Gary Saul Morson
         Who Speaks for Bakhtin?: A Dialogic Introduction
         The more we spoke, the more we discovered disagreement behind our
            agreements and envisaged different implications for the
            same or were they the same ideas. "I suppose
            that's what Bakhtin meant when he wrote that agreement, not
            just disagreement, is a dialogic relationship," she
            reflected. "Agreement is never identity. It always
            presupposes or becomes the occasion for differences which I
            guess may be one reason why it can be so profitable to
            agree." I could detect Kuhn's concept of a scientific
            consensus here but agreed anyway.
            It turned out, in fact, that I had hidden disagreements with all
            the contributors to the collection. I had undertaken the project
            with the evidently quixotic hope that we could create, in imitation
            of Bakhtin's eccentric circle of linguists, Marxists,
            Christians, biologists, and literary theorists, a circle of our
            own. "You want to be a living allusion," she would say.
            By the end of that afternoon, however, neither she nor I were
            confident that we could despite all the views we did
            share ever sign both our names to the same introduction.
            "Not to be a Formalist," she interrupted,
            "perhaps it's a question of form…"
            Moi: …You know, the most appropriate form for an article
            introducing Bakhtin would be a dialogue, since dialogue is his
            central concept.
            Elle: Of course, if you can speak of a center in a writer so
            eccentric. How would it begin?
            Moi: Well, like Notes from Underground, on an ellipsis…That would
            illustrate his idea that all speech is a response to words that
            have been uttered before, that we never confront a linguistically
            virgin world, that each utterance is a response to other utterances
            and is formulated in expectation of a response to it all that
            might be developed later on in the dialogue. Moi could explain it
            all to Elle.
             
            Gary Saul Morson, associate professor and chairman of Slavic
            languages at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of
            Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky's "Diary of a
            Writer" and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. His previous
            contribution to , "Tolstoy's Absolute
            Language," appeared in the Summer 1981 issue.
Caryl Emerson
         The Outer Word and Inner Speech: Bakhtin, Vygotsky,_and_the
            Internalization of Language
         Both Bakhtin and Vygotsky, as we have seen, responded directly or
            indirectly to the challenge of Freud. Both attempted to account for
            their data without resorting to postulating an unconscious in the
            Freudian sense. By way of contrast, it is instructive here to
            recall Jacques Lacan who, among others, has been a
            beneficiary of Bakhtin's "semiotic
            reinterpretation" of Freud.17 Lacan's case is
            intriguing, for he retains the unconscious while at the same time
            submitting Freudian psychoanalysis to rigorous criticism along the
            lines of Bakhtin. By focusing attention on the dialogic word, he
            encourages a rereading of Freud in which the social element (the
            dynamics between doctor and patient) is crucial. As Lacan opens his
            essay "The Empty Word and the Full Word":
            Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of formation,
            or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single
            intermediary: the patient's Word….And every word calls for a
            reply.
            I shall show that there is no word without a reply, even if it
            meets no more than silence, provided that it has an auditor: this
            is the heart of its function in psychoanalysis.18
            The word is conceived as a tool not only in the external world but
            also of an autonomous internal world as well. And what emerges, it
            would seem, is a reinterpretation of the role of dialogue in the
            painful maturational process of the child. For Vygotsky, the
            child's realization of his separateness from society is not a
            crisis; after all, his environment provides both the form and the
            content of his personality. From the start, dialogue reinforces the
            child's grasp on reality, as evidenced by the predominantly
            social and extraverted nature of his earliest egocentric speech.
            For Lacan, on the contrary, dialogue seems to function as the
            alienating experience, the stade du miroir phase of a child's
            development. The unconscious becomes the seat of all those problems
            that Bakhtin had externalized: the origin of personality, the
            possibilities of self-expression. The je-moi opposition in the
            mirror gives rise to that permanent for "a locus where there
            is constituted the je which speaks as well as he who has it
            speak."19 And consequently, the Word takes on an entirely
            different coloration: it is no longer merely an ideological sign
            but a potent tool for repressing knowledge of that gap, the face in
            the mirror, the Other. Lacan's celebrated inversion of
            Saussure's algorithm, with the line between signifier and
            signified representing repression, created a powerful but ominous
            new role for language. The child is released from his alienating
            image only through discovering himself as Subject, which occurs
            with language; but this language will inevitably come to him from
            the Other. Thus speech is based on the idea of lack, and dialogue,
            on the idea of difference.
             
