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THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION Four Essays by M. M. BAKHTIN Edited by Michael Holquist Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN Copyright © I98I by the University of Texas Press Dedication All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America There is nothing more fragile than the word, and Bakhtin's was almost lost. This translation is dedicated to those devoted Rus Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data sian scholars who gave so generously of themselves to Mikhail Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Mikhailovich the man and to the cause of preserving dialogue. The dialogic imagination. (University of Texas Press Slavic seriesj no. I) Translation of Voprosy literatury i estetiki. Includes index. I. Fiction-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Literature Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Holquist, J. Michael. II. Title. III. Series. PN333I.B2513 8or'·953 80-I5450 ISBN 0-292-7I527-7 ISBN o-292-7I534-x (pbk.) I Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 78I9, Austin, Texas 78712. Second Paperback PrinT' -- The publication of this volume was assisted in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency whose mission is to award grants to support education, scholarship, me dia programming, libraries, and museums in order to bring the results of cultural activities to the general public. Preparation was made possible in part by a grant from the Translations Program of the endowment. CONTENTS Acknowledgments [xi] A Note on Translation [xiii] Introduction [xv] Epic and Novel [3] From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse [4 1] Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel [84] Discourse in the Novel [259] Glossary [423] Index [435] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks are due first of all to the Executors of the Bakhtin AI chives, Vadim Kozinov and Sergej Bocorov. Their devotion to Bakhtin is matched only by their generosity toward those who would study him. To 1. R. Titunik we owe a special debt of grati tude. He read large parts of the first draft of this translation and if, as we hope, there were improvements in subsequent drafts, it is because we constantly had his image before us, the threat of one of his red-penciled "ughs" or "cute, but wrong, utterly wrong" in the margin. The high standard of scholarship as well as translation that he has established in his own work was a con stant inspiration to us. He did not see the final version and there fore cannot be charged with any inaccuracies, all of which are our own responsibility. Thanks also to the many scholars from vari ous departments who helped us in the task of identifying some of Bakhtin's more recherche examples: to Millicent Marcus in Ital ian; Robert Hill in French; James Wimsatt, Medievalist, in En glish; Robert Mollenauer in German; Michael Gagarin and Carl Rubino in Classics, all of the University of Texas. Thanks also to Vadim Liapunov of the Slavic Department, Indiana University, to whom we turned when all else failed. We are grateful as well to llya Levin and Sofia Nikonova who played the role of native speakers, with resource and wit. Preparation of the manuscript was particularly complex due to the many languages, two sets of footnotes and so forth. We could not have done it without Elaine Hamilton. The person who has borne with this for three years now and still had the patience and dedication to come in on weekends when it was necessary to re type yet another version of some arcane passage is Gianna Kirtley. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the University Research Institute at the University of Texas provided generous grants to support this translation. [xii] ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is also a sponsored activity of the Institute of Mod ern Russian Culture at Blue Lagoon, Texas. Thanks as always to Katerina Clark, who was ready to give help whenever it was needed, whether it was a technical term in Rus A NOTE ON TRANSLATION sian or a word of encouragement in English. Thanks to Snugli Cottage Industries. Thanks finally to the anonymous donor whose Medician gesture made not only this book but the whole series in which it appears possible. The IPA transcription system is used in this book, except in those cases where a word or a name has entered general English usage via' another system (i.e., Bakhtin, not BaxtinJ. Bakhtin's footnotes are indicated by superscript numbers; the editor's footnotes are indicated by superscript letters. This book contains four essays that originally