Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin

Walter L. Reed

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781623561116
• eBook ISBN: 9781623564049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Literature and literary criticism throughout the twentieth century are famous for their proclamations of the death of the author, the eclipse of character and the "nothingness of personality, " as Borges put it. Walter Reed investigates the ideas of personhood developed by one of the most influential literary theorists of the last century: Mikhail Bakhtin. He finds in Bakhtin a personalism based on the idea of an ongoing dialogue between authors and their heroes in imaginative literature. Such a model of inter-personality, Reed argues, allows us to appreciate the rich possibilities of personhood set forth in the earlier nineteenth-century period of Romanticism. Elaborating a new general theory and providing close readings of classic works of Romantic poetry and fiction, Romantic Literature in Light of Bakhtin offers a better understanding of the preoccupation with the individual, creative self that lay at the heart of this revolutionary literature that still speaks to readers today.

1

Architectonics: Articulating a Period Imagination

It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.

Friedrich Schlegel

I

The editor of the English translation of Bakhtin’s earliest writings, most of them unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, entitles his introduction to the volume “The Architectonics of Answerability.” Michael Holquist offers the phrase as a working title for an ambitious project Bakhtin undertook in the early 1920s, a systematic treatise that was to have included sections on ethics, aesthetics, politics, and religion. Although he offered no title of his own, Bakhtin gave a brief description of this magnum opus in what seems to be part of the first section, translated by Vadim Liapunov as Toward a Philosophy of the Act:

The first part of our inquiry will be devoted to an examination of these fundamental moments in the architectonic of the actual world of the performed deed—the world actually experienced, and not the merely thinkable world. The second part will be devoted to aesthetic activity as an actually performed act or deed, both from within its product and from the standpoint of the author as answerable participant […] The third part will be devoted to the ethics of politics, and the fourth and final part to religion. The architectonic of that world is reminiscent of the architectonic of Dante’s world and of the world of medieval mystery plays.¹

The term “architectonic” or, more usually in English, the plural “architectonics,” refers literally to architecture and the construction of buildings, but metaphorically it refers to a comprehensive system of thought, a systematic arrangement of knowledge. Architectonics articulates the foundational structure of any systematic philosophy. The concept and ambition go back to Aristotle (the term is used in his Nicomachean Ethics, for example), and the idea of architectonics was given new currency and prestige in Kant’s magisterial critiques, The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason and The Critique of Judgement. (Kant claimed that reason itself is architectonic in nature.) An architectonics was part and parcel of any number of nineteenth-century philosophies, neo-Kantian or Idealist, and it was from his early attraction to the neo-Kantian philosophy of the Marburg School in Germany, led by Hermann Cohen, that Bakhtin seems to have fastened on the project as well as the term.²

Bakhtin’s architectonics is distinctive, however, and not just because only part of his projected manuscript seems to have been written. His is a distinctively provisional and uniquely self-revising structure of thought; it offers an “open totality,” to use one of his formulations cited in the Foreword. It is a holistic schema marked by “unfinalizability,” to use another of his favorite terms, even in its conception. Such a paradoxical attitude toward systematic thought has its roots in Romanticism. It can be found in the aphorism of Friedrich Schlegel in the epigraph to this chapter, as well as in the declaration in Blake’s Jerusalem, “I must create a system or be enslav’d by another Man’s/ I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.”³ Most other philosophical architectonics, of which Kant’s is the supreme example for Bakhtin as for post-Kantian philosophy in general, are closed and finalized (or at least finalizable in principle, in the case of Hegel’s dialectic) in comparison. They aim for stability of separate and distinct categories. In Bakhtin’s thought, however, conceptual categories actively contest one another, struggling for dominance and control. Or, in another characteristic tendency of his thinking, they delineate a gradual transition from one category to the other. In some cases, the opposing categories are even said to overlap with one another. Another way of putting it is to say that Bakhtin’s architectonics is dynamic and creative, systematic thinking revealed in the process of laying and rearranging its own foundations.

It is in the context of such a flexible philosophical scheme that the extended essay “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” the largest surviving section of Bakhtin’s projected four-fold architectonic and an important early articulation of better-known ideas and methods he developed later in his career, can be best understood. For it is here, in the architectonics of aesthetic activity, that the peculiar, shifting structure of Bakhtin’s discursive categories is first noticeable. While the four major parts of the projected treatise are presented as categorically different from one another, describing radically different types of value or “axiologies,” in the Kantian term, they also turn out to overlap. One realm or sphere of activity turns out to “interpenetrate” or to “permeate” another, as Bakhtin puts it. What are presented initially as hard and fast boundaries become more open, quite crossable borders; these borders, in turn, become thresholds, inviting conceptual trespass across them. Such transformations of a strong binary opposition into a graduated continuum occur unpredictably and without logical inconsistency on Bakhtin’s part, largely it seems because it is always an individual person who is envisioned as acting—as taking meaningful and valid steps, as the Russian word postupok favored by Bakhtin connotes—across as well as within the categories. Furthermore, and this emphasis is crucial to all three chapters of this book, Bakhtin’s schema is founded on the architectonic relations of the individual person as this person sees them: I-for-myself, the-other-for-me, and (less prominent in Bakhtin’s analysis but important nonetheless) I-for-the-other. The concrete individual person does not disappear from philosophical view in this analysis. But she or he only has meaning—only makes meaning and receives meaning—in relationship with other people, others who themselves are only meaningful—aesthetically, ethically, politically, and religiously—as dialogically constituted partners or antagonists.

