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Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ilya Kliger
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Abstract

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.

Type
On the Borders of the Silver Age
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , Fall 2008 , pp. 551 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference “The Long Silver Age“ at the University of Chicago, whose organizers, Robert Bird and Lina Steiner, I would like to thank for their hospitality. I am also grateful to those present at the panel for the discussion that followed. In addition, I would like to thank Hiba Hafiz and Nasser Zakariya for several illuminating conversations on the subject of this essay, and I am especially indebted to Michael Holquist, Harsha Ram, Galin Tihanov, and the two readers for Slavic Review for their helpful comments on the later versions.

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2. For a discussion of Bakhtin's views ofjoyce in the context of his theories of the epic and the novel, see Tihanov, Galin, “Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival: Towards the Synthesis of Epic and Novel in Rabelais,” Paragraph 24, no. 1 (March 2001): 66–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8. Ibid., 92. To be sure, Bakhtin's defense of the opposing “expressive” aesthetics, the aesthetics of sympathy, to which Goethe's naive Wilhelm gives voice, is only provisional. In the very next sentence he goes on to say that vivification, though necessary, is insufficient for proper aesthetic experience. In order to be aesthetic, sympathy (vchuvstvovanie) must be consummated, rounded off, made whole. But there is nothing controversial in this demand; insofar as Bakhtin makes it, he positions himself on die side of Kant and Goethe's stranger from the Tower. It is the peculiar demand for vivification, in other words, that requires closer attention and will receive it in what follows.

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11. In discussing expressive aesthetics, Bakhtin mentions Kant and remarks, somewhat mysteriously, that he occupied an ambivalent position in this context. Art and Answerability, 92. I can only offer a conjecture that this ambivalence refers to Kant's distinction between free and dependent beauty, with the latter producing limitations on the aesthetic activity of the subject.

12. In referring to the formalists here and below I do not presume to exhaust the complexity and heterogeneity of the school, but only to treat certain, admittedly crucial, aspects of their theory as giving voice to a more general modernist condition, diagnosed in Bakhtin's work.

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24. Perhaps some of the most suggestive of Bakhtin's statements on the specifically heroic, future-centered features of modernity appear in his notes toward an essay on Maiakovskii. See Bakhtin, , Sobranie sochinenii, 5:51–57 Google Scholar.

25. Thus, “the diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism, and man's impotence in the face of it, is the real subject-matter of Kafka's writings.” Lukács, , Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 77 Google Scholar.

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28. Thus, as Galin Tihanov points out, “Lukács's conservative Marxism and his heavy debt to Hegel always kept him away from a radical assertion of the new.” Tihanov, Galin, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford, 2000), 293 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40. Ibid., 2:339.

41. Ibid., 2:334.

42. Ibid., 2:384-86.

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44. Ibid., 39.

45. Ibid., 278, 284.

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49. V V Babich makes a highly intriguing observation that the very categories of author and hero could have become central to Bakhtin's poetics as a result of his thoughts about Dostoevskii and symbolist prose. See Babich, , “Dialog poetik: Andrei Belyi, G. G. Shpet i Mikhail Bakhtin,” Dialog, Karnaval, Khronotop, 1998, no. 1:15 Google Scholar.

50. See, for instance, Stacy Burton's analysis of The Sound and the Fury in “Bakhtin, Temporality and Modern Narrative: Writing ‘the Whole Triumphant, Murderous, Unstoppable Chute,'” Comparative Literature 48, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 39-65, or, with more relevance to the following discussion, Keys, Roger, The Reluctant Modernist: Andrei Belyi and the Development of Russian Fiction, 1902-1914 (Oxford, 1996), pt. 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Bely, Andrei, Petersburg, trans. Maguire, Robert A. and Malmstad, John E. (Bloomington, 1978), 35 Google Scholar. It should be added here that Nikolai Apollonovich, the senator's son, keeps a bust of Kant in his study.

52. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, Norman Kemp (New York, 1965), 23 Google Scholar.

53. Ibid., 92.

54. Bely, , Petersburg, 35 Google Scholar.

55. Papernyi, Vladimir, “Poetika russkogo simvolizma: Personologicheskii aspekt,“ in Boichuk, A. G., ed., Andrei Belyi: Publikatsii, issledovaniia (Moscow, 2002), 152 Google Scholar; my translation.

56. In this regard, see also Lidiia Ginzburg's suggestive discussion that some twentiethcentury prose is engaged in an attempt to replace the hero (as character) with process in O literaturnomgeroe (Leningrad, 1979), 129-43.