Bakhtin Between East and West

Cross-cultural Transmission

Karine Zbinden

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351196338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

"Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) has had an enormous influence on literary studies and cultural theory. Bakhtin between East and West: Cross-Cultural Transmission looks beyond the concepts of carnival and dialogue and traces for the first time the transformation of the Bakhtin Circle's thought from its introduction to the West in Julia Kristeva's seminal late-1960s theory of intertextuality, through Tzvetan Todorov's landmark study and on to contemporary interpretations. The notion of sociality in all its problematic complexity provides the red thread guiding us through this historical and thematic examination of Western and Russian Bakhtin studies. As a critical evaluation of Bakhtin scholarship across various cultures and a celebration of the vigour of the Circle's legacy, this is an invaluable resource for scholars and students with an interest in Bakhtin and critical theory."

Chapter 1
The Structuralist in the Closet

Cross-Cultural Transmission: France and Beyond

As a first approach to the problem of the cross-cultural transmission of works by Mikhail Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle, this chapter will consider the early French reception of Bakhtin’s works, in fact the first decade, from 1967 until 1980. I will concentrate on Julia Kristeva’s article of 1967, ‘Bakhtine, le mot, le dialogue et le roman’, which is one of the first articles ever written in French on Bakhtin. So this early period represents the prime zone of Kristeva’s influence, which expands well into the 1970s, in fact until Tzvetan Todorov's Mikhaïl Bakhtine: le principe dialogique in 1981.¹ It is an interesting fact that Kristeva and Todorov have turned out to be, to some extent, responsible for the dissemination throughout the Western world of Bakhtin’s and the Bakhtin Circle’s works, thus putting French theory at the point of origin of the Bakhtin phenomenon. At a time when Bakhtin studies are grappling with a seemingly limitless set of appropriations and (what are often perceived as) distortions and, to counter that trend, are recontextualizing his though in the contemporary debates that informed it, it seems appropriate to give the first rendition of his thought its due.

However, my perspective is biased towards Bakhtin in the sense that what concerns me primarily here is how Bakhtin’s thought was interpreted, and disseminated, and not so much what contribution Bakhtin made to Kristeva's thoughts. It is important to bear this in mind, as my position throughout the chapter may seem to promote a conservative attitude to texts and reject adaptation to contemporary debate a principio. Most of my reservations about intertextuality concern the often unproblematized apposition of ‘dialogism’ as synonymic gloss and its presentation as direct point of origin. If anything, Kristeva should derive more credit for her interpretation and innovation. But wider recognition would also endow her with greater responsibility for the effect her use of Bakhtin's concepts has had on subsequent interpretations of his work, especially at a time when her article offered, very consciously, virtually the only access to his thought in French.

Clive Thomson identifies Kristeva and Todorov as the two landmarks in Bakhtin studies². Both had indeed a great impact internationally. However, the French reception seems to have been on the wane ever since: Thomson rightly contends that French scholarship has not really followed up these studies (‘Bakhtin in France and Québec’, p. 68). Anthony Wall is harsher when he claims that ‘the “Bakhtin” in French seems to have all but disappeared’ (together with the Italian and the German ‘Bakhtins’, he adds).³ Bakhtin was not very popular in France for a long time, at least in comparison with the virtual adulation that he has enjoyed elsewhere. It seems that Bakhtin has been more often applied, be it in French literary studies or linguistics, than really discussed. This is possibly an effect of Kristeva’s artical, which opened the way to a use of Bakhtinian concepts to define and refine the aims and tasks of semiotics. But, quite naturally, there was at the time no such thing as Bakhtin studies.

