Mikhail Bakhtin by Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist (review)

Book Reviews281 KATERINA CLARK and MICHAEL HOLQUIST. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. 398 p. The Bakhtin show has gone on the road in America. In 1984 alone, we saw new English-language editions of Bakhtin's two major works, Problems ofDostoevsky's Poetics and Rabelais and His World; the publication of the book reviewed here; a translation of Tzvetan Todorov's excellent Mikhail Bakhtin: Dialogical Principle ; and an entire issue of Studies in 20th Century Literature devoted to Bakhtin. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship was reissued in English with a new foreword in 1985. Such Bakhtinian terminology as "polyphony," "carnival," and "chronotope" has flooded our literary vocabulary, not always to its betterment, and his concepts of "voice" and "dialog" have provided us with a striking new view of language as well as a spate of opportunities for self-conscious puns. The Clark and Holquist book seeks on one hand to justify this explosion of attention , and on the other, to provide it with perspective by giving it a proper context — something heretofore lacking. In the tradition of the "Life and Works" genre the authors attempt to combine biography with criticism, and indeed, the book was originally entitled The Life and Works of Mikhail Bakhtin. That they ultimately settled for the simpler version is perhaps an indication that the proper balance which such a title implies was not wholly realized. The book seems to lack an overall developmental unity which, it must be said, was probably unavoidable. Biographical information about Bakhtin is often so sketchy that entire decades of his life exist as virtual black holes, and the uncertainty about his authorship — or lack thereof — of certain works further complicates critical discussion. Despite an entire chapter painstakingly devoted to supporting the authors' assertion that Bakhtin should probably be listed as sole author of these works, there is much left to be said (see Todorov 6-11; and Wlad Godzich, Foreword to The Formal Method viii-ix). To their credit, however, Clark and Holquist acknowledge at the outset that there is no irrefutable proof to back up this claim. Ultimately, this concern is secondary anyway, since the texts themselves do exist and still speak to us with great urgency. The authors are intent upon portraying Bakhtin more as a general thinker than as a literary theorist, frequently comparing his work to that of such figures as Heidegger, Einstein, Sartre, and Piaget. Their treatment of his earliest writings depicts an unorthodox, though deeply convinced religious man whose belief in the traditional Russian kenotic vision of Christ created a philosophical basis from which would emerge his central vision of the freedom and creativity of dialogic communication (language). Bakhtin's conception of language, they convincingly argue, went far beyond mere definition of a medium for literary expression or even social interaction , for language is the means through which we interact with an interlocutor, an "other," an activity which ultimately provides the very basis for determining self. While at times the authors may be a bit too much in awe of their subject, on the whole, their account is even and lucid. Still, the best chapters are those which deal with Bakhtin's writings about literature. They characterize his conception of the novel cleverly as an "epistemological outlaw, a Robin Hood of texts" (276), a "supergenre" (290) (or perhaps a supragenre?), which, by nature, flouts traditional generic — or any other — rules. The novel's primary function is to communicate, to bear meaning, and this is achieved primarily through the author's manipulation of the multifarious layers of language (voices) at a given time in a given space (chronotope). With this in mind it is intriguing to contemplate the occasional complaint that the novel is 282Rocky Mountain Review dead these days. We may just find that it is not only not dead, but that it has never been healthier. Carlos Fuentes' contention that the Latin American novel is the greatest novel of modern times and Bakhtin the greatest theorist of the novel may well be justified. The biography the authors were able to assemble is interesting (it centers on the 1920s, 30s, 60s, and 70s). Anecdotal information such as Bakhtin's penchant for noting...