Liisa Steinby is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku. Her main research interests include the problems of modernity and subjectivity in the novel from the eighteenth century to the present and related questions in literary theory.

Tintti Klapuri is Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests include Chekhov, temporality and contemporary Russian literature. 

Bakhtin and his Others

(Inter)subjectivity, Chronotope, Dialogism

By Liisa Steinby, Tintti Klapuri

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85728-308-5

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii,
Translation and Transliteration, ix,
Introduction The Acting Subject of Bakhtin Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri, xi,
Chapter 1 Bakhtin and Lukács: Subjectivity, Signifying Form and Temporality in the Novel Liisa Steinby, 1,
Chapter 2 Bakhtin, Watt and the Early Eighteenth-Century Novel Aino Mäkikalli, 19,
Chapter 3 Concepts of Novelistic Polyphony: Person-Related and Compositional-Thematic Liisa Steinby, 37,
Chapter 4 Familiar Otherness: Peculiarities of Dialogue in Ezra Pound’s Poetics of Inclusion Mikhail Oshukov, 55,
Chapter 5 Author and Other in Dialogue: Bakhtinian Polyphony in the Poetry of Peter Reading Christian Pauls, 73,
Chapter 6 Tradition and Genre: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy Edward Gieskes, 87,
Chapter 7 Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope: The Viewpoint of an Acting Subject Liisa Steinby, 105,
Chapter 8 The Provincial Chronotope and Modernity in Chekhov’s Short Fiction Tintti Klapuri, 127,
List of Contributors, 147,

CHAPTER 1

BAKHTIN AND LUKÁCS: SUBJECTIVITY, SIGNIFYING FORM AND TEMPORALITY IN THE NOVEL

Liisa Steinby

Introduction: Bakhtin and Lukács

New research on the German and Russian background of Bakhtin’s thinking, and the new perspectives and understanding thus opened up, invite an interest in contributing to this understanding by clarifying some new connection or aspect. Since Bakhtin apparently combined quite freely ideas from a great number of different authors – and notoriously even borrowed directly from their works without indicating the source (e.g. Poole 1998) – it is obvious that a great deal of work remains to be done in this area. My purpose in this chapter is to elucidate one of those connections, namely Bakhtin’s debt to the young Georg Lukács, the Hungarian aesthetician and literary scholar. Lukács, who wrote in German, began as a Neo-Kantian and Hegelian, but in the 1930s became immensely influential as a Marxist literary theorist.

The basic study of Bakhtin’s relation to Lukács, and of the common intellectual background they shared, is Galin Tihanov’s The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (2000). Until the publication of Tihanov’s work, the connection between Lukács and Bakhtin passed unnoticed in the Bakhtin boom that has been ongoing since the 1970s. There is a natural reason for this: in none of his published writings does Bakhtin ever mention Lukács. Tihanov, however, noticed a reference to Lukács in Bakhtin’s unpublished doctoral dissertation (Tihanov 2000, 295). The fact that Bakhtin intended to translate Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel (Die Theorie des Romans, 1920) into Russia, before he found out that the Marxist Lukács himself disapproved of this early work (Clark and Holquist 1984, 99), makes Lukács’ apparent non-presence in Bakhtin’s writings even more conspicuous. Tihanov ambitiously investigates these two theoreticians of literature and culture, comparing them not only with each other but also with their common background in German cultural philosophy, aesthetics and literary theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Tihanov suggests that Bakhtin, in his most original contribution to the theory of the novel, actually takes a stand in the 1930s discussion of the novel and of literary realism, in which the Marxist Lukács played a major role (cf. Tihanov 2000, 140). I argue, however, that there exists an important earlier connection between Bakhtin and the young Lukács that is in need of further clarification, especially with regard to the latter’s seminal The Theory of the Novel. That Bakhtin never refers to The Theory of the Novel in his published writings might be because this idealist (Neo-Kantian – Hegelian) work of the young Lukács would have been an undesirable source for a writer in the Stalinist period. This, however, does not mean that the work ceased to influence Bakhtin’s thinking – just as the Marxist Lukács never stopped employing German idealist aesthetics as the basis of his own theory of art. Moreover, we will see that through the young Lukács – though obviously not only through him – Bakhtin’s roots reach further back, to Hegelian and Early Romantic thinking about the novel.

Subject and Signifying Form: The Early Bakhtin and the Early Lukács

In ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, Bakhtin shows how the ‘consummating’ and ‘meaning-governed’ form (Bakhtin 1990b, 25, 138) is given to the hero in an act of contemplation and aesthetic creativity by the author. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, he defines this unity-creating aesthetic activity as follows:

The unity of the world in aesthetic seeing is not a unity of meaning or sense – not a systematic unity, but a unity that is concretely architectonic: the world is arranged around a concrete value-center, which is seen and loved and thought. What constitutes this center is the human being: everything in this world acquires significance, meaning, and value only in correlation with man – as that which is human. (Bakhtin 1993, 61)

The hero and his life deliver the content for the work of art, to which the author gives a form; this form is not a synthesis of meaning or a systematic account of the content, but an ‘architectonic’ form, organizing the content and thus bearing significance but preserving the genuine concreteness of the individual’s experiences (Bakhtin 1993, 61). ‘Architectonic form’ is thus equivalent for Bakhtin to the consummating, ‘meaning-governed’ or signifying aesthetic form. He contrasts this with the ‘compositional form’, referring to the mere technical arrangement of the material (cf. Bakhtin 1990a, 303–4).

