From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
7.2 (1987): 29-37.
Copyright © 1987, The Cervantes Society of America
The Problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin's Poetics
HE PROBLEM OF
Cervantes in Bakhtin's poetics is initially a simple one: his inconspicuousness.
Neither Cervantes nor his novel Don Quixote figure at all prominently
in Bakhtin's voluminous theorizing about the novel as a literary form. Bakhtin
wrote (and later revised) a whole book on Dostoevsky. He devoted a book and
a large section of an important essay to Rabelais. And he wrote a third book,
on the novel of education and the history of realism, that paid considerable
attention to Goethe, although only part of this has
survived.1 But about Don Quixote, a
novel for which Dostoevsky claimed literally apocalyptic significance, Bakhtin
has curiously little to say. In the roughly 1200 pages of his major writings
on the novel currently available in English, there are some twelve pages
worth of discussion of this “grandest and saddest book conceived by
the genius of man,” in Dostoevsky's assessment of Cervantes'
masterpiece.2 Given this one per-cent
1 See
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, intro. Wayne Booth, ed. and trans.
Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Rabelais
and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA; M.I.T. Press, 1968);
and “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of
Realism (Toward A Historical Typology of the Novel),” Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson, intro. Michael Holquist, and
trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986)
2 The Diary
of a Writer, trans. Boris Brasol (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1949), p.
260.
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solution, it would be easy to conclude that contemporary Cervantes scholars
concerned with modern literary theory should ignore Bakhtin and concentrate
on other more Cervantes-centered theorists —Ortega y Gasset, for example,
or René Girard, or even Viktor Shklovsky, who devotes considerable
space to Don Quixote in his Theory of
Prose.3
Although it would be easy to come to this
conclusion, it would also be a mistake. Even in the brief glimpses we get
of Cervantes in Bakhtin's writings on the novel, there are significant insights
into Don Quixote. And in the relative absence of Cervantes from Bakhtin's
novelistic pantheon, we learn important things about the contours and limits
of this contribution to modern literary theory that has aroused such interest
in the West in recent years. Most of all, the initial noncongruence of beholder
and beheld allows us to reflect on the relationship between the theory of
the novel and the history of its practice and to question whether it is theory
or practice that should have the final word.
In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics,
a book which Bakhtin seems to have completed a version of as early as 1922
but which he revised for republication in 1963, Cervantes and Don
Quixote appear mainly as prototypes for the distinctive novelistic formation
of “polyphony” which Dostoevsky is credited with originating.
“A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses,
a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic
of Dostoevsky's novels,” Bakhtin writes. “What unfolds in his
works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world,
illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of
consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine
but are not merged in the unity of the event” (p. 6). Initially, Bakhtin
is unwilling to attribute any of this energetic alterity and independence
of character to earlier novelists. Dostoevsky “created a fundamentally
new novelistic genre [and] his work does not fit any of the preconceived
frameworks or historico-literary schemes that we usually apply to various
species of the European novel” (p. 7). Later on, however, Bakhtin allows
that “embryonic rudiments” or “early buddings of polyphony”
can be detected in Cervantes, as well as in Shakespeare, Rabelais and
Grimmelshausen (p. 33). And in material added to the 1963 edition, Cervantes
achieves a somewhat fuller measure of this polyphonic potential under the
rubric of “carnival.” This affords a significant insight into the
peculiar inwardness of Don
3 See “Wie
Don Quijote gemacht ist” in Shklovsky's Theorie der Prosa, trans.
Gisla Drohla (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1966).
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Quixote when Bakhtin compares the tonality of laughter in Cervantes
and Rabelais. “In Cervantes there is no longer that public-square intensity
of sound, although in the first book of Don Quixote laughter is still
quite loud, and in the second it is significantly (when compared with the
first) reduced. This reduction is also linked with certain changes in the
structure of the major hero's image, and with changes in the plot” (p.
165).
This distinction between the two parts of the
Quixote is something that Auerbach, for all his close reading of the
novel in Mimesis, overlooks. Nevertheless, the momentary eminence
Cervantes achieves here is flattened out in the sweeping historical vista
that concludes this discussion of Dostoevsky's precursors. “Dostoevsky
is the creator of authentic polyphony, which, of course, did not and
could not have existed in the Socratic dialogue, the ancient Menippean satire,
the medieval mystery play, in Shakespeare and Cervantes, Voltaire and Diderot,
Balzac and Hugo. But polyphony was prepared for in a fundamental way
by this line of development in European literature” (p. 178).
The phenomenology of persons, of author and
characters, in this first phase of Bakhtin's theory of the novel is succeeded
by a sociolinguistics of voices in his second major contribution to the subject.