appeared in Vopros.yJi.t-eratm-¥--r~ (~~.9w, !.21.5 J. Two additional es says are not included here, because they either have already been translated into English or do not bear directly on the theme unify ing the other four, t1,1e novel and itsrelatiori to lanS!la~e. The "Translator's Note" to non-Russian versions of Bakhtin's works has become a geme in its own right. More often than not, the peculiarity of Bakhtin's Russian is invoked to justify a certain awkwardness in the translated text. We believe the matter is more complicated. Bakhtin himself provides the best context for perceiving the true nature of the problem in the distinction he draws between "§tyle" and "language"-especiaUy as it pertains to the "image ot~ lanK\l~~.:." We have sought to make a transla tion at the level of images of a whole language (obraz ;azykaJ. The translations are complete. Bakhtin is not an efficient writer, but we believe he pays his way. * * * Since junior members of team projects frequently receive less credit than is their due, I wish to emphasize that this translation is the result of a real dialogue: Caryl Emerson and I went over every word of Bakhtin's text together. MICHAEL HOLQUIST INTRODUCTION I Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin is gradually emerging as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. This claim will strike many as extravagant, since a number of factors have until recently conspired to obscure his importance. Beyond the diffi culties usually attending the careers of powerful but eccentric thinkers, there are, in Bakhtin's case, complications that are unique. Some of these inhere in his times: his two most produc tive periods occurred during the darkest years of recent Russian history: the decade following I9I7, when the country reeled un der the combined effects of a lost war, revolution, civil war and famine; and the following decade, the thirties, when Bakhtin was in exile in Kazakhstan, and most of the rest of Russia was hud dling through the long Stalinist night. It was in these years that Bakhtin wrote something on the order of nine large books on top ics as major and varied as Freud, Marx and the philosophy of lan guage. Only one of these (the Dostoevsky book) appeared under his own name during these years. Three others were published under different names (see section III of this introduction); some were partially lost during his forced moves; some disappeared when the Nazis burned down the publishing house that had ac cepted his large manuscript on the Erziehungsroman; some were "delayed" forty-one years in their publication when journals that had accepted manuscripts were shut down, as happened to the Russian Contemporary in I924; others, such as the Rabelais book, were considered too aberrant for publication, due to their emphasis on sex and body functions (see section II of this introduction). Another factor that has clouded perception of the scope of Bakhtin's activity in the anglophone world,' at least, is the tradi- [xvi] INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION [xvii] tion in which he was working. He was trained as a classicist dur dealing with the nineteenth century; it is the relatively un ing a period when the German model of philology dominated familiar Wezel or Musiius he cites. Russian universitiesj thus he inherited a certain heaviness of Bakhtin throws a weird light on our received models of intel style and a predilection for abstraction that English or American lectual history. It is as if he set out to carnivalize-to use a verb readers, accustomed to a more essayistic prose, sometimes find that has become modishly transitive due to his own work on heavy going. Bakhtin's style, while recognizably belonging to a Rabelais-the normal periods and figures we use to define the re Russian tradition of scholarly prose, is, nevertheless, highly idio lay of culture. Clearly; one could make such a perverse undertak syncratic. Language in his texts works somewhat as language ing pay its way only if possessed of two prerequisites: enormous ! does in the novel, the ~enre that obsessed him all ~is life: accord learning and a theory capable of sustaining a balance between f ing to Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novell, "the genre Itself works by such an aberrant history and more conventional historical exhaustive presentation rather than by elegant concentration." models. The more we know about Bakhtin's life, the clearer it becomes Of Bakhtin's preternatural erudition there can be no doubt-he that he was a supreme eccentric, of an order the Russians express belongs to the tradition that produced Spitzer, Curtius, Auerbach better