Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born in 1895 in a town near Moscow. Together with his elder brother, Nikolai, he spent a happy and calm childhood. Their governess was a German lady, so, early in childhood both Mikhail and Nikolai learned a foreign language. The fact that they were brought up in a polyglot family forecasts the whole future affairs of these two brothers. Nikolai became seriously interested in linguistics, and so did Mikhail. Having his elder brother as another teacher and at the same time a good partner for the discussions, Mikhail was in a situation that was plural and heterogeneous. This presence of different ideas, cultures, and languages was not specific to his family. The cities in which Bakhtin spent his childhood (Vilnius and Odessa) were polyglot cities. In Vilnius the official language was Russian, but the common people communicated with each other with a variety of different languages: Lithuanian, Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Odessa, a port on the Black Sea was also populated with a mixture of different cultures and languages. It is noteworthy that Saul Bellow also experienced a variety of cultures, languages, and ideas from early in the childhood, the characteristic trait that he lends to Herzog. Bakhtin studied Greek and Latin at St. Petersburg university where, Nikolai was a senior student of the same courses. After the Revolution and Civil War of 1918, Nikolai joined the army and then the White Guard, and consequently, was sent to exile. Mikhail, instead, chose the small towns and, in poor physical and financial conditions continued his studies. The totalitarian regime of Stalin was a situation to instigate his concern about the relationship between the dominant ideology and the other ideologies with little or no opportunity to express their ideas. This brought up serious moral questions into the young mind of Bakhtin: the communist party imposed its interpretation of the affairs, its own 'ideology,' to everybody and Bakhtin could not see it as moral. He saw the politicians of his society as paranoid, because they rejected any other idea different from their own as the enemy to their integrity. Bakhtin could not announce his objections to the politics of his time and, very much like a poet, questioned the fundamental assumptions of the ruling party in a metaphorical way. He gave the issue an aesthetic air and discussed that novel is a privileged genre because in it no author can impose his ideology on his characters. Bellow has a similar conception of novel and society when he writes that "the opposites must be free" to express their ideas ("The Future of Fiction" 146). However, the question of the freedom of the subjects became a deep concern and shaped the personality and ideas of Bakhtin. Enjoying a good command of German (and a variety of other languages including Greek, Latin and French), Bakhtin turned to German classic philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Schlegel. Buber and Kierkegaard were also his intellectual companions in his search for the possible answers. Kant (1724- 1804) taught him to be always at doubt about his understanding and to compare it with the others. This is not agnosticism, but the ability to check the contents of one's consciousness permanently. So epistemological questions such as the possibility of true knowledge were raised. His deep respect for history has its roots in the philosophy of Hegel (1770-1831), with whom Bakhtin has some debates. At Schlegel's knee he came to have a deep respect for art, especially for novel. According to Schlegel (1772-1829) "novels are the Socratic dialogues of the our time" (qtd. in Bowie, 85). The echo of this idea is present in all the writings of Bakhtin on novel. He quotes the same statement in the beginning of his book on Dostoevsky (20); also, in a later essay he shows in detail how Socrates is a novelistic force in the history of Western philosophy and how novel has its roots in the dialogues of Socrates (Dialogic Imagination 50). About the relationship between "I" and "the other" Bakhtin shares some ideas with Martin Buber (1878-1965) whose writing was certainly available to Bakhtin. (The ideas of Buber were available to Saul Bellow as well and if one is to find a common intellectual ancestor for Bellow and Bakhtin perhaps that would be Martin Buber.) However, the apparently diverse and different concerns and questions were deeply interconnected in the mind of Bakhtin. Therefore, with a range of aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological questions he entered the intellectual debate of his time.