            17. See Ivanov, "The Significance of M. M. Bakhtin's
            Ideas," p. 314.
            18. Jacques Lacan, "The Empty Word and the Full Word,"
            in Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Anthony
            Wilden (Baltimore, 1981), p. 9.
            19. Lacan, from "La Chose freudienne" (1955), quoted in
            Wilden, "Lacan and the Discourse of the Other," in
            Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, p. 266.
             
            Caryl Emerson, assistant professor of Russian literature at Cornell
            University, has translated (with Michael Holquist) The Dialogic
            Imagination, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (forthcoming
            1984). She is currently at work, on a study of Boris Godunov in
            Russian cultural history
Susan Stewart
         Shouts on the Street: Bakhtin's Anti-Linguistics
         According to Bakhtin, the reason that literature is the most
            ideological of all ideological spheres may be discovered in the
            structure of genre. He criticizes the formalists for ending their
            theory with a consideration of genre; genre, he observes, should be
            the first topic of poetics. The importance of genre lies in its two
            major capacities: conceptualization and "finalization."
            A genre's conceptualization has both inward and outward
            focus: the artist does not merely represent reality; he or she must
            use existing means of representation in tension with the subject at
            hand. This process is analogous to the dual nature of the
            utterance, its orientation simultaneously toward its past contexts
            and its present context. "A particular aspect of reality can
            only be understood in connection with the particular means of
            representing it" (FM, p. 134).Genre's production of
            perception is not simply a matter of physical orientation; it is
            also a matter of ideology: "Every significant genre is a
            complex system of means and methods for the conscious control and
            finalization of reality" (FM, p. 134). According to Bakhtin,
            nonideological domains are "open work," not subject to
            an ultimate closure; but one goal of works of art is precisely to
            offer closure, a "finalization" that accounts for their
            ideological power and their capacity to produce consciousness. In
            the particular finalization of genre, we see a continual tension
            between tradition and situation.25 As Terry Eagleton suggests in
            Criticism and Ideology, "A power-loom, for one thing, is not
            altered by its products…in the way that a literary convention is
            transformed by what it textually works."26 Analogously,
            Bakhtin writes that "the goal of the artistic structure of
            every historical genre is to merge the distance of space and time
            with the contemporary by the force of all-penetrating social
            evaluation" (FM, p. 158). It is perhaps because of this
            purported goal that Bakhtin himself seemed to prefer the novel,
            which he viewed as a meta-genre incorporating at once all domains
            of ideology and all other literary genres. Finally, we must
            emphasize that Bakhtin's model of genre rests upon his
            insistence that literary evolution is not the result of device
            reacting against device, as Viktor Shklovsky believed, but rather
            of ideological, and ultimately socioeconomic, changes.
             
            25. For a discussion of the tension between genre and performance,
            and between tradition and situation, in folkloric performances, see
            Hymes, "Folklore's Nature and the Sun's
            Myth,"Journal of American Folklore 88 (Oct.-Dec. 1975): 345-
            69.
            26. Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 73.
             
