Bakhtin Dialogics of Critique

2. Through the mediation of literary forms, both artists and readers can understand
the unity and inner logic of an entire epoch and master new aspects of reality.
This is a highly suggestive insight, but unfortunately Medvedev does not develop it
in any great detail.
BAKHTIN AND DOSTOEVSKYS POLYPHONIC UNIVERSE
Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics remains significant in that it strives to carve out
a radically new way of looking at language and intertextuality in both literature and
everyday life.
The primary concepts that emerged from this text were to remain central to
Bakhtins philosophical project until his death in 1975, despite various theoretical
shifts in orientation and emphasis. As such, they are of more than passing interest
vis--vis the understanding of the nature of ideology and the dynamics of
discursive struggle in society, and to much contemporary writing in sociology,
communications theory, literary criticism, and linguistics which are only now
catching up to the themes and problematics sketched out by Bakhtin and his
colleagues decades earlier.
23. The first examines Dostoevskys novelistic universe using broad
philosophical categories which owe much to the tradition of German idealist
philosophy (particular that of Kant as well as the neo-Kantians Ernst Cassirer and
Hermann Cohen) and the Romantic aesthetic in general. The second section
represents Bakhtins attempt to situate Dostoevsky in relation to a particular
literary/cultural tradition which he designated as the carnivalesque. He felt that
this particular generic tradition could be ultimately traced to Socratic dialogue and
Menippean satire through to the popular carnivals of the Middle Ages and early
Renaissance, and he insisted that Dostoevskys (like Rabelaiss) work could not be
adequately comprehended unless this ancient folk-carnival basis was fully
acknowledged and appreciated. The third part is concerned with detailed stylistic
analyses of selected passages from Dostoevskys novels and short stories,
organized in terms of a complex typology of discourse-types.21
24. For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky was the first genuine exponent of the fully
polyphonic novel which, as both a description of literary form and an ethical ideal,
had hitherto been only partially realized in particular, marginalized genres within
European literary history. The crux of this polyphony is the suggestion that

Dostoevskys novels contain a plurality of unmerged consciousnesses, a mixture of

valid voices which are not completely subordinated to authorial intentions or the
heavy hand of the omniscient authorial voice/narrational voice. That is, the
characters voice is equally as important and fully weighted as the authors own,
and the former cannot be simply viewed as an appendage of the latter. In
Dostoevskys novels, that is, the heros word possesses extraordinary
independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the
authors word and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters
(Bakhtin 1984: 7). This construction of a series of autonomous yet interacting
ideological worlds (as embodied by particular characters) within the text affects
every element of the novel itselfplot, narration, style, imagery, or the portrayal
of time and space (the chronotope). For Bakhtin, the subordination of such
elements of the novel to the interaction of consciousnesses was the essence of
Dostoevskys artistic genius:
Dostoevsky, like Goethes Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus),
but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing
with him and even of rebelling against him. A plurality of independent and
unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is
in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevskys novels. What unfolds in his works is
not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a
single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal
rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the
event. Dostoevskys major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not
only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying
discourse. [] The consciousness of a character is given as someone elses
consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time it is not turned into an
object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the authors
consciousness. (1984:67)
Bakhtin stresses that such a multiplicity of interacting consciousnesses is a
necessary but not a sufficient characteristic of a genuine polyphony. The authors
affirmation of a characters right to be treated as a subject and not as an object
must also constitute the guiding artistic principle behind the verbal structuring of
the novel as a whole and the world beyond the text it projects in other words, it
must form the basis of a fully-fledged dialogic world-view. Bakhtin suggests that
the maintenance of this dialogical principle can be accomplished through the use of
particular artistic devices which predestines the character for freedom (a relative

freedom, of course), and incorporates him into the strict and carefully calculated
plan of the whole (1984: 13). Such devices aim at the rupturing and dislocation of
the seamless whole of the monologic world of objects, events and consciousnesses
through the introduction of heterogeneous and multiform materials into the text.
In the polyphonic novel, elements of plot, characterization and so forth are all
structured to make dialogic opposition inescapable. The result is an endless clash
of unmerged souls, the construction of a multiplicity of diverse yet
interconnecting ideological worlds. Bakhtin refers to this as the great dialogue,
and he feels it is a principle which inheres in every element of the polyphonic text
indeed, in all of social life itself:
To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything
ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an
end. [] Everything in Dostoevskys novels tends toward dialogue, toward
a dialogic opposition, as if tending toward its center. All else is means;
dialogue is the end. A single voice ends nothing and resolves nothing. Two
voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence. (1984:252)
Dostoevskys characters are therefore ideologists in the fullest sense of the word.
They express a coherent Weltanschauung, what Bakhtin calls an integral
ideational position. Dostoevskys artistic goal is therefore not mimesis, the faithful
reproduction of an external reality, but rather the representation of how this
reality appears to the heros self-consciousness. In Dostoevskys writings, then, we
are not privileged to see who the hero is, but rather how he is conscious of
himself; our act of artistic visualization occurs not before the reality of the hero,
but before a pure function of his awareness of that reality (1984:48).
26.Accordingly, Dostoevskys most significant heroessuch as Ivan Karamazov,
Raskolnikov, and Prince Myshkincannot be understood as amalgams of fixed,
static traits; nor are their actions and thoughts wholly predictable. They not only
react but act; sensitized to their own surroundings and to their situation, they are
existential beings who are fully responsible for their own deeds and words. Hence,
Dostoevskys primary artistic strategy is oriented toward the expression and finetuning of a characters discourse, a discourse which is designed to galvanize
characters, provoke them, make them respond dialogically, thereby laying bare
[their] own final word as it interacts intensely with other consciousnesses (Bakhtin
1984:54).

Dostoevskys heroes are imbued with the power to signify because they are
privileged with a fully weighted semantic position. If polyphony is to be fully
realized, then this direct and unmediated power to mean cannot be restricted to
the author. And it is precisely Dostoevskys approach which, according to Bakhtin,
represents a new and integral authorial position which allows for an
unprecedented method of visualizing the human being in the sphere of art.22
Dostoevskys heroes are imbued with the power to signify because they are
privileged with a fully weighted semantic position. If polyphony is to be fully
realized, then this direct and unmediated power to mean cannot be restricted to
the author. And it is precisely Dostoevskys approach which, according to Bakhtin,
represents a new and integral authorial position which allows for an
unprecedented method of visualizing the human being in the sphere of art.22

To be means to communicate

that is valuable for sociologists as well. 1984:32

The entire sphere of dialogic interaction itself, where disourse lives an authentic
life.

A shift from the phenomenological orientation

historico literary approach.

of the Dostoevsky book to

Through the understanding of Bakhtins intellectual output during this period

is of critical importance in the appropriation of B themes and concepts for the
task of reconstructing the theory of ideology.
Verbal ideological sphere. Theis necessitates an exploration of his understading
of the dynamics of heteroglossia in the social world and how this phenomenon is
articulated with the novel form.

33.

To unify verbal-ideological world.

38.

45.

Grotesque

69.

!!!

!!

85.

!!!!!

!!!

96

!!!

Nietzsche