In thinking about his questions Bakhtin was never alone. Always he felt the presence of an intellectual partner, an 'other' that questioned, answered, or guided him; but what is important is that he was (often, if not always, consciously) exposed to a variety of different answers. He always attended the intellectual circles that were held in different places. Being brought up in a polyglot and heterogeneous environment, he always saw a grain of 'truth' in each formulation, each way of seeing, each answer. He found every worldview as valid as the other. Consequently, he grew interested more in the relationship between ideas than in the ideas themselves. In each idea, each utterance, he saw the presence of at least two different ideologies. This is what he attributes to Dostoevsky (Dostoevsky's Poetics 17), but primarily applies to his own self. This presence of various ideas is not a passive being-there, rather, there he saw an active dialogue.
All these concerns and questions found their manifestation in an aesthetic project that led to the writing and publication of a book on Dostoevsky in 1929. Bakhtin was forced to leave Leningrad for an exile in Kazakh town of Kustani (Dentith 7) shortly after the publication of the book. But this period was very fruitful for Bakhtin as it made it possible for him to write his doctoral dissertation on Rabelais and another book on bildungsroman. World War II and change of political climate, however, stopped the process of examination of his doctoral dissertation. The book on novel of education was also destroyed partly because of Bakhtin's own fault: there were two copies of the manuscript; one was destroyed by Germans in their attack to the publishing house, and the other one was used by Bakhtin as cigarette papers! Therefore, one significant work of an author for whom writing is primarily a dialogue with the world remained uncommunicated.
When Bakhtin was politically suspect and had no right to write or publish anything, he wrote and published under the name of his friends, Voloshinov and Medvedov. The debate about the attribution of these books to Bakhtin is a long one that is partly resolved by the recent publication of an interview with Bakhtin in which he
acknowledged that the three books -- Freudianism ,The Formal Method in Literary Inquiry andMarxism and the Philosophy of Language -- and the 1926 article "Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art" were written by him, even that he wrote them "from beginning to end." But he maintained that they were written for his friends, to whom he relinquished his authorial rights.(Bocharov 1013)
Indeed the act of relinquishing the authorial right to another person and to write under the name of somebody else is consistent with the philosophy of Bakhtin. He calls this assimilation :
the process whereby an individual temporarily adopts the view point or ideology of another person, or assimilates these to his or her own consciousness. Such assimilation will be more or less complete, more or less whole-hearted, to the extent that the individual's view point or ideology are or are not at odds with those of the interlocutant. The concept can be seen as comparable in certain to Samuel Coleridge's 'willing suspension of disbelief', although Bakhtin seems to move more in the direction of 'adoption of belief'. (Hawthorn 7)
To write under the name of another person creates the opportunity to view the things and affairs from another point of view different with ones own established point of view. It was Kierkegaard (1813-55) who so famously wrote books and published them with different fictional names. His intention was to make his philosophy less systematic. Bakhtin perhaps followed the example of Kierkegaard with the difference that he did not use fictional names for the authors. They were Bakhtin's own friends with some ideological differences. This idea, however, should not blur the fact that, because of his certain anti-Stalinist ideas and actions, Bakhtin could not publish under his own name. He had no other way except to publish under the name of the others. However, this is a good example of the way one's real socio-historical conditions affects his or her worldview.
The relationship between the ideas of Marxists and their intellectual ancestors with those of Bakhtin is a controversial issue among Bakhtin scholars. While for some critics as Lynne Pearce "the dialogic principle is explicitly Marxist" (8), for others, such as Simon Dentith, "Bakhtin's philosophical starting point is clearly not in Marxism, and his center of gravity remains outside the classical concerns of Marxism throughout his life" (19); and, to Holquist, "it is well known that Bakhtin was a thinker with little sympathy for Hegelian dialectic, which in his later notebooks he explicitly attacks" (73). Therefore, it is essential to explore and clarify how Bakhtin was related to Hegelianism and Marxism of his period.