            Susan Stewart is associate professor of English at Temple
            University. She is the author of a book of poetry, Yellow Stars and
            Ice (1981), and two books of literary theory, Nonsense: Aspects of
            Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature (1979) and On Longing:
            Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, and the
            Collection (forthcoming 1984).
Michael André Bernstein
         When the Carnival Turns Bitter: Preliminary Reflections Upon_the
            Abject Hero
         For Bakhtin the "gradual narrowing down" of the
            carnival's regenerative power is directly linked to its
            separation from "folk culture" and its ensuing
            domestication as "part of the family's private
            life." Nonetheless, Bakhtin's faith in the inherent
            indestructibility of "the carnival spirit" compels him
            to find it preserved, even if in an interiorized and psychological
            form, in the post-Renaissance literary tradition, and he
            specifically names Diderot, along with Molière, Voltaire, and
            Swift, as authors who kept alive the subversive possibilities of a
            Saturnalian laughter (pp. 33, 34). But, of course, as Bakhtin
            himself recognizes, much more has changed in both the nature and
            the effects of that laughter than merely its locus of action. The
            crucial difference, according to Bakhtin, is a new sense of terror
            felt at the heart of the post-Renaissance carnival grotesque:
            The transformation of the principle of laughter which permeates the
            grotesque, that is the loss of its regenerating power, leads to a
            series of other essential differences between Romantic grotesque
            and medieval and Renaissance grotesque…The world of Romantic
            grotesque is to a certain extent a terrifying word, alien to
            man…Something frightening is revealed in that which was habitual
            and secure. [Pp. 38-39]
            Directly linked to this burden of terror, of laughter as a response
            to dread, not exuberance, is a change in the literary function of
            madness:
            Other specific traits are linked with the disappearance of
            laughter's regenerating power…. The theme of madness is
            inherent to all grotesque forms, because madness makes men look at
            the world with different eyes, not dimmed by "normal,"
            that is by commonplace ideas and judgments. In folk grotesque,
            madness is a gay parody of official reason, of the narrow
            seriousness of official "truth." It is a
            "festive" madness. In Romantic grotesque, on the other
            hand, madness acquires a somber, tragic aspect of individual
            isolation. [P. 39]
            Bakhtin's typology of laughter, for all its richly textured
            local insights, is haunted, from its inception, by a wistfully
            nostalgic longing for a realm of pure and ahistorical spontaneity,
            a rite of universal participation whose essentially affirmative
            character is guaranteed by its very universality. The most
            characteristic feature of such a carnival is, in fact, its
            abolition of all distinctions between participant and viewer:
            Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not
            acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators.
            Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights
            would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle
            seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates
            because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival
            lasts, there is no other life outside it…. It has a universal
            spirit: it is a special condition of the entire world, of the
            world's revival and renewal, in which all take part. [P. 7]
            Yet as soon as the question of representation arises, whether in
            Rabelais or in his successors, the "footlights" which
            separate actor and spectator, reader and character, come into
            being, introducing the very divisions the work's themes deny.
            Belatedness, the knowledge of coming after the festival has already
            been fragmented, is thus not limited to a post-Rabelaisian,
            bourgeois culture; it is itself a condition of every Saturnalian
            text, and what has changed is not the inclusiveness of the carnival
            per se but the literary consequences of acknowledging that
            belatedness.
             
            Michael AndréBernstein, associate professor of English and
            comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley,
            is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
            Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione, a volume of verse. He is
            currently at work on a book about the Abject Hero and literary
            genealogy.
Michael Holquist
         Answering as Authoring: Mikhail Bakhtin's Trans-Linguistics
         All of Mikhail Bakhtin's work stands under the sign of
            plurality, the mystery of the one and the many. Unlike the third
            eye of Tibetan Buddhism, which gives those who possess it a vision
            of the secret unity holding creation together, Bakhtin seems to
            have had a third ear that permitted him to hear differences where
            others perceived only sameness, especially in the apparent
            wholeness of the human voice. The obsessive question at the heart
            of Bakhtin's thought is always "Who is talking?"
            It was his sense of the world's overwhelming multiplicity
            that impelled Bakhtin to rethink strategies by which heterogeneity
            had traditionally been disguised as a unity. In his several
            attempts to find a single name for the teeming forces which jostled
            each other within the combat zone of the word whether the
            term was "polyphony," "heteroglossia," or
            "speech communion" Bakhtin was at great pains
            never to sacrifice the tension between identity and difference that
            fueled his enterprise. He always sought the minimum degree of
            homogenization necessary to any conceptual scheme, feeling it was
            better to preserve the heterogeneity which less patient thinkers
            found intolerable and to which they therefore hurried to
            assign a unitizing label.
            Bakhtin's metaphysical contrariness has the effect of making
            at times appear to be indiscriminate, as when he refused to
            recognize borders between biography and autobiography or, more
            notoriously, between speaking and writing. But, as I hope to show,
            these apparently cardinal distinctions are for Bakhtin only local
            instances of unity that participate in and are controlled by a fare
            more encompassing set of oppositions and differences. All this
            places an extra burden on those who seek an overarching design in
            Bakhtin's legacy: the apparently unitizing term
            "Bakhtin" proves to be as illusory or more
            illusory in its ability to subsume real distinctions as any
            other, if we submit it to a Bakhtinian analysis.
             
