Fruits of Her Plume: Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture

Essays on Contemporary Russian Women's Culture

Helena Goscilo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781563241253
• eBook ISBN: 9781317470021
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The 1980s witnessed the ascendency of Russian women in multiple spheres of artistic creation, including literature, film, and painting. This volume may thus be said to engage not only women's artistic production but, indeed, the best and most colourful of recent Russian culture. Treating contemporary Russian women's creativity, it approaches women's texts, films, and canvasses from a range of perspectives, from anti-gendered to feminist. Some of the essays introduce writers not previously well studied, others challenge conventional interpretations and assumptions, while still others yield original viewpoints through novel juxtapositions. In addition to offering insights into the various artists under analysis, the essays map the wide terrain of issues and methodologies proliferating in cultural criticism today, and mirror the diversity that is one of the most appealing features of women's creativity in contemporary Russia.

1

BAKHTIN AND WOMEN

A Nontopic with Immense Implications

Caryl Emerson

I should begin by explaining the irreverent and sassy title. Why a nontopic? Because Bakhtin himself, in his voluminous writings stretching over half a century, had almost nothing to say about the currently fashionable liberationist triad: race, class, gender. This fact has greatly reassured Bakhtin’s demarxified disciples in the former Soviet Union, who are bitterly aware that “thinking in group categories” has brought their country to the brink of moral and economic disaster. To that issue I shall return, for in general one of the most peculiar aspects of recent years has been the spectacle of literary scholars in the formerly communist East emulating what is conservative in the West, while Western academic critics lap up what has been thoroughly discredited in the East. It is sufficient to note that “gender consciousness” is not part of Bakhtin’s legacy.

How might this absence be explained? The matter has puzzled many feminists. One critic admits: “It is a paradox indeed that the great thinker of alterity, whose whole philosophical project argues for respect for the Other, seems to have removed from sight (and mind) the Other par excellence: woman and the feminine” (Hajdukowski-Ahmed 153). Is it possible that Mikhail Bakhtin, apostle of difference, passed over in silence what many people today consider to be the most fundamental difference of all between one person and another? There are, it seems, several ways one might account for this perceived lack in Bakhtin, and let me run through them quickly.

First, there is always the Freudian possibility of repression—the argument that not seeing something is in fact the clearest evidence that it really exists, deeply matters, and for that reason has been stowed away out of sight, where it does its dangerous work out of the reach of consciousness. But somehow Bakhtin does not lend himself to psychoanalytic manipulation. He is too genial, too sloppy and generous in his thought; he carries too much around on his sleeve, and he gives no indication, in his life or in his works, of any special investment in guilt.

Second, there is the argument of tact and good taste. With the exception of a few passages dealing with the body in the early writings¹ and many matter-of-fact discussions of body processes in the Rabelais book (in both places the tone is stultifyingly academic), Bakhtin fully partakes of the Russian critical tradition of bashfulness and reticence in print toward intimate matters, such as sexuality and private life. As anyone who has translated Bakhtin knows, much inspiration is to be had in those pages—but “the pleasure of the text” is not. This well-developed sense of propriety and privacy in written discourse is borne out by the scant evidence we have of Bakhtin’s behavior with others: he was formal, correct, somewhat aloof even with devoted students of long standing, such as the Mirkina sister; he avoided the telephone and wrote almost no letters, and those letters that do survive are largely businesslike appeals for work or reports on his health. And he never turned—one cannot imagine him turning—his own close and indispensable half-century of marriage into a memoir.²

Then there is the argument of indifference. The gender issue might not have been visible to Bakhtin because he took it so totally for granted: equal rights for women had been, after all, a major rallying cry of the Russian intelligentsia ever since the 1850s, and subsequently became an important platform in the Bolshevik program. To be sure, Russian women enjoy the double burden of women the world over—that is, childbearing frequently combined with work outside the home, domestic indispensability combined with political invisibility, psychological and biological needs often not satisfied in institutions created with men in power. Nevertheless, the case could be made that whatever her inferior status, Russian woman culturally has a superiority complex: a self-image rooted in shapeless, immortal Mother Earth, a sense of herself as a person who presumes strength and autonomy even under the most adverse conditions, who does not expect help, who is willing to endure; in short, an image of Russian woman as savior, survivor, and arbiter of the mess left by generations of “superfluous men.” Something like this argument was made by Tat'iana Tolstaia in her defense of the recent controversial bestseller on Russian women by Francine du Plessix Gray (Tolstaya 3–7).

