Literature And Spirit

Essays on Bakhtin and His Contemporaries

David Patterson

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813160207, 9780813116471
• eBook ISBN: 9780813181790
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

"If Bakhtin is right," Wayne C. Booth has said, "a very great deal of what we western critics have spent our time on is mistaken, or trivial, or both." In Literature and Spirit David Patterson proceeds from the premise that Bakhtin is right.

Exploring Bakhtin's notions of spirit, responsibility, and dialogue, Patterson takes his reader from the narrow arena of literary criticism to the larger realm of human living and human loving. True to the spirit of Bakhtin, he draws the Russian into a vibrant dialogue with other thinkers, including Foucault, Berdyaev, Gide, Lacan, Levinas, and Heidegger. But he does not stop there. He engages Bakhtin in his own insightful and unique dialogue, meeting the responsibility and taking the risk summoned by dialogue.

Literature and Spirit, therefore, is not a typically cool and detached exercise in academic curiosity. Instead, it is a passionate and penetrating endeavor to respond to literature and spirit as the links in life's attachment to life. The author demonstrates that in deciding something about literature, we decide something about the substance and meaning of our lives. Far from being a question of commentary or explication, he argues, our relation to literature is a matter of spiritual life and death. The reader who comes before a literary text encounters the human voice. And Patterson enables his reader to hear that voice in all its spiritual dimensions.

Unique in its questions and in its quest, Literature and Spirit addresses an audience that goes beyond the ordinary academic categories. It appeals not only to students of literature, philosophy, and religion, but to anyone who seeks an understanding of spiritual presence and meaning in life. Through his affirmation of what is dear, Patterson responds to the needful question. And in his response he puts the question to his audience: Where are you? Literature and Spirit thus speaks to those who face the task of answering, "Here I am."

TWO

Bakhtin, Berdyaev, and Gide

Dostoevsky’s Poetics of Spirit

In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin argues that in Dostoevsky’s novels an idea is “neither a principle of representation (as in any ordinary novel), nor the leitmotif of representation, nor a conclusion drawn from it (as in a novel of ideas or a philosophical novel); it is, rather, the object of representation” (24). The title of his book on Dostoevsky might suggest that Bakhtin is concerned more with the author’s poetics than with his message, more with the how than with the what of the idea. Yet his approach to Dostoevsky is based on a connection between the manner in which the idea unfolds and the content of the idea; to be sure, it is an approach that renders suspect the separation of form and idea. In his essay “The Problem of Verbal Genres” Bakhtin is quite explicit on this point: “Style,” he argues, “is directly connected with determined thematic unities and—what is especially important—with determined compositional unities” (Estetika 242). And he states his thesis in “Discourse in the Novel” by saying, “The principle idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract ‘formal’ approach and an equally abstract ‘ideological’ approach” (Dialogic 259). Bringing out the dialogical dimensions of Dostoevsky’s novels, Bakhtin’s investigation is itself dialogical and conveys a “potential other meaning, that is, the loophole left open,” which “accompanies the word like a shadow” (Problems 233). Alongside his theory of the novel he develops a discourse on truth; with his examination of character he presents a concept of self. Thus we find a polyphony of ideas at work in Bakhtin’s treatment of Dostoevsky’s poetics, so that his work is both testimonial and analytical.

The message to which Bakhtin bears witness is to a large extent the one that Nicholas Berdyaev and André Gide convey in their own investigations. One could, for instance, describe Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky in words similar to those Gide uses to portray his study of the Russian author: “It will be, just as much as a book of criticism, a book of confessions, to anyone who knows how to read; or rather, a profession of faith” (xi). Although Bakhtin operates from a very different perspective and would surely have much to add, he would probably agree with Gide’s claim that “ideas are all that is most precious in Dostoevsky” (xii). Berdyaev, too, places his accent on ideas in Dostoevsky. He may not use the same terms that Gide does, but his purpose is the same, namely, “to display Dostoevsky’s spiritual side” (Dostoevsky 11). This, indeed, is precisely what Bakhtin achieves, perhaps even more so than Berdyaev or Gide, for Bakhtin explores discourse or the word with the view that the word is spirit.

