev and V. N. Voloshinov” (Titunik, “The Formal Method,” p. 176). The group is discussed at some length in Medvedev, P. N., The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans, and intro. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. ix-xxiiiGoogle Scholar.

5. Although the studies relating to each of these topics are not all under Bakhtin's name, it is held by V. V. Ivanov that Bakhtin was actually the author of Voloshinov's Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. Titunik (New York, 1976) and Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, as well as Medvedev's The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Ivanov, “Significance of Bakhtin's Ideas,” p. 366). Titunik holds a more cautious view of Bakhtin's authorship, allowing that Bakhtin's imprint on these works is unmistakable, “M. M. Baxtin (The Baxtin School),” pp. 329-30, footnote 6. Wehrle, in his introduction to The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, defends Ivanov's position at least for the Medvedev text (to which he appends Bakhtin's name as coauthor) ( Medvedev, , Formal Method, p. xGoogle Scholar).

6. The historical context out of which Bakhtin's ideas arose, Bakhtin's anticipation of key concepts in structuralism and semiotics, and the subject of dialogic relationships in language and art have been the focal point of most discussions of Bakhtin's contribution to literary theory and criticism. No systematic attempt has as yet been made to understand the connections between such disparate works by Bakhtin as the philosophically oriented “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'- nosti,” Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1979), pp. 7-180 and “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane. Ocherki po istoricheskoi poetiki,” Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow, 1975), pp. 234-407, to mention but two examples.

7. Bakhtin, , Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 151 Google Scholar. Bakhtin asserts, “In language as the subject matter of linguistics there are and can be no dialogical relationships; they are possible neither among elements in a system of language (among words in a dictionary, among morphemes, etc.), nor among elements of a ‘text’ in a strictly linguistic approach…. Linguistics of course recognizes the compositional form of ‘dialogical speech’ and studies its syntactic and lexico-semantic characteristics. But it studies them as purely linguistic phenomena, i.e., in the plane of language, and is quite incapable of treating the specifics of dialogical relationships between speeches (repliki).” Bakhtin calls the discipline which examines the dialogic phenomena of speech “metalinguistics,” claiming that “when studying 'dialogical speech, ’ linguistics must utilize the results of metalinguistics” (ibid., p. 151).

8. Roman, Jakobson, “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1960), pp. 353, 357Google Scholar, discusses these communications elements in literary theory. Iurii Lotman has suggested alterations in Jakobson's scheme in order to appreciate more fully how information is transmitted within a culture (Lotman, “O dvukh modeliakh kommunikatsii v sisteme kul'tury,” Tartuskii gosudarstvennyi universitet, Uchenye zapiski, Trudy po znakovym sistemam, vol. 6 (Tartu, 1973), pp. 227-43. It is not my purpose to discuss the differences between the respective paradigms of these two scholars; Jakobson's simplified categories quite adequately represent the model necessary for our discussion of Bakhtin's discourse typologies within aesthetic “communication” systems.

9. This aspect of Bakhtin's theory of the enriched “word” in dialogic relationships has been overlooked in Bakhtin commentary. Yet a resolution of the problem of rhetorical relations, so crucial to the critical enterprise, is inherent in Bakhtin's system. In allowing for clear and precise divisions and combinations of each facet of the rhetorical configuration, Bakhtin resolves a “metacritical” problem in an era which simultaneously demands scientific exactitude and definition of meaningfulness in art. At this level of abstraction, Bakhtin was unequivocal in arguing that “exactness” necessarily falls below “profundity” in a humanistically determined hierarchy of principles for the profession ( Bakhtin, M. M., “K metodologii literaturovedeniia,” Kontekst (Moscow, 1974), pp. 203–12 Google Scholar.

