Bakhtin School Papers, Russian Poetics in Translation, ed. Ann Shukman, 10, 1983.
This collection was the first in a recent wave of Bakhtin publications which peaked in 1984 with Caryl Emerson's new translation of Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (Bakhtin, 1984a), the revision of R.W. Rotsel's purportedly 'flawed' 1973 translation of the same title (Bakhtin, 1984b), the reissue of Helene Iswolsky's 1968 translation of Rebelais and his World (Bakhtin, 1984c), the publication of Michael Holquist's and Katerina Clark's bio-study of Bakhtin (Holquist and Clark, 1984), and of the translation of Todorov's 1981 monograph, 'M.M. Bakhtine: Le Principe dialogique' (Todorov, 1984).
That this wave of publications of a 'victim' of Stalinist Russia should occur in the year in which Orwell placed his vision of a Stalinist Britain is an irony of history whose carnivalesque inversion Bakhtin, as the introducer of the concepts of carnival and the carnivalesque into the literary critical and, in turn, cultural studies, vocabulary, would have appreciated. The reversal of fortunes is also a modicum of justice for the difficulties under which Bakhtin worked and for the neglect his work has suffered.
This collection brings together 'the major part of the published output in article form of the Bakhtin school' (Introduction:l), or more precisely, of its major members, Medvedev and Voloshinov. But not of Bakhtin himself — these are not 'Bakhtin Papers.' Those are partially available elsewhere for the English reader in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Bakhtin, 1981). The essay of Bakhtin's translated in volume 3, number 1 of A.J.C.S., adds to their number, though it had already been translated (Bakhtin, 1976:284-296). What it does include though is Voloshinov's relatively well known 'Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry', previously only available as an appendix to Voloshinov's hard to obtain Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (Voloshinov, 1976).
Thus the teacher is curiously absent from this collection of school papers — the teacher has left the room — or more precisely, Bakhtin is bracketed — literally. On the contents page, Bakhtin's name is bracketed alongside all but two occurrences of his star pupil's names. As well as the absence of Bakhtin, it is thus also necessary to remark
123 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
the presence of bracketed Bakhtin, 'Brackhtin' for short. Yet, curious-er and curiouser, 'Brackhtin' (what does it mean to bracket a name next to another? What relation does parenthetical suspension signify between the name inside and that outside? Does the unbracketed name hold the bracketed name reverentially in the cupped hand of its brackets?) and Bakhtin are totally absent from the titles heading the pieces with which his name is bracketed in the 'Contents' (see pp.5, 31, 75 and 93). It is as if Bakhtin sat beside his star pupils while the roll was being marked and then left the room when they started to write. Yet, what is curiouser and curiouser and curiouser, is that the name of Bakhtin appears in the running titles at the head of the alternate pages of one, and only one, article in the form of 'Voloshinov/Bakhtin' (see pp.32-48).
This last device follows a convention used by Todorov who coupled the names of Medvedev/Bakhtin and Voloshinov/Bakhtin around a partitioning slash of indeterminacy which, while granting some priority to the name which comes 'first,' did not, he claimed, fix the precise relationship: 'La bane oblique ne prejugeant pas de la nature de la relation entre les deux noms (de combination ou de substitution)' (Todorov, 1979:502). Or three for that matter. Albert J. Wehrle also uses the same convention in his translation of The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, but in his introduction he indicates that the slash between Medvedev/Bakhtin signifies 'the conventional signifier/-signified bar' (Bakhtin, 1978:xi). Hardly a slash of indeterminacy! Though not, of course, a rod of determinacy.
Which is what the fuss is all about — the relation between the three names. Were Voloshinov and Medvedev nom de plumes of Bakhtin? Or were they names of friends of Bakhtin under which he also published? Or did he give them his mss., or did they pinch them, and then publish them under their own names? Or were they ghost writers for Bakhtin? Or did they write in collaboration with Bakhtin? And so on. The permutations are only limited by imagination. I do not intend to attempt to define the relationship — nor does Ann Shukman. The more interesting question is why do we want to know what it was? Why is authorial indeterminacy so threatening? Why is authorship so tied up with individuality, and so on? Questions which I can't go into here, but ones for which Foucault's 'What is an Author?' (Foucault, 1977), provides the first lines of enquiry.
It is possible to either accuse Ann Shukman of perpetrating confusion out of editorial laxity or mischievousness in the inconsistency of naming, or to ascribe to her editorial perspicacity in opting for a play of indeterminacy by being inconsistent or by introducing a new convention, the bracketed Bakhtin, or even to credit her with decon-
124 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
structing (as my 'Brackhtin' does) the will to know individual authorship (a high degree of lexical redundancy here). But the desire to know her 'intention' is merely the contagion of the disease to know authorship, the desire for origins.