Thus toward the end of the surviving “ethical” section of Bakhtin’s philosophical treatise, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, the exposition suddenly turns to aesthetic evidence in an example from literature. “In order to give a preliminary idea of the possibility of such a concrete, value-governed architectonic,” Bakhtin explains, “we shall analyze here the world of aesthetic seeing—the world of art.”⁴ What this means is that the discussion of ethical answerability will focus on a literary hero, since the work of art is organized, according to Bakhtin, around the human being as the embodiment of aesthetic value. The hero is the center of human value not because he is good in any moral sense or powerful socially or politically, but simply because he or she is the focus of the interested—and for Bakhtin, the loving and sustaining—attention of the author. As in English, the Russian geroi, means “protagonist” or “main character” as much it does as “heroic character or personality.”

As Bakhtin develops the distinctively Russian idea of the author’s aesthetic affection for his hero, he turns to the Russian national poet Pushkin for a concrete example. The last ten pages of what has been for sixty pages a treatise on ethics turn into a close reading of Pushkin’s lyric poem “Parting.” In this short poem there turn out to be two heroes (the speaker-hero or “objectified author” and the beloved, the woman he is addressing), an “author-artist” (situated behind the poem and not to be confused with the first-person speaker), and a “contemplator,” a reader. The reader, situated before the text, is not completely distinguishable from the author-artist but is not identical with him either. Thus instead of the ethical unity of one person acting responsibly before others, we are suddenly presented with an aesthetic plurality of four persons, four possible, hypothetical or potential persons in intimate relationship with one another within a work of art, a work formed by the creative activity of one of them, the author-artist who, as artist, is not simply reducible to the historical being who once existed.

Significantly, the very same poem by Pushkin becomes the focus of attention at the beginning of “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” the much longer but still incomplete aesthetic part of Bakhtin’s early magnum opus. (These opening pages are placed in a “Supplementary Section” at the end of the text by the editors of the 1990 English translation, due to the fact that the section exists only in a fragmentary form in the surviving manuscript.) Though the terms and concepts in the aesthetic analysis here are somewhat different from those of the ethical analysis of the poem in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, it is the presence of a human being, a concrete though imagined person who functions as a center of value in and of himself, that establishes the domain of art and provides the foundation for aesthetic activity within the literary process and product. “There is no aesthetic vision and there are no works of art without a hero,” Bakhtin asserts. “The only thing we must do,” he says, “is distinguish between an actual expressed hero and a potential hero who strives to break through the shell, as it were, of a given object of aesthetic vision.”⁵ On the other hand, he acknowledges, there is no hero—only an undeveloped potential of a human being—if there is no author, no creator behind the work.

Yet in the very next paragraph Bakhtin acknowledges the instability of this distinction, allowing that in some cases “a given human being and a determinate hero do, in fact, gravitate toward each other and often pass into each other without any mediation” (229). As in his philosophy more generally, Bakhtin’s aesthetics here is internally transgressive. It establishes a polarity, a logical opposition of categories, only to render relative and graduated their distinction from one another. Dualisms become dialogic, complementary instead of oppositional. The last paragraph of the fragmentary opening section of this aesthetic system with interpenetrating parts gives an uncharacteristically fable-like explanation of how, in literature proper, the single or singular person who is the focus of ethical activity becomes more than one aesthetically:

Author and hero meet in life; they enter into cognitive-ethical, lived-life relations with each other, contend with each other (even if they meet in one human being). And this event, the event of their life, the event of their intensely serious relations and contention, crystallizes in an artistic whole into an architectonically stable yet dynamically living relationship between author and hero which is essential for understanding the life of the work.⁶

There are five sections of “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity” that follow this preliminary discussion: “The Problem of the Author’s Relationship to the Hero,” “The Spatial Form of the Hero,” “The Temporal Whole of the Hero (The Problem of the Inner Man—the Soul),” “The Whole of the Hero as a Whole of Meaning,” and “The Problem of the Author.” Within all of these analytical elaborations, Bakhtin’s own distinctive version of the literary person interpersonally articulated remains central. Once we understand its interpersonal as well as intrapersonal character, its focus on an individuality which is also a sociality, I am claiming here, the modes of personhood elaborated in this early and unpublished essay can provide a compelling scheme for the interpretation of literary texts of all kinds, especially the literary texts of Romanticism. For the creative individual, however problematic he or she may be, is the central (though by no means the exclusive) concern of Romanticism. The creative individual, in fact, is the cornerstone of an architectonics of otherness, as I am calling it, the implicit scheme of relations that organizes the conceptualized world of this distinctive period of European and American cultural history.

