Page 186 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically
inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a
single mind, it also cannot be expressed by "a single mouth". The polyphonic truth requires many
simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that
complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply "averaged"
or "synthesized". It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the
context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.
When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Art was translated into English and
published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of "carnival" and the book was
published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics. According to Bakhtin,
carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together.
The carnival creates the "threshold" situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed
and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing
Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time
the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the
voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the
other.
Rabelais and His World: Carnival and Grotesque
During World War II Bakhtin submitted a dissertation on the French Renaissance writer François
Rabelais which was not defended until some years later. The controversial ideas discussed within
the work caused much disagreement, and it was consequently decided that Bakhtin be denied his
doctorate. Thus, due to its content, Rabelais and Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
was not published until 1965, at which time it was given the title, Rabelais and His World.
A classic of Renaissance studies, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin explores Rabelais' Gargantua
and Pantagruel. Bakhtin declares that, for centuries, Rabelais's book had been misunderstood, and
claimed that Rabelais and His World clarified Rabelais's intentions. In Rabelais and His World,
Bakhtin concerns himself with the openness of Gargantua and Pantagruel; however, the book
itself also serves as an example of such openness. Throughout the text, Bakhtin attempts two
things: he seeks to recover sections of Gargantua and Pantagruel that, in the past, were either
ignored or suppressed, and conducts an analysis of the Renaissance social system in order to
discover the balance between language that was permitted and language that was not. It is by
means of this analysis that Bakhtin pinpoints two important subtexts: the first is carnival
(carnivalesque) which Bakhtin describes as a social institution, and the second is grotesque realism
which is defined as a literary mode. Thus, in Rabelais and His World Bakhtin studies the interaction
between the social and the literary, as well as the meaning of the body and the material bodily
lower stratum.
In his chapter on the history of laughter, Bakhtin advances the notion of its therapeutic and
liberating force, arguing that in resisting hypocrisy "laughing truth... degraded power".
The Dialogic Imagination: Chronotope, Heteroglossia
The Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975) is a compilation of four essays
concerning language and the novel: "Epic and Novel" (1941), "From the Prehistory of Novelistic
Discourse", "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel", and "Discourse in the Novel". It
is through the essays contained within The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the
concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope, making a significant contribution to the
realm of literary scholarship. Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the "primacy of
context over text" (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relation
between utterances (intertextuality). Heteroglossia is "the base condition governing the operation
of meaning in any utterance." To make an utterance means to "appropriate the words of others

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