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Научни трудове на Съюза на учените в България-Пловдив Серия A. Обществени науки, изкуство и култура, том L, Съюз на учените сесия 31 октомври - 1 ноември 2014 Scientific research of the Union of Scientists in Bulgaria-Plovdiv, seriesA. Public sciences, art and culture, Vol. I., Union of Scientists, ISSN 1311-9400, Session 31 October - 1 November 2014.
ДИЛЕМАТА МЕжДУ СЪТВОРЕНИЕТО И ЕВОЛЮЦИЯТА НА ПОЛИФОНИЧНИЯ СВЯТ НА ДОСТОЕВСКИ Атанас Манчоров
Пловдивски университет „Паисий Хилендарски"
THE CREATION/EVOLUTION DILEMMA OF DOSTOEVSKY'S POLYPHONIC WORLD Atanas Manchorov The Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv
Abstract
The present article discusses the rise of polyphony in terms of the dilemma between creation-ism and evolutionism. My aim here is to ensure some propaedeutic support for the thesis that the evolutionist view of polyphony is just as strong as that of creationism. As the two views introduce opposite historico-literary schemes and produce alternative notions of polyphony, I will address the following questions: first, the alibi of creationism in Bakhtin's writings relating to his review of previous scholarly work, the "prehistory-history" opposition, creationism as an indispensable opponent of the monologic worldview; and second, the meaning of evolution and its polysemantic nature as regards ancient religious rites, the novel and its types, serio-comical genres, society, and language.
The present article discusses Bakhtin's idea of the genesis of polyphony which poses a dilemma between two contrasting views, namely between creationism and evolutionism. Accordingly, I shall try to ensure propaedeutic support for the thesis that the evolutionist view of polyphony is just as strong as that of creationism since this artistic method is the result of a centuries-long period of development and, therefore, Dostoevsky's oeuvre epitomizes not only its mature stage but also its entire existence. The two views introduce opposite historico-literary schemes and produce alternative notions of polyphony as regards its levels of maturity and its use in literature. In this connection, the following questions will be addressed: the alibi of creationism, the significance of the notion of evolution in Bakhtin's work and its polysemantic nature, the ways in which the historical predecessors of polyphony affect the "unshakable" status quo of creationism as a result of the unreserved recognition of Dostoevsky as the creator of a new artistic technique. Also discussed will be the roots of polyphony in classical literature, the prerequisites for the creation of the polyphonic novel, the tension between history and typology in Bakhtin's literary historiography, etc.
The task of deducing creationism as a guiding principle of his aesthetics is not easily achievable because of his historical approach to genrological issues - the stylistic lines of novel, the formation of double-voiced discourse, the manifestations of Menippean satire through the centuries, etc. - which, in one way or another, brings the studied works into the same spatio-temporal continuum with strong causality allowing us to track changes taking place over time. It is these distinguishing features which exhibit evolutionism as a dialogical opponent of the "epiphanic" genesis
of literary forms that are undeniably significant at any particular stage. Given the close attention to the historical roots of the novel (e.g. in "Discourse in the Novel" and "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse"), Dostoevsky's role with regard to polyphony tends to be quite specific not because he developed it and raised it to a new level by merely altering its key aesthetic moments, but quite the opposite: he created a new technique of representation that was completely different from all previous artistic methods.
Bakhtin did not come up with the idea of Dostoevsky's polyphony suddenly and all by himself. Instead, he placed his observations in an already existing discussion context, as is evident from his review of major research resources in the first chapter of Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (5-46) where he explained his agreements and disagreements with a number of authors. The polemic with Rozanov, Volynsky, Merezhkovsky, and Shestov concerns the problem of philosophical monologization, and that with Vyacheslav Ivanov, Sergei Askoldov, and Leonid Grossman relates to the novel's artistic features. However, it is important to note that Bakhtin took into account the scholarly monograph of L. P. Grossman, according to whom the Russian writer's contribution to prose fiction lied "in the creation of a new and authentically brilliant page in the history of the European novel" (Grossman, Poetika 1651 - qtd. in Bakhtin, Problems 14). Yet Bakhtin was critical of Grossman who had wrongly ascribed the emergence of dialogism to "a contradiction, never quite overcome, in Dostoevsky's worldview" as a result of the collision between "Two powerful forces - humanistic skepticism and faith" (Grossman, Put' 172 - qtd. in Bakhtin, Problems 16). Laying stress on such transpersonal factors obscures the importance of the individual author's concept in relation to this form of novelistic discourse which focuses on the representation of the multifaceted and ever-changing truth. One of the main points in the critique of the formal method is its depersonalization of the subject and hence its inability to express the subject's uniqueness by finding its way out of the multicursal Saussurean maze of combinations of ready-made elements. The fact that novelty is enclosed within the inherited system of language complicates the matter of individual creativity so much that it falls into the trap of universal laws and transcendental abstractions (see Morson and Emerson, 39-40). Bakhtin's view of Dostoevsky's innovative contribution is complex for at least two reasons. First, since both language, in terms of its grammar and vocabulary, and speech genres, in terms of their substantial functional integrity and recognizability, are interiorized by virtue of non-volitional reception, one can hardly speak of the uniqueness of personal utterance, la parole, in the strict sense of the word (Bakhtin, Speech Genres 81). Second, a genre as a holder "of creative memory in the process of literary development" (Bakhtin, Problems 106) not only maintains continuity, but also depreciates the author's originality - only up to a point indeed - and demonstrates a new mode of perspectival interaction. These issues, however, will be discussed in more detail elsewhere.