There is a fourth possible reason for the absence of gender consciousness in Bakhtin’s work. In Bakhtin’s world, things are either dan, “given” to us ready-made, or zadan, “posited” by us as a project requiring time and work. Writing a novel, learning a language, and getting through the day are examples of projects. Codes, dialectics, Aristotelian poetics, and one’s class origins are givens. Gender identity, I am afraid, is also a given. And for Bakhtin, it was the differences that you worked at, not the differences you were born with or born into, that mattered most. It follows that you can best work at difference, at becoming what only you can become, not by stressing solidarity with others with the same givens as you but by doing quite the opposite, by continually differentiating your own ever-changing and radically individual potential. These convictions, so central to Bakhtin’s passionately centrifugal thought, would seem to argue against any a priori assumptions of superiority by a group on the grounds of its subjection (or, for that matter, on any other grounds) and against “liberation movements” on behalf of women as women.³

There are two more possible approaches to the question. The first would dismiss the above options of repression, tact, indifference, and the given/posited distinction, claiming that there is gender bias in Bakhtin’s writings, and it is directed against women. Often this argument is mounted on little but the thin ground of translation convention.⁴ The translators of the volume titled The Dialogic Imagination, for instance, chose to use the male referent throughout, although Russian (like French and German) has a more or less unmarked third-person pronoun that implies no gendered image at all—as indeed English did not before the new sensitivities conquered the field. But more substantial complaints of sexist content have been raised as well. Most have to do with Bakhtin’s treatment of carnival laughter, his broad tolerance of its promiscuous imagery, and his seeming indifference to sexually offensive behavior in print. The most famous objection along these lines is by Wayne Booth, who back in 1982 took Rabelais to task for sexism and Bakhtin to task for his “antifeminist” position toward it.⁵ But for all the troubled sincerity of Booth’s confession, and for all the manifest unattractiveness of Rabelais’s bad taste and old-boy tone, a close look at Bakhtin’s book suggests that the charge is unfair. According to Bakhtin, the popular tradition that inspired Rabelais was not at all hostile toward women. Quite the contrary: woman was seen as the source of all flow and change, the bodily grave of the unbendingly severe medieval Gallic man. Only when that image was impoverished and trivialized in later eras did it become sensual and base; it was, as Bakhtin argued (rightly or wrongly), “the new, narrow conception” of sexuality, described with the “moralizing and scholastic humanist philosophy” of the sixteenth century, that reduced women to a negative image (Rabelais 240–41).

Best, then, that we agree with the feminist critic Nancy Glazener, who opens her essay on Bakhtin and Gertrude Stein with the admission that “Bakhtin’s work is not markedly feminist: he wrote mainly about canonical male authors, flirted with auteur theories of literary creation, and was conspicuously silent about feminism and the social effects of gender difference” (109). Except for the downputting aside about Bakhtin’s “flirting with auteur theories of literary creation”—theories of the creative process being perhaps the single greatest contribution of Bakhtin’s lifework—Glazener is absolutely correct. Although Bakhtin spoke quite eloquently against other -isms (Marxism, Freudianism, Formalism, structuralism), he was indeed conspicuously silent about feminism.

But then Glazener goes on to say that Bakhtin’s work “appears to be hospitable to the inclusion of gender as an additional significant social and discursive category” (109). Here is our sixth and final approach to the problem, and one that seems to open the door. Bakhtin overtly opposed most of the “group thinking” that characterized his desperately overly politicized age, but he is not, at least, on record as an opponent of gendered thinking (that isn’t much of an endorsement, but it’s a start). And many people would argue that in any case strong and original thinkers do not and should not control the use that others make of their thoughts. If Bakhtin’s categories now appeal to new generations in different ways, this can only be cause for rejoicing.

To a certain point I agree with that reasoning. A bold and imaginative extension of someone else’s thought is fully appropriate if it is acknowledged as such. But transforming a theoretician’s ideas in the process of applying them does not release critics from the obligation to read texts carefully, nor does it empower them to draw any inferences whatsoever from any imaginable source. Nor should the new reading go violently against the grain of the original in whose spirit it claims to be cast. And it is my feeling that some feminist readings inspired by Bakhtin do overstep these boundaries, even as others have opened up responsible dialogue.

In the remainder of this essay, then, I will address some of the strengths, weaknesses, and pitfalls—as I see them—of applying Bakhtin to gender criticism, using recent work known to me. (I hasten to add that I am not widely or well versed in feminist theory or practice; my interest is that of an amateur, and my expertise comes entirely on the Bakhtin end of things.) I shall then offer a few comments on why it is so difficult and dangerous to politicize and radicalize Bakhtin—as is widely done in the West, and is rapidly being undone in Bakhtin’s homeland.