10. The homophonic text was characteristic of most nineteenth-century writers, except Dostoevskii, whose novels are polyphonic. In borrowing a term from symphonic composition, Bakhtin attempted to identify the kind of narrative in which points of view resist reduction to a single (authoritative) position (Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 3-6, 9, 14, 22-23). The homophonic (or monological) narrative represents discourse and points of view which may be reduced to the “author's” ideological position. Through the discourse typologies Bakhtin was able to explicate the intricacies of Dostoevskii's style in and through which mutually exclusive ideological positions, philosophical dispositions, existential dilemmas, and perceptual differences were given equal value. Because the discourse types are based, however, on a unified language theory constituted in its core of dialogic relationships, it is not surprising to find that the discourse types may be applied outside Dostoevskian discourse to homophonic texts.

11. Yury, Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon, Michigan Slavic Materials, no. 7 (Ann Arbor, 1977), p. 1977 Google Scholar.

12. Bestuzhev scholarship has long recognized the antecedents of his fiction and criticism in Scott, Radcliffe, Hugo, Madame de Staël, the Schlegels, as well as in the historical tales of Nikolai Karamzin. See Lauren, Leighton, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975), pp. 60, 64, 98–104 Google Scholar; I. I. Zamotin, Romantizm dvadtsatykh godov XIX stoletiia v russkoi literature, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1911), pp. 171-282; N. Kovarskii, “ Marlinskii, Rannii,” Russkaia proza, ed. Tynianov and Eikhenbaum (The Hague: Mouton, 1963, pp. 135–58 Google Scholar; Henzel, Janusz, Proza Aleksandra Biestuzewa-Marlinskogo w okresie Peterburgskim (Warsaw, 1967), pp. 11–30 Google Scholar. Each of these authors treats various facets of literary influence on Bestuzhev. None, however, attempts to discover the covert polemical dialogues in which Bestuzhev participates in relation to these authors or to himself and his contemporaries. With Bakhtin's aid, the polemical nature of Bestuzhev's prose may be perceived with precision

13. Ivan, Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. Natalie Duddington (New York: Dutton & Co., 1960), p. 35Google Scholar; Serge, Zenkovsky, ed., “Tales from the Novgorodian Chronicles,” Medieval Russia's Epics, Chronicles, and Tales (New York: Dutton & Co., 1963), p. 163Google Scholar.

14. Zenkovsky, , Medieval Russia's Epics, p. 303 Google Scholar.

15. Ibid., p. 327.

16. Bakhtin, , Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 160 Google Scholar.

17. Pushkin's utilization of Romantic narrative is discussed at length, albeit from a perspective that is not ostensibly Bakhtinian, in David M. Bethea and Sergei Davydov, “Pushkin's Saturnine Cupid: The Poetics of Parody in The Tales of Belkin,” PMLA, 96, no. 1 (January 1981): 8-21.

18. Ibid., p. 152. Bakhtin asserts that in its very nature fiction incorporates points of view which lie outside the manifest text, for example, the hypothetical reader's perspective. In conceiving of another “word,” as Bakhtin calls the extratextual perspective, prose is rendered dialogic. Fiction stands in a covert relationship to another potential extrinsic utterance (idea) which the word committed to the page incorporates into itself and which may therefore be deduced from the aesthetic word. Bakhtin holds, furthermore, that this dialogically enriched word is detectable in everyday speech as well.

19. I have taken the liberty to suggest a tone one might assume in reading the distinct voices organized in the separate columns. The reader may form other intonations and verbal gestures in rendering the same passages. To read these excerpts, however, without altering one's tone of voice may diminish one's appreciation of Bakhtin's system.

20. Fyodor, Dostoevsky, Three Short Novels, trans. Constance Garnett (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), p. 3 Google Scholar.

21. Leo, Tolstoy, Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Harper and Row, 1967, p. 177 Google Scholar.

22. As Bakhtin's system aids us in comprehending those thematic components which constitute Olenin's dilemma (the “what” ), it also brings us to an understanding of Tolstoi's need of an omniscient narrator (the “how” ). The Tolstoian narrator must speak for the protagonist if he is at one and the same time to present material which the character himself cannot voice and to comment on that material as well. Through Bakhtin, the critic's complex problem of describing the “what” and the “how” becomes a relatively simple task of presentation, requiring display rather than extensive exegesis.