Central to Hegel's system is his idea of dialectic. This idea is adopted by Karl Marx (1818-83) in his theories about the role of economics in the formation of culture (known as 'materialistic dialectic'). The modifications done by Marx are often considered as radical, but, the dialectical core is the same. According to Hegel, history develops out of the confrontation of two opposed forces (Marx says that the two forces are the different classes of the society, while Hegel maintains that matter and spirit are in conflict). These two forces, apart from their manifestations, are called thesis and anti-thesis. When these two forces confront each other, a resolution is achieved which is called synthesis. This is neither the original thesis nor the anti-thesis, but the outcome of their struggle, itself a unified whole. The synthesis becomes a thesis and "[i]n order to become conscious of its own existence, . . . . [it] must create an opposite, an other," an antithesis, "against which it can define itself" (Hawkes 76). So the process continues until the end of history. This is the way history develops. What is important is that this is the process through which 'Mind' or 'Consciousness' develops. History, according to both Hegel and Marx, is the story of Geist coming to consciousness.
Hegel identifies three stages for this development: in the first stage, there is pure matter and no mind "the Egyptian pyramid is the great symbol of this early stage" (Holquist 73-4). The next stage is marked with the equilibrium of mind and matter that is evident in the Greek art. The final stage is when mind overwhelms the matter. Gothic architecture and Romantic art, according to Hegel, suggest a late phase in this period (see Eagleton 23-4). Art is necessary to make this development possible; similarly, it is to Marxists, necessary for social evolution: "Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world" (Fischer 14). According to this view, finally the mind would not need art as a form of expression of itself. So despite some differences between Marxists and Hegelians they share the fundamental assumption of the evolutionary nature of consciousness and the function of art for this evolution. For both, gradually, the self discovers itself, and the only function of art is to make this self-realization possible.
Bakhtin partially agrees with these theories but actually has a different view of the nature and function of art. His concept of dialogic can be read the same as dialectic without synthesis. There is no end to the tension between the opposed forces. In the first place it is, for Bakhtin, naive to see the forces as only two; rather, there is a plurality of forces. Hegel and his Marxist followers introduced a 'binary system' for explanation of the historical affairs. It is an attempt to explain and interpret rather than to propose a methodology for study. Even Marxists with all their emphases on objectivity have proved to be too much idealistic, at times Romantic. They wanted to change this world to an ideally 'better' one. Certainly there were good intentions at the origin, but they failed in practice. All of a sudden they saw themselves entrapped in the totalitarian system of Stalin in which every institution, literature included, should be at the service of the Party. Perhaps Lynne Pearce has another, more European interpretation of Marx in mind when she refers to Bakhtin as a Marxist. But actually Bakhtin was not a Marxist. The reigning Marx interpretation of his time was an 'orthodox' Marxism, and Bakhtin was actively against such a system. Indeed his whole work can be read as an answer to the prevalent Marxism of his time.
In contrast to the binary system that dialectics presents, Bakhtin introduced the idea of dialogic, which sees the working of many different forces in the movement of history. This is a plural view; therefore, it cannot be a system, and there is no need to justify any previous interpretation. It remains open to any future knowledge. It seeks to know the events (and the relationship between them) not to interpret them according to one specific ideology. Some may introduce the objection that the true knowledge of things in themselves is impossible. Bakhtinian methodology provides an answer to this: every attempt to know brings some sort of relevance and even respect for the knowledge of the other people. This aspect is important as it shows all the attempts to knowledge with a sideward glance, a loophole, an inevitable relation to the knowledge of the other people. In contrast to Hegel's pure Idea, the Absolute, the Final Meaning, the Last Word, in Bakhtin's methodology there is no pure wisdom, no idea with capital 'I.' There are only wisdoms , ideas , which are dependent on each other; they are interdependent, under direct and indirect influence of each other. This may seem a little bit dialectical, but it is not: in dialectic there are only two opposed forces, in dialogic many; dialectic, quite like the monologic world of the epic is utopian; it wants the two forces to lead to a unified whole, a synthesis; dialogics, leads to a study of the different forces: it leads to epistemology . "When novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomes the dominant discipline" (Dialogic Imagination 15). What is of great significance is that while dialectics narcissistically leads to a self discovery, dialogics leads to the discovery of the other; dialectics leads to a totalitarian system, dialogics to a democratic society.