            Michael Holquist is professor and chairman of the department of
            Slavic languages and literatures a Indiana University. With his
            wife, Katerina Clark, he has just completed Mikhail Bakhtin, a
            study of Bakhtin's life and works, forthcoming in the autumn
            of 1984. He is currently working in Moscow.
Christine Froula
         When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy
         There are, of course, many important differences between the
            deployment of cultural authority in the social context of second-
            century Christianity and that of twentieth-century academia. The
            editors of the Norton Anthology, for example, do not actively seek
            to suppress those voices which they exclude, nor are their
            principles for inclusion so narrowly defined as were the church
            fathers'. But the literary academy and its institutions
            developed from those of the Church and continue to wield a
            derivative, secular version of its social and cultural authority.
            Since Matthew Arnold, the instutition of literature has been
            described in terms which liken its authority to that of religion,
            not only by outsiders Woolf's woman "divining the
            priest" but by insiders who continue to employ the
            stances and language of religious authority; see, for instance, J.
            Hillis Miller's credo in a recent issue of the ADE Bulletin:
            "I believe in the established canon of English and American
            literature and in the validity of the concept of privileged texts.
            I think it is more important to read Spenser, Shakespeare, or
            Milton than to read Borges in translation, or even, to say the
            truth, to read Virginia Woolf."9 Such rhetoric suggests that
            the religious resonances in literary texts are not entirely
            figurative, a point brought out strikingly by revisionary religious
            figures in feminist texts. In her recent essay " &lsquo;The
            Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," Susan
            Gubar cites as some of the "many parables in an ongoing
            revisionary female theology" Florence Nightingale's
            tentative prophecy that "the next Christ will perhaps be a
            female Christ," H. D.'s blessed Lady carrying a
            "Bible of blank pages," and Gertrude Stein's
            celebration of The Mother of Us All.10 The revisionary female
            theology promoted in literary writing by women implicitly counters
            the patriarchal theology which is already inscribed in literature.
            The prophesied female Christ, blank Bible, and female Creator
            revise images familiar in the literary tradition, and, in contrast
            to earlier appropriations of religious imagery by Metaphysical,
            Pre-Raphaelite, and other poets, make visible the patriarchal
            preoccupations of literary "theology." These voices,
            like the Gnostic voices recovered at Nag Hammadi, are only now
            being heard in chorus; and Pagels' study of "the
            gnostic feminism" (as the New York Review of Books labeled
            it) helps to illuminate some aspects of a cultural authority
            predicated on the suppression or domination of other voices.
             
            Christine Froula, associate professor of English at Yale
            University, is the author of A Guide to Ezra Pound's
            "Selected Poems"and of the forthcoming "To Write
            Paradise": Syle and Error in Pound's Cantos. She is
            currently working on a book about literary authority in James Joyce
            and Virginia Woolf.
Stanley Fish
         Profession Despise Thyself: Fear and Self-Loathing in Literary
            Studies
         It might seem at this point that I am courting a contradiction: If
            antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior and if
            professional behavior covers the field (in the sense that anything
            one might urge will be a manifestation of it), then how can I fault
            Bate for using antiprofessionalism to further a professional
            project? By collapsing the distinction (on which
            antiprofessionalism runs) between activity that is professionally
            motivated and activity motivated by a commitment to abstract and
            general values, have I not deprived myself of a basis for making
            judgments, since one form of activity would seem to be no different
            from or better than any other? The answer is no, because the
            consequence of turning everything into professionalism is not to
            deny value but to redistribute it. One deconstructs an opposition
            not by reversing the hierarchy of its poles but by denying to
            either pole the independence that makes the opposition possible in
            the first place. If my argument that there can be no literary
            criticism or pedagogy that is not a form of professionalism, it is
            also that there can be no form of professionalism that is not an
            extension of some value or set of values. Whereas before one was
            asked to choose between professionalism and some category of pure
            value (which, significantly, could only be named in the vaguest
            terms), the choice can now be seen as a choice between different
            versions of professionalism, each with its attendant values. To say
            that antiprofessionalism is a form of professional behavior (and is
            therefore in a philosophical sense incoherent) is not to have
            closed the discussion but to have identified the basis on which it
            can continue by identifying the questions that should now be asked:
            What kind of professional behavior is antiprofessionalism? and What
            are its consequences? The answer is that, at least in its literary
            form, it urges impossible goals (the breaking free or bypassing of
            the professional network) and therefore has the consequence of
            making people ashamed of what they are doing. The psychological
            distress that marks this profession, the fact that so many of its
            members exist in a shamefaced relationship with the machinery that
            enables their labors, is in part attributable, I think, to literary
            antiprofessionalism, which is, as a form of professional behavior,
            almost always damaging.
             
