The Dialogic Imagination by M. M. Bakhtin

First published:Voprosy literatury i estetiki, 1975 (English translation, 1981)

Type of Philosophy: Aesthetics, ethics, social philosophy

Context

The Dialogic Imagination consists of translations of four of the six essays published in 1975, the year of Mikhail Bakhtin’s death. The publication of The Dialogic Imagination was the result of interest in Bakhtin on the part of a new generation of Russian literary scholars who sought to rescue Bakhtin from the obscurity forced on him during the Stalinist era.

To gain a proper appreciation of the essays, it is important to understand not only how they finally came to be published and what Bakhtin espoused but also what he rejected and wrote against. Chief among the ideas he rejected was monologism (of which Stalinism was the most obvious example); it was also the topic about which Bakhtin was least able to write openly. Bakhtin’s rejection of monologism extends to his rejection of any system that claimed to offer a complete, scientific explanation of language in general and literature in particular. At a time when formalism and structuralism were in favor throughout Europe and especially in the Soviet Union, Bakhtin developed a very different, deeply historical approach, one that saw language not as abstract and scientifically classifiable but as intensely social, indeed as a ceaseless struggle of opposing, intersecting forces. For Bakhtin, then, the multiple meanings of a living utterance exceed any system’s capacity for fixing, explaining, and containing them. Thus, rather than seeking unity in diversity, Bakhtin explored the diversity within language’s apparent unity by attending closely and sensitively to the “the social atmosphere of the word” and “the dialogic orientation of a word among other words.”

The Epic and the Novel

The first of The Dialogic Imagination’s four essays, “Epic and Novel,” was written in 1941 and first published in 1970 (and in expanded form in the 1975 collection). It offers a succinct and relatively straightforward introduction to one of Bakhtin’s most important ideas, in effect defining one genre, the novel, by contrasting it with another, the epic. According to Bakhtin, what distinguishes the epic is the complete separation of its world from contemporary reality (the time of its narration) and by means of this separation, the creation of a valorized past: absolute, closed, complete, uncontaminated by the present, above all unchanging, and therefore both inhuman and ahistorical.

The novel is everything the epic is not. It is alive, liberated, and liberating; this is its aesthetic and its ethic. Anticanonical, unfinalized and unfinalizable, the novel is less a carefully defined genre than an antigenre, whose plasticity and formlessness define or constitute its form. The novel intersects with other genres, which it critically examines, using parody and other means to expose their limitations and conventionality. Freely absorbing other literary as well as subliterary and extraliterary forms, the novel proves itself the most omnivorous, fluid, and organic of the genres and therefore the most resistant to theoretical explanation. Written one year earlier (1940), and first published three years earlier (1967), the collection’s second essay, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” follows much the same line of thought. It traces the novel back to its roots in those forms (Socratic dialogue, Menippean satire, folklore, carnival, popular laughter) which, unlike the epic, emphasize what is low, present, contingent, and parodic. These are the forms that prepare the way for the novel as “the genre of becoming.”

Chronotopes

The collection’s remaining essays are much longer and more complex. Written in 1937-1938 and revised in 1973, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel” concerns “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.” (“Chronotope” literally means “time-place.”) Bakhtin’s interest is not in the way literature reflects the world (he rejected naïve realism); instead it is with the ways in which literature organizes the world spatially and temporally, as he demonstrates by analyzing a number of representative chronotopes.

Not surprisingly, the earliest chronotope, that in a Greek romance, is also the most abstract and static. Its settings are vaguely exotic but otherwise indefinite; the adventures themselves are interchangeable and both causality and development entirely lacking. The world of the Greek romance is one in which much happens but nothing actually changes, least of all the hero, who emerges from his many adventures exactly as he began and always will be. Bakhtin then considers genres that begin to include all that the Greek romance excludes: first, the adventure novel of everyday life, with its striking mix of adventures and quotidian existence, its use of wandering as an organizing structure, and emphasis on change, albeit of a spasmodic kind such as metamorphosis, and second, ancient biography and autobiography, with their emphasis on the “exteriority of the individual,” an individual who exists either as an already existing potential or as “an organic human collective.”

Bakhtin takes notice of the realism in folklore and of the way the world of chivalric romance is subject to chance (miraculous) occurrences and the way the heroes of these romances are at once individualized and symbolic. In the encyclopedic dream visions of the late Middle Ages (Dante Alighieri’s in particular), Bakhtin emphasizes the “struggle between living historical time and the extratemporal other worldly ideal,” which is to say “the struggle between two epochs and world-views.” Especially important to Bakhtin’s theory of the novel’s development are those works in which rogues, clowns, and fools figure prominently because of the ways in which they expose conventionality (the rogue’s flouting of all that is socially acceptable, the clown’s play, and the fool’s incomprehension).

The lengthy discussion of the Rabelaisian chronotope contains the main points that Bakhtin explores more fully in his Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kul’tura srednevekov’ya i Renessansa (1965; Rabelais and His World, 1968), an expanded and revised version of his 1940 doctoral dissertation. The most obvious feature of the Rabelaisian chronotope is expansiveness, but Bakhtin is more interested in its basis in folklore, its emphasis on feasts and deaths, its rhythm of destruction and construction, and the demise of the medieval metaphysic and the rise (or birth) of a less transcendent, more authentic worldview in which the individual, instead of being sealed off from the natural world, is open to it and made an integral part of it. The Rabelaisian chronotope contrasts sharply with that of the idyll, which, even though it develops a special relationship to place, is nonetheless “severely limited to only a few of life’s basic realities.” The severely circumscribed spaces that figure so prominently in the nineteenth century novels of Honoré de Balzac, Stendhal, and others, on the other hand—the parlors and salons, for example—open up new possibilities. They serve as crisis points and thresholds—points of intersection for characters and speech types alike.

