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83 Chapter Four Discursive Reflexivity in the Anekdot Two Chukchi are sitting on the shore of the Pacific in Siberia. “Want to hear a joke?” “A political joke?” “Yes.” “Better not. You can get exiled for that.” ANDREI SINIAVSKII (writing as Abram Terts) observed in 1978 that the anekdot is a rare example of reflexive—or, in his words, “selfconscious ”—folklore.1 Siniavskii limits his discussion of self-consciousness to meta-jokes like the one that serves as the epigraph for this chapter, but the descriptor “reflexive” is in fact applicable to a rather broader variety of anekdot, analysis of which reveals how the genre’s capacity for self-regard (“self” both in terms of the text and the discursive source of the text, i.e., the joke teller) contributed substantially to its prominence in Soviet culture, especially during the Stagnation years. Its reflexive tendencies distinguished the anekdot both diachronically, from its predecessors in the Russian oral tradition,2 and synchronically, from its generic contemporaries in Soviet culture , whether unofficial (dissident literature) or official (the socialist-realist canon). In addition to meta-anekdoty, the following types of anekdot employ reflexivity of one sort or another: (1) intertextual anekdoty: texts that make reference to specific texts of other genres (a group that includes not just the classic cycles about Chapaev, the Soviet World War II mole Shtirlits, cartoon characters, and so on, but also many political jokes); (2) texts that evaluate the nature and practice of verbal signification in more or less implicit ways; and (3) self-referential ethnic anekdoty: jokes told by Russians in which Russianness is foregrounded. At first glance, this list may seem irresponsibly to conflate two distinct species of reflexivity: meta-textuality, on one hand, and self-reference in the literal sense during an individual or group’s discourse, on the other. Russian jokes about stereotypical behaviors and character traits of the Russian (or Russo-Soviet) ethnos, however, are arguably intertextual in their own right, insofar as they often implicate extant textual representa- Resonant Dissonance 84 tions of that ethnos. Their function often overlapped with that of the more obviously intertextual anekdoty: to engage critically the normative, inscribed models of social reality that dominated the corpus of texts available for popular consumption. Still, I have separated my analysis of Russian reflexive ethnic jokes (which I examine in chapter 5) from the present chapter, which treats the first two varieties of self-referential anekdoty just listed. In the post-Stalin years, especially during Stagnation, the anekdot became more than a ubiquitous form of oral discourse; its tendency to engage with other constituent texts and genres of Soviet culture made it the genre of choice for popular meta-discourse. While anekdoty of the period do, naturally, depict actual personalities, relationships, and sociopolitical events, “anecdotal” significations of such things have more immediate referential links to previous significations: concrete textual representations of real-life phenomena. Ol’ga Chirkova wrote that anekdoty are constructed on the basis not of “realia as such, but those realia that have moved to the level of idea.”3 Ideas are expressed in the form of discourse and, as Mikhail Bakhtin tells us, every unit of discourse—every utterance—is by definition responsive to previous utterances in the given cultural environment’s communicative chain.4 What is significant about the anekdot as a speech genre is its tendency to display its responsive nature, to draw attention to its discursive position vis-à-vis other utterances. Anekdot telling is not merely a response, but also a performance of response, just as dance is both movement and a performance of movement.5 Performance as a cultural practice involves simultaneous use of and commentary on a medium of expression. Its reflective probing of “the formal features of the communicative system”6 is thus also reflexive; cultural performance is self-evident meta-communication. Verbal performance is a reflexive form of discourse in the same way that philology is: the discursive medium—language—is also the discursive referent (although in philological analysis the reference is explicit). While this bootstrapping dilemma has the potential to undermine the objectivity (and therefore the credibility) of a scientific endeavor like philology, reflexivity only amplifies the discursive potency of the anekdot, a form of utterance that has thrived on “paradoxicality”7 since long before it became the chief medium for parodying the self-contradictory absurdities of ideological pronouncements. Because it is of the same stuff as its referent, the intertextual anekdot is able to assimilate all or part...

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