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Strange Synchronies and Surplus Possibilities: Bakhtin on Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Gary Saul Morson
Gary Saul Morson*
Affiliation:
Department of Slavic Languages, Northwestern University
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Extract

We live forward, but we understand backward.

—Kierkegaard

Bakhtin must surely be regarded as the most remarkable modern thinker to examine time in narrative. For him, the problem was no mere exercise in literary theory. Rather, it was a way to examine ultimate questions—or in the Russian phrase, “accursed” questions—about human existence. In this respect, his work is representative of the Russian tradition, in which literature and criticism served as forms of—a skeptic would say, substitutes for—philosophy. In this Russian view, the task of philosophy is to examine the relation of ideas to the way people live. Novels are a supreme form of philosophy because, unlike the terribly thin accounts of life found in philosophical tracts, they offer a rich and “thick” description of human thinking and action.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , Fall 1993 , pp. 477 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1993

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References

1. This essay is adapted from the third chapter of my recently completed book, Narrative and Freedom : The Shadows of Time (New Haven : Yale University Press, forthcoming).

2. Naturally, there are other traditions regarding criticism and philosophy in Russia.

3. This, of course, is the view attacked by Dostoevsky's underground man. Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (Fall 1993)

4. I adapt these terms from Ilya Prigogine. See Prigogine, , From Being to Becoming : Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco : W. H. Freeman, 1980)Google Scholar.

5. These quotations from Bruno and Leibniz are taken from the article on “Time” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas : Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Weiner (New York : Scribner's, 1973), 4 : 393, 394.

6. William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism, ” “The Will to Believe” and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and “Human Immortality : Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine” (New York : Dover, 1956), 150. Further references are to DD.

7. For a consideration of how this formulation applies to evolutionary biology, see Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life : The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York : Norton, 1989 Google Scholar; and the discussion of Gould in chapter six of Narrative and Freedom.

8. Mikhail, Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti,” Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, ed. Bocharov, S. G. (Moscow : Iskusstvo, 1979), 104 Google Scholar. Further references are to AiG.

9. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book, ” appendix 2 of Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevshy's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 288. Further references to “Toward a Reworking” are to TRDB; references to this edition of the Dostoevsky book are to PDP.

10. As Robert Belknap pointed out to me, my thesis here can be viewed as an extension or adaptation of Lessing's core argument in Laocoon. See especially chapters 16 and 17 of Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laocoon : An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78–90.Google Scholar

11. In TRDB, Bakhtin directly compares polyphonic creative activity with God's relation to free people (TRDB, 285).

12. The notebooks for The Idiot and The Possessed are yet to be examined with the attention they deserve, as documents in their own right and not as mere way stations toward these two novels. The American editions of these notebooks, which contain superb editorial commentary and material, are not mere translations but reflect considerable editorial effort and attention. See Fyodor, Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for “The Idiot” , trans. Katherine Strelsky, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1967 Google Scholar; and Dostoevsky, , The Notebooks for “The Possessed” , trans. Victor Terras, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1968 Google Scholar. See also Miller, Robin Feuer, “The Notebooks for The Idiot ,” Dostoevsky and “The Idiot ” : Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1981), 46–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. On Dostoevsky's creative process and methods of working, see Jacques, Catteau, Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans. Audrey Littlewood (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989.Google Scholar

14. The Notebooks for “The Idiot” , 242.

15. I recall that, as a college student taking one of my first airplane flights, I caught myself thinking that the plane could not crash because then what sense would s my life make?—and then reflecting that planes are held up only by physics, not by metaphysics; or as I would say now, by causes, not destinies or pre-given narrative structures.

16. That is pretty much how Shklovsky reads Sterne's play with temporality. See Victor, Shklovsky, “Sterne's Tristram Shandy : Stylistic Commentary” in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism : Four Essays (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 25–57 Google Scholar.

17. Shall we call this the suspense convention?

18. Mikhail, Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin : University of Texas Press, 1981), 34Google Scholar. Further references are to E&N.