The problem of the birth of the polyphonic novel can be adequately grasped only through the prism of the Being-non-Being dichotomy. Bakhtin traced the roots of polyphony and its preparation back to the genres of classical and medieval literature. That he associated it with different styles and different eras (on the basis of the transcendental manifestation of genre memory) did not belittle Dostoevsky's original creation, because its 19th-century blossoming would hardly have been possible in the verbal generic context of bygone times, i.e. in the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire of antiquity, in the mysteries of the Middle Ages, in Shakespeare's plays or in later authors such as Voltaire, Balzac, and Hugo. Yet his ensuing statement informs us that "polyphony was prepared for in a fundamental way by this line of development in European literature" (Bakhtin, Problems 178) for if its "latent" forms appeared in classical literature, its centuries-old spirit "was reborn and renewed in Dostoevsky" (Bakhtin, Problems 178). On the whole, this view tends toward creationism. Whenever he looked into the historical depth of polyphony as an artistic principle of seeing, he used explicit concepts outlining two distinct developmental periods: on the one hand, its preparation (see Bakhtin, Problems 36) and, on the other hand, its authentic stage of existence that epitomizes its true nature (see Bakhtin, Problems 178). Undoubtedly, this case
1 Grossman, Leonid. PoetikaDostoevskogo [Dostoevsky's Poetics]. Moscow: GAKhN, 1925. Print.
2 Grossman, Leonid. Put' Dostoevskogo. Leningrad: Brokgauz-Efron, 1924. Print.
strongly reminds one of the dividing line between the epic and the novel in his inquiry into the history of novelistic discourse. Some of the designations for polyphony - "elements," "embryonic rudiments" and "early buddings,"3 "roots,"4 "preparation,"5 etc. are associated with its "prehistory," while others, e.g. "birth",6 are used to denote its beginning and actual existence. This radical move in the realm of literary aesthetics poses the problem of the unity of tradition and hence the accuracy of his analysis, although the designations definitely present both phases of development as part of the same time-space-causality continuum. Bakhtin nevertheless was quite explicit that the creator of the polyphonic novel was none other than Dostoevsky. After research works such as "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (the two Stylistic Lines of the novel) and "Discourse in the Novel" retracing the historical routes of the genre and after the view expressed on several occasions that the forerunners of polyphony were quite a few (Shakespeare, Balzac, Grimelshauzen, etc.), one finds oneself faced with the necessity of achieving a proper balance between the concepts of "prehistory" and "real history." The complex relationship between them is due to the properties of Bakhtin's methodological lens. One of the main reasons behind the unrelieved tension between them is the deep-rootedness of neo-Kantian categories in his aesthetics and the ensuing typology in which each novelty is altogether separate from its forerunner. This explains why Dostoyevsky's prose cannot be included in "any of the preconceived frameworks of historico-literary schemes that we usually apply to various species of the European novel" (Bakhtin, Problems 7).
