A feeling for history? Bakhtin and 'the problem of great time'

Slavonic and East European Review

Volumn 84, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 32-51

  Shepherd, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 66349086562     PISSN: 00376795     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (88)

1. M. M. Bakhtin, 'K filosofii postupka', and 'Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti', in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, 1, Filosofskaia estelika 1920-kh godov, ed. S. G. Bocharov and N. I. Nikolaev, Moscow, 2003, pp. 7-68 (pp. 14-15) and pp. 69-263 (pp. 175, 176);
2. English translations (modified) M. M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov, Austin, TX, 1993, p. 10,
3. and M. M. Bakhtin, 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity', in Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov, Austin, TX, 1990, pp. 4-256 (pp. 99, 100).
4. M. M. Bakhtin, 'K metodologii gumanitarnykh nauk' (hereafter, 'K metodologii'), in Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, ed. S. S. Averintsev and S. G. Bocharov, 2nd edn, Moscow, 1986 (hereafter, Estetika), pp. 381-93 (p. 393);
5. English translation M. M. Bakhtin, 'Toward a Methodolog)' for the Human Sciences' (hereafter, 'Toward a Methodology'), in Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee, Austin, TX, 1986 (hereafter, Speech Genres), pp. 159-70 (p. 170).
6. M. M. Bakhtin, 'Otvet na vopros redaktsii Novogo mira', in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, 6, 'Probletny poetiki Dostoevskogo', 1963
7. Raboty 1960-kh-1970-kh gg., ed. S. G. Bocharov and L. A. Gogotishvili, Moscow, 2002 (hereafter, Sobranie sochinenii, 6), pp. 451- 57 (p. 454) (hereafter, 'Otvet');
8. English translation (modified) M. M. Bakhtin, 'Response to a Question from the Novyi mir Editorial Staff', in Speech Genres, pp. 1-9 (pp. 3, 4) (hereafter, 'Response');
9. original publication M. M. Bakhtin, 'Smelee pol zovat'sia vozmozhnostiami', Novyi mir, 1970, 11, pp. 237-40.
10. M. M. Bakhtin, 'O polifonichnosti romanov Dostoevskogo', in Sobranie sochinenii, 6, pp. 458-65 (p. 461);
11. this interview, conducted by the Polish journalist Zbigniew Podgorzec, was first published in Polish in 1971, and in Russian in 1975: see S. G. Bocharov, '[Commentary on "O polifonichnosti romanov Dostoevskogo"]', in ibid., pp. 728-31.
12. Bakhtin, 'K metodologii', pp. 390, 392, 393;
13. 'Toward a Methodology', pp. 167, 169, 170. Modifications to the published translation include correction of the inaccurate rendering of 'prazdnik vozrozhdeniia' as 'homecoming festival', which obscures the use of a recurrent and key term.
14. S. S. Averintsev and S. G. Bocharov, '[Commentary on "K metodologii gumanitarnykh nauk"]', in Bakhtin, Estetika, pp. 409-12 (p. 409).
15. See, for example, S. S. Averintsev, 'V stikhii "bol'shogo vremeni"', Literaturnaia gazeta, 1995, 46 (15 November), p. 6; it is equally unsurprising that one obituary of Averintsev himself should have associated him with the same category: see Andrei Nemzer, 'Chelovek "bol'shogo vremeni": Pamiati Sergeia Averintseva' (2004), 〈http://www.ruthenia.ru/nemzer/averincev.html〉 [accessed 11 July 2005].
16. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Stanford, CA, 1990, pp. 229-30.
17. For an example of the controversy aroused by the approach taken to carnival in this study, see Clive Thomson and Anthony Wall, 'Cleaning up Bakhtin's Carnival Act', Diacritics, 23, 1993, 2, pp. 47-70,
18. Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, 'Imputations and Amputations: Reply to Wall and Thomson', Diacritics, 23, 1993, 4, pp. 93-96,
19. and Clive Thomson and Anthony Wall, 'Chronic Chronotopicity: Reply to Morson and Emerson', Diacritics, 24, 1993, 4, pp. 71-77.