In “Discourse in the Novel,” a long essay written in 1934-35, Cervantes
achieves a new prominence. In the 160 pages of this essay in The Dialogic
Imagination, Dostoevsky is only mentioned in passing while there are
some six pages worth of discussion of Don Quixote. Much of this discussion
is of real significance, both for understanding Bakhtin's protean concepts
of language and literature and for understanding the place of Cervantes in
a historical poetics of the novel. The main concept in this essay, one which
Don Quixote exemplifies particularly well, is “heteroglossia,”
the condition of many different discourses struggling to be heard in any
concrete utterance. On one level, heteroglossia is the general condition
of all communication in language for Bakhtin, but it is something that is
realized on a higher level most fully and self-consciously in the literary
form of the novel. After considering a number of different strategies for
“incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel,” Bakhtin
notes the possibility of a still higher-order combination of combinations.
“Of such a sort is the classic and purest model of the novel as a genre
—Cervantes' Don Quixote—,” Bakhtin observes, “which
realizes in itself, in extraordinary depth and breadth, all the possibilities
of heteroglot and internally dialogized novelistic
discourse.”4 Many critics, of course,
have
4
“Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, ed. Michael [p. 32] Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981),
p. 324.
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commented on this multi-generic, encyclopedic quality of Don Quixote,
but Bakhtin focuses on the novelistic typicality of this form in a way that
has yet to be fully appreciated. He also expands his sense of the heteroglossia
of the Quixote beyond the merely literary. Beginning with Don
Quixote, he argues, “the novel must represent all the social and
ideological voices of its era, that is, all the era's languages that have
any claim to being significant” (p. 411). This is a challenge to the
literary formalism of much Cervantes criticism.
Don Quixote figures significantly as
well in this essay in Bakhtin's attempt to develop a more intrinsic poetics
of the novel. Cervantes' text becomes the epitome of the “Second Stylistic
Line” of the novel's development, a line that is more radically dialogic
or heteroglossial than the First Stylistic Line, which opens dialogic
possibilities only to foreclose them. The contrast between these two stylistic
lines is a more sophisticated version of the traditional distinction between
novel and romance. Furthermore, within the Second Stylistic Line, Don
Quixote turns out to embody both of the two basic types of testing that
purely literary discourse is subjected to: the testing that centers on a
hero trying to live according to the books he has read and the testing that
centers on an author trying to live by writing a book of his own. “Both
these types of testing literary discourse [are] blended into one
. . . as early as Don Quixote,” Bakhtin says, noting
the importance of Cide Hamete as well as of Quixote himself (p. 413).
Nevertheless, after “Discourse in the
Novel,” Bakhtin's attention to Cervantes as exemplary novelist begins
to decline. In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,”
the other major essay on the novel from the 1930s, Rabelais begins to overshadow
Cervantes as the major embodiment of novelistic energy. Some fifty pages
of this 174-page essay are devoted to “The Rabelaisian Chronotope”
and “The Folkloric Bases of the Rabelaisian Chronotope,” while
Cervantes is only mentioned three times. Bakhtin does claim “enormous
significance” for Don Quixote in “the long history of
literature's assimilation of historical time,” but apologizes that “in
this essay . . . we cannot undertake an analysis of Cervantes'
novel.”5
This eclipse of Cervantes in Bakhtin's poetics
continues in Bakhtin's separate book on Rabelais, completed as a dissertation
in the 1940s but only published in 1965. Here the sociolinguistics of voices
gives way to
5
Dialogic Imagination, p. 165.
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a folklorics of festivity, and while Cervantes is mentioned often enough
in the company of Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and others, the only concrete
discussion of the Quixote centers on the “narrowing down”
of the exuberant energies and appetites to which the carnivalization of
Gargantua and Pantagruel had given expression. Although Bakhtin admits
that this process of decline is only in its “initial stage' in Don
Quixote, he argues for an increasing privateness and morbidity of physical
experience in Cervantes' novel. “Bodies and objects begin to acquire
a private, individual nature; they are rendered petty and homely and become
immoveable parts of private life, the goal of egoistic lust and possession.
This is no longer the positive, regenerating and renewing lower stratum [of
Rabelais], but a blunt and deathly obstacle to ideal
aspirations.”6
Thus the concrete, explicit view of Cervantes
and Don Quixote afforded by Bakhtin's literary theory is a tantalizing
but a fleeting one. It is of course quite possible to ignore the limits of
the actual and to extrapolate from one or another of Bakhtin's generative
concepts of literature and language and discuss what a full developed Bakhtinian
view of Don Quixote might be. I am aware of essays by Manuel
Durán and Donald Fanger which offer preliminary forms of such an
extrapolation,7 and unless a manuscript like
Nabokov's Harvard lectures on Don Quixote turns up (it is known that
Bakhtin did lecture on Cervantes at the Pedagogical Institute of Saransk),
we will have to resort to the borrowed illumination of “dialogism”
or “the chronotope” or the “extralocality” of the author
to the hero to see Cervantes and see him whole from Bakhtin's point of view.