            Stanley Fish's most recent work is "Wrong Again: A
            Reply to Ronald Dworking," Texas Law Review (August 1973).
            His previous contributions to  include "With
            the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and
            Derrida" (Summer 19820 and "Working on the Chain Gang:
            Interpretation in the Law and in Literary Criticism"
            (September 1982).
Walter Jackson Bate
         To the Editor of 
         II. Without mentioning what most of the article is about, Fish
            plucks out some remarks from a small part of it and condemns me as
            being antiblack, antifeminist, and so forth. It seems to me that
            Fish, after removing a few sentences from context
            (forgivable we all do it; there's a limit to the amount
            one can naturally quote), then does three other things: (1) he
            summarizes or rephrases these remarks in such a way as to turn them
            into a polemical statement; (2) he makes an inference all his
            own; and (3) he then attacks the inference he has made. In his
            second paragraph, speaking unfavorably of the old-fashioned hope of
            finding universal values, he states: "It follows, then, …
            that works which advocate or have their origin in particular
            attitudes, strategies, sectarian projects, or political programs do
            not qualify as literature and should not be treated as such by
            literary scholars" (p. 350; my emphasis). It by no means
            "follows," except perhaps in Fish's mind. It
            follows merely that some of these concerns if pursued in
            isolation from other contexts and in a spirit of
            propaganda are not, by themselves, an adequate substitute, or
            replacement, for approaches (broadly historical, sociological,
            moral, stylistic) that may provide a center from which to move to
            the subjects Fish mentions. I certainly have no wish to exclude
            these subjects from the curriculum. In fact, I have probably
            devoted as much of my teaching to some of them, especially
            political writing, as has Fish. I realize that for Fish himself our
            reactions in reading are inevitably subjective and that no text can
            be viewed as a settled thing. But I must plead that the reader,
            before condemning me because of Fish's remarks, judge me by
            what I said rather than by what he inferred or magnified. I said
            only that, facing a decline in numbers of students, English
            departments found it more tempting than ever to provide courses on
            subjects often removed from larger contexts and treated in
            comparative isolation rather than to require more general study of
            history, philosophy, sociology, or psychology. I should like to
            repeat that I was not condemning departments for doing this. I felt
            it was rather sad that what Fish calls the "market,"
            and the fondness of so many students now for propagandistic
            approaches, should force us to jettison much that was more rigorous
            and demanding therefore less popular.
             
            Walter Jackson Bate is the Kingsley Porter University Professor of
            English at Harvard University. Among his many books are John Keats
            (1963) and Samuel Johnson (1975), both of which were awarded the
            Pulitzer Prize.
Edward W. Said
         Response to Stanley Fish
         At one point Fish says that a profession produces no
            "real" commodity but offers only a service. But surely
            the increasing reification of services and even of knowledge has
            made them a commodity as well. And indeed the logical extension of
            Fish's position on professionalism is not that it is
            something done or lived but something produced and reproduced,
            albeit with redistributed and redeployed values. What those are,
            Fish doesn't say. Then again he makes the rather telling
            remarks that he is "turning everything into
            professionalism" (p. 361) an instance of overstating
            and overinsisting at a moment when what he is really arguing for
            can neither be formulated nor defended clearly. To turn
            "everything" into professionalism is to strip
            professionalism of any meaning at all. For until one can define
            professionalism and the particular values associated with
            it there is very little value in going on about the
            incoherencies of antiprofessionalism. Fish resorts to the
            reductionist attitude of telling us that professionalism is what
            is, and whatever is, is more or less therefore right, which by only
            the slightest extension of its logic is a view no less applicable
            to antiprofessionalism.
            On the other hand, Fish does say that the profession has changed,
            that new ways of doing things have emerged, that values are
            contested within and without the profession. Those kinds of
            observations, however, have to be pursued, made me more concrete,
            put in specific historical contexts, one of which is the fact that
            professions are not natural objects but concrete, political,
            economic, and social formations playing very defined, although
            sometimes barely visible, roles. Unfortunately, Fish commits the
            lobbyist-s error by obscuring and being blind to the sociopolitical
            actualities of what he lobbies for even as he defends its
            existence. Thus when Fish alleges that the reason most literary
            professionals "exist in a shamefaced relationship with the
            machinery that enables their labors" is because of their
            damaging antiprofessionalism (pp. 361-62), he is making an
            observation whose form is assertive but whose sense is tautological
            since he neither defines the professional and professionalism nor
            specifies "machinery" and "labors" with any
            precision at all. For if you take the extraordinary step of
            reducing everything to professionalism and institutionalism as Fish
            does, then the very possibility of talking about the profession
            with any intelligibility is negated. Few would dispute Fish's
            important point, that all interpretive and social situations are in
            fact already grounded in a context, in institutions, communities,
            and so forth. But there is a very great difference between making
            that claim and going on to say that so far as the literary
            profession is concerned, "the profession" is the
            context to which "everything" can be related.
             
            Edward W. Said's most recent work is The World, the Text, and
            the Critic. His previous contributions to  are
            "The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions"
            (Summer 1978) and "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and
            Community" (September 1982).
