M. M. Bakhtin and "World Literature"

Abstract

M. M. Bakhtin and "World Literature' Katerina Clark In recent years, scholars in a variety of fields have been interested in the phenomenon of diaspora. Many have sought ways to analyze the impact on cultural, ethnic or national identity when large numbers of people from one ethnic group or country find themselves, whether by accident or design , scattered over many other countries. In our present diasporic age when, for example, the distinction between colonial and metropolitan culture is eroding, there has been a revival of interest in the concept "world literature," a notion first introduced by Goethe in an essay of 1827.1 In seeking models for going about the study of "world literature" many have turned to the examples of Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany who found academic employment in Istanbul where they meditated world literature, or more precisely wrote about literary phenomena in a strikingly transnational way. Auerbach's Mimesis, essentially the summa of his Istanbul musings, has long been regarded as a milestone in the evolution of Comparative Literature, but has recently been looked at anew precisely because of its diasporic inception.2 At approximately the same time, in the mid to late thirties, Bakhtin was part of another diaspora, the diaspora of those Soviet intellectuals dispersed in the many camps of the Gulag or, as in his case, in exile (Bakhtin was sent first to Kazakhstan and then to Saransk where he was surounded by Mordvinians, who speak a non-Indo-European language—and by camp guards; in 1936 he moved to exile in Savelovo, one hundred odd kilomeJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 266-292. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. M. M. Bakhtin and "World Literature" 267 ters from Moscow but close enough for him to be able to resume something approaching his former intellectual life). When scholars have sought to contextualize Bakhtin's writings from the mid to late thirties they have largely placed him in terms of the Stalinist regime and its culture: Was he obliquely attacking Stalinist repression as one who had suffered from it might well be inclined to do? Or was he in some strange sense an apologist for Stalinist excesses as Mikhail Ryklin has argued (Ryklin 64). In the Rabelais book Bakhtin cautioned against giving any interpretation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel based on the author's political circumstances, and while one is often tempted to see this or that point made by Bakhtin in his texts of these years as veiled political commentary, and in local instances this may be the case, it seems far-fetched to argue that he mustered such a barrage of literary erudition, and fastened on Rabelais as his subject matter, merely to provide camouflage for a critique of Stalinism. Arguably, while biographically Bakhtin belongs with the Soviet internal diaspora of exile and the camps, intellectually he belongs more with the anti-fascist diaspora, and especially with its contingent of displaced germanophone intellectuals. Though through his writings he entered into the debates on literary theory of his time, he did so to a marked degree using the diaspora's literary-cum-philosophical framework. Looking at Bakhtin's writings from this perspective also enables us to situate Bakhtin in terms of the recent debates about "world literature." More specifically, here I shall place his works in the particular context of a trans-national anti-fascist movement from the mid to late thirties in which this diaspora played a leading role, and in relation to this movement's concept of "world literature." In so doing, I shall confine myself largely to a discussion of three major texts written by Bakhtin in exile during the late thirties: the essay on the chronotope of 1937-8, the extant fragments from his book on the novel of education (written before 1938) and, primarily, his dissertation on Rabelais, the first redaction of which was submitted to the Gorky Institute (Moscow) in 1940. In these works Bakhtin emerges, as do so many leading Germanophone intellectuals of the anti-fascist diaspora, as essentially a product of the German intellectual world of the early twentieth century. In his various extant writings, whatever...