The idea of signifying form, one which arises from the content and is not mechanically imposed on it, played a major role in aesthetic thinking in the German tradition since Romanticism. It is obviously an essential element of the young Bakhtin’s aesthetics as well, and I would argue that in different, even radical modifications it continues to play an important role in his thinking down to his last writings, such as the essay on speech genres. I therefore suggest that this concept be taken as one of the focal points in analysing Bakhtin’s relation to his German background and especially to Lukács. This can be understood as a continuation and narrowing down of what Tihanov perceives as the most important themes which Lukács and Bakhtin share with their German predecessors: the concepts of culture, form and genre (Tihanov 2000, 21 – 61). All three concepts are both very common and very broad; what is needed is a more specific scrutiny as to how they were used in the German context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, before they can be applied in elucidating Lukács’ and Bakhtin’s thinking. This requirement is not easily accomplished, as the concepts of culture, form and genre are seldom clearly defined and are used in a number of different ways. The concepts of subject, which we consider here primarily in the context of the novel, and of signifying form, may initially not appear much clearer; but I believe that we can clarify them considerably through a contrastive analysis of some of Lukács’ and Bakhtin’s writings.

The idea that culture is a creation of signifying forms is a tenet in Neo-Kantianism, but it is also important in Hegelianism and the ‘philosophy of life’; actually, it is a common philosophical idea at the turn of the century, but we find its roots already in the philosophy of art of Herder, Schiller and Hegel. The form, often conceived as ‘inner form’, in contrast to any technical devices, is the perceivable Gestalt through which the content of the work of art is mediated. In Lukács’ Soul and Forms (Die Seele und die Formen, 1911), the perspective from which a number of authors and thinkers are described is the particular form they give to their experience of living. The form of an experience thus is something that interprets the content of the experience as a whole and determines its significance, while letting the experience retain its concreteness – in contrast to a conceptual definition, which is inevitably abstract. As the signifying form of an individual’s life, this concept comes close to Bakhtin’s ‘consummating’ form.

Lukács’ essays in Soul and Forms suggest that an individual creates signifying forms both in life and in art. For instance, Lukács describes how Kierkegaard, after abandoning his fiancee, purposefully and self-sacrificingly represents himself publicly in ‘Diary of a Seducer’ (1843) as an unscrupulous libertine, in order to save his fiancee’s reputation and let her make a new life as the wife of another man. In this case, the ‘form’ is the public image that a person creates of himself by means of a literary work. In another essay, Lukács represents the life of Novalis as a realization of the Romantic philosophy of life. These cases might very well illuminate Bakhtin’s idea of organizing experience using a person as a ‘value centre’ – except that here Lukács is speaking of the lives of real people, not of life as represented in a literary work of art. But Lukács also explores how the tragic view of life and the ethics of the tragical are realized in the form of Theodor Storm’s short stories. In each case, form is created by viewing and interpreting a person’s acts and experiences in terms of a value or an idea, presenting these lived materials as a signifying whole. Since for the young Lukács the state of modern man is tragic, he particularly describes various cases in which life is given a tragic form, both in life and in literature.

For Lukács, then, form is anything but a purely external ordering imposed on a certain content or, in the case of literature, a product of the technical application of a set of devices. Form is in no way an extraneous ingredient added to the content, but is the very essence of content; it is the (quasi-) perceivable overall meaning of the experiences. This concept of form persists throughout Lukács’ work. In the Neo-Kantian Soul and Forms, an indefinite number of subjectively created forms of experience are supposed to exist, which do not combine to make an overall picture of the world:

How colourful is the world and how rich in its colourfulness and how strong and rich are we, to whom it is given to become aware of this all. And the forms that are born out of this feeling do not produce a great order, but a great variety: not the great connection of the whole, but a great variety in each of its corners. (Lukács 1911, 308)

This emphasis on the variety of subjective forms of experience and the lack of coherence resembles Bakhtin’s presentation of Dostoevsky’s ‘polyphonic’ novel. However, in Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel only a few years later, this plurality of various subjective truths or views of an experience has been replaced by the search for a meaningful order of existence as a whole, of ‘totality’ in the Romantic and Hegelian sense of the word.