20. For a similar contrast between Bakhtin's later and earlier preoccupations, compare Graham Pechey's assertion that by 'great time' Bakhtin 'signifies the immortality of all meanings', and that 'the turn taken by the late Bakhtin is from the grotesque-in-history to the sublime-in-theory': Graham Pechey, 'Eternity and Modernity: Bakhtin and the Epistemological Sublime', Theoria, 1993, 81/82, pp. 61-85 (pp. 61, 64).
21. L. A. Gogotishvili, '[Commentary on "Rabochie zapisi 60-kh-nachala 70-kh godov"]' (hereafter, '[Commentary on "Rabochie zapisi"]'), and 'Obshchaia preambula k "Rabochim zapisiam 60-kh-nachala 70-kh godov"' (hereafter, 'Obshchaia preambula'), in Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 6, pp. 543-701 (p. 696) and pp. 533-43 (p. 537). Gogotishvili describes how Kozhinov combined, with little regard for the chronological order of their composition, materials taken from various notebooks of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as material dating from the 1940s. He had this typed up, and gave it to Bakhtin in the expectation that the latter would approve it for publication; Bakhtin, however, evidently did not look at the typescript. The text was published in 1975 under the title 'Toward a Methodology for Literary Scholarship' ('K metodologii literaturovedeniia'). Kozhinov then returned the original materials to the archive in a form that suggested that they constituted a single unit.
22. The 1979 publication was purged of Kozhinov's transpositions and interpolations, and the material from the 1940s was published in part, in the editorial commentary, under the correct title of 'K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk' ('Toward the Philosophical Bases of the Human Sciences', subsequently published in full: see M. M. Bakhtin, 'K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk', in Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, 5, Raboty 1940-kh-1960-kh godov, ed. S. G. Bocharov and L. A. Gogotishvili, Moscow, 1996 [hereafter, Sobranie sochinenii, 5], pp. 7-10 [hereafter, 'K filosofskim osnovam']). The new title, 'K metodologii gumanitarnykh nauk', was in fact a heading used by Bakhtin for just one section of the notes from which the text was compiled. For full details, see Gogotishvili, 'Obshchaia preambula', pp. 535-37, and Gogotishvili, '[Commentary on "Rabochie zapisi"]', pp. 655-57.
23. S. G. Bocharov and L. A. Gogotishvili, '[Commentary on "1961. Zametki"]', in Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 5, pp. 647-68 (p. 649).
24. See also, S. G. Bocharov, '[Commentary on Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo]', in M. M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, 2, 'Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo', 1929. Stat'i o L. Tolstom, 1929. Zapisi kursa lektsii po istorii russkoi literatury, 1922-1927, ed. S. G. Bocharov and L. S. Melikhova, Moscow, 2000, pp. 431-543 (p. 437).
25. See I. L. Popova, 'O spiritualakh: K istokam filosofii vozrozhdeniia M. M. Bakhtina', Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, 2001, 3 (36), pp. 81-98 (hereafter, 'O spiritualakh');
26. reprinted as I. L. Popova, '[Commentary on "O spiritualakh (k probleme Dostoevskogo)"]', in Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 6, pp. 519-33.
27. M. M. Bakhtin, 'K stilistike romana', in Sobranie sochinenii, 5, pp. 138-40 (p. 139).
28. Bakhtin,'K filosofskim osnovam', p. 10.
29. Bakhtin, archival materials dating from the first half of the 1940s, quoted in I. L. Popova, '[Commentary on "[K voprosam ob istoricheskoi traditsii i o narodnykh istochnikakh gogolevskogo smekha]"]', in Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 5, pp. 420-24 (pp. 423-24).
30. This discrepancy between sections of the editorial apparatus of volume five written by different scholars, although comparatively minor, is symptomatic of underlying tensions of a potentially more debilitating nature; for a discussion of these tensions, see Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, Oxford, 1999 (hereafter, Mikhail Bakhtin), pp. 122-24.
