Keeping the Conversation Going: Prosaics and Literary Theory

There is certainly little pleasure in distancing oneself from as lucid and generous an account of one’s work as Thomas Pavel offers in his essay “Freedom, from Romance to the Novel: Three Anti-Utopian American Critics.” Pavel’s description of my aims in Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History seems to me exemplary in its succinct attentiveness, and his characterization of both Gary Saul Morson’s and Caryl Emerson’s writings illuminates precisely those areas that also resonate most meaningfully for me. And yet I have the uneasy sense of being an outsider in the critical movement Pavel portrays, my affiliations to it more tenuous and circumstantial than fundamental and substantive. Not only am I not a Slavist, but I doubt that Bakhtin has been nearly as central for me as he was (and continues to be?) for Emerson and Morson. They have a rightful claim to being considered American Bakhtinians; I am, at best, a latecomer and only an intermittent participant in that conversation. Many of the texts and traditions on which Bakhtin wrote are not those that most deeply concern me, but when I have tried to address similar themes, as I did in Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero, it was to draw upon those other traditions to offer an alternative account of the nature of dialogue, the carnivalesque, and the relationship between high art and contemporary mass culture than the one Bakhtin proposed. Ultimately, it is not so much the legacy of any single critical predecessor but rather a shared emphasis on anti-utopian, anti-apocalyptic thinking that connects Emerson, Morson, and me, and it is the challenge of articulating a prosaics of the quotidian that seems to me to engage all three of us most forcefully.

More fundamentally, perhaps, I am uncomfortable with the whole notion of distilling so heterogeneous a body of work as Emerson’s, Morson’s, and my own from the instigations of any “master theoretician,” even one as polymath and suggestive as Bakhtin. It seems to me among the most curious tics of contemporary academic discourse that literary critics are routinely presumed to derive their real intellectual interest, methodologies, and choice of texts from the example of an earlier critic, rather than from the stimulus of the poets and novelists who first sparked their intellectual and imaginative curiosity, making the formal study of literature a compelling project to begin with. Today, one is often asked to declare one’s theoretical allegiances and derivations as though testifying to the charismatic authority of a particular wonder rebbe or to the group identity shared by members of a political sect. But there is something inherently contradictory in applying such monologic criteria to any perspective, whether Emerson’s, Morson’s, or my own, that is skeptical of the interpretive power of a system to uncover an otherwise unfathomable truth, that doubts there exists a particular code, law, or pattern beneath the multiplicity of concrete, daily existence, and that stresses the significance of random, haphazard and unassimilable contingencies in human affairs. So, to the charged question of how to define my own critical stance, instead of offering a catalogue of authorities and movements, I prefer the deliberately prosaic response that my intention is principally “to keep the conversation going.” It is true that the “conversation of mankind” was also Michael Oakeshott’s favorite trope for human life, a notion he expressed in the wonderful fable that man acquired his present appearance through being “descended from a race of apes who sat in talk so long and so late that they wore out their tails.” ¹ But although the Oakeshottian resonance is appealing, what matters is not the provenance of the phrase, but the way it speaks to certain key strands in the emerging critical countertradition that unites ethics and exegesis from an anti-utopian and anti-systematic perspective, a project in which, with very different emphases, Emerson, Morson, and I all participate.

In this regard, it is especially striking how the essays published in this issue by Emerson, Morson, and me never cite Bakhtin at all, or, indeed, exhibit any...