23. Romanticism in Russia has recently drawn the attention of many Western scholars and even more Soviet academicians. Iurii Lotman in particular has advanced our understanding of the often mysterious and frequently misleading period in which Bestuzhev wrote, although his attention has not been focused on Bestuzhev. Lotman has clarified troublesome problems concerning literary and extraliterary norms (aesthetic and behavioral). Additionally, he has defined clearly the covert and overt relations between everyday speech and aesthetic utterance in the first third of the nineteenth century (lurii Lotman, “Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni [bytovoe povedenie kak istoriko-psikhologicheskaia kategoriiaj,” Literaturnoe nasledie dekabristov [Leningrad, 1975], pp. 25-74 and lurii Lotman, “The Theater and Theatricality,” Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, ed. Henryk Baran, pp. 33-63).

24. N. Kovarskii, “Rannii Marlinskii,” p. 140; N. Petrunina, “Dekabriskaia proza i puti razvitiia povestvovatel'nykh zhanrov,” Russkaia literatura, 1978, no. 1, pp. 33-34.

25. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, , Sochineniia, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1958), 1: 3–37 Google Scholar. Bestuzhev's footnote occurs before the epigraph to the first chapter and after the title “Roman i Ol'ga: Starinnaia povest'.”

26. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

27. In prose fiction of the early 1820s, the genres advanced by new authors were not merely those popular at the time in Europe (and therefore fashionable), but were almost exclusively those that supplied the narrative's own reasons for appearing in print. Travelogues, diaries, anecdotes, and physiological sketches, each of which motivated the inclusion of fictional accounts (stories) proper, abounded in the literature. The first person narrator, conventional when considered from the point of view of genre, was an absolute necessity to the budding young author who apparently felt that a reason had to be given for the presentation of a story (no matter how crude or improbable the reason might be).

28. In order to enclose this type of homophonic narrative within Bakhtin's system, alterations have to be made similar to those made in treating the Tolstoi text: the direct discourse of the narrator becomes charged with the multivoiced intonations of Bakhtin's Type Three discourse. It should be noted, however, that with this adjustment the discourse typologies remain distinct. It is their functions which have slightly altered to accommodate the peculiarities of the given text.

29. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, , Sochineniia, 1: 6–7 Google Scholar.

30. Karamzin, Nikolai M., “Poor Liza,” The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia, ed. Harold Segel, vol. 2 (New York: Dutton & Co., 1967), p. 80Google Scholar.

31. The propensity to call a spade a spade is part of the Decembrist behavioral canon as we see in Iurii Lotman's “Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni,” pp. 34-36.

32. Alekseev, M. P., “Legenda o Marlinskom,” Etiudy o Marlinskom (Irkutsk, 1928), p. 11 Google Scholar.

33. Commentaries on the prose fiction of Bestuzhev's exile years have emphasized repeatedly its coded nature, examining subtextual references to Marlinskii's real identity, Bestuzhev's defense of his post-Decembrist behavior, Bestuzhev's participation in the revolt itself, and the author's political positions. Here an attempt is made to identify another code referring to Belinskii and, perhaps, to Gogol'.

34. Vissarion, Belinskii, Polnoesobraniesochinenii, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1953), p. 83 Google Scholar. Interestingly, Bestuzhev wrote very little thereafter. When he did, it was merely travel notes or letters to his publishers and family. This fact is usually ascribed to Bestuzhev's arduous military life after 1834 with its constant round of military campaigns and expeditions through the Caucasian mountains. But the effects of Belinskii's criticism on Bestuzhev's pen cannot be discounted.

35. Bestuzhev clearly misses Belinskii's point — it was not that feeling should be purged from literature, but that the way in which feeling is conveyed should be altered. Bestuzhev's inability to appreciate Belinskii's position determines the form of his argument.

36. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, Sochineniia, 2: 192.

