Mikhail Bakhtin's Heritage in Literature, Arts, and Psychology. Art and Answerability

Abstract

This abundant volume of essays on the thought of the Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin is partly mislabelled. The title is apt in that 2018, the year of the volume's publication marked the centennial of Bakhtin's “Art and Answerability,” which several of the essays in the volume address; but if “heritage” implies a succession through time of responses to Bakhtin, then most of the essays collected here really take his ideas outside their original context and apply them in new areas. The title could also have indicated more directly that a preponderance of its essays deal with Bakhtinian ideas in the context of Spanish studies. This misdirection is unfortunate because a less staid and tradition-minded title could have foregrounded the volume's energetically outward-looking approach, which looks back to the original ideas but then applies them to a wide range of phenomena that come into its field of vision (especially in literature, philosophy, and psychology). The volume thus offers a festival of Bakhtinian perspective rather than an analysis of Bakhtin's thought itself (a type of groundwork that has already been done by such scholars as Caryl Emerson, Gary Saul Morson, Michael Holquist, Katerina Clark, Galin Tihanov, and Craig Brandist, to name just a prominent few).If any single aim draws these essays together, it is the burden of arguing for the centrality to Bakhtin's ideas about the novel of Cervantes's Don Quixote. And it is “ideas” about the novel, because as several of the authors point out, Bakhtin did not advance a single “Theory” of the novel but a series of overlapping but distinct claims about its origins and meanings. In their respective essays, Howard Mancing and Slav N. Gratchev, the volume's editors, note that the evidence for this claim is somewhat sparse—Bakhtin refers to Cervantes's novel several times, but never at great length (as he did for Rabelais and Dostoevsky, to each of whose oeuvres he dedicated a book) and generally with an air of nodding toward a classic—but the argumentation is lively and Mancing in particular offers a cogent overview of Bakhtin's ideas about the European novel along the way (“Bakhtin's Theory of the Novel” and “Bakhtin Reading Cervantes: the Birth of the Novel,” respectively).Among the other distinctly Spanish-inflected essays are Yelena Mazour-Matusevich's “Contextualizing Bakhtin's Intuitive Discoveries: The End of Grotesque Realism and the Reformation,” which offers a compelling footnote to Bakhtin's interest in noncanonical forms by arguing that what Bakhtin calls the “grotesque” was really mythological consciousness, and that it was premodern Catholic culture that served as the bearer forward of this consciousness in the form of the grotesque realism that so exercised Bakhtin in the later Rabelais. Ricardo Castells extrapolates from the volume's insistence on the centrality of the Quixote in an overview of tricentennial celebrations of Cervantes's novel in Havana, which sheds fascinating light on the complexities of the novel's reputation in the diaspora (“Bakhtinian Re-Accentuation and he Commemoration of the Third Centenary of Don Quixote at the University of Havana [1905]”). Brian M. Phillips explores the unusual example of a picaresque heroine rather than hero, then offers an entertaining anthropological account of Salamanca's festival Lunes de Aguas—an ongoing instance of Bakhtinian carnival—in which prostitutes are temporarily expelled to the middle of the Tormes river during Lent (“Bakhtin and the Spanish Picaresque: Between La Pícara Justina and Lunes de Aguas").Among the gems outside the circle of Spanish studies are Margarita Marinova's “The Art and Answerability of Bakhtin's Poetics,” which presents an unpublished work of Bakhtin's, which acknowledges the carnivalesque quality of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry, with its orientation toward the language of the street—an assessment strikingly at odds with Bakhtin's disparagement nearly everywhere else of the allegedly insurmountably monologic qualities of verse. Yumi Tanaka's “Rejecting a Quixotic End: Kenzaburo Oe's Bakhtinian Reading of Don Quixote” explores how the Japanese novelist both wrote a novel (The Infant of the Mournful Countenance, 2002), which is an explicit allegory of the Quixote, and engaged explicitly with Bakhtin's literary theory—arguably the most genuinely polyphonic, Bakhtinian triangulation of works presented in the volume. In the domain of philosophy, Michael E. Gardiner compares Bakhtin and Foucault as latter-day Cynics—capitalized, because Gardiner looks back to the fourth-century BCE Diogenes of Sinope and his concept of parhēssia or fearlessly offensive speech (“'In Search of Lost Cheekiness': Bakhtin and Foucault as Neo-Cynics”). In “Bakhtin Against Dualism: Restoring Humanity to the Subjective Experience,” Steven Mills makes the somewhat predictable statement that, as the early “Art and Answerability” already makes clear, Bakhtin regarded social bonds as essential to human being; but Mills places his observation in a very useful account of Bakhtin's thought as a reaction against Cartesian dualism. Indeed, one of the valuable insights that emerges from the volume as a whole is the number of other thinkers with whom Bakhtin's ideas are in actual or potential dialogue: not only the obvious Soviet contemporaries like the Formalists or the Marxist Georg Lukács, but Simmel, Kierkegaard, and Foucault—or even, in one of the volume's most intriguing contributions, the disabled Swiss philosopher Alexandre Jullien, who found a way out of the resentful isolation his illness threatened to impose on him in a philosophy of mutual engagement with, and obligation to, others.As is inevitable in a large collection, the quality of the contributions—definable here as degree of genuine engagement with Bakhtin's ideas—varies considerably. Among those whose relation to Bakhtin is somewhat loose is Victor Fet, whose “Russian Translations of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books: A Bakhtinian Re-Accentuation” wanders among variant translations of Carroll into Russian—but would be a delight to read even without the Bakhtinian label. One regrettable aspect of the volume is the number of essays whose English is not fully idiomatic. Closer editing would have been welcome.