Response to Thomas Pavel, "Freedom, from Romance to the Novel: Three Anti-Utopian American Critics."

Abstract

Thomas Pavel's essay offers so much that is profoundly interest ing about Bakhtin, and provides such insight into values sitting deep in existential liberals with an illusionist, low-realist bias (that's the three of us), that one is tempted to start the forum over again with Pavel as the hub rather than as the response. Three counterqueries must suffice. First, can I agree with Pavel's statement that Bakhtin?at least as he appears, inevitably reduced, in my chronicle The First Hundred Years?indeed values outsideness as the primary human virtue? Sec ond, since so strong an outsiderly imperative is certain to create a paradox for any of creativity and also (as a related liability) to produce some pretty strange readings of literary works, in emphasiz ing this factor am I divorcing Bakhtin's aesthetics and moral from his criticism? Correctives to Bakhtin's famous practical critical readings of Dostoevsky, Rabelais, the ancient epic, and lyric poetry have been stockpiling for years?and Pavel adds his own here: a defense of the maligned Greek romance. Bakhtin, I do believe, would be distraught by such a divorce within his legacy. As he confided to a disciple late in life, from his early years he had aimed to create a first philosophy that integrated ethical, spiritual, and aesthetic values in a vision as systematic and ambitious as the one achieved by the great German academic philosophers. Last, can a place be found in this roundtable discussion for Alexander Pushkin? Bernstein's and Morson's essays neatly fit together. Both focus on temporal perception disorders, on licit and illicit uses of the shadows of time. In his commentary, Pavel makes bold to ground these two entries in a common source: the modern, secular, illusionist conviction (arguably at the base of Bakhtin's novelistic teleology as well) that assumes that creative adaptation to the world and maximal exploi tation of its options is the most complete and desirable expression of human freedom. Pushkin (and many others mentioned by Pavel in his critique) would have been wary of this position. Glorious as Pushkin is as poet and critic, in my essay in his honor for this forum he is odd man