than we in their word cudak, which has overtones of such and, somewhat later, Rene Wellek. Many times when we have intense strangeness that it borders on cudo, a wonder. And this consulted specialists in the various fields from which Bakhtin so peculiarity is reflected not only in the strange history of his texts easily draws his recherche examples, it was only to be told that (why; ultimately; did he publish under so many names?), but in such and such a work did not exist, or, if it did, it was not "charac his style as well, if one may speak of a single style for one who teristic./I A few days later, however, after some more digging or was so concerned with "other-voicedness." Russians immedi thinking, the same specialist would call to say that indeed there ately sense this strangeness: again and again when we have gone was such a work, and, although little known even to most ex to native speakers with questions about a peculiar usage of a fa perts, it was the most precisely correct text for illustrating the miliar word or an unfamiliar coinage, the Russians have thrown point Bakhtin sought to make by invoking it. up their hands or shaken their heads and smiled ruefully. He has, then, a knowledge of West European civilization de Another difficulty the reader must confront is the unfamiliar tailed enough to permit him to use traditional accounts as a di shadings Bakhtin gives to West European cultural history. He alogizing background to sustain the counter-model he will pro tends to ignore the available chapterization into familiar periods pose. And that counter-model is motivated by a theory that can and -isms. It is not so much Periclean Athens or Augustan Rome rationalize not only its own subversions, but the effects of main that attracts him as it is the vagaries of the Hellenistic age. He is stream traditions as well. preoccupied by centuries usually ignored by othersj and within I say theory and not system-the two do not always go hand in these, he has great affection for figures who are even more hand-because Bakhtin's motivating idea is in its essence op obscure. A peculiar school of grammarians at Toulouse in the sev posed to any strict formalization. Other commentators, such as enth century A.D. may appear to others as an obscure group work Tsvetan Todorov in a forthcoming book devoted to Bakhtin, have ing in a backwater during the darkest of the Dark Agesj for seen this as a weakness in his work. They have come to this con Bakhtin the work of these otherwise almost forgotten men con clusion, I believe, because they bring to Bakhtin's work expecta stitutes an extremely important chapter in the human struggle to tions based on the kind of thinking characteristic of other major accommodate the mysteries of human language. He keeps re theorists who engage the same issues as Bakhtin. turning to the Carolingian Revival or the interstitial periods be Bakhtin is constantly working with what is emerging as the tween the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. When he does cite a central preoccupation of our time-Janguage. But unlike others familiar period, he often tends to isolate an otherwise obscure fig who have made substantial contributions to our understanding of ure within it-thus his focusing on Pigres of Halicarnassus or Ion language in the twentieth century-Saussure, Hjelmslev, Ben of Chios among the Greeks, on Varro among the Romansj when veniste and, above alI, Roman Jakobson (all of whom-are system- [xviii] INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION [xix] atic to an extraordinary degree)-Bakhtin is not. If you expect a Secondly, language must not be understood in these essays in Jakobsonian order of systematicalness in Bakhtin, you are bound the restricted sense in which it occupies professional linguists. to be frustrated. This does not mean, however, that he is without As Bakhtin says (in "Discourse in the Novel"), "At any given mo a peculiar rigor of his own. It is rather that his concept of lan ment . . . a language is stratified not only into dialects in the guage stands in relation to others (of the sort that occupy lin strict sense of the word (i.e., dialects that are set off according to guists) much as the novel stands in opposition to other, more for formal linguistic [especially phonetic] markers), but is ... strat malized genres. That is, th,!:.!l9,Xel-as Bakhtin more than anyone ified as well into languages that are sOcio-ideological: languages else has taught us to see-does not lack its organizing princin~, belonging to profeSSions, to genres, languages peculiar to particu b!!! th~l_ar~of a_Q!ff~!e!!t_ o!de~ from those regulating so~ets..2! lar generations, etc. This stratification and diversity of speech odes. It may be said Jakob~!l works with poetry because lie as a !raznorecivost'] will spread wider and penetrate to ever deeper Pushkinian love of order; )Bakhtin, on the contrary, loves novels levels so long as a language is alive and still in the process of because he is a baggy monste:t;,J becoming. " At the heart of everything Bakhtin ever did-from what we The two contending tendencies are not of equal force, and each know of his very earliest (lost) manuscripts to the very latest (still has a different kind of reality attaching to itt ~!