37. Ibid., p. 36.

38. It comes as no surprise that Bestuzhev was insensitive to the imaginative, poetic, and even moral core of Gogol “s romantic prose. He was equally insensitive to Pushkin's Evgenii Onegin, Boris Godunov, and Belkin Tales.

39. Noses appear in Russian, European, and American literature of Romance during the 1830s. A. N. Nikoliukin asserts that this fact cannot account for the sudden proliferation of noses in Bestuzhev's work in exile ( Nikoliukin, , “K tipologii romanticheskoi povesti,” K istorii russkogo romantizma [Moscow, 1973], pp. 276–Google Scholar).

40. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, , Sochineniia, 2: 288 Google Scholar. Leaving the coded reference to Bestuzhev himself aside (the confluence of the lug [South] and the Northern Dvina, that is, the Caucasus and St. Petersburg), we clearly hear a parodic voice with its altered accent. In the publications of Baron Brambeus and Nikolai Gogol', the reading public was becoming quite familiar with sudden comic shifts in intonation. Bestuzhev's possible parody has gone unnoticed, however. Consequently, what has formerly been considered Bestuzhev's emulation of a new prose style may now be seen as an attack on the new writers’ manner. The polemical nature of this excerpt with regard to Gogol’ is uncertain, but the paragraph following it contains Bestuzhev's sole reference in his entire corpus to the grebe (gogoV): “Now quickly with a running jump the sharp-nosed vessel groaned against a splashing and foaming sand bar, so quickly in fact that the spray flashed and the foam poured over the sailors from head to foot. The boat drew water. The frightened and doused Aleksei let loose the topsail; it flapped while the boat nosed up, surged over the crest of a wave and in a moment plunged headlong into a wall of water. In five minutes it was sailing along the sea like a grebe (gogolem) which washed ashore with a murmur” (ibid., p. 289). Evidence of a literary polemic with Gogol' cannot be thoroughly corroborated, but Bakhtin's system assists in determining the possibility of such a polemic.

41. Bestuzhev apparently was quite an authority on literary, historical, and grammatical matters pertaining to Persian culture and language. While living in Derbent (1830-34), he was frequently consulted by scholars to settle disputes (A. V. Popov, “ Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, A. A.,” Russkie pisateli na Kavkaze [Baku, 1949], p. 31 Google Scholar and M. A. Vasil'ev, “Dekabrist A. A. Bestuzhev kak pisatel'-etnograf,” Nauchno-issledovatel'skii sbomik [Kazan', 1926], p. 66). Bestuzhev's desire was to be accorded a similar status in Russian literary society.

42. Bestuzhev never made specific reference to Gogol’ in his works. This is a curious and telling fact since he was prone to comment on contemporary literati in his letters to his brothers and to the Polevois. During a July 24, 1835 search of his quarters by the government in the city of Piatigorsk, a copy of Gogol “s Mirgorod was found among Bestuzhev's possessions, attesting to his familiarity with Gogol” s work. Bestuzhev was an avid reader of all world literature, so his faults as an author cannot be traced to his ignorance of literature. Given Bestuzhev's interest in the development of prose, and particularly in his place in literary history, he undoubtedly was quite familiar with Gogol “s collection of tales.

43. This is a direct reference to his own tale “The Frigate Hope,” a work in which “faith and hope” function as autobiographical cues pertaining to the author's involvement in the Decembrist revolt. See in this regard lurii Lotman, “Dekabrist v povsednevnoi zhizni,” p. 57 and Lauren Leighton, “Bestuzhev-Marlinskii's ‘The Frigate Hope': A Decembrist Puzzle,” Canadian Slavonic Papers, 1980, no. 2, pp. 171-86.

44. Bestuzhev-Marlinskii, , Sochineniia, 2: 357–58Google Scholar. The passage goes on in this manner at some length; for reasons of space only half is here reproduced.

45. There are other indications of aesthetic failure in the work, but they are beyond the scope of this article. For a discussion of these deficiencies see Lewis Bagby's “Bestuzhev-Marlinskii's ‘Mulla Nur': A Muddled Myth to Rekindle Romance,” Russian Literature, 11-12 (February 1982): 117-28.