Before looking in detail at Kristeva’s interpretation of Bakhtin it is worth appraising the special treatment received by Bakhtin’s monograph on Rabelais. This was generally acclaimed at the time of its publication in France (1970), but its reception was mainly limited to journalistic reviews or very short articles. These reviews tend to provide a political evaluatio of L’Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen-âge et sous la Renaissance, one in which the revolutionary character of both Rabelais and Bakhtin is put forward. Its destiny seems a product of circumstance. Apart from the sensation created by the appearance of a monograph on a French writer by a Soviet scholar and the fact that it sold sufficiently well to be reprinted in 1982, the French version of Rabelais and his World did not have much to offer to a branch of scholarship in which Renaissance studies are not exactly thriving. It was soon left to gather dust on remote shelves, with the exception of Yvonne Bellenger’s very critical evaluation: apart from the unsatisfactory presentation (the lack of an index and a table of contents), Bellenger deplores the imprecision of the references as well as the mediocrity of the style and of the translation, but, more importantly, she identifies ‘two major defects: dogmatism and contradiction'.⁴ Both the bibliographical insufficiencies and the translation problems will turn out to be issues of considerable epistemological importance, as we will see more in detail in chapter 3. However, in relation to Bakhtin’s currency in French scholarship, Lesourd points out that ‘Bakhtin is absent precisely where one would expect him most, that is in the monographs dedicated to Rabelais’, which in most cases barely mention him in the index (‘M. Bakhtin vo Frantsii’, p. 5). Noëlle Batt presents an interesting hypothesis to explain Bakhtin’s relative lack of success in France. she contends that the forty–year delay between the publication of problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (1929) and the publication of the French translation of the revised version, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1970), gave time for some of his ideas to be developed and popularized by others. Thus, his originality is less obvious to a readership conversant with Jacques Lacan, Emile Benveniste, and Jean-Paul Sartre. This, she claims, also explains why American scholars were more impressed by Bakhtin since the debates initiated by these thinkers concerned them less directly.⁵ Although thought-provoking, this argument has several obvious flaws, the most glaring one being the conflation of Bakhtin’s and the Bakhtin Circle’s work into one work, the Dostoevsky monograph, which did little in terms of Bakhtin’s engagement with linguistics and psychoanalysis. More significantly, this suggestion rests on some of the very interpretations which the present book seeks to problematize, in other words the reliance on the notion that Bakhtin was a precursor not only to Lacan (Kristeva) but also to Benveniste and Sartre (Todorov).

I will concentrate more specifically on the notions of appropriation and distortion as they can be defined with the help of Bakhtin, in order to put in perspective Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin. It seems all the more important to evaluate her interpretation, since she spoke more or less in a vacuum with only the echo of her own words for feedback (with two exceptions⁶). The absence of real dialogue is not only just another ironical turn of fate for Bakhtin, but seems to have granted Kristeva a distinct authority on the subject which my reading of her article will challenge.

The chronology of the translations into French of Bakhtin’s works is important. Kristeva’s article proved so consequential most probably because it was published even before Bakhtin’s texts were available to a French-speaking readership.⁷ Only in 1970, three years later, did Problèmes de la poétique de Dostoïevski (Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics) appear in two different translations, one published by L’Age d’Homme in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the other by Seuil in Paris with an introduction by Kristeva, revealingly entitled ‘Une poétique ruinée'.⁸ The same year Rabelais and his World was also translated into French L’Oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance. These two works by their very nature present Bakhtin predominantly as a literary critic.

In 1977 Le Marxisme et la philosophie du langage (Marxism and the Philosophy of Language) was published by Editions de Minuit with a very brief and rather damaging preface by Roman Jakobson. Jakobson fully subscribes to the idea that Bakhtin is the real author of the monograph — a view shared by the translator, Marina Yaguello — and the Marxism mere window-dressing perpetrated on the grand oeuvre by an inferior ‘disciple’ whose servile obedience to the regime nevertheless had the advantage of preserving the book. But Jakobson also firmly believes in Bakhtin's deeply structuralist model of thought (see below, p. 23). Marxisme et la philosophie du langage marks the beginning of the publication in French of more theoretically oriented works by the Bakhtin Circle. Esthétique et théorie du roman was published the year after, to be followed in 1980 by Le Freudisme (Freudianism), similarly credited to Bakhtin, and which received hardly any attention at all, the reason for this being perhaps that it was another Swiss translation.

The question of the attribution of the disputed texts is in fact rather crucial. Whether one considers them Bakhtin’s works or not is bound to modify the perception of Bakhtin’s thought as a whole. It is interesting to note that French scholarship, which has generally attributed them to Bakhtin without a thought,⁹ also tends to view Bakhtin as a systematic thinker, who built up throughout his life a coherent and unified system of thought. Thus the problem of attribution appears inextricably intertwined with the issues of appropriation and distortion.

Ironically enough, Bakhtin studies nowadays seem to try to live up to Kristeva's imposition of structuralism on Bakhtin in the sense that the relationship between Russia and the West looks more and more like a binary opposition, with the notable exception of the more conservative wing of American scholarship, which eagerly joins Russia’s most nationalistic ranks. The acrimonious debate between Russian and Western Bakhtinians now focuses on the question of appropriation. This appears to bring a deceptive unity to scholarship in both East and West. In fact this is far from being the case. In Russia the issue of appropriation serves the argument that the West is essentially debasing Bakhtin’s legacy. This in turn should confirm the worst fears of Russian Bakhtinians about the intentions of their Western counterparts, were they to be given fuller access to the precious heritage, as the thorny problem of the Bakhtin archives seems to testify. So what could appear at first glance as a positive development in East–West scholarly collaboration in fact has quite the opposite effect: the general unworthiness of Western Bakhtin studies is condemned without appeal.