Bakhtin shares Lukács’ concept of form as presented in Soul and Forms: the form is a form of human experience which, being meaningful, interprets the content of the experience without removing anything of its concreteness. Lukács is of course not Bakhtin’s only source for this conception of form, and it is not only Hegel who in his aesthetics understands artistic form in this manner (e.g. Hegel 1975a, 52; Hegel 1975b, 13, 64); the Neo- Kantians, along with the ‘philosophers of life’ such as Nietzsche, regarded man essentially as a creator of signifying forms for his experiences. When Bakhtin criticizes the Russian Formalists’ understanding of form, he does not intend to disregard the concept of form as a whole but merely a particular understanding of it.

In the essay ‘The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art’, written during 1923 – 24, Bakhtin attacks the Formalist notion of the form of a work of art, as created by applying certain technical devices (priemy) to the linguistic material. For this Bakhtin uses the term ‘compositional form’ (e.g. Bakhtin 1990a, 269 – 70, 303 – 4). According to Bakhtin, understanding a literary work of art simply as an organization of linguistic materials cannot explain either its aesthetic or its ethical significance (1990a, 261ff.); he states categorically that linguistics cannot grasp the specificity of art (1990a, 294). Rather, the aesthetic form of a literary work of art is to be understood as the form of the concrete human content of the work, i.e. of the persons represented and their actions along with all their cognitive and ethical dimensions.

The reality of cognition and ethical action that enters (as an already identified and evaluated reality) into the aesthetic object and is subjected there to concrete, intuitive unification, individuation, concretization, isolation, and consummation, i.e., to a process of comprehensive artistic forming by means of a particular material – this reality we call (in complete agreement with traditional word usage) the content of a work of art (or to be exact – of the aesthetic object) […] Content is an indispensable constitutive moment in the aesthetic object, and artistic form is correlative to it; outside this correlation, artistic form has no meaning at all. (Bakhtin 1990a, 281; emphasis in the original)

Bakhtin – no doubt quite rightly – finds the reason for the Formalists’ misunderstanding in their endeavour to establish a new kind of literary study on a totally scientific basis (1990a, 259): the traditional speculative aesthetics is rejected by the formalists as non-scientific, in favour of an empirical approach which deals only with the perceivable (linguistic) traits of the text. Consequently, aesthetic form, as Klaus Städke (2001, 487) remarks, cannot be anything but a mere configuration of linguistic materials, without any representative or expressive function.

In Soul and Forms, form is created by an individual, who can give form either to his or her own life, as do Kierkegaard and Novalis, or to a work of art. Where in Toward a Philosophy of the Act cultural forms, which are general, and the lived life in its concreteness, are presented as irreconcilable (e.g. Bakhtin 1993, 2, 30), in ‘The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art’ and in ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’ content and form, which is now understood as inner or ‘consummating’ form, can be in harmony. In ‘Author and Hero’, the author is able to create a signifying form of a person, his world and his story, by contemplating the hero and his life from an aesthetic distance. Bakhtin argues extensively why it is impossible for a character to create an encompassing form for him- or herself: he or she, being part of the world, is constantly involved in making decisions and performing actions, each of which changes what he or she actually ‘is’. Only someone contemplating his or her life from an aesthetic distance is able to bestow upon him or her a ‘finalized’ or ‘consummated’ form (Bakhtin 1990b). This form shows what a person actually is; in other words, in an artistic creation, the complex phenomenon of a human being and his or her life are given a signifying form.

Likewise in ‘The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art’ the author is the subject who, out of the content, creates the signifying form of a work of art. Secondarily, the same activity also characterizes the recipient – viewer, reader, listener – of a work of art:

In form I find myself, find my own productive, axiologically form-giving, activity; I feel intensely my own movement that is creating the object, and I do so not only in primary creation, not only during my own performance, but also during the contemplation of a work of art. I must to some extent experience myself as the creator of form, in order to actualize the artistically valid form as such. (Bakhtin 1990a, 304; emphasis in the original)

That Bakhtin came both in ‘Author and Hero’ and in ‘The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Art’ to separate action in life or ethical action from artistic activity may be a consequence of the influence of Hermann Cohen’s aesthetics, which Bakhtin in several respects follows closely in his discussion of aesthetic creation in ‘Author and Hero’ (cf. Cohen 1912; Steinby 2011). However, even though Bakhtin questions the individual’s capability of creating a signifying form of him- or herself and his or her life, this does not in any way alter his Lukácsian concept of signifying form in art. On the contrary: when Bakhtin in his later (‘mature’) works turns from ethics and aesthetics to the theory of the novel – where he continues to apply both his ethical and his aesthetic views – the problem of signifying forms becomes relevant in a new manner.

From the German Early Romantics through Hegel to Lukács, the question of how an individual is able to grasp existence in its totality as meaningful is considered to be the main problem of the novel. This problem is closely related to that of signifying form, because search for totality can be understood as the individual’s effort to create a signifying form that comprises not only their own life, but – even if symbolically – existence as a whole. This line of thought can be followed clearly down to Lukács’ The Theory of the Novel. In a sense, this line continues up to Bakhtin’s theory of the novel in Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and beyond.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Bakhtin and his Others by Liisa Steinby, Tintti Klapuri. Copyright © 2013 Liisa Steinby and Tintti Klapuri. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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