~.if.E:g~n~rce~,are unpublished) work-is a mgh.ly.Jiil?.tinctive c.oncept qf la~su..age. clearly more powerful and ubiquitous-theirs-is the r~~Ji1:y_of ac- The conception has as its enabling a priori an almost Manichean 1;!!.al_~iculation. They are always in praesentia; they determine sense of opposition and struggle at the heart of existencefa cease- the way we actually ~xperience language as we use it-and are ( less battle between centrifugal forces that seek to keep things used by it-in the dense particularity of our everyday lives. Uni ( apart, and centripetal forces that strive to make things cohe~e: I fying, centripetal forces are less powerful and have a complex on This Zoroastrian clash is present in culture as well as nature, and tological status. ;Their relation to centrifugal operations is akin to in the specificity of individual consciousness; it is at work in the the interworking that anthropologists nominate as the activity of even greater particularity of individual utterances. The most cultur.e in model~g ~ com~letely different order called nat~ As complete and complex reflection of these forces is found in Bakhtm says (agam In "DIscourse"): "A unitary language is not human language, and the best transcription of language so und~r something that is given [dan], but is in its very el?sence some stood is the novel. thing that must be posited [zadan]-at every moment in the life Two things must immediately be added here. First, while lan of a language it opposes the realities of heteroglossia !~aznorecie], guage does serve to reflect this struggle, it is no passive stuff, no but at the same time the [sophisticated] ideal [or primitive delu mere yielding clay. Language itself is no less immune from the sion] of a single, holistic language makes the actuality of its pres effects of the struggle than anything else. Its nature as a system is ence felt as a force resisting an absolute heteroglotstate; it posits even more fraught with the contest, which m~ be why it oc definite boundaries for limiting the potential chaos of variety, thus cupies so central a place in the activity of mind\Ba~tin, nee~ it guaranteeing a more or less maximal mutual understanding~ ..." be said, is not working in this dichotomy of forces WIth the kmd The term Bakhtin uses here, "heteroglossia" [raznorecie], is a of binary opposition that has proved so important in structuralist master trope at the heart of all his other projects, one more funda linguistics (and so seductive to social scientists and humanists mental than such other categories associated with his thought as lusting for a greater degree of systematicalness). That opposition "polyphony" or "carnivalization." These are but two specific leads from human speech to computer language; it conduces, in ways in which the primary condition of heteroglossia manifests other words, to machine~ Bakhtin.'s sense of .a d~el b.etween itself. Heteroglossia is Bakhtin's way of referring, in any utter more widely implicated forces leads m the OppOSIte dIrectIOn and ance of any kind, to the peculiar interaction between the two fun stresses the fragility and ineluctably historical nature of lan damentals of all communication. On the one hand, a mode of guage, the coming and dying of meaning that it, as a phenome transcription must, in order to do its work of separating out texts, non, shares with that other phenomenon it ventriloquates, man. \ be a more or less fixed system. But these repeatable features, on -"" [xx] INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION (xxi] the other hand, are in the power of the particular context in thinkers-both in other ways very different from Bakhtin-to which the utterance is made; this context can refract, add to, or, come to grips with the way intimacy with our own voice conduces in some cases, even subtract from the amount and kind of mean to the illusion of presence: HusserI in the Logical Investigations ing the utterance may be said to have when it is conceived only as and ~errida in his 1967 essay "Speech and Phenomenon.") a systematic manifestation independent of context. It I~ the need to ~onfront ~his multiplicity in a principled way This ext.