Paradoxical Relations: Bakhtin and Modernism

The speaking subjects of high, proclamatory genres--of priests, prophets, preachers, judges, leaders, patriarchal fathers, and so forth--have departed this life. They have all been replaced by the writer, simply the writer, who has fallen heir to their styles. He either stylizes them (i.e., assumes the guise of a prophet, a preacher, and so forth) or parodies them (to one degree or another). He must develop his own style, the style of the writer. . . . Literature has been completely secularized. The novel, deprived of style and setting, is essentially not a genre; it must imitate (rehearse) some extraartistic genre: the everyday story, letters, diaries, and so forth.--M. M. Bakhtin, "From Notes Made in 1970-71"

We have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things.

--Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative

Critics of twentieth-century literature have found Bakhtin's theories particularly congenial even though Bakhtin himself pays scant attention to it. The long historical range from which he draws in the books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais and in the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination and Speech Genres and Other Late Essays virtually stops at the end of the nineteenth century. His major analyses of classical literature, Rabelais, Goethe, and Dostoevsky have no contemporary counterpart, and even the historical typologies in "Discourse in the Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" end in the nineteenth century, with Stendhal and Balzac, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Bakhtin did teach twentieth-century literature, and scattered references indicate his familiarity with writers as varied as André Gide, Jack London, Bertolt Brecht, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, and Pablo Neruda. ¹ The only twentieth-century writer he gives more than cursory notice, however, is Thomas Mann, to whose Buddenbrooks, Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and Confessions of Felix Krull he refers in discussing the bildungsroman, the aesthete as ideologue, carnivalized laughter, the inner personality, and the realist grotesque. The incipient insights in these references--most of them parenthetical and fragmentary--suggest the intellectual ease with which Bakhtin might have written at length about Mann. In late notes about "the open hero," "the complex authorial position," "the problem of the third party in a dialogue," and "the main thing: the problem of polyphony," Bakhtin provocatively writes that Doctor Faustus offers "an indirect confirmation of my idea" (PDP, 284). ²

In the end, however, Bakhtin simply did not write in detail about any aspect of twentieth-century literature; "as far as we can tell," Caryl Emerson observes, "he was profoundly unresponsive to the major works of twentieth-century modernism." ³ From the point of view of Western literary theory and criticism at the century's end, this unresponsiveness is ironic, for in the last twenty years Bakhtin's theories have proved popular among critics of modernist and postmodernist literatures. Extrapolating from his discussions of discourse and narrative in "the modern world," critics have found Bakhtin useful in analyzing the work of writers from Gertrude Stein and James Joyce to Donald Barthelme and Pat Barker. The ideas of a thinker of modernity on a large scale, from the late classical world through the nineteenth century, have been readily, even eagerly, adapted for reading the twentieth century's distinctive responses to modernity--modernism and postmodernism. ⁴ "His ideas," Robert Seguin argues, "are always already a way of at least implicitly staging the modernist/postmodernist debate." ⁵

Though we cannot determine precisely why Bakhtin did not write about the twentieth century or "expound a 'theory' of modernism"--nor need we do so--various practical factors undoubtedly played a role. ⁶ Bakhtin's academic training was in classical and medieval literatures; he lived in provincial towns with modest libraries, in a political climate in which many contemporary texts were simply inaccessible to him. Writing about recent writers instead of deceased, canonical ones would almost certainly have been unwise for a scholar already in intellectual exile (cf...