Toward a Mechanics of Mode: Beyond Bakhtin

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

It seems paradoxical that a Russian Formalist whose theories date from 1928-29, when Formalism was falling out of favor, should be the first to study the links between the public ceremony of joyous debasement and an important segment of French literature. But in fact we must thank Mikhail Bakhtin for having treated in Rabelais and His World (1940) the traditional representations of disorder and anti-social outrage as esthetic phenomena with recognizable patterns and conventions. Through his analysis of the carnival, he has located their source and justified their presence while throwing light on their positive function not only in Gargantua et Pantagruel but, by extension, in a growing number of outrageous comedies. It is surprising in another sense that Bakhtin's first book, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929), places the serious writing of Dostoevsky in the same large carnivalesque tradition, discovering there a popular language previously ignored by critics bent on elevating literary icons. This earlier study goes far towards explaining the mechanics of a writer whose power escapes very few but whose gifts are more often praised and misprized than understood. Approaching the carnival as a folk super-genre, it discloses virtues where flaws have offended the eyes of earlier (and later) critics. The awkwardness of Dostoevsky's style, his failure to differentiate between the voices of his protagonists, the sharp shifts in tone and perspective, the curious juxtapositions, the unresolved plots and internal tensions are, for Bakhtin, part of an overriding esthetic proper to the dialogic work. They belong to the same tradition which spawned the circus, the symposium, and the menippean satire. This is a bold position, a remarkably clear-sighted one, and the pieces distinguished and assembled by Bakhtin not only fit marvelously together; they are in themselves elegant and well shaped. If in this essay I feel obliged to question certain aspects of Bakhtin's approach, it is precisely because his discoveries are too important to be clouded by the limitations of his perspective. These books are significant partly for the insights they bring to two major writers but mainly because, together, they constitute a message groping for a method, a view of the arts as they relate to primitive ceremony and interrelate modally. Despite a profound sympathy for the idea that carnival activities provide us with a frame of reference for the study of