The Living Utterance: Bakhtin and Christianity
(delivered at CGSA, 10/23/09)
Good evening, and thanks for having me back to speak. I’ve been working through some of these ideas for about five years now, and I’ve found that it’s always helpful to try them out on new audiences, especially audiences who haven’t heard my worst jokes yet. I must admit, though, that you all have me at a bit of a disadvantage: at all my previous CGSA talks, we’d have to finish the meeting and actually go out somewhere for dinner, whereas tonight, I understand, there may well be actual food in the room before I finish speaking. I find myself, then, metaphorically standing between grad students and a free meal, a position only slightly less perilous than standing between a mother bear and her cubs, so will do my best to limit my remarks to a reasonable length.
In his email announcing tonight’s meeting, Bob asked whether the world of literary theory was any place for a Christian. It’s a fair question, especially in today’s academy: though many foundational critics of the early 20th century professed Christian faith, as did the majority of their philosophical and literary mentors, most currently popular theories at least implicitly reject Biblical views of language, creativity, human sinfulness, redemption, and even the possibility of faith. For many critics, and often for scholars who use their ideas, Christianity is often not so much tried and rejected as it is left out of the entire conversation. Academic freedom, it seems, only goes so far.
I bring this up not solely as an excuse to get good and mad at the Vast Left-Wing Ivory Tower Conspiracy that’s constantly keeping me down (Cue Dennis from Monty Python: “Help, help, I’m being repressed!”), but to remind us that not all academic expressions of faith can necessarily be expressed openly. This was certainly the case with Mikhail Bakhtin, the subject for tonight’s talk. Bakhtin lived in Russia from 1895-1975, meaning he spent the bulk of his life under Soviet rule. As those of you who’ve studied Russian history know, this was an important period of transition for Christianity in Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church, which was still a significant cultural and ideological force during Bakhtin’s early life, gradually lost power during the opening decades of the twentieth century—opposing the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution of 1917 didn’t help matters—and was one of the key targets of Stalin’s purges during the 20s and 30s. And though Stalin did officially reopen a Soviet-friendly version of the church in 1941, by the time of Bakhtin’s death in 1975 there were fewer than 5,000 active churches in the entire region.
As a member of the intelligentsia at this time, with his first academic publication appearing shortly after the Bolsheviks took power, Bakhtin was a relatively high-profile writer, and knew well that stating any explicitly Christian opinions publicly would not exactly be a smart career move. Accordingly, the kind of biographical evidence that we’d normally expect for someone we wish to claim as a Christian scholar—Galileo’s work on the theology of science, for instance—is sketchy at best, a fact that has led most Western Bakhtin scholars to deny or downplay his religious convictions. However, thanks primarily to the outstanding research in Ruth Coates’ 1998 book Christianity in Bakhtin, I believe we can build a convincing case that Bakhtin was at least sympathetic to Christian faith, even if the specifics of his beliefs are hard to pin down. From there, I’ll discuss some theological implications of Bakhtin’s rather multifarious theories, and conclude by showing how I’m using those theories in some of my own research.
Because Bakhtin was careful, and rightly so, about revealing beliefs and opinions contrary to those of the Communist Party, Coates notes that he “rarely and with great reluctance talked about himself” and that “almost nothing is known of his life, still less of his inner life,” and even interviews conducted late in his life, decades after Stalin’s purges, “yield next to nothing about Bakhtin’s personal convictions” (2). However, she maintains, and this is consistent with other biographical sources, “there is a general consensus among those who knew him that Bakhtin was a religious man” (2). Although some biographers have tried to associate Bakhtin with certain religious or philosophical groups by virtue of personal connections with their leaders during the 20s, many of the specifics of his beliefs remain elusive. We do know that he was interested in theology from early in his career, participating in a debate in 1918 entitled “God and Socialism.” The only extant account we have of that debate, a review written by a socialist apologist, notes that Bakhtin “defended religion, that muzzle of darkness,” and while “at certain points of his discourse [Bakhtin] showed recognition and appreciation of socialism, [he] could only wail and was disturbed that this same socialism showed no concern at all for the dead…and that, as he put it, with time the people would not forgive it for this” (qtd. in Coates 5). Now, it would be foolhardy to try and extrapolate a fully-formed doctrine of eschatology or the Resurrection based just on this review, but it does suggest that Bakhtin was not entirely comfortable with the Party line about religion, and at least in this case considered Christianity to have definite advantages over socialism.
This focus on religion carried over to Bakhtin’s early academic essays, though most of these writings were only made available in translation in the past 25 years or so. In a series of lectures among a group of scholars who would come to be known as the Bakhtin Circle, for instance, Bakhtin analyzed the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee in Luke 18 (in which Jesus contrasts their attitudes in prayer), arguing that the tax collector (I’m quoting Coates’s summary here) “finds justification not in himself, like the Pharisee, but in an ‘incarnated Third Person’” and that “well-founded peace…is reached when one abandons self-assurance and passes through a period of restlessness and penitence to arrive at a condition of trust in God” (6). In making this argument, Bakhtin was most likely drawing on the extensive Russian Orthodox studies of kenosis, a Greek term meaning “emptiness” or “emptying,” as in Paul’s teaching in Philippians 2:7 that Christ “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing [lit. “emptied himself”], taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of man.” Along similar lines, another of Bakhtin’s papers from this period argues that “[a] personal relationship with a personal God…is the sign of religion, but it is also the special difficulty of religion, thanks to which a peculiar fear of religion and Revelation may arise, a fear of its personal orientation” (qtd. in Coates 6).