Engelhardt, a Russian literary scholar who has done some researches on Dostoevsky's ideological novel, is a Marxist critic who is reviewed by Bakhtin in his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Bakhtin's analysis of Engelhardt can be enlarged to the whole philosophy of Hegel and Marx. He praises Engelhardt because he was "the first to define correctly the place occupied by the idea in the Dostoevskian novel" (24). But at the same time, Bakhtin shows that Engelhardt's conclusions are incorrect. "In none of Dostoevsky's novels is there any evolution of a unified spirit. . . . . each novel presents an opposition which is never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses, and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit" (26). For Engelhardt (and equally for Hegel and Marx), the different ideas that are present in the novels of Dostoevsky (or any other novel) evolve through a dialectical process, so that finally a fully synthesized whole emerges: the author's synthesis. This is, to Bakhtin, a reduction of a "profoundly pluralistic " novel into a philosophical monologue (26).
It is true that Marxists were the first to pay attention to the question of the ideas in novel; they even found that these ideas are in struggle with each other, but they failed to recognize the essential unfinalizability of this conflict, and the plurality of the ideas.
If one is to find, beside dialogue, the second most important Bakhtinian term, it may be heteroglossia. It should be mentioned that this process of grading Bakhtinian terms, of choosing one term as the most important, or central, is by itself monologic, as it prefers one specific point of view over the other. Actually, from another point of view, heteroglossia may be more important than dialogue as the logical pre-requisite of any dialogue is the presence of two or more 'voices,' ideas. If one is to look at it from this perspective, then, polyglossia makes it possible to exist within a single cultural system, or text, "two or more national languages" (Dialogic Imagination 431). When there is a variety of different languages, which is synonymous for Bakhtin with different ideas, then any language finds meaning only in its relation to other 'languages'. Unlike the New Critical tradition, the context becomes more important than text. In contrast to New Criticism that assigns primacy of significance to textual analysis, Bakhtinian heteroglossia maintains that:
At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions -- social, historical, meteorological, physiological -- that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other condition . . . . as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress. (Dialogic Imagination 428)
As the New Critics maintained, the aesthetics of literary form is important, while, a Bakhtinian approach maintains that the form is important only in its relation to other literary and non-literary events/forms. The very refusal of New Criticism to consider social, historical, and political issues (in the Aristotelian sense of politics) in literary studies, by itself is a social phenomenon. It is a school, an ideology among the different schools that has certain interrelationships with the other schools, and cannot help being socio-political. To hold one's tongue, and remain silent is by itself a form of communication. New Critics used to read only the formal dimension of the text and ignored to read or see the cultural and historical situatedness, the context of the text. The only truth of a work of art is its formal and aesthetical properties; any other reading is regarded as an 'affective fallacy'. They felt it possible to secure the text against any microbe of the outside world, and study it in a pure, objective, de-microbized laboratory. The act of rejecting the intentions of the author ('the intentional fallacy'), as it opens the text for any other interpretation other than that of the author could have been closer to Bakhtin, but this is done for a certain intention: to reduce the possible interpretations of a text to the one 'valid,' 'objective' interpretation. What is extraordinary about New Criticism is that it flourished in a country in which authors were actively engaged in non-literary issues. Melville was a philosopher concerned with the question of good and evil, with the true nature of the things behind their masks; Hawthorne, angry with his people, severely criticized them; Mark Twain satirized all the values of New England, not to mention the overtly political tone of the Negro writers such as Richard Wright, W. E. B. Du Bois and the contemporary Ralph Ellison. To reduce the authorial intentions of these authors to only aesthetic and formal concerns is nothing but a monologic reading of literature, an annihilation of the inherently other-directed properties of the texts in favor of a systematic, therefore, ideological reading.