It is possible to mark, though, some differences in the work of the three names. Ann Shukman argues that 'None of Bakhtin's 'own name' writings ... adopt a Marxist approach' (Introduction: 3). Whereas those of Voloshinov and Medvedev do. Thus the presence or absence of 'a Marxist approach' can be 'used' as a test for measuring the difference between teacher and pupils, as if the latter introduced this aberration of 'Marxism' to the chagrin of the former, like class-room rebels. But the use or non-use of an 'approach' called 'Marxist,' (whatever that is) is not what is at stake here per se. What is at stake in this debate is intimated by Ann Shukman when she suggests that Bakhtin's remark 'I hear voices in everything and the dialogic relationship between them, might serve as the epigraph to all his writings and this profoundly personalistic approach was perhaps what he most fruitfully passed on to his friends and collaborators' (introduction: 4). Or what his self-same 'pupils' successfully rebelled against in their 'Marxist' approach as is evidenced in this collection from which can be gleaned a number of counter-mottoes to inscribe over the door of the 'Brackhtin' school: 'the T can realize itself in discourse, only when dependent on the 'we' (p.12). 'The word is a social event' (p.17). And 'human speech is a two-sided phenomenon' (p.l 14). Finally, 'style is at least two people' (p.27).
But is the 'Brackhtin' of these mottoes any less the Bakhtin of the hearing voices epigraph? What is at the same time the most engaging and exasperating thing about Bakhtin and 'Brackhtin' is that there is a Bakhtin for virtually all readers — the Marxist 'Brackhtin' and the personalist Bakhtin, the discourse analyst 'Brackhtin' and the almost philologist Bakhtin. And it is the former rather than the latter which this reader, though not it seems Ann Shukman, reads here. Which is in turn exasperating because it is personalist. The reader is thus not only caught between two different readings of Bakhtin and 'Brackhtin,' but is caught in the terms in which the text has constructed him or her as reader. All texts, a la Derrida, may be double like the Bakh-tin/Brackhtin text, but the doubling is doubled here by the play of names inside and outside the brackets, and around the mulberry bush of the slash. All that can perhaps be said is that it is the 'Brackhtin' or Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Voloshinov, 1978) and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Medvedev/Bakhtin, 1978) which this reader retrieves, and 'the reader' can retrieve, from here, rather than the Bakhtin of Rabelais and his World (Bakhtin, 1984c) and The Dialogic Imagination (Bakhtin, 1981). Indeed two of the
125 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:7 (1986)
pieces collected here are earlier versions or abstracts of chapters of the former works. The Bakhtin of the chronotope and heteroglossia, of carnival and the carnivalesque, is absent from this collection, though the Bakhtin/Brackhtin of the dialogic is here in nascent form — implicitly in the counter-mottoes I quoted, explicitly elsewhere (see pp.117-8).
Thus the concept of a Bakhtin school is misleading if it is taken to mean consistency of thought emanating from Bakhtin as schoolmaster, faithfully copied and repeated by 'his' pupils. It is more a collection of thinkers thinking on loosely inter-related topics on a recurrent agenda concerning, in broad terms, the relations of language, literature and the social, which created an intellectual climate which could be called Post-Formalist (a case could be made for adopting this as an alternative name to the 'Bakhtin School') and which occurred in the same place at the same time whose major parameter, if not catalyst, was the presence (or absence), or more precisely, presence/absence of Bakhtin.
Rod Giblett teaches at Murdoch University
Notes
1. Copies of the reviewed work are available through Professor Michael O'Toole, Murdoch University.
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1976) 'The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humour (Rabelais and Gogol),' in
Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, (ed.) Henryk Baran. White Plains:
International Arts and Sciences Press (originally published 1975).
........... (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (trans.) Michael
Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press (originally published 1975).
... (1984a) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, (trans.) Caryl Emer
son. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press (originally
published, 1929; 2nd ed., 1963).
............ (1984b) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, (trans.) R.W. Potsel.
(rev. ed.) Ann Arbor: Ardis (trans. originally published, 1973).
126 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
............ (1984c) Rabelais and His World, (trans.) Helene Iswolsky.
(Originally published 1965; translation originally published, 1968). Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1977) 'What is an Author?' Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,
(trans.) Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Oxford: Basil Blackwell
(originally published 1969).
Holquist, Michael and Clark, Katerina (1984) Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press.
Medvedev, P.N./Bakhtin, M.M. (1978) The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship:
A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics', (trans.) Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press (originally published 1928).
Todorov, Tzvetan (1979) 'Bakhtine et l'alterite,' PoetiquelO: 502-513.
............ (1984) M.M. Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, (trans.)
Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press
(originally published 1981).
Voloshinov, V.N. (1976) Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, (trans.) I.P. Titunik.
New York: Academic Press (originally published 1927).
............ (1978) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, (trans.)
Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik. New York: Seminar Press
(originally published 1930).
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