II

One distinct advantage of the Bakhtinian architectonics of Romanticism that I am offering here is that it mediates a long-standing debate among scholars of this period as to whether Romanticism or the Romantic period actually exists, whether these terms have any definite meaning, given the variety of things they have been used to refer to.

“On re-reading this book ten years after I wrote it, I find its chief faults to be those which I myself least easily forgive in the books of other men: needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper,” C. S. Lewis wrote in a preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1943. One of the causes of obscurity, he thought, was the way he had used the word “Romanticism”: “I would not now use this word to describe the experience which is central to this book. I would not, indeed, use it to describe anything, for I now believe it to be a word of such varying senses that it has become useless and should be banished from our vocabulary.”⁷

It is possible that Lewis was remembering the famous essay by Arthur O. Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” published in 1924, which advocates a similar procedure. Lovejoy specifies three distinct senses of “what is called Romanticism,” two of which he furthermore finds internally contradictory, and concludes “that any attempt at a general appraisal of even of a single chronologically determinate Romanticism—still more, of ‘Romanticism’ as a whole–is a fatuity.” Such a perception of many incompatible Romanticisms eventually yielded to the synthetic, unitarian view proposed by René Wellek, “On the Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History,” which appeared in 1949 and began to enlist a long series of concurring opinions from Western scholars.⁸ As late as 1972, in his survey “Trends of Recent Research on West European Romanticism,” Henry H. H. Remak affirmed Wellek’s 1963 reaffirmation of a “central creed of the great romantic poets in England, Germany, and France,” namely that “all see the implication of the imagination, symbol, myth, and organic nature, and see it as a part of the great endeavor to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and world, the conscious and unconscious.”⁹ Admitting that this consensus had been reached and retained “miraculously,” Remak did anticipate, however, that such agreement among scholars might not last for long.

He was right. The influential erosion of a unified historical theory of Romanticism in the work of Paul de Man was actually well under way by then, from the essay “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” written and published in French in 1960, to the “Introduction” to the special issue of Studies in Romanticism on the “Rhetoric of Romanticism” published in 1979. And it was soon to be taken up, from another theoretical quarter, by Jerome McGann, in a series of essays from the later 1970s, eventually collected in The Beauty of Inflections (1985), and in his influential polemic The Romantic Ideology.¹⁰ De Man confessed to feeling a certain “bad conscience,” regretting that the close rhetorical analysis of texts he pioneered had made it impossible to talk meaningfully about periods of literary history like Romanticism, except as “rather crude metaphors for figural patterns rather than historical events or acts.” And McGann distinguished between the great variety of literary works produced in the historical period called Romantic and the anti-historical “ideology of Romanticism” that informs many of the works most highly regarded by literary critics like Wellek, M. H. Abrams, Northrop Frye and others, advocates of what he calls the “unified field theory” of Romanticism.¹¹ But the idea of a unified or even coherent Romanticism has been continually questioned in the last forty years of studies devoted to the period or movement, challenged in the name of historical or linguistic particularities beyond the aesthetic. “The convenient labels by which critics sought to untrouble the roiling waters of actuality have grown more and more irrelevant to the true historical situation,” another distinguished American Romanticist noted in 1993, “or (which is to say much the same thing) they have seemed rather a falsification than an explanation of the nature of the age.”¹²

The concept of architectonics developed in the early theoretical writings of Bakhtin, however, allows us to see first of all that these opposed ideas about Romanticism are not contradictory alternatives but complementary ones. Indeed, they can be seen as representing two dialogical tendencies, systematic and unifying on the one hand, anti-systematic and diversifying on the other, in any cultural construct or verbal utterance. For Bakhtin, it is not the ideological content of particular utterances that determines their unity or diversity—that is, that determines the unity or diversity of a cultural phenomenon, whether a whole historical period or a single verbal text. Rather, it is the way all utterances, large-scale and small, embody and express “two embattled tendencies in the life of language.” “Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’ (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces),” he argues in “Discourse in the Novel.” “Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a school and so forth. It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language.”¹³

This key passage in Bakhtin’s writings has been invoked in support of the emphases in literary scholarship of the West over the past several decades on ethnic diversity and cultural variety, on the particulars of historical materialism and the materials of history, or on the idiosyncrasies of figurative language, the various turnings of tropes, especially in the inevitably figurative language of literature, away from literal meaning and straightforward reference. That is to say, Bakhti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword: Romanticism in Light of Bakhtin
• 1 Architectonics: Articulating a Period Imagination
• 2 Personalism: Reckoning Voices
• 3 Chronotopes: Coordinating Representative Genres
• Afterword: Bakhtin in Light of Romanticism
• Appendix: Diagrams
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright