Bakhtin and Popular Culture

Abstract

M IKHAIL BAKHTIN is acknowledged in increasingly wide circles as a sensitive observer of popular culture in its sociohistorical context. His acute study of the folkloric rituals of carnival-from the phallophors of epic Saturnalia, whose role was to joke and cavort obscenely, to the rogue comedians at turn-of-the-century country fairs-uncovers a vast and fertile dialogue of heteroglossia.1 Not only at the carnival but pervading all levels of language, Bakhtin identifies infinitely shifting heteroglottal strata made up of loosely bound generic wholes, subgeneric wholes, accents, systems, dialects, and constantly fragmented layers of language working together, or at battle, or at play. This dialogic scheme covers, in The Dialogic Imagination and Rabelais and His World, most epic drama and Russian and European nineteenth-century realist literature and invites its own extension into areas of recent Western popular culture. Although Bakhtin insists that the novel is the key form of the time, his advantage over everyone else working on novel theory is his appreciation that the novel, rather than assimilating its language to form, shapes its form to languages and consequently appears as what Michael Holquist describes as a supergenre, ingesting and engulfing all other genres. Therefore the range of texts composed of a series of different languages interpenetrating one anotherBakhtin's classification of novelness--must clearly be immense. In fact, rather than limiting the term novel to a narrow definition of a piece of textual fiction, Bakhtin uses it to name the interplay of heteroglottal strata at work within any given literary system in order to reveal the artificial limits and constraints of that system; for as Bakhtin sees it is fundamentally opposed to the ordering into genres and canons that is characteristic of most literary systems. Bakhtin's version of novelization does not permit generic monologue, but rather insists on an interplay of dialogues between what any given system will admit as literature, or high culture, or art,