Towards a New Material Aesthetics: Bakhtin, Genre, and the Fates of Literary Theory by Alastair Renfrew

Abstract

I I84 Reviews J.Douglas Clayton proves himself to be a selfless editor, translatingmany of the Russian contributions with great elegance, introducing the book with laconic objec tivity,and contributing the shortest, but not the slightest, piece in the book, on the non-verbal utterances in 'Steppe'. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON DONALD RAYFIELD Towards a New Material Aesthetics: Bakhtin, Genre, and theFates ofLiterary The ory. By ALASTAIR RENFREW. London: Legenda. 2006. XViii+ 200 pp. ?45. ISBN 978-I-900755-94-8. Alastair Renfrew's book offers an intricate and critical reading ofwhat he sees as the decisive moment of origin of European literary theory inorder then to fashion from that reading a (post-)theoretical position forour own time. With 'thebenefit of long hindsight'-a repeated watchword of this study-Renfrew unpacks the complex ne gotiations of theBakhtin 'school' with Russian Formalism and of both with what then passed for Marxism in the cultural field. Polemical stances assumed under external pressures are disentangled from themore promising inner dynamics of arguments; incoherences are impartially exposed on all sides; and all along the author has inhis sights themaster-category bywhich alone (forhim) not only thepunctual singularity and the historical iterabilityof thework but also the literaryand the non-literary as such can be conceptually reconciled: namely, genre. For all theirvaunted antagonism, the 'Marxist' and the (early) Formalist cases are in thrall to the same undeconstructed dichotomy of 'form' and 'content', differing only in the priority they give to those terms in the interestof (respectively) 'causal' and 'immanent' analyses of the literary work. Variously, though not always coherently,Mikhail Bakhtin and his friendsPavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov supply thismissing deconstruction by insisting that the material of thework isneither some sort of raw socio-historical stuffentering it fromoutside, nor themere realistic alibi for textual play, nor even language as con ceived by linguistics, but that already aestheticized phenomenon which is language 'translinguistically' conceived. Completing the cast of characters inRenfrew's story is Iurii Tynianov, undoubtedly the best of all the Formalists, here nobly rescued from relative obscurity-or dubious fame as co-inspiring with Roman Jakobson the imperializing Saussurean systematism of the Structuralist aftermath-and held up as a key proponent of the view that the 'life' towhich the literary relates is never other than lingually instantiated inmutable though relatively stable formsof script or speech. Engaging at close quarters with Formalism, Medvedev none the less cannot see thatTynianov is the great exception and antidote to early Formalist binarism, while Voloshinov arrives at a conception of thework as 'immanently sociological'. Blinded by circumstance to the parallel lines on which they are contemporaneously working, these three together are posthumously compelled into complementarity and mobilized by Renfrew in a correction ofBakhtin himself,whose I929 monograph on Dostoevsky is seen as a 'dialogical hybrid' perched precariously astride a divide be tween an inherited neo-Kantian 'idealism' and the 'highermaterialism' of the 'turn' to language which his two younger colleagues had presumably encouraged in him; here, and in a succession of laterworks, he simultaneously suggests and resists the conclusion that 'the object of the human sciences is not "being" or "man" but is rather their verbal embodiment' (p. 6o). Even the category of 'carnival', for all its connotation of bodiliness, iswedded to an anti-discursive tropology of 'seeing' and 'the image'. The tension between these 'neo-idealist' and 'discursive-material' lines of genre theory in Bakhtin finds 'vigorous resolution' in 'Discourse in theNovel', where themove thatmakes 'novel' carry awider resonance of 'novelness' farbeyond MLR, I03.4, 2oo8 II85 works compositionally defined by that term isnone the less compromised by an out dated and unnecessary counterposition of 'novel' to 'poetry'. For a trulyopen theory of genre we need togo to 'The Problem of Speech Genres', awork of the I950S where genre itself is finallypredicated across thewhole terrain of speech and writing, and 'pragmatic' and 'aesthetic' imperatives in the utterance are freed from the absolute ofmutual exclusion into thenuanced relativityof interpenetration. This is the great model for the renewed 'material aesthetics' ofRenfrew's title. The rewards of Renfrew's fine study come at a cost: his style is unremittingly abstract, and the reader should be warned that itobserves a strict decorum of...