Chronotopes and Catastrophes: The Cultural History of Mikhail Bakhtin

Abstract

The Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is best known to historians as the author of a book on Rabelais which subverts the received notion of that author and inverts the commonplace idea of the Renaissance. Rabelais, Bakhtin maintains, is not a humanist-evangelist concealing Socratic seriousness in scatalogical tales; his roguish peasant-kings are authentic folk heroes and Rabelais is their literary voice and ideological advocate. And the Renaissance, for all its Michelangelos and Queen Elizabeths, is mainly distinguished by the manner in which its greatest figures -Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais satirize official culture by drawing upon carnivalesque sources of folk humor.2 The essays translated and commented upon in the two books under review offer the English reader the theoretical bases for these unorthodox assertions. They reveal Bakhtin as someone other than an unorthodox student of literature who somehow survived under Stalin. Bakhtin is an historical thinker of scope and genius; these essays are of methodological importance not only to students of the Renaissance but to every historian of culture. The astonishing range of his interests and breadth of his hypotheses are outlined with care and perspicacity by Tzvetan Todorov in the essay which forms the first half of the French volume under review.3 As the titles of these books indicate, the generative center of Bakhtin's thought is dialogic. The neologism is related both to dialogue and to