Again similar to Berdyaev and Gide, Bakhtin proceeds from a Christian standpoint; it will be recalled, for instance, that he was exiled to Kustani in 1930 for his involvement in a Christian group known as Voskresenie. While Berdyaev and Gide openly assume a Christian position, Bakhtin found it necessary to do so by implication in his early works, although his Christian bent does come out quite clearly in Aesthetics of Verbal Art (see Estetika 51-52). More specifically, Berdyaev and Bakhtin embrace a Johannine Christianity, with Berdyaev invoking the Johannine Spirit (see Dostoevsky 207) and Bakhtin citing the Johannine Word (see Estetika 357). In her preface to Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson points out that Bakhtin’s endeavor, in fact, is “a basically religious quest into the nature of the Word” (xxxi). And in Mikhail Bakhtin, Clark and Holquist write, “This conviction that the sign has a body corresponds to Bakhtin’s ontotheological view that the spirit has a Christ. The kenotic event that is reenacted in language is the mode of God’s presence to human beings” (225). The kenotic event—the spirit or word made flesh—is the key to the approaches to Dostoevsky taken by Bakhtin, Berdyaev, and Gide. All three, each in his own way, are concerned with the spiritual dimensions of Dostoevsky and with literature as spirit.

The ensuing comparison of Bakhtin, Berdyaev, and Gide in their investigations of Dostoevsky will show that the dialogical dimensions of Dostoevsky’s art are its spiritual dimensions, with both aspects intersecting in the word. The discourse and form of his novels are essential to the ideas they address, a point that Gide no doubt wants to make when he declares, “Had he been philosopher instead of novelist, he would certainly have attempted to bring his ideas into line, whereby we should have lost the most precious of them” (51). The ideas in this case cannot be brought into line, if that means conformed to the reason that rules speculative philosophy. They require, instead, the delirious discourse of the novel, just as the spirit needs storm and dizziness. In Dostoevsky’s novels concept is involved with structure, message with poetics, literature with spirit. Setting up a dialogue among the three thinkers before us, we shall see that spiritual truth takes on polyphonic form and that the literary effort to penetrate the personality is also a religious endeavor. Before us, then, is “a meditation on the mysteries inherent in God’s making people and people’s making selves, with the activity of people creating other people in literary authorship as a paradigm for thinking at all levels of creating” (Clark and Holquist 80). Before us, in short, is a poetics of spirit. And the stake is spiritual life.

POLYPHONIC FORM

In their discussion of the Kantian features of Bakhtin’s thought, Clark and Holquist tell us, “The systematic aspects of language are to speech as the material world is to mind. Thus they differ from each other but always operate together. The two sets of features interact in a dynamic unity and cannot without conceptual violence be separated from each other. The arena where they intermingle and the force that binds them are both what Bakhtin understands by ‘utterance’ ” (222). Similarly, we are here viewing the novel as an arena, as well as a force, of interaction. It is a framework of discourse in which a multitude of voices are brought together for dialogical intermingling. The manner in which those voices are set off one against the other—the here and there of their arrangement—constitutes the novel’s polyphonic form. When dealing with polyphonic form, then, we deal with a spatial rather than a chronological structure, a point that Bakhtin stresses with respect to Dostoevsky’s novels (Problems 28).

The spatial structure is not simply an aesthetic device but is a definitive feature of the novel’s discourse itself. “Words have their locus” Foucault maintains, “not in time, but in a space in which they are able to find their original site, change their positions, turn back upon themselves, and slowly unfold a whole developing curve: a tropological space” (Order 114). Organized according to an interchange of words, Dostoevsky’s novels are built around characters that determine who they are according to where they are situated in relation to another character. The problem of presence, the problem of making life one with the word, is the problem of being able to respond, “Here I am,” when standing before the other. Recall, for example, the imperative Kirillov, in The Possessed, puts to Verkhovensky when he says, “If the laws of nature did not spare even Him, did not spare even their miracle, but made Him live in a lie and die in a lie, then the whole planet is a lie and rests on a lie and a stupid mockery. Thus the very laws of this world are a lie and a vaudeville of devils. What is there to live for? Answer if you’re a man!” (Besy 642-43). And then there are questions such as the one Ivan puts to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov: “I want to be there when everyone finds out what all this has been for. All the religions of the earth are founded on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, you see, and what am I supposed to do about them?” (Brat’ya 267). In Dostoevsky’s novels, being there always means being with, or better: being for. Confronted with the task of living in his word, each character meets the difficulty of being present before another; each must transfer his life blood into his voice through a response, in word or deed, to another voice.