~aQ!.~m ~en§!tiYity to the immensep.l~alio/ ot~~ that Impels BakhtIn to COIn some of his more outre terms ~ence more than anything else distinguishes BakhtIn from !tJ:te wo~d "heteroglossiil" itself, "word-with-a-loophole/, "~_ oer modems who have been obsessed with language. I empha with-a-sidewards-glance~ "intonational quotation marl{s" and so size experience here because Bakhtin's basic scenari~ for mo~el forth). He uses these rather than the more conventional terminol ing variety is two actual people talking to each other In a specIfic ogy we assoc.iate with a linguistic concern for language first of all dialogue at a particular time and in a particular place. But these because trad~tio~al linguistics has taken little heed of the prob persons would not confront each other as soverei~ egos capable lem of altenty In language. Bakhtin like Austin !How to Do of sending messages to each other through the kind of un~lut ~hings wit11. Words, I962),~~ !S;eech Act~:-;969) and par tered space envisioned by the artists who illustrate most receIver tIcularly gJ!_~-:ithe legendary but still unpublished 19 7 James sender models of communication. Rather, each of the two per 6 lectures on LOglC and Conversation), stresses the speech aspect of sons would be a consciousness at a specific point in the history of language, utterance, to emphasize the immediacy of the kind of defining itself through the choice it has made-out of all the p~s- meaning he is after. He ddes so as well to highlight his contention . sible existing languages available to it at that moment-of a dis th~t langu~g~ is never-except for certain linguists-what lin course to transcribe its intention in this specific exchange. guIStS say It IS: There is no such thing as a "generallanguage/' a The two will like everyone else, have been born into an en language that IS spoken by a general voice, that may be divorced vironment in which the air is already aswarm with names. Their from a specific saying, which is charged with particular over development as individuals-and in this Bakhtin's thought paral tones. (Language, when it means, is somebody talking to some lels in suggestive ways that of Vygotsky in Russia (see Emerson, body else, even when that someone else is one's own inner 1978) and Lacan in France (see Bruss, in Titunik's translation of addresseeJ Volosinov's Freudianism, I976)-will have been prosecuted as a Bakhtin's t,h.eory of. metalap.guage. is extremely complicated gradual appropriation of a specific mix of discourses that are capa and deserves detailed study. I have merely alluded to it here in ble of best mediating their own intentions, rather than those or~er.to provide a context for the more particular subject matter which sleep in the words they use before they use them. Thus ~g these four essays-the novel. I began with Bakhtin's in each will seek, by means of intonation, pronunciation, lexical SIstence on ~e. primacy of speech because what he has to say choice, gesture, and so on, to send out a message to the. other about novels IS Incomprehensible if the emphasis on utterance is with a minimum of interference from the otherness constItuted not always kept in mind. In section IV we shall once again take by pre-existing meanings (inhering in dictionaries or ideologi~s) u? t~e ~ela~ionship between Bakhtin's ideas about language and and the otherness of the intentions present in the other person In his distInctIve theory of the nnvel!.s.extraliterar.yjmIlQX1ance. the dialogue. Implicit in all this is the notion that all transcription systems including the speaking voice in a living utterance-are inadequ~te II to the multiplicity of the meanings they seek to convey. My VOIce gives the illusion of unity to what I say; I am, in fact, constantly Bakhtin.~asEo!:1! I6 NovembeI(l:89~in Orel into an old family of expressing a plenitude of. meanings, some i~tend~d, o~ers of the nobIlity, datIng from at leastt:lie fourteenth century, that no which I am unaware. (There is in this obseSSIOn WIth VOIce and longer owned property at the time of his birth. Bakhtin's father speech a parallel with the attempts of two important recent was a bank official who worked in several cities as Mikhail [xxii] INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION [xxiii] Mikhailovich was growing up. The early years of his childhood Ba~tin-was Ger~an philosophy. At this point Bakhtin thOUght were spent in Orel, then in Vilnius (Lithuania)' and finally Odessa, ofhhilmself essentIally as a ph~!!?