Unfortunately, not long after Bakhtin participated in these discussions, he was accused of collaborating with the underground Russian Orthodox Church in 1929—the truth of that accusation is still unknown—and was sentenced to five years in a prison camp, a sentence that was “commuted after a great effort on the part of his friends to a period of internal exile” in Kazakhstan (Coates 7). Though two separate transcripts of Bakhtin’s interrogations classify him as “religious,” presumably based on his own testimony, after this point Bakhtin fell silent for some thirty years, continuing to write but not publish, until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s by—who else—a handful of graduate students who had found his early work. He did manage to publish one book, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, before his exile, but for the most part he had to content himself with what the Russians call “writing into his desk.” Grad students, I suspect, can relate.
Now, as you might imagine, with no bureaucracy, advisors, or papers to grade, Bakhtin’s scholarly output during these years was quite prolific: just what’s been collected and translated so far fills six books and six articles, and the resulting volume of secondary literature is quite frankly staggering. Likewise, though various scholars have done good work setting up a taxonomy and a working glossary for Bakhtin’s theories, he was not exactly known for strict and conscientious organization within his essays, let alone within an entire work. So as I turn now to look more closely at the potential theological implications of one of his key concepts, that of dialogue, I do so fully aware that no brief summary—and probably not even a lifetime of dissertations—can do justice to the entire body of his work. With that said, however, I do think that Bakhtin understood his various concepts, particularly those related to language and worldview, as constituting a coherent worldview, one which I will argue is rooted in Christian thought.
Both as a literary critic (primarily but not exclusively of Dostoevsky) and a theorist of language, the idea and implications of dialogue fascinated Bakhtin, and his arguments about it occupy much of his work. In fact, one of the central terms in scholarly conversations about Bakhtin is “dialogism,” which according to Morson and Emerson he conceives of as “a live process” that “transcends received models, none of which allow for unfinalizability” (50)—that is, none of which can fully account for the continual self-revisions that Bakhtin sees as necessary for human interaction. An individual utterance, in contrast to the system of dialogue in which most of Bakhtin’s formalist and structuralist contemporaries were interested, not only expresses an individual’s personality—which for Bakhtin, was always a fallen personality—but by requiring an audience it opens up the possibility of both community and transcendence. Or, to cite Holquist and Emerson’s definition, under dialogism “everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. […] A word, discourse, language or culture undergoes ‘dialogization’ when it becomes relativized, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things. Undialogized language is authoritative or absolute” (426).
There’s lots we could do with this passage in terms of Bakhtin’s interaction with Christian theology—or, as he puts it in a description of Dostoevsky, his “feeling for faith, that is, an integral attitude (by means of the whole person) toward a higher and ultimate value” (qtd. in Contino & Felch 1). Here, I want to highlight the fact that for Bakhtin all utterances are somehow responsive, whether one’s immediate interlocutor is physically present or not, Bakhtin identifies conversation as necessitating ethics and ultimately charity, a theme he develops in his book on Dostoevsky as well as in his long essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1934). One critic puts it this way: “the incomplete Bakhtinian ‘I’ is…to be understood within the Judeo-Christian tradition as that which is in need of the other, of communion, for completion; that is, as a refutation of egoism” (Coates 16, summarizing Barbara Thaden).
Let’s go back to the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in Luke 18, which as you’ll recall Bakhtin wrote about early in his career. We’ll start in verse 9:
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.' But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted."
Now, we don’t know for sure whether the tax collector heard the Pharisee, or even whether the Pharisee consciously addressed the tax collector, but we can argue that there’s some sort of interaction between their respective prayers, even if it’s only for the audience of Jesus’ parable. The Pharisee, presumably like those in the audience “who trusted in themselves that they were righteous,” uses what Bakhtin would call a “word with a sideways glance” to identify, define, and, well, quite frankly diss the tax collector. In the Pharisee’s logic, the other man was simply an object to use for comparison, not a human being made in imago Dei and certainly not a fellow sinner in need of grace. This self-centered focus is clear even in the English translation: I am not like other men, I fast twice a week, and I give tithes of all that I get. What Bakhtin saw in this parable, I think, was the truth that the juxtaposition between self-exaltation and humility that Jesus highlights at the end of the parable is not exclusively a function of one’s attitude towards God, but also involves even indirect interactions with other fallen humans.