We must bear this in mind when we hear Bakhtin say, “The fundamental category in Dostoevsky’s mode of visualizing was not evolution, but coexistence and interaction. He saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time” (Problems 28). Again, as crossroads and turning points become more important in literature, the stasis of epic time gives way to the dynamic of novelistic space; the novel makes room for the alien word, or the voice of the other, and creates a space where dialogue can occur. The dialogue is not in time but rather time is in the dialogue. When voice coexists with voice and word interacts with word, the chronological collapses into the instant, not as a particle of time but as an atom of eternity. Everything hangs on the word of the other and on my response to that word; hence Golyadkin’s torment over Krest’yan Ivanovich’s “expressive silence” throughout the second chapter of The Double. Standing before the other, the soul does not stand still but constantly lives and dies, hanging at the critical zero point of life and death. Thus, Bakhtin observes, “Dostoevsky always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable—and unpredeterminable—turning point for his soul” (Problems 61). Dostoevsky, indeed, often places his character literally at the threshold; think of Golyadkin at the entrance to Olsufy Ivanovich’s social gathering and Raskolnikov poised with the axe on the pawnbroker’s doorstep in Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie). In the polyphonic form characterizing Dostoevsky’s art, counterpoint signifies turning point. And being on the threshold means being in the face of the other.

We might therefore question Gide’s assertion that Dostoevsky’s art “is not the result of observations of the real; or at least, not of that alone. Nor is it the fruit of a preconceived idea, and that is why it is never mere theorizing, but remains steeped in reality. It is the fruit of intercourse between fact and idea” (97). In response to Gide, we should point out first of all that reality is not something we observe “out there”; nor is it a strictly subjective construct. Rather, it arises between mind and object, so that the reality Gide speaks of is a product of the interaction between author and world.

“World,” moreover, is not a dead datum but a living multitude of voices and consciousnesses, and any notion of “fact” is couched in an idea. It is the face, not fact, that speaks. Levinas may help us with his insight that “the epiphany of that which can present itself directly, outwardly and eminently—is visage. The expressing helps the expression here, brings help to itself, signifies, speaks” (“Signature” 185). The stillness of a stone—the silence of the underground man’s wall of “nature’s laws, the conclusions of natural science, mathematics” (Dostoevsky, Zapiski 105)—is not the silence of a face. As Bakhtin puts it, “in stillness nothing makes a sound; in silence no one speaks. Silence is possible only in the human realm” (Estetika 338). If one should point out, with Bakhtin, that Raskolnikov, for instance, “does not think about phenomena, he speaks with them” (Problems 237), we may answer that he speaks in reply to a voice that summons him from within and from beyond phenomena, the voice of the spirit or truth, if you will, the voice of the one who witnesses every dialogue from a third position. If this is what Gide has in mind, then we see that the intercourse between fact and idea may be the “great dialogue” Bakhtin invokes when he says, “All relationships among external and internal parts and elements of his [Dostoevsky’s] novel are dialogic in character, and he structured the novel as a whole as a ‘great dialogue’ ” (Problems 40). The “great dialogue” with whom? With the other, the world, spirit, oneself—both within and beyond the novel.

Dialogical structure and polyphonic form, on Bakhtin’s view, are synonymous. “The polyphonic novel,” he declares, “is dialogic through and through”; dialogical relationships, he adds, permeate “all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of human life—in general, everything that has meaning and significance” (Problems 40). Polyphonic form is here intrinsic to meaning, which is grounded in a process of listening and response. “I call meaning responses to questions,” Bakhtin writes in his “Notes from 1970-1971.” “That which responds to no question is, for us, void of meaning”; and meaning “exists only for other meaning, that is, coexists with it” (Estetika 350). The polyphony of voice is therefore a polyphony of meaning, a counterposition of question and response. What must be noted in this regard is the importance of the question. The underground man’s stone wall is the wall of fixed formulas and ready answers; it is the wall of authoritative reason and syllogistic conclusions; it is, as the underground man suggests, the wall of death (Dostoevsky, Zapiski 118-19). Questions break down this wall to make room for dialogue as it unfolds in Dostoevsky’s novels. Questions are the life of dialogue; dialogue is the source of meaning; meaning is the substance of life. “To be means to communicate dialogically,” observe Clark and Holquist (86). It has been said that when dialogue ends, everything ends. Here let it be added that when the question ends, dialogue ends.

As Berdyaev has noted, Dostoevsky generally plays the dialogical counterposition of question and response off a central position, a central voice, that poses questions and makes responses to other voices. “Dostoevsky’s novels,” he writes, “are all built up around a central figure, whether the secondary characters converge towards it or the reverse” (Dostoevsky 41). We must remind ourselves, however, that this central voice is not the voice of the author’s message but the reference point for the interaction of voices. To be sure, it happens, as in the case of Stavrogin in The Possessed, that the central figure never actually voices his ideas; instead, we hear only the responses of Shatov, Kirillov, and Verkhovensky to that voice. Their responses, in turn, place Stavrogin in a position of responsibility: the central figure is not a static sounding board but an active respondent. This movement of convergence, this orientation toward the other’s voice, is the distinguishing, dynamic feature of polyphonic form.

