Mikhail Bakhtin

 

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) had to survive the turmoil of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist purges, and the hardships of the second world war before receiving even modest recognition.

Bakhtin stressed the multi-layered nature of language, which he called heteroglossia. Not only are there social dialects, jargons, turns of phrase characteristic of the various professions, industries, commerce, of passing fashions, etc., but also socio-ideological contradictions carried forward from various periods and levels in the past. Language is not a neutral medium that can be simply appropriated by a speaker, but something that comes to us populated with the intentions of others. Every word tastes of the contexts in which it has lived its socially-charged life.

 

Bakhtin's concepts go further than Derrida's notion of 'trace', or Foucault's archaeology of political usage. Words are living entities, things that are constantly being employed and partly taken over, carrying opinions, assertions, beliefs, information, emotions and intentions of others, which we partially accept and modify. All speech is dialogic, has an internal polemic, and this is most fully exploited by the novel, particularly the modern novel. {4}

 

Bakhtin's work anticipated many concerns of Modernist and Postmodernist writing, most notably that of viewpoint. Sociologists recognize communities of discourse — overlapping groupings with common beliefs, interests and styles of expressing themselves. There is no purely literal language, and concepts of truth and meaning have finally to be treated as ways of reacting to experience rather than as logical concepts applying across all possible worlds. No centralizing programme or policy, therefore, but a network of alliances, overlapping and shifting frames of reference which are constantly being modified — by chance, ignorance, experiences, conversations, by television, newspapers, magazines and books.

Bakhtin's achievement was to formalize this approach, and show how the variety of voices (each with their different community of discourse) make up a modern novel. His work also provides an answer to Foucault and others who see language as an instrument of state repression. There is no common viewpoint in modern writing, any more than literature can be written to order, by following some blueprint or recipe. Writing of any length inevitably contains what Bakhtin called the carnivalesque — the expressive, random, individual viewpoint. Language may be saturated with ideology, but it never represents the one, monolithic viewpoint.

 

Bakhtin's approach illuminates not only politics and the novel, but many aspects of poetry creation and interpretation. Words in a poem naturally arrive with their past usages and intentions, but become hybridized in the good poem — i.e. entirely taken over by the poet, losing their many worlds of reference. Intentionally and consciously by the poet, and so understood by the reader, the polyglot social contexts are fused into the one horizon. Inevitably this must be so, or the poem would lack autonomy or artistic unity. And so the way lies open to an authoritarian, fossilized diction, and to poetry as the preserve of a priestly class, matters which Bakhtin deplored.

An expanded article can be found on TextEtc.

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Mikhail Bakhtin


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