Dialogism and the Novel

The last essay in The Dialogic Imagination is also the earliest of the four to be written (1934-1935) and arguably the most interesting if at times the most confusing. As Bakhtin points out at the beginning of “Discourse and the Novel,” “The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art must overcome the divorce between an abstract formal’ approach and an equally abstract ideological’ approach.” Defining the novel as a diversity of voices and speech types, Bakhtin here contrasts it not with the epic (as in The Dialogic Imagination’s opening essay) but with poetry. Unlike poetry, which Bakhtin faults for giving rise to the idea of “a purely poetic, extrahistorical language,” novelistic discourse “cannot forget or ignore.” Against the monologism of poetry (and the epic) and its “Ptolomaic” conception of language, he posits the novel’s essential dialogism, its Galilean “decentering” of meaning and liberating sense of “linguistic homelessness.” This liberation gives rise both to the centripetal forces that seek to limit meaning and to a speaker’s yearning not just to speak but to be heard and responded to—important ideas that Bakhtin discusses elsewhere. Rather than excluding or limiting heteroglossia (“another’s speech in another’s language,” serving two speakers, each with his or her own intentions), the novel intensifies it. Indeed, Bakhtin explains the development of the novel as “a function of the deepening of its dialogic essence,” which leaves “fewer and fewer neutral, hard elements” outside its relativizing gaze.

Bakhtin turns his attention to the stages in the novel’s development. One of his most interesting observations concerns the difference he finds in the way the Baroque novelists of the eighteenth century approached heteroglossia and incorporated it in their work, whether condescendingly from above or more enthusiastically from below. Another is the part played in the novel’s development by the English comic novel with its parodic recycling and stylization of literary language. Unfortunately, not all of this important essay is quite so clear or provocative, least of all the perhaps overly fine distinctions he makes between different kinds of hybrid constructions.

A Novel Theorist

The first book by Bakhtin to appear in English translation was Rabelais and His World, a work well suited to the interests of the iconoclastic late 1960’s. The second, The Dialogic Imagination, appeared thirteen years later. Drawing on the rediscovery of Bakhtin in the Soviet Union, it heralded the emergence of Bakhtin in the West as a major literary theorist. Although there are important differences between the two books (ones that a number of Bakhtin scholars have subsequently tried to minimize in an effort to reshape Bakhtin as an essentially conservative thinker), the most significant difference has to do with the circumstances surrounding their reception, specifically, the way The Dialogic Imagination was hailed as an important contribution to the growing field of narratology and as a viable but by no means reactionary alternative to other poststructuralist theories, deconstruction in particular.

In 1984, Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark published a biography of Bakhtin and his Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (1963; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1973, 1984), an expanded version of a 1929 publication, was translated into English. The work contains Bakhtin’s fullest treatment of the overall argument of The Dialogic Imagination and many of its main points as well. From these two works, the Bakhtin who was once known for his work on carnival (in the Rabelais book) has emerged as the novel’s most important and influential theorist, both because of the stimulating albeit idiosyncratic way he has traced the novel’s history and because he has examined so scrupulously the question of “who speaks” in the novel and “under what conditions.” As Bakhtin points out in “Discourse in the Novel,” “this is what determines the word’s actual meaning. All direct meanings and direct expressions are false.”

Principal Ideas Advanced

•The novel is the most liberated and liberating of the genres and as a genre may be distinguished from epic and poetry in terms of its openness both to the living present and to language in all its variety.

•The novel has its own distinctive prehistory and chronotopes (that is, ways of organizing time and space).

•The novel must be studied in terms of the ways it incorporates diverse, intersecting voices and speech types rather than on the basis of abstract formal properties.

Bibliography

Danow, David K. The Thought of Mikhail Bakhtin: From Word to Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. This gracefully written introduction is a clear and accessible presentation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought for readers encountering the philosopher for the first time.

Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. This anthology reprints excerpts from Bakhtin’s key works and presents well-researched critical guides to the concepts in those works.

Emerson, Caryl. The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. An indispensible book for those who wish to explore the ongoing world of Bakhtin scholarship. It provides an in-depth overview of the issues debated by Russian Bakhtinians as well as those debated by Bakhtin scholars of the English-speaking world.

Emerson, Caryl, and Gary Saul Morson. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Poetics. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Though it is a little too detailed to be an accessible introduction to Bakhtin’s philosophy, this is an invaluable companion to anyone trying to read his entire body of work.

Holquist, Michael, and Katerina Clark. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. This critical biography of Mikhail Bakhtin is notable in part for its assertion that selected works of Bakhtin’s associates, Pavel Medvedev and Valentin Voloshinov, were in fact the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, dictated to his friends and published under their names when he was out of favor with the Stalinist government. No definitive resolution of this issue has ever appeared.

Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. Though this may not be the most definitive guide to Bakhtin’s thought available, its use of contemporary references in long discussions of Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony, dialogism, and the carnival make it helpful for those coming to his work with only a basic knowledge.