Caryl Emerson, who for years has operated as go-between as it were between these two worlds, has become the great champion of the deep sense of deprivation suffered by Russian Bakhtin scholars in view of this Western ‘expropriation’, to up Carol Adlam’s term.¹⁰ One irreducible distortion suffered by Bakhtin in careless Western hands is due to the impossibility for any non-Russian to understand a truly Russian thinker. It is clear that reclaiming Bakhtin has come to mean much more in political (if not truly economic) terms than for epistemological reasons. Thus distortion and appropriation are closely related to possession and dispossession.

Interdisciplinary use of Bakhtin and the disputed authorship issue both appear grounded in this very possessive and territorial attitude towards Bakhtin. An instance of this proprietorial attitude to Bakhtin can already be observed in the early French reception.¹¹ Isabelle Kolitcheff’s translation of the Dostoevsky book takes more liberties than the Swiss translation by Guy Verret; both translations are based on the revised text of the 1963 edition. This is reflected in the title, which in the French version loses the ‘Problems’ to become simply: La Poétique de Dostoïevski (Dostoevsky’s Poetics). The text has been edited, clauses and repetitions suppressed, to make it more readable according to French literary standards. As a result it is often more elegant than its Swiss counterpart; however, it seems that elegance of expression is not always synonymous with accuracy.

Bakhtinian double-voicedness has been used to theorize translation, contrasting the nineteenth-century Russian practice of the translator imprinting his mark on the target text (TT) with contemporary efforts to communicate the source text (ST) in as unmediated a way as possible.¹² The translator’s bias can, however, only be identified on two conditions: firstly, access to the Russian original is mandatory, which defeats the very purpose of translation and is largely not available to most Western readers, and secondly, some knowledge of the intellectual contexts, debates, and traditions which influenced the composition of the work is equally essential. The latter has a corollary: the translator’s contemporary intellectual context is highly significant both in the conscious choices he/she makes to improve readability but perhaps even more importantly in a less conscious form of slippage to or projection of contemporary concerns. The translator’s context is also apparent in new connotations of words which may have arisen from later research or from theoretical, cultural, or even socio-historical developments. Examples abound. Outright mistakes, such as either gross misunderstandings or oversights, although they greatly hinder comprehension, will not be discussed. What is more interesting is the issue of contextual knowledge both of the ST and of the TT. In this respect, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics in French offers a fascinating example of coloration of the TT by the target context and of varying attitudes towards the ST.

The left-hand column gives the French translation, followed by my own literal translation of it into English, while the right-hand column gives the Swiss-French translation, again followed by its literal English translation:¹³

On ne trouve pas chez Dostoïevski ces deux éléments essentiels sur lesquels repose toute idéologie traditionnelle: la pensée isolée et le système de pensée unique, objectal (qui porte sur des objets en soi) Dans une conception habituelle, il existe des pensées isolées, des affirmations, des fonctions [Polozheniia] qui, en elles-mêmes, peuvent être vraies ou fausses selon leur rapport avec l’objet en soi, et indépendamment de la personne qui les véhicule, à laquelle elles appartiennent.[...]

Dostoïevski ne connaît ni cette sorte de pensées ni cette sorte d’unité de système. Pour lui, l’unité de base [posledniaia] indivisible est non pas la pensée, la position, l’affirmation isolée et objectalement limitée, mais l’option et l’attitude globales d’une personnalité.

(La Poétique de Dostoïevski, p. 135 in 1970 edition, pp. 143–44 in Essais Points reprint)

One does not find in Dostoevsky these two essential elements on which any traditional ideology rest: isolated thought and the unique, object-centred (i.e. oriented towards objects in themselves) system of thought. In a usual conception, there exist isolated thoughts, assertions, functions which, in themselves, can be true or false according to their relation to the object in itself, and independently of the person who conveys them, to whom they belong. [...]

Dostoevsky does not know either this kind of thoughts or this kind of unified system. For him, the basic indivisible unit is not thought, position, assertion (isolated and limited to its object), but a personality’s global option and attitude. L’idéologie créatrice de formes de ls Dostoïevski ignorait justement les deux éléments essentiels sur lesquels s’édifie toute idéologie: une pensée particulière et un système de pensées [sic] unique par rapport à l’objet. Pour l’attitude idéo-logique courante il existe telles pensées, telles affirmations, telles propositions [polozheniia], qui en elles-mêmes peuvent être vraies ou fausses selon leur rapport avec l’objet et sans qu’il importe de nt. savoir qui en est porteur, à qui elles app...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Is Mikhaïl Bakhtine French?
• 1 The Structuralist in the Closet
• 2 The Loop(hole) of Sociality
• 3 The Problem of Sociality
• 4 Dialogism in the (Post)structuralist Imagination
• 5 Two Master Narratives ((Post)structuralism and the Cold War), But No Superaddressee
• Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
• Index