Bakhtin has understood further that such movement is not simply an aesthetic matter but constitutes the expression of a certain ideological outlook: “A distrust of convictions and their usual monologic function, a quest for truth not as the deduction of one’s own consciousness, in fact not in the monologic context of an individual consciousness at all, but rather in the ideal authoritative image of another human being, an orientation toward the other’s voice, the other’s word: all this is characteristic of Dostoevsky’s form-shaping ideology” (Problems 98). It is also characteristic of his ideology-shaping form, since, as Bakhtin realizes, “one of the most basic tasks for the novel” is “the laying-bare of conventionality, the exposure of all that is vulgar and falsely stereotyped in human relationships” (Dialogic 162). But perhaps seeking is a better term than shaping in this instance. For the voice of the other is constantly questioning, continually reshaping form and idea. Notes from Underground is a good example. The change in form from part one to part two corresponds to a change in the problem facing the underground man: he shifts from the difficulty of being alone—“I am alone, while they are everyone” (Dostoevsky, Zapiski 125)—to the task of generating a relation with the other, with Liza.

Reading Bakhtin’s statements concerning the distrust of conviction and the laying bare of convention, we see more clearly why Gide remarks that “convention is the great breeder of falsehood” (121). When conviction takes the form of automatic answer, it is, like convention, a monological declaration, and not a dialogical interrelation; it is “an avoidance of activity,” Clark and Holquist explain, “that has the effect of making my life a subfunction of a self-imposed ‘axiological reflex’ (cennostnyj refleks), similar to Heidegger’s das Man” (76). The monological is untruth. For untruth is the mimicry of the formula, in which the man is no longer speaking but is spoken. Recall, for instance, Golyadkin’s repeated insertion of “as they say” in The Double (Dostoevsky, Dvoinik 119, 120, 121, 125) and his insistence that nevertheless he is his own man (124). We are reminded in this connection of Lacan’s assertion that if a person can be the slave of language, he “is all the more so of a discourse in the universal movement in which his place is already inscribed at birth, if only by virtue of his proper name” (Écrits 148).

Truth happens only where one’s voice arises in a contrapuntal manner, as a response that calls for response. This is what characterizes polyphonic form. We shall go into other implications of form for a view of truth below. Here let it be noted that a notion of truth lies beyond polyphonic form and that polyphonic form, in turn, has ramifications for how we view truth. Recalling in this connection Berdyaev’s statement about the central figure, we discover that the convergence of one character toward another constitutes both the formal interaction of voices and the dialogical quest for truth. One character encounters another not to convert but to question, as when Ivan confronts Alyosha with the suffering of the children in The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky, Brat’ya 262-69). The distrust of conventional convictions, moreover, is found not only in the orientation toward the other’s word, as distinguished from the discourse of the crowd, but in the form of the novel itself. Hence Bakhtin contends, “This ability of the novel to criticize itself is a remarkable feature of this ever-developing genre” (Dialogic 6). Ever-developing, the novel is anticonventional. The dialogical relation between characters engages the novel in an implied dialogue with itself; turning back on itself, it participates in its own polyphony.

The more profound the novel’s consciousness of itself, the more pronounced the polyphonic form within the novel. In his study of Dostoevsky, Berdyaev perceives the tension of polyphony within the author’s works, noting that “a centrifugal and centripetal movement among human beings runs through all the novels” (44). Berdyaev’s remark immediately brings to mind Bakhtin’s view of language—the basis of human relations—as a composite of centrifugal and centripetal forces. While Dostoevsky’s style is a unifying feature of discourse in his novels, the polyphonic form has a disunifying effect; polyphonic form is made up of heteroglossia—a stratification and opposition of discourses—in tension with the unitary language of style. “This stratification and heteroglossia, once realized,” Bakhtin writes, “is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as language is alive and developing. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted process of decentralization and disunification g...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• One. Bakhtin and Foucault: Laughter, Madness, Literature
• Two. Bakhtin, Berdyaev, and Gide: Dostoevsky’s Poetics of Spirit
• Three. Bakhtin and Lacan: Author, Hero, and the Language of the Self
• Four. Bakhtin and Levinas: Signification, Responsibility, Spirit
• Five. Bakhtin and Heidegger: Word and Being
• Six. Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index