Creationism also receives support from the theory that the polyphonic novel is not just a new stage of novelistic discourse: it destroys the old tradition by obliterating the form of the monologic (homophonic) novel and building a relationship between author and hero on an entirely different plane. In this sense, one is left with the impression that there is a new line of literary development. An endnote explained that although Dostoevsky had certainly had predecessors in the realm of polyphony, Bakhtin found it necessary to detach himself from pure historicism for the sake of typology.7 What thus comes to the fore again is the problem of the tension or even antagonism between these principles of which he was obviously fully aware insofar as the writer's main task was one of "constructing a polyphonic world and destroying the established forms of the fundamentally monologic (homophonic) European novel" (Bakhtin, Problems 8; author's emphasis). It is necessary to emphasize that the accomplishment of such a task is not entirely the result of a personal creative project: it is due in no small part to the ambience of the very period since "Subjectively Dostoevsky participated in the contradictory multi-leveledness of his own time", he changed his ideological views, his affiliations, and his method demonstrates a strong leaning toward a simultaneous display of multiple, contradictory individual "truths," not of conflicting ideas processed by a single person's mind (Bakhtin, Problems 27; author's emphasis). By this particular criterion Goethe was at the opposite pole for he depicted the formation of ideas "as various stages of some unified development" (Bakhtin, Problems 28). The deep ideological and political controversies of the epoch with its naturally ensuing multi-voicedness, the emergence of déclassé intellectuals as a social phenomenon, the propensity for the objective multi-leveledness of social life, the ability to see the world as a bunch of shifting and interacting perspectives (see Bakhtin, Problems 30-31), all these factors facilitated the overcoming the monologic novel's authorial stance that resolved interpersonal contradictions by objectifying them only in its own field of view.
The emergence of historical consciousness over time permeated Bakhtin's work and was a key methodological landmark in his theories of the novel: suffice it to point out the major types of chronotope, the two stylistic lines of development in the novel, the idea of historical inversion, etc. As he once put it, "In my book I have attempted to involve Dostoevsky in the historical process
3 They refer to Shakespearean drama (PDP 33).
4 For example, of dialogism in 18th-century French literature and farther back in antiquity (see PDP 143).
5 In other words, the genres that laid the artistic groundwork for the polyphonic novel over the centuries (PDP
36).
6 That is the advent of "the new structure of the polyphonic novel" (PDP 36).
7 The question here arises as to the precise meaning of the term predecessors, as refracted through Bakhtin's prism, and the way it fits into the context of a given historically accumulated aesthetic experience.
of literary development" (Бахтин 6: 460).8 By recognizing the germs of polyphony so far back in time, he brought history into conflict with typology. Of course, this is not an isolated case since literary theory can sometimes fall into the trap of contradictory thinking that puts the reliability of a methodological approach to the test: such is the case, for instance, with some non-dialogic theories of narrative, like the poetics of prose, whose conflicting perspectives show their inadequacy to consider the spatio-temporal dimensions of novelistic discourse (see Morson and Emerson, 19). Bakhtin, due to his flair for research, unmistakably discovered the germs and preparatory period of polyphony, but his partial indebtedness to neo-Kantianism made him attach importance to the "real phase" of every development as he described it by means of antinomies. Having expressed his agreement with Lunacharsky, he reaffirmed the phenomenon's continuity but without a trace of functional and aesthetic equality between the stages of its maturation not only because "to speak of a fully formed and deliberate polyphonic quality in Shakespeare's dramas is in our opinion simply impossible" (Bakhtin, Problems 33-34), but also because of the insurmountable genre differences between drama and the polyphonic novel. Despite all the clues as to the historical depth of dialogism and multi-voicedness, something which Bakhtin did not tend to deny, none of them speculates that actual polyphony occurred prior to the nineteenth century. On the contrary, all the arguments are presented in a way that is strongly reminiscent of his method for observing the rise of the novel as a developmental antithesis of epic. Going back to the statement that "Dostoevsky alone can be considered can be the creator of genuine polyphony" (Bakhtin, Problems 34), one finds a precise placement of polyphony in space and time as well as a total lack of transition through the fixing of a clear typological borderline.
The second major task I undertake here is to elucidate the meaning of evolution. Although Bakhtin never made much direct use of it (i.e. эволюция) in his book on Dostoevsky, it appears more frequently in English translation. In fact, one can find a number of Russian words standing for their target-language counterpart. One plausible explanation of this narrowing ratio might lie in their reference to pathways of diachronic transformation. As there is far too little space here to contextualize the term in detail, I will move on to outline some of its main types of usages.
The first one implies that evolution is not necessarily a slow process. Having condensed Hegel's view of historical change into a brief statement, he maintained that rapid renovation was inherent in evolutionary growth and that it was essential to one's sense of measure (see Бахтин 3: 229). Consequently, revolution is inextricably linked with evolution, i.e. an original idea does not come slowly into view but takes a quantum leap forward.