The sample essays upon which I draw come from three collections published between 1989 and 1990: one is an anthology edited by American and British leftists, Bakhtin and Cultural Theory; the other two are special Bakhtin issues of the Amsterdam journal Critical Studies. As one of the contributors points out in a helpful survey of the literature, feminist readings take almost all of their Bakhtin from a few works of the middle period: the long essay “Discourse in the Novel,” the much shorter “Epic and the Novel,” and the reworked dissertation, Rabelais and His World (Thomson 143–44). The most “decentered” texts in the Bakhtin canon, these works do indeed lend themselves to theories of subversion, leakage, antitradition, collectivity, body talk, cycles of reproductivity, and the fertile life at the margins. Feminist readings also make occasional mention of the book on Dostoevskii, and of the Marxist and anti-Freudian works written by Bakhtin’s associates. The early and late Bakhtin is almost never touched. This pattern of usage yields a somewhat skewed and pinched picture of Bakhtin—but the image is nevertheless there, and worth discussing.

Feminists who use Bakhtin’s ideas tend to begin by celebrating his work. For much appeals intuitively: Bakhtin’s obsession with open and receptive orifices, with the novel as an inherently subversive force, and his passion for undermining stable structures through the antics of such marginal figures as rogues, clowns, fools. The best among the feminists, however, celebrate these ideas with an increasingly uneasy conscience. For when they mobilize this subversive energy directly on behalf of a nominally oppressed group or “voice”—say, woman’s voice—their readings end up with many more problems than celebrations. The stumbling blocks are two: first, the peculiarly apolitical, playful and impersonal utopianism of Bakhtin’s carnival phase, and second, his inexhaustible good humor and benevolence. Bakhtin simply refuses to take offense. (It is for this reason, I note in passing, that Bakhtin, despite all his rhetoric about the lower bodily stratum, folk culture, and popular laughter, remains an aristocratically distanced stoic: he cannot be insulted.) The carnival he advocates really does go both ways, mocking all presumptions to privilege, holding no grudge. And we probably all agree that without some mechanism for gathering and retaining power, without some minimal investment in the individual’s willingness to register an insult, it is difficult to get an effective politics out of all of Bakhtin’s inversions, guffaws, decrownings, decenterings, and heteroglossia.

A good example of the problems this can cause is Dale Bauer’s book Feminist Dialogics: A Theory of Failed Community (1988). “My first reaction to Bakhtin was to become seduced by his theory of dialogism,” Bauer writes (5). But she soon realized that “Bakhtin’s blind spot is the battle.” To be used at all for liberationist goals, he had to be radically revised. The revision is a hair’s-breadth away from rejection. In her Preface, Bauer correctly notes that “Bakhtin’s model [of an active dialogic community] relies on a positive space, a community he celebrates because of its activity, its engagement of others. By adding a feminist turn to it, the dialogic community becomes a much more ambivalent territory… often the site of repression, subversion, marginalization, and suicide” (xiv).

Here the “feminist turn” must come face to face with the maddeningly imprecise politics of Bakhtin’s carnival world—a world governed not by politics at all, but rather by a Utopian antipolitics, a world where “repression, subversion, marginalization, and suicide” are simply laughed away. This disappearing act can happen, of course, because carnival doesn’t contain any real bodies that hurt. Seeking some accommodation for the hurting female body, Bauer tries to “intersect [Bakhtin’s] celebration of carnivalized language with the language of sexual difference.” But she is honest enough to admit that in doing so, one sacrifices most of the spirit of carnival. She searches for ways to turn Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and double-voicedness into responsible political dissent, but is left with such ultimately unsatisfactory, nonproductive categories as women’s “inarticulation” and “silence.” Bakhtin himself, we might note, rarely worried about people’s not being able to talk—although he occasionally did worry that people would not be able to hear.

A more recent account of Bakhtin’s contributions to feminism, by Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz, takes a more philosophical approach to the subject. But it too founders, albeit on the shoals of a different problem. The problem here comes not with the absen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Bakhtin and Women A Nontopic with Immense Implications
• 2 Bakhtin’s Concept of the Grotesque and the Art of Petrushevskaia and Tolstaia
• 3 Soviet Russian Women’s Literature in the Early 1980s
• 4 The Poetics Of Banality Tat’iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze, and Larisa Zvezdochetova
• 5 The Creation of Nadezhda Iakovlevna Mandel’Shtam
• 6 The Canon and the Backward Glance Akhmatova, Lisnianskaia, Petrovykh, Nikolaeva
• 7 Speaking Bodies Erotic Zones Rhetoricized
• 8 Games Women Play The “Erotic” Prose of Valeriia Narbikova
• 9 Happy Never after The Work of Viktoriia Tokareva and Glasnost’
• 10 “Leaving Paradise” and Perestroika A Week Like Any Other and Memorial Day by Natal’ia Baranskaia
• 11 Iuliia Voznesenskaia’s Women With Love and Squalor
• 12 The Heartfelt Poetry of Elena Shvarts
• 13 Reflections, Crooked Mirrors, Magic Theaters Tat’iana Tolstaia’s “Peters”
• Index