31. See O. E. Osovskii, 'Bol'shoe vremia', Bakhtinskii sbornik, 4, 2000, pp. 94-95.
32. See chapter four of M. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, Moscow, 1965;
33. English translation M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Manchester, 1984
34. M. M. Bakhtin, 'Rable i Gogol' (Iskusstvo slova i narodnaia smekhovaia kul'tura)', in Voprosy literatury i estetiki: Issledovaniia raznykh let, Moscow, 1975 (hereafter, Voprosy), pp. 484-95 (p. 495);
35. English translation M. M. Bakhtin, 'The Art of the Word and the Culture of Folk Humor (Rabelais and Gogol)', trans. by Henryk Baran, in Baran (ed.), Structuralism and Semiotics: Readings from the Soviet Union, White Plains, NY, 1976, pp. 284-96 (p. 296);
36. M. M. Bakhtin, 'Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane: Ocherki po istoricheskoi poetike', in Voprosy, pp. 234-407 (hereafter, 'Formy vremeni') (p. 399);
37. English translation M. M. Bakhtin, 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics' (hereafter, 'Forms of Time'), in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M Bakhtin, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, TX, 1981, pp. 84-258 (hereafter, The Dialogic Imagination) (p. 251).
38. What was first published, and has been subsequently interpreted, as a coherent 'essay' on the chronotope is in fact no such thing: Bakhtin was prevailed upon to write his 'Concluding Remarks' for what seems to be material extracted from drafts of a work dealing with the Bildungsroman in Germany and the prose of Goethe (see Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin, p. 176).
39. Bakhtin, 'Otvet', p. 351;
40. 'Response', p. 5.
41. See Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time, Oxford, 2000 (hereafter, The Master and the Slave), p. 156.
42. English translation 'Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel', in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 3-40 (p. 16; I have amended the English translation which reads, wrongly, 'as they are also fused in the semantic layers of ancient languages', and which Tihanov cites unchanged). On Bakhtin and Cassirer
43. see especially Craig Brandist, 'Bakhtin, Cassirer and Symbolic Forms', Radical Philosophy, 85, 1997, pp. 20-27,
44. and Brian Poole, 'Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin's Carnival Messianism', South Atlantic Quarterly, 97, 1998, 3/4, pp. 537-78, where Bakhtin's plagiarism of passages from a different work by Cassirer is revealed.
45. As Tihanov points out (Tihanov, The Master and the Slave, p. 157), in the 'Concluding Remarks' Bakhtin does refer openly to Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and its 'analysis, rich in factual material, of the reflection of time in language (the assimilation of time by language)': Bakhtin, 'Formy vremeni', p. 399; 'Forms of Time', p. 251 (translation modified).
46. Tihanov, The Master and the Slave, p. 157; see pp. 269-70 on the 'process of intense appropriation of Hegel's work' in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, and pp. 271-91 on Hegelian features of Bakhtin's treatment of the body and other aspects of the carnivalesque. On the relationship between the neo-Kantian and Hegelian aspects of Bakhtin's thought, see Craig Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics, London, 2002, p. 131.
47. Barry Sandywell, 'The Shock of the Old: Mikhail Bakhtin's Contributions to the Theory of Time and Alterity', in Michael Bell and Michael Gardiner (eds), Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1998, pp. 196-213 (p. 208). Sandywell was unaware of Bakhtin's use of the term 'great time' in the 1940s.
48. M. M. Bakhtin, 'Roman vospitaniia i ego znachenie v istorii realizma: K istoricheskoi tipologii romana', in Estetika, pp. 199-249 (hereafter, 'Roman vospitaniia') (p. 213);
49. Bakhtin, 'Roman vospitaniia', p. 229; 'The Bildungsroman', p. 36 (translation modified).
50. M. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i Renessansa, Moscow, 1965 (hereafter, Tvorchestvo), p. 61. The published English translation of this section is characteristically elliptical and imprecise, omitting Bakhtin's examples and concealing his use of the term 'great time': 'The literature known as "realism of manners" was already presenting, together with authentic carnival themes, the images of a static grotesque entirely removed from the main flux of time and from the flux of becoming': M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington, IN, 1984 (hereafter, Rabelais), p. 53.
51. Both versions are preserved in Bakhtin's archive, and are scheduled to be published in his Collected Works; on the relationship to them of the 1965 publication, see Popova, '[Commentary on "Dopolneniia"]', pp. 474-75. For an exhaustive account of the submission and defence of Bakhtin's dissertation, see Nikolai Pan'kov, '"Everything Else Depends on How this Business Turns Out . . .": The Defence of Mikhail Bakhtin's Dissertation as Real Event, as High Drama and as Academic Comedy', Dialogum, 1, 1998, pp. 11-29, and 2, 1999, pp. 7-40.