The second one is associated with ancient religious rites. What comes to the fore here as regards Aristophanes' work is "the evolution of an ancient sacral mask" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 219; emphasis added). In this particular case there is one-to-one correspondence between the source-text and target-text lexical items.9
The third usage concerns the development of the novel which is both time-consuming and active inasmuch as he spoke of "the living evolution of the novel as a genre (Bakhtin, Dialogic 9).10 Of course, the same principle applies to "the evolution of various types of novels" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 8; emphasis added)11 and "all subsequent evolution of the purely adventure novel" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 87; author's emphasis).12
The next one refers to the spoudogelois (i.e. "serious-smiling") genres since they epitomized the initial stage "in the evolution of the novel as the genre of becoming" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 22; emphasis added).13
Another important usage evokes various aspects of man, society, and social life. When discussing the peculiarities of folkloric time in Rabelais, Bakhtin stressed the indiscriminate merging
8 See his interview entitled "О полифоничности романов Достоевского" (рр. 458-65).
9 R. "эволюция древней сакральной маски" (Бахтин 3: 467; emphasis added).
10 R. „живом становлении романа как жанра" (Бахтин 3: 614; emphasis added).
11 R. „происхождением отдельных разновидностей романа" (Бахтин 3: 613; emphasis added).
12 R. "все последующее развитие чисто авантюрного романа" (Бахтин 3: 344; author's emphasis; "развитие" - emphasis added).
13 R. "развития романа как становящегося жанра (Бахтин 3: 626; emphasis added).
of personal and societal growth in terms of "the evolution and completion of a man as an individual" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 239).14 He also emphasized the "processes of evolution and of renewal of society and the folk" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 68; emphasis added)15 and "the verbal-ideological evolution of specific social groups" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 270; emphasis added).16
The sixth one, the history of language, especially its stratification into register, sociolect, etc. is a significant part of Europe's literary landscape „At any given moment of its evolution" (Bakhtin, Dialogic 271; emphasis added).17 Obviously, not only did Bakhtin speak of evolution (and/or development and becoming) on a number of occasions, but he also gave it a high priority in his historical analysis.
What conclusions can we draw? Technically, both creationism and evolutionism are equipollent in his scheme of literary development. Under these circumstances, however, I have every reason to believe that on occasion the former seems to gain the upper hand. Of course, in Bakhtin's typologically-laden model of literary history, well-grounded enough in the realm of its own (neo-Kantian) logic, it is only the fully cultivated dialogic thinking that is capable of validating the fundamental essence of polyphony which, although evolving slowly over many centuries, has little to do with the literary achievements of its pre-historical period. From my perspective, the main problem with this model lies in the deep rift that separates this type of artistic vision and the degree of its manifestation up to the nineteenth century from its purest form in Dostoevsky's work. Putting it otherwise, the being of polyphony divides into two stages of "unequal" quality, a prehistory and a "true" history, as the latter is separated by a distinct boundary from the writing of its historical forerunner-cum-opponent. Bakhtin's historical accounts are oftentimes typologically dominated because of the "forcefully" obscured historical plausibility of literary genres whose development shows no transitional stages and no neighboring areas of slightly inferior or superior forms of aesthetic experience.
Works cited:
Morson, Gary Saul, and Caryl Emerson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Print.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. Print.
Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1986. Print.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981. Print.
Бахтин, М. М. Собрание сочинений в семи томах. Т. 3: Теория романа (1930-1961 гг.). Москва: Языки славянских культур, 2012.
Бахтин, М. М. Собрание сочинений в семи томах. Т. 6: Проблемы поэтики Достоевского, 1963. Работы 1960-х - 1970-х гг. Москва: Языки славянских культур, 2002.
14 R. "становление и совершенствование индивидуального человека" (Бахтин 3: 485; emphasis added).
15 R. "процессов становления и обновления общества и народа" (Бахтин 3: 538; emphasis added).
16 R. "словесно-идеологического становления определенных социальных групп" (Бахтин 3: 24; emphasis added).
17 R. "в каждый данный момент его становления" (Бахтин 3: 25; emphasis added). There are similar references: for instance, "historical life and evolution of all languages" (DI: DiN 358; emphasis added) - R. "исторической жизни и становления языков" (Бахтин 3: 113; emphasis added) against the backdrop of spontaneous hybridization, "the very socio-ideological evolution of languages and society" (DI: DiN 365; emphasis added) - R. „самим социально-идеологическим становлением языков и общества" (Бахтин 3: 119; emphasis added), and "Social stratification of language in the process of evolution" (DI: DiN 399; emphasis added) - R. "Социальная расслоенность языка в процессе его становления" (Бахтин 3: 154; emphasis added).