So, does the bare fact that Bakhtin imagines linguistic community in a manner consistent with Scripture necessarily earn him the title of “Christian scholar” in the traditional sense? Well, I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to claim absolute orthodoxy for him, but based on what I’ve read I do agree with Ruth Coates’ claim that we can identify a “’coherent theistic framework to Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory,’ based upon the biblical doctrines of God, persons, creation, fall, and incarnation” (qtd in Contino & Felch 5). And because Bakhtin was, by training and by profession, first and foremost a scholar of literature, I’d like to finish tonight’s talk by showing one way Bakhtin’s ideas helps me understand the relationship between the Bible and American literature, which broadly speaking will be the topic of my upcoming dissertation.
Earlier, I focused on the implications of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism in terms of interpersonal ethics, what Alan Jacobs has recently labeled the “hermeneutics of love.” Now I want to turn to another key facet of that theory: the relationship between a source of authority, particularly an authoritative text, and an individual consciousness or utterance. Bakhtin primarily expresses this relationship in terms of what he calls “double-voiced discourse,” which he distinguishes both from “direct, unmediated discourse directed exclusively toward its referential object, as an expression of the speaker’s ultimate semantic authority” and from “discourse of a represented person.” (It’s worth noting here that slovo, the term translated as “discourse,” has a broader sense than the English term word, and is toughly analogous in scope to the Greek Logos.) Like the Pharisee’s prayer, double-voiced discourse has “an orientation toward someone else’s discourse” (199), and represents the re-voicing of an external text by an unfinalizeable human. For instance, when a Christian recites the Lord’s Prayer as part of corporate worship, he or she in a sense translates the original Greek NT text through multiple registers, first into the language he or she learned it in, through whatever filters of corporate or institutional associations, and finally by owning the text through a personal utterance. All of these registers, Bakhtin argues, require some sort of negotiation, and often involve some sort of change.
This is certainly true for my final example tonight: Melville’s transformation of the character of Ishmael from Genesis to Moby-Dick. Particularly in the Massachusetts of 1850, where Melville composed the bulk of his masterpiece, Genesis constituted an authoritative text, one which both Melville and the bulk of his audience would have known inside and out. So let’s start by looking at the Biblical account of Ishmael, which starts in Genesis 16. There, once Ishmael’s mother Hagar has fled to the desert, we’re told in verses 11-12 that “the angel of the LORD said to her,
"Behold, you are pregnant
and shall bear a son.
You shall call his name Ishmael,
because the LORD has listened to your affliction.
12He shall be a wild donkey of a man,
his hand against everyone
and everyone’s hand against him,
and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen."
And, sure enough, Ishmael is born, named, and by all accounts lives up to the angel’s description. That’s not precisely the end of the story, as Abraham goes on to try (unsuccessfully) to lobby God to make Ishmael count as the promised child, but I want to call your attention here to the dynamics of agency. In this account, Ishmael is always the object, being acted upon by others: the angel names him, Hagar bears him, Abraham circumcises him, and God effectively writes him out of the main covenant. Now, I don’t think we can realistically argue that Ishmael does not matter in this text, either as a character or as a human being, but the narrator makes it very clear that God’s narrative agency—the ability to frame a story, choose what characters appear, and in some way control the plot—mirrors His power over the rest of creation. In Bakhtin’s terms, this narrative approach is monologic, meaning that it uses a single, authoritative voice, as opposed to the dialogic or heteroglossic, multi-voiced novels he finds in Dostoevsky. Bakhtin tends to view all sacred writ as monologic, an argument that has some weaknesses, but for our purposes the characterization will do.
So what happens when we move from a sacred text to a secular novel, and from “You shall call his name Ishmael” to Melville’s well-known opening, “Call me Ishmael”? Well, lots of things, many of which I haven’t really figured out yet—fortunately the dissertation isn’t due for a few more years! But just for a start, consider the implications of that verb, “call.” As this is the opening of the narrative, we don’t have a specifically defined audience, such as another character, but we do know that someone has to respond to Ishmael to grant him his name. In this way, the narrative resembles that of Genesis, since Ishmael still isn’t completely in charge of his own identity, a theme that Melville returns to often in the course of the novel. Furthermore, in the same intro Ishmael tells us that he goes to sea as a “substitute for pistol and ball,” that is, for suicide, which further suggests a loss of identity. Yet at the same time, this is a real, complicated, messy, human narrator taking on this character, and refracting it through his own set of neuroses. By taking on the Ishmael persona from Genesis, I’ll be arguing in my future chapter, Melville’s narrator also takes on the dynamics of internal and external character definition, and does all sorts of wacky and hopefully interesting things with them.
I’ll stop here, so we can move on to the more edible part of the evening, but I hope I’ve given you a sense of how Bakhtin’s theology of language opens up avenues for thinking about human language, and more broadly human interaction, in Biblical terms. There’s certainly still a lot about Bakhtin that I don’t understand—this happens when you work with an occasionally obsessive and wordy super-genius—but I’m looking forward to figuring out more of his work and his worldview as I go on in my studies. Let me leave you with one of the many quotes from his essay “Discourse in the Novel” that makes me want to bang my head against the desk until I understand his ideas better: “Indeed, any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the ‘light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about it” (276). But even those alien words, Bakhtin reminds us, bring us back to “living utterances” that “cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads”—and whether we like it or not, with equally vital Pharisees and tax collectors, all desperately in need of the Word become flesh. Thanks for your attention.
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