52. For an acknowledgement of a connection between carnival and 'great time' on the part of a scholar who, as we have seen, had previously considered the two incompatible, see Caryl Emerson, 'Coming to Terms with Bakhtin's Carnival: Ancient, Modern, sub Specie Aeternitatis', in R. Bracht Branham (ed.), Bakhtin and the Classics, Evanston, IL, 2002, pp. 5-26,
53. where she refers to 'Bakhtin's carnival of Great Time' (p. 19).
54. Judith N. Shklar, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind, Cambridge, London, New York and Melbourne, 1976 (hereafter, Freedom and Independence), p. 50.
55. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, 3 vols, New Haven, CT and London, 1953-57, 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, pp. 182, 188.
56. Charles W. Hendel, 'Introduction', in Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1, Language, pp. 1-65 (p. 62).
57. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, 1977, section 801.
58. Jon Stewart, The Unity of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit': A Systematic Interpretation, Evanston, IL, 2000, p. 462.
59. Shklar, Freedom and Independence, p. 50.
60. See Brian Poole, '"Nazad k Kaganu": Marburgskaia shkola v Nevele i filosofiia M. M. Bakhtina', Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, 1995, 1, pp. 38-48,
61. Barry Sandywell has explored the similarities between Bakhtin and another messianic thinker, Walter Benjamin (with whom Bakhtin shares a number of common affiliations), arguing that the two 'concur in problematizing the category of redemptive time'. For Benjamin, 'the semantic potential of the past shatters the linear image of a continuous line linking past, present and future', while for Bakhtin (and here Sandywell highlights once again the Hegelian connection), 'the theme of "great time" holds open a promise of spiritual self-recollection (erinnerungen)': Barry Sandywell, 'Memories of Nature in Bakhtin and Benjamin', in Craig Brandist and Galin Tihanov (eds), Materializing Bakhtin: The Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory, London and New York, 2000, pp. 94-118 (p. 108).
62. M. I. Kagan, 'Evreistvo v krizise kul'tury', in O khode istorii, ed. V. L. Makhlin, Moscow, 2004, pp. 171-86 (p. 185).
63. On Kagan's role as á mediating figure between major neo-Kantian philosophers with whom he studied and members of the Bakhtin Circle, in whose discussions he played a leading role in its early years, see David Shepherd, 'Re-introducing the Bakhtin Circle', in Craig Brandist, David Shepherd and Galin Tihanov (eds), The Bakhtin Circle: In the Master's Absence, Manchester, 2004 (hereafter, The Bakhtin Circle), pp. 1-21 (pp. 7-9).
64. W. D. Lindsey, '"The Problem of Great Time": A Bakhtinian Ethics of Discourse', Journal of Religion, 73, 1993, 3, pp. 311-28 (p. 323).
65. This is true, for example, of a number of the contributions to Susan M. Felch and Paul J. Contino (eds), Bakhtin and Religion: A Feeling for Faith, Evanston, IL, 2001.
66. Popova, 'O spiritualakh', p. 95; '[Commentary on "O spiritualakh (k probleme Dostoevskogo)"]', p. 532.
67. See Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo, pp. 64-66;
68. Rabelais, pp. 56-58;
69. and M. M. Bakhtin, 'Rabochie zapisi 60-kh-nachala 70-kh godov', in ibid., pp. 371-439 (p. 400).
70. Unless some positive evidence is forthcoming, we must conclude that the case for direct Joachimist influence in the nineteenth-century Russian prophetical movement is unproven': Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 2nd edn, Oxford, 2001, pp. 331-32.
71. On the Bakhtin Circle and the Third Renaissance, see Nikolai Nikolaev, 'Lev Pumpianskii and the Nevel School of Philosophy', in Brandist, Shepherd and Tikanov (eds), The Bakhtin Circle, pp. 125-49 (pp. 135-37, 143).
72. See O. E. Osovskii, '"Iz sovetskikh rabot bol'shuiu1 tsennost' imeet kniga O. Freidenberg": Bakhtinskie marginalii na stranitsakh Poetiki siuzheta i zhanra', Bakhtinskii sbomik, 4, 2000, pp. 128-34,
73. and Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics, pp. 134-37.