§opper and not as a literary where he finished the gymnasium and entered the historical and sc 0 ar. philological faculty of the local university in 1913. He soon trans A v~ry ~~portant member of the group for him, then, was ferred to Petersburg University, where his brother Nikolaj (later ~atveJ IsaI~ Kagan, later an editor of the monumental Encyc1ope professor of Greekand'Tfiigl:Listics at Birmingham University) ~la of SO~let Energy Resources, but at this time still a profes was a student. SIOnal philosopher-a philosopher, moreover, who had just re It was an exhilarating time to be in St. Petersburg. There was turne~ from Germany, where he had spent almost ten years the stimulation of attacks and counterattacks by Symbolists, Ac studYIng ~t Marburg and Berlin. He had been close to the Marburg meists and Futurists in poetry. Criticism, too, took on a new Neo-Kantians: he translated Natorp and was highly thought of by urgency and glamor: the very year Bakhtin came to the city H.erm~nn Cohen and Ernst Cassirer. K:.8!!D was Bakhtin's best Shklovsky published the article that was to be the first salvo in friend In these years, in some ways fiiITng tIle personal and intel the battles that raged around the Formalists. The university was lectual gap left by the departure of Bakhtin's brother, Nikolaj. We an especially exciting place to be, notably in the areas of Bakh can s.ee traces of Kagan's influence in the concern for such Neo tin's interests. D. K. Petrov, the distinguished Hispanist and stu K~ntian preoccupations as axiology and the need to rethink the dent of Baudouin de Courtenay, the philosopher A. 1. Vvedenskij ~Ind/wor1d opposition that are present in Bakhtin's first pub and Aleksandr N. Veselovskij, a founder of the modern study of hshed work: '~Art and Responsibility." This small 1919 piece is ac~ comparative literature, were teaching at this time. But Bakhtin tually. a preClS of ~ major work on moral philosophy to which was influenced particularly by the great classicist F. F. Zelinskij; ~akhtIn devoted hImself while in Nevel' that was never pub some of Bakhtin's key concepts can be traced back to suggestions hshed (except in portions, and then only sixty years later in in ZeliIlskij's works, primarily those dealing with the Roman or 1979). ' atorical tradition. Q!!!il}g the~~-Yf<EU:~ B~1dltjrdaW tb..~J9!!1!djl In 1920 he ~oved to Vitebsk, in the same general area. Vitebsk ~q1.ls oL~~ p.~dig1ou~knO'wl~~e-Qf.philg~9PJ,J,Y, ~spec:!eny"cle~~i was at that tIme a cultural boom town, an island of light in the cal and Gerrn.an thi.I1kers. Vvedenskij was the leading Russian dark c~r~nt~.of revolution and civil war, a refuge for such artists Kanti'm, and N~ o. Lossitij, another of Bakhtin's teachers, had as. El ~ISItskiJ, ~ale.vich and Marc Chagall. Several prominent studied under Windelband and Wundt. In 1918 Bakhtin finished sCientI~ts also l~v~d m the Belorussian city at this time, as well the university and moved to Nevel', a west Russian city, where he as leading mUSICIans from the former Mariinskij Theater who taught school for two years. taught at the Conservatory. A lively journal, Iskusstvo, was It was here that the members of the first "Bakhtin Circle" (with started, and there were constant lectures and discussions. the exception of P. N. Medvedev, who became associated with it .T wo eve~ts of. great personal importance occurred during the in 1920 in Vitebsk) came together: Lev Pumpianskij, later pro Vitebsk. penod: m ~92~ Bakhtin married Elena Aleksandrovna fessor in the Philological Faculty at Leningrad University; V. N. OkO~OVIC, who was mdispensable to him until her death in 1971; Volosinov, later a linguist, but at this time a musicologist and ~d In 1923 the bone disease that was to plague Bakhtin all his would-be Symbolist poet; M. V. Judina, later one of Russia's great life-~nd that would lead to the amputation of a leg in 1938- est concert pianists; 1. 1. Sollertinskij, later artistic director of the made ItS ~st appearance. In 1924 Bakhtin moved back to Lenin Leningrad Philharmonic; and B. M. Zubakin, archeologist, Ma grad, wor~In~ at the Historical Institute and consulting for the son and grand eccentric. There were others as well who attended S~ate PublIshmg House. Bakhtin was finally moved to let some of discussions less frequently, but who shared the passionate inter his work see the light of day. est of the group in threshing out literary, religious and political . ~ the fate of an early article we can see the emergence of a topics. But the most frequent topic of discussion, the subject of ~ICIOUS pattern that was to repeat itself throughout his life: con most burning concern for the majority of the group-certainly for tinually, Bakhtin's manuscripts were suppressed or actually lost,