-
The Role of Chronotope in Dialog
- Slavica Publishers
- Chapter
- Additional Information
John Bartle, Michael C. Finke, and Vadim Liapunov, eds. From Petersburg to Bloomington: Essays in Honor of Nina Perlina. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, 2012, 65–79. (Indiana Slavic Studies, 18.) The Role of Chronotope in Dialog Michael Holquist Nina Perlina’s scholarship is best characterized by its scrupulous attention to small details from which she extracts significant new meanings. Her academic escutcheon might well have as its motto, “in specialibus generalia quaerimus.” Unable to match her exquisite akri-‐‑ beia, I’d nevertheless like to pay a small tribute in the form of a medi-‐‑ tation on one of Bakhtin’s footnotes. It is not just any footnote, how-‐‑ ever, but the infamous qualification he appends to the first pages of his essay on the chronotope in which he sets himself off from Kant. Chronotope has been one of the most frequently invoked items in the toolbox of Dialogism. It remains, however, one of the most vexed categories in the Bakhtinian canon. A recurring dilemma is the ques-‐‑ tion, “What—precisely—is the field of inquiry in which the term has its greatest relevance?” It is clearly about time and space, but time and space as experienced where: in literature or in real life? Time/space as experienced by whom—characters in fictional texts, by the author, by the characters, by readers of literature, or by human beings in life as well as literature? Is the chronotope a literary, or an anthropological, metaphysical, or existential category? Or does it share boundaries with all these disciplines, and if so, how shall we discriminate between their applications? There are many reasons for this confusion, beginning with Bakhtin’s own expository imprecision in the long essay he de-‐‑ voted to the subject in 1937–38. Problems associated with the term were compounded when in 1973 Bakhtin added a new set of “conclud-‐‑ ing remarks” to his earlier text. In the end, however, I believe that difficulties in understanding chronotope derive fundamentally from the central place it occupies in Bakhtin’s core conception of dialog. In what might be called the para-‐‑ dox of ubiquity, we fail to see the tree for the forest. Chronotope is so omnipresent throughout Bakhtin’s oeuvre that it is difficult to see it as a freestanding topic in its own right. In this essay, I am going to argue 66 Michael Holquist that the chronotope is everywhere in Bakhtin, because chronotope is, in fact, the master key to his whole theory of dialog. Dialog, no matter how defined, is a relationship. A question that is so obvious that it often goes unasked, much less answered, is why the particular relationship of dialog became the topic that dominated Bakhtin’s thinking throughout his career. I will say more about this later, but suffice it here that I interpret Bakhtin’s lifelong commitment to dialog as a late reaction to Kant’s Copernican revolution in episte-‐‑ mology, founded as it was on the primacy of relations over mere things. Stated as a one-‐‑line zinger, my thesis is that the claim in the Cri-‐‑ tique of Pure Reason that human perception is confined to representa-‐‑ tions of things (Vorstellungen), and that we can never know the world as it is (noumena, the Ding-‐‑an-‐‑sich) transforms our perception and thinking into a necessary give-‐‑and-‐‑take between mind and world, mind and other minds. Without the absolute assurance that comes from contact with things in themselves, knowledge ineluctably trans-‐‑ forms into a gamble with reality, an experiment, a dialog of inference in the mind and responses from the world that more or less confirm or disconfirm our hypotheses. Kantian epistemology makes knowing the product of work. It converts thinking into an endless dialog between minds and world in which we more or less correctly gauge the appro-‐‑ priateness of our response. In Bakhtin’s post-‐‑Kantian universe the ba-‐‑ sic tool or instrument for judging the accuracy of our epistemological experiments is time/space. The chronotope is the instrument that per-‐‑ mits calibration of the time/space coordinates without which thinking and communication—human understanding, indeed—would be im-‐‑ possible. Quite simply, chronotopes provide the clock and the map we employ to orient our identity in the flux of existence. This is a large claim that requires grounding in both a historical and a theoretical analysis. History of Conceiving Time/Space in Bakhtin Let me begin by rapidly reviewing the role of chronotope in Bakhtin’s own thinking over the course of...
Buy This Book in Print