There is also the possibility of borrowing from Bakhtin at strategic points
in one's own theoretical analysis, an approach that I take in An Exemplary
History of the Novel and that Alban Forcione takes in Cervantes and
the Mystery of Lawlessness.8 It would
certainly be perverse to hide the light of this brilliant theorist under
the bushel of his own preferred examples.
6 Rabelais
and His World, p. 23.
7 See Manuel
Durán, “El Quijote a través del prisma de Mikhail
Bakhtine: carnaval, disfraces, escatología y locura,” Cervantes
and the Renaissance, ed. Michael D. McGaha (Easton, PA: Juan de la Cuesta,
1980), pp. 71-86; and Donald Fanger, “Dostoevsky and Cervantes in the
Theory of Bakhtin: The Theory of Bakhtin in Cervantes and Dostoevsky,”
Harvard Library Bulletin (forthcoming).
8 See Walter L.
Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the
Picaresque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981) and Alban K.
Forcione, Cervantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness: A Study of “El
casamiento engañoso y El coloquio de los perros” (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984).
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It is also possible to inquire whether there
is some reason or rationale for Bakhtin's relative silence on Cervantes.
We know that Don Quixote was a favorite text of Shklovsky and the
Russian Formalists and that Bakhtin, publishing under the name of his friend
Medvedev, was critical both of Formalist literary theory in general and of
Shklovsky's interpretation of Don Quixote in
particular.9 Michael Holquist and Katerina
Clark in their indispensable biography of Bakhtin remark how certain literary
topics like “the epic” functioned in part as veiled references
to issues in Bakhtin's own ideological environment like “socialist
realism.”10 It is arguable that in the
politics of literary discourse in the increasingly oppressive Stalinist era,
Don Quixote was neither sufficiently acceptable on an official level
nor sufficiently subversive on an unofficial level to engage Bakhtin's full
critical attention. It is also arguable that the peculiar ironies concerning
the status of the reader in Cervantes' fiction partially eluded Bakhtin's
critical ear, so attuned to the more powerful resonances of the
“idea” in Dostoevsky, the “body” in Rabelais, or
“emergence” in Goethe. As Caryl Emerson has shown in her analysis
of Bakhtin's view of Tolstoy, there are important novelists whom Bakhtin's
theory of the novel (and philosophy of existence) are simply incapable of
hearing clearly and seeing
sympathetically.11 Nevertheless, it is certainly
less a case of Bakhtin polemically “closing down” Cervantes —as
Emerson argues he does with Tolstoy— than with his seeing over him,
looking with a farsighted astigmatism beyond the “long, thin graphism”
of Don Quixote, to use Foucault's arresting
phrase,12 into the farther reaches of the
novelistic terrain.
While these are all promising avenues of reflection
on the problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin's poetics, I would like to open a
rather different perspective at the close of this brief discussion, passing
through the looking glass of Bakhtin's image of Cervantes, as it were, and
considering the image of Bakhtin in Cervantes' poetics. Ortega y Gasset claims
in Meditations on Quixote that we need a book “showing in detail
that every novel bears Quixote within it like an inner filigree, in
the same way as every epic poem contains the Iliad within it like
the
9 See The
Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), esp. pp. 136-41.
10 Mikhail
Bakhtin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1984), pp.
273-74.
11 “The Tolstoy
Connection in Bakhtin,” PMLA 100 (1985), 68-80.
12 The Order
of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971), p. 46.
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fruit its core.”13 What Bakhtin's concept
of dialogism suggests is that we also need a book showing that every
theory of the novel contains the Quixote within it, like an
organism its chromosomes. The book that is a prototype for so much of the
subsequent practice of fiction is also a prototype for much that passes for
the theory of the novel, particularly in our century. This is surely a plausible
perspective with a text that so confounds one's easy assumptions about the
difference between literary creation and literary criticism.
Within the purview of Cervantes' poetics, then,
however implicit or “unwritten” this system of literary norms and
types may be, we can consider the place of Bakhtin in relation to the positions
of other twentieth-century theorists. What is interesting is that most modern
theories of the novel seem to inherit their characteristics from the opponents
and understudies that Don Quixote encounters in the course of his adventures.