46. Lauren, Leighton, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, pp. 34–35Google Scholar.

47. These first two items are so well documented as to amount to cliches in Gogol’ criticism. The last, however, belongs to Bestuzhev himself, reflecting the inflexible attitude of an epigone unable to perceive the validity, if not necessity, of Romantic literature's next stage of development.

48. In Bakhtin's time the three dominant trends in literary criticism (exemplified by the historical poetics of Veselovskii, the Formalism of Viktor Shklovskii, and the social materialism of Marxist literary theory) each embodied one of our three theoretical problems. Although contemporary theories have solved these problems, Bakhtin prefigures their resolution in his focus on utterance, dialogue, and structure. For Bakhtin's position vis-a-vis these three trends in literary criticism during the first third of the twentieth century, see Julia, Kristeva, “The Ruin of a Poetics,” Russian Formalism, ed. Bann and Bowlt (New York: Harper and Row, 1973, pp. 102–108 Google Scholar.

49. For a recent treatment of three specific kinds of readers identifiable in Bestuzhev's prose, see Lauren, Leighton, “Bestuzhev-Marlinskii's” The Frigate Hope, '” pp, 171-86Google Scholar.

50. Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 226–62 Google Scholar.

51. Julia Kristeva, “Ruin of a Poetics,” p. 103. Kristeva's discussion of Bakhtin focuses solely on his ideas pertaining to polyphonic texts, and the limitations she identifies pertain merely to such texts. I, on the other hand, am working with the discourse types as they may be incorporated into the treatment of homophonic texts — the limitations met here are distinct. See, additionally, Julia Kristeva, “Bakhtin, the Word, the Dialogue, and the Novel,” Critique, 23 (April 1967): 438-65.

52. There are many sides to the literary universe, and each of its dimensions may require an interpretive principle capable of encapsulating the special qualities inherent in it. Bakhtin's system may not necessarily represent a program superior to others, but it indicates a mode by which other approaches may test their discoveries at the level of utterance.

53. Lotman, for example, synthesizes these oppositions in his treatment of text structure, but his own discourse submits to privative language. Bakhtin's simple paradigm shows that the use of such a language is not inevitable or necessary. The beauty of Bakhtin's method is that it represents an economical way to describe what is culturally an economic form for transmitting information and meaning. One need only refer to the excerpts from Bestuzhev to see the resolution of our formal problems (without requiring attendant explanations of the same).

54. Medvedev, , Formal Method, pp. 26–37Google Scholar.

55. “Perhaps the reproach most frequently addressed to structuralist literary criticism is that it fails at the level of the individual text,” Robert, Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, p. 142 Google Scholar.

56. “Not only is there intellectual awe as the mind raises itself to the thought of all that is, the universe, the eon; but also we are seized by the marvel of the sheer fact that it is, esti. And the two — what is and the is of all that is, the eon, and the esti — must both be held inseparably in thought. To keep these two together, Parmenides tells us, is to follow the path of light and truth — Aletheia (unhiddenness),” William, Barret, The Illusion of Technique (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1979), p. 207 Google Scholar.

57. It is with an understanding of eon and esti that we may begin to recognize the wellsprings of Bakhtin's aesthetics in Greek culture, literature, and ritual. As regards the necessarily limited focus of this article, the discourse types display a pre-Aristotelian sensitivity loosely wrapped in a Cartesian mind longing to honor the miraculous object without distorting it. Hence Bakhtin's attention to inviolable utterance and unalterable dialogue. At this level of apprehension, too, we may link disparate Bakhtin treatises, for example, the literary discussion of Menippean satire in Poetika Dostoevskogo, and the highly philosophical discussion of self-perception comprising most of “Avtor i geroi esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti.” These works, like so many others, issue from Bakhtin's understanding of ancient thought. If this is indeed the case, it would seem that any treatment of Bakhtin's entire work might best proceed from this point.