74. See L. A. Gogotishvili, '[Commentary on "[O Flobere]"]', in Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 5, pp. 492-507 (pp. 504, 505).
75. For a more nuanced account of the relationship between the work of Lévy-Bruhl and Marr and his followers (including Freidenberg), one that takes into account Bakhtin's own far from entirely negative assessment of Marr, see Brandist, The Bakhtin Circle: Philosophy, Culture and Politics, pp. 109-11.
76. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask, San Diego, CA, New York and London, 1957 (hereafter, The Sacred and the Profane), pp. 68, 88, 89.
77. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York, 1965 (hereafter, Eternal Return), pp. 145-46.
78. Bakhtin, '[Kvoprosam samosoznaniia i samootsenki. . .]', p. 78.
79. 'Bakhtin's idea of "eternal return" most probably does not coincide with Nietzsche's: in this sense Nietzsche was probably valued by [Bakhtin] simply for his historically timely accentuation of the problem': Gogotishvili, 'Commentary on "[O Flobere]"]', p. 504. This is not to say that there may not be Nietzschean overtones to Bakhtin's treatment of time; as so often, it is essential to be sensitive to the mediation of key ideas. For example, in referring to 'great time' as 'a later term' used by Bakhtin to denote and explain the greatness of writers such as Dante, Dostoevskii and Shakespeare, Bocharov and Gogotishvili note the similarity between Bakhtin's move and the Symbolist poet, critic and classical scholar Viacheslav Ivanov's association of Dostoevskii with 'great, pandemic art' ('bol'shoe, vsenarodnoe iskusstvo'), 'great [bol'shoe], Homeric or Dantean, art': see Bocharov and Gogotishvili, '[Commentary on "1961. Zametki"]', p. 649.
80. The significance of Ivanov's reading of Dostoevskii's 'novel-tragedy' for the approach taken by Bakhtin in Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevskii's Art, 1929) and in the revised version of this study, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo (Problems of Dostoevskii's Poetics, 1963) is well known. For a lucid account that gives due weight to the role played by Bakhtin's close associate Lev Pumpianskii in mediating and directing the influence of Ivanov (and, through him, of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy), see Bocharov, '[Commentary on Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo]', pp. 437-42;
81. see also O. E. Osovskii, 'F. Rable, karnaval i karnaval'naia kul'tura v rabotakh M. M. Bakhtina 1930-1950-kh gg.', Dialog. Karnaval. Khronotop, 1, 2002, 38, pp. 59-74 (p. 61).
82. For a general account of Ivanov's aesthetic theory, see Victor Terras, 'Vyacheslav Ivanov's Aesthetic Thought: Context and Antecedents', in Robert Louis Jackson and Lowry Nelson Jr. (eds), Vyacheslav Ivanov: Poet, Critic and Philosopher, New Haven, CT, 1986, pp. 326-45 (on Ivanov's opposition of 'great' and 'small' and its antecedents, see pp. 334-37).
83. Relativity theory is, of course, together with Kantian thought, a crucial reference point for Bakhtin's definition of the chronotope. For an incisive account of Bakhtin and relativity theory, and of previous treatments of the question, see Erik Dop, 'A Dialogic Epistemology: Bakhtin on Truth and Meaning', Dialogism, 2000, 4, pp. 7-33.
84. On the Kantian dimensions of the chronotope, see Bernhard F. Scholz, 'Bakhtin's Concept of the "Chronotope": The Kantian Connection', in David Shepherd (ed.), The Contexts of Bakhtin: Philosophy, Authorship, Aesthetics, Amsterdam, 1998, pp. 141-72.
85. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 89.
86. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 112.
87. Apart from Hegel and Nietzsche, figures to whom both Bakhtin and Eliade are indebted, in different ways and to different degrees, include Bergson, Cassirer and Lévy-Bruhl: see Bryan S. Rennie, Reconstructing Eliade: Making Sense of Religion, Albany, NY, 1996.
88. see also Galin Tihanov, 'The Body as a Cultural Value: Brief Notes on the History of the Idea and the Idea of History in Bakhtin's Writings', Dialogum, 2001, 5-6, pp. 111-21.