Carnivalizing Difference

Bakhtin and the Other

Peter I. Barta, Paul Allen Miller, Charles Platter, David Shepherd, Peter I. Barta, Paul Allen Miller, Charles Platter, David Shepherd

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134697694
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Langues et linguistique
• Thema: Linguistique

It has seemed at times that there is no neutral territory between those who see Bakhtin as the practitioner of a kind of neo-Marxist, or at least materialist, deconstruction and those who look at the same texts and see a defender of traditional, liberal humanist values and classical conceptions of order, a conservative in the true sense of the term. Arising from a conference under the same title held at Texas Tech University, Carnivalizing Difference seeks to explore the actual and possible relationships between Bakhtinian theory and cultural practice. The introduction explores the changing configurations of our understanding of Bakhtin's work in the context of recent theory and outlines how that understanding can inform, and be informed by, culture both ancient and modern. Eleven articles, spanning a wide range of periods and cultural forms, then address these issues in detail, revealing the ways in which Bakhtinian thought illuminates, sometimes obfuscates, but always challenges.

1 ALIENATED COUPLES IN EURIPIDEAN TRAGEDY: A BAKHTINIAN ANALYSIS

Nancy Felson

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In two early essays, Toward a Philosophy of the Act and “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, both composed between 1920 and 1924, Mikhail Bakhtin develops a model to describe ethical interactions between two or more parties in a variety of contexts, real and Active. His model has a general application, both to successful interactions and to failures. In this essay I begin by looking at Bakhtin's model for the interaction of couples as he deploys it in his reading of Pushkin's poem “Parting”, then use it to illuminate interactions between marital couples in three Euripidean plays, Iphigenia at Aulis (I.A., 405), Alcestis (438), and Medea (431). For each play, I focus on an exchange that takes place at a moment of rupture or impending rupture or at a crisis. In all three cases, the wife tries to exact reciprocity from her husband based on her previous acts of generosity toward him. Clytemnestra in I.A. asks Agamemnon to spare their child, arguing that she was consistently a virtuous wife who fulfilled her spousal duties despite his violence in wooing her. Alcestis bases her request that Admetus not remarry on her voluntary self-sacrifice for him and on his love of their children. Medea reminds Jason how she saved him and gave up everything for him and how he was therefore in her debt. Then she reviles him because he betrayed her, disregarding all her favors and violating his sacred oath.

Though Euripides represents each of the three couples uniquely, all miscommunicate in some fashion. By providing a way almost to “measure” the ingredients in their interactions and to monitor changes in those ingredients over time, a Bakhtinian analysis illuminates this miscommunication. Using such an approach, a critic can describe with precision moments of rupture and crises in understanding, as well as efforts by either partner to end discord and (re)introduce reciprocity, or else to retaliate and exact revenge. With this precise descriptive information, instead of viewing the interrelation as irreparably flawed, tragically doomed, or precluded because of the incontestable hierarchical nature of the marital relation in fifth-century Athenian society, a critic can envision alternative, positive pathways for them. Such an expanded vision of alternate possibilities for the couple explains some of the intensity of the tragedy,¹ which turns out to arise from a failure to communicate that is anything but necessary.

Bakhtin begins Toward a Philosophy of the Act by insisting on the radical singularity of each person at every moment and by asserting the impossibility that one individual can penetrate the alterity, or otherness, of an other. Since we each organize the world according to our own complex of values, our “value-centers” belong to each of us uniquely; they are our “blind spots”, the uniqueness of which Bakhtin celebrates: “Life knows two value-centers that are fundamentally and essentially different, yet are correlated with each other: myself and the other; and it is around these centers that all of the concrete moments of Being are distributed and arranged” (TPA, 74). Accordingly, each person, having acquired knowledge, imparts a “tone” to it and “signs” or “acknowledges” it, bringing the knowledge toward the self by attaching it to that self. This “signature”, this “attachment”, produces “answerability” — a prerequisite for any dialogic relation.²

Bakhtin introduces three complementary terms for describing interactions: “I-for-myself”, “the-other-for-me”, and “I-for-another”. All three, taken together, express an inter-dependence between a self and an other which respects the radical singularity of each.³ The absence, however, of a single ingredient makes full dialogism impossible. What we will see in the Euripidean tragedies that I examine is the absence of dialogism, which can be expressed by any combination of the inverse of these three categories: “I-against-myself” (self-denigration, even self-destruction), “the-other-against-me” (victimization), and “I-against-another” (revenge).

Bakhtin applies these intertwined ideas to Pushkin's “Parting” in two complementary studies (TPA, 65-66 and AH, 211–221). For Bakhtin, this poem offers a complex of overlapping and interacting value-centers, seen from the diverse perspectives of its two characters. Its protagonist — the “author-hero” — is the representation of a person with all the emotional-volitional tones and values, as put into completed form, or “finalized”, by the poet. As “author-creator”, Pushkin gives shape to his protagonist through “live-entering”, i.e. through finding domains of shared value with his character, as an other, while still maintaining his own place — his own “outsideness” — with respect to that other. Only from his own perspective can he be said to “live-enter” his character. Since his relation to this personage is unidirectional and hence asymmetrical (the character does not “live-enter” his author-creator in turn), his “live-entering” differs radically from that between characters in art or, in life, between an I and an other (AH, 4–2), which can be and often is reciprocated.