They are theories inimical to Quixote himself. Ian Watt's theory of the novel
as “formal realism” for example, is a lineal descendent of Sancho
Panza's attempt to counter-balance Quixote's romancing idealism. René
Girard's theory of the novel as “triangular desire” derives from
the antagonistic mimesis of the Bachelor Sampson Carrasco. Wayne Booth's
prescriptive “rhetoric of fiction” can be traced back to the
inquisitorial proceedings of the priest and the barber at the beginning of
the First Part of Don Quixote, while Lukacs' more
“historico-philosophical” analysis finds its prototype in the
pronouncements on fiction by the Canon of Toledo at the end of the First
Part.14 In the case of Bakhtin's theory of
the novel, however, we have an understanding of the art of fiction that can
only be traced back to Don Quixote himself. There is an uncanny family
resemblance between Quixote's theory of his practice and Bakhtin's practice
of his theory, a resemblance that suggests another explanation of why the
novel Don Quixote is so little visible in Bakhtin's writings.
13
Meditations on “Quixote,” trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego
Marín (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 162.
14 See Ian Watt,
The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957); René
Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of
Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Georg Lukács,
The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press,
1971). One might also note Ramón Saldívar's recent contribution
to the theory of the novel in Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers
of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1984), a deconstructive theory that might be said to emanate from one of
Quixote's evil enchanters.
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Consider the following similarities. Both Don
Quixote and Mikhail Bakhtin imagine life and literature as a matter of combat.
Emerson notes in her preface to Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Bakhtin's
“fondness for military metaphors. In his texts words are always competing,
doing battle, winning and losing territory” (p. xxxvii). Like Quixote,
Bakhtin envisions “letters” in terms of “arms.” There
is then Bakhtin's tendency to treat the novel as the noblest of literary
forms, the “leading hero in the drama of literary development,”
in Bakhtin's phrase or the “Robin Hood of texts,” as Holquist puts
it.15 The novel in Bakhtin's imagination
not only exercises its own freedom; it also liberates other genres from the
fetters of official culture, like Don Quixote the galley slaves or any of
the other “captives” he encounters. Furthermore, the novel as Bakhtin
presents it expands as alarmingly as the chivalric romance in Quixote's
conception of the genre. For Bakhtin “the novel” ends up including
any number of literary manifestations that a more empirically minded critic
would see as separate and distinct: Greek romance, Socratic dialogue, classical
biography, Menippean satire, the mystery play, and innumerable forms of folkloric
discourse and performance. Like the ideal of chivalric romance in Quixote's
imagination, the idea of the novel in Bakhtin assimilates other genres to
itself as its proper nourishment. Finally, and most importantly, Bakhtin
reveals himself as a theorist of Don Quixote's party in the way he recasts
issues of representation and truth as issues of aesthetic wholeness and ethical
responsibility. Paul de Man's criticism of Bakhtin for ignoring the
“fundamental question of the compatibility between the descriptive discourse
of poetics and the normative discourse of
hermeneutics”16 is a twentieth-century
echo of the Canon of Toledo's amazement at Quixote's “so mingling truth
and fiction” in spite of all his attempts to make Quixote separate these
realms.
In his important and as yet officially untranslated
essay entitled “The Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” Bakhtin
describes the way in which an author “loses his evaluating point of
extralocality to the hero” —that is, the way an author may fail
to establish his imaginative authority over his protagonist. In one version
of such a loss of control, Bakhtin says, “the hero takes possession
of the author. The hero's emotional and volitional situation among other
subjects, his
15 Mikhail
Bakhtin, p. 276.
16 “Dialogue
and Dialogism,” Poetics Today 4 (1983),107. De Man, it should
be noted, is trying to turn Bakhtin's notion of dialogue back against him
here.
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cognitive and ethical position in the world, is so authoritative for the
author that he can only see the world of subjects with the eyes of the hero
and can only experience it within the events of the hero's life. The author
cannot find a convincing and persistent evaluative support point outside
the hero.”17 This analysis seems
appropriate, mutatis mutandis, to Bakhtin's position as critical author
vis-a-vis Cervantes' hero Don Quixote. Bakhtin's theory of the novel cannot
hold the novel Don Quixote clearly in its gaze because it contains
a project analogous to the character Don Quixote's own so deeply within
itself. Like that other eccentric cervantista of the twentieth century,
Borges' Pierre Menard, Bakhtin demonstrates the centrality of Cervantes'
great fiction more by existential homage than by essential reflection.
I acknowledge the Quixotic eccentricity of
this final assessment of the problem of Cervantes in Bakhtin's poetics. But
it seems to me that Cervantes himself mounts powerful arguments against our
tendency to assume that, in the dialogue of theory and practice, literary
theory can and must have the last word. Both Cervantes and Bakhtin demonstrate,
from opposite sides of the critical fence, that the privilege and authority
of all theory are on loan from the creative imagination but also that the
escapism and delight of the literary imagination are vehicles for serious
philosophical investigation.
17 Quoted
from an unpublished translation by Vern W. McGee, to whom I am indebted for
assistance in surveying Bakhtin's oeuvre.
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