Freedom, from Romance to the Novel: Three Anti-Utopian American Critics.

To Mihai Sora

Bakhtin’s Apology for Freedom

The extraordinary appeal of Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings probably comes as much from the power of his ideas as from the elegant obsolescence of his style of inquiry. Unbeknownst to the world, Russia turns out to have produced a true practitioner of Geisteswissenschaft, a man as well read as any of the early twentieth-century German giants (Karl Vossler, Leo Spitzer, Erwin Panofsky), but whose innovative vision of the literary art was almost free of aestheticist formalism, and emphasized instead the moral and political implications of literature. Just imagine: a Wölfflin with a moral conscience, an Auerbach with a deep soul, a Spitzer inspired by the teachings of the Orthodox Church. Moreover, in contrast to most twentieth-century humanists, who usually preferred the art of the past and barely hid their displeasure with the excesses of modernism, this man, who had read everything and had something new and provocative to say about every topic he touched upon, was an enthusiastic admirer of the modern genre par excellence, the realist novel. Bakhtin’s fluent prose seems thus designed to please American critics and satisfy their deepest yearnings: nostalgia for universal intellects, fascination with self-anointed moral prophets, and unqualified commitment to modernism.

To be sure, with all the infatuation it provoked over the last twenty years, until recently Bakhtin’s oeuvre exercised only a limited influence upon American criticism as a whole; in the last few years, however, it directly or intermittently inspired a small group of exceptionally talented critics (Michael André Bernstein, Caryl Emerson, and Gary Saul Morson) who have produced an important and potentially revolutionary body of work. A recent book by Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin, ¹ suggests why it should be so. Together with Katerina Clark, Michael Holquist, and Gary Saul Morson, Caryl Emerson has helped introduce Bakhtin’s ideas in America; she has also clarified, criticized, and developed many of them. Having translated, together with Michael Holquist, some of Bakhtin’s most influential essays, Emerson’s monograph Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, co-authored with Gary Saul Morson, is a highly reliable introduction to the thought of the Russian critic. ² In her latest contribution to Bakhtinian studies, Emerson, who admires the Russian critic but reserves the right to judge him, demonstrates that such typically Bakhtinian notions as “polyphony,” “dialogism,” and “carnival,” are unreliably defined, imperfectly defended, and, as a result, can easily be challenged. At the same time, Emerson argues that Bakhtin’s critical project fully deserves to be continued and expanded.

Emerson’s monograph is organized as a survey of recent Russian critiques of Bakhtin’s work. Reading her book, one discovers that the legend of a perennially ignored and persecuted Bakhtin is only partly confirmed by fact. Under Soviet rule, Emerson shows, the political persecution of suspect scholars was to some extent compensated by the deep respect everyone, including the Communist Party, felt for learning in general and for literary learning in particular. Bakhtin’s work might not have been published soon enough or reprinted regularly, yet the man was a living legend, known by his admirers and by the authorities to be one of the most important Russian literary scholars alive. Teachers of literature, moreover, were hardly a target of Stalinist persecution: in the intricate hierarchy of class enemies, they were assigned a relatively low priority, far beneath discredited Party officials, kulaks, and writers proper. Bakhtin’s troubles stemmed from his affiliation with a religious group rather than from ideological dissidence in his professional field. His marginalization might also have reflected the changing fortunes of Dostoevsky (the topic of Bakhtin’s first book) under the Soviets: tolerated until the 1930s, the great novelist was later correctly recognized as a sworn enemy of utopian leftism and, accordingly, his works were virtually outlawed until the 1960s. But as Emerson reminds us, Bakhtin’s book on Dostoevsky, published in 1929, had the honor of being reviewed rather positively by no less a personage than Anatoly Lunacharsky, the chief ideologue of the Party on literary issues...