In “Parting”, the author-creator (Pushkin) represents the author-hero or protagonist (“I”) at two poignant moments in relation to his beloved (“you”): one is the moment of separation, the other the imagined moment of reunion (in death). As the poem begins, the author-hero is describing the moment of parting:

Bound for the shores of your distant homeland

You were leaving this foreign land.

In that unforgettable hour, in that sorrowful hour,

I wept before you for a long time.

My hands, growing ever colder.

Strained to hold you back.

My moans implored you not to break off

The terrible anguish of parting.

Bakhtin proceeds through the three-stanza poem, tracing shifts in value-centers and identifying the emotional-volitional tones of the lyrical hero and heroine that predominate at any textual moment. One technique he uses is to establish the reference point, or rigo from which events are experienced. In the opening couplet, for example, Italy is “homeland” and Russia “this foreign land” from the heroine's value-center, even though the hero is speaking.⁴ Thus the narrator-hero, at this stage, “live-enters” the heroine, capturing her perspective in his speech. Some items, like the hour and its epithets “unforgettable” and “sorrowful” (3), are events both for him and for her; but throughout the first stanza, it is his emotional-volitional tone that predominates. It is ishands (third couplet), in immediate proximity to isbody, that he describes as straining to keep her within their spatial environment; likewise ismoans (in the fourth couplet) implore her at this moment of parting:

But you tore away your lips

From our bitter kiss;

From a land of gloomy exile

You called me to another land.

You said: “On the day of our meeting

Beneath an eternally blue sky

In the shade of the olive trees.

We shall once more, my beloved, unite our kisses of love.”

In the second stanza, the lover depicts his beloved's context and his own in a state of intense interpenetration: the eternally blue sky that exists for every mortal life, including theirs, is presented as the site of their future meeting. Indeed, while her value-center takes some precedence, it nevertheless remains encompassed in his. Since he is the objectified author, his concrete reference-points remain primary. “The beloved”, in Bakhtin's words, “is valuatively affirmed and founded by the lover, and consequently her entire valuative event-context (in which Italy is her homeland) is affirmed and founded by him as well.”

But there — alas! — where the sky's vault

Shines with blue radiance.

Where the waters slumber beneath the cliffs.

You have fallen asleep forever.

Your beauty and your sufferings

Have vanished in the grave —

And the kiss of our meeting has vanished as well…

But I am waiting for that kiss — you owe it to me…

The two couplets that open the third stanza concretize the place that she designates for their meeting. Here the lover transforms the possible site of the future meeting (in Italy) into the actual site of her death. He also uses her word (“blue radiance” echoing “blue sky”) and refers back to her language (“that kiss”). The world of stanza 2, dominated by her value-center, a place where she might exist and they might meet again, gives way in stanza 3 to a world characterized — for him — by her absence. In the final couplet his value-center decidedly prevails: the tone of the parting and unrealized meeting here turns into that of the assured and inevitable meeting there. His last line — “But I am waiting for that kiss — you owe it to me…” — collects her earlier promise: “We shall once more, my beloved, unite our kisses of love.” Not only does the lover acknowledge his beloved by using her language and referring to the kiss she promised, but he also changes his direction in the course of the poem: he will travel to her homeland, to Italy. He quotes her words in stanza 2 and then shows himself as changed by them, obedient to them. The poem performs “I-for-another”, in that the narrator-lover, in the very choice of words, incorporates the vantage point of his beloved.

Bakhtin's analysis illustrates how one can describe the shifts between value-centers as a poem moves forward, shifts discernible even when the speaker (in this case, the lover) dominates the discourse. Though in such cases the subjectivity of the beloved never gets represented completely, a measure of dialogicality is nonetheless remarkably conveyed. As we shall see, Bakhtin's model is equally suitable for describing the dialogic potential of cases, such as those in the Euripidean tragedies discussed below, in which the interaction between couples is far less equal.

DIALOGICAL COUPLES

Given the structure of Greek marriage and given the attitudes of (many, most, all?) Greek males, from the archaic period onward (the misogynistic documents and statements, the Utopian vision of a world without women, the exclusion of women from public life), it is important first to ask: can reciprocity between husband and wife even occur? Then, if our answer is yes, we can tackle further questions: Does Euripides present couples in his tragedies aspiring to dialogicality? If so, why do they fail?

Winkler (1990) and Zeitlin (1990) both see ancient Greek theater as providing an arena in which males can explore societal issues, using the female as their cognitive tool.⁵ As Zeitlin remarks, “in Greek theater […] the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other” (68). “Even when female characters struggle with the conflicts generated by the particularities of their subordinate social position”, she continues, “their demands for identity and self-esteem are nevertheless designed primarily for exploring the male project of selfhood in the larger world” (69). Winkler, in his companion essay, emphasizes the profoundly political function of tragedy within the Athenian polis. He sees the City Dionysia, at which trag...