Bakhtin can be associated with the contemporary philosophers who are working against any 'center' of authority. Among these one may mention Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Edward Said and a host of other philosophers and theoreticians who are commonly labeled as postmodernist or poststructuralist. A closer reading of Bakhtin reveals that, like his relation to other schools and disciplines, his relation to postmodernism is, to use one of his favorite words, ambivalent.
The most distinguished branch of postmodernism is deconstruction that is associated with the name of Jacques Derrida. According to his philosophy, essentially there is no center of meaning for a text; the text may produce an infinite number of meanings. As soon as the text is produced, it finds its own life, and in an open and boundless way it moves and finds meaning. Derrida and the other deconstructionists are against the intention of the author; they maintain that a text at times produces meanings that are against the intended meaning. Derrida considers no end to the production of meaning of a text. For Bakhtin, who is not as radical as Derrida, signs or texts have some specific meanings, but these meanings are determined in the context of the text. The intended meaning of the author, in a Bakhtinian approach, is one among the many possible meanings that a context may allow. The context of a text consists of different cultural, economical, social, and philosophical relations between the author, the narrator(s), and the characters. Each of these three elements in a novel has some contribution to the production of meaning, without exclusion of the role of one another. In a Derridaian approach, as was taken by Roland Barthes, the author is gone for good; he/she is 'dead'. The text becomes the author of itself; the text writes itself. This approach is in strong opposition to those who search for the intention of the author and raise it to the absolute meaning of a text. Bakhtin neither kills the author, nor gives him or her an absolute position. On the one hand, the author has written the text; he or she has chosen the words and the characters of the novel. To this extent the author may be seen as an absolute force behind the text, but Bakhtin is the one who could see some other working forces as well: the narrator as the one who has his or her own specific worldview is another force, the characters with all their difference in attitude with each other, with the narrator and with the author are the other forces in determining the structure of the meaning of the text. Beside these, but again not as something apart or beyond them, one should consider the role of the specific geographical and historical contexts in which the text is being read. The role of the reader is something that Bakhtin does not discuss at length partly because he specifies himself with the interactions of the different points of view within the text (or the novel), the way this interaction is manifested in the text. The idea of interaction and dialogue, however, can bring the reader into the text as an active agent.
If the reader is introduced into the dialogues of the text, one may bring up the question that now a monologic epic or a lyric poem is as plural as a polyphonic novel, and it is quite true. The answer may be that these classical genres in their discourses do not specify any dialogic place for the reader. The reader in a classical, monologic approach is someone who is to be informed, not communicated with. The relationship between a classical text and its reader is one directional. The reader has to accept (or at the extreme, reject) what the text says. In an epic, the reader is passively moved both by the actions of the hero and the language of the text. Every element in an epic is working to reinforce this effect, so that reading an epic, ideologically, the reader is of the same party of the author, the narrator, and the hero. In a lyric poem, as another classic genre, the reader has to have absolute sympathy with the emotions of the persona of the poem. Without this sympathy the poem fails to be a perfect piece of poetry. The poet adopts certain strategies (i. e., imageries, figures of speech, etc.) in order to arise and reinforce the sympathy of the reader.
For Bakhtin, novel is a privileged genre, not because it is associated with realism, nor that it can represent things as they are better than the classical genres, but because the novel establishes a complex set of ideological, philosophical, and political relationships between the author, the narrator(s) and the characters. In the classical genre of epic these three, together with the reader, do not have any free relationship with each other; indeed they are from every respect very similar to, almost identical with each other; therefore, dialogue is not necessary. To Bakhtin an identity absolutely free from the others is a false one that is propagated by those who are in power in the society; and the novel is a privileged genre as it affirms the plurality and essential difference between the identities and ideas of the people. It is impossible for two persons, in a novelistic, Bakhtinian approach to have the same identical identity/ideology. They may have common ideas, but this, in itself, is not so great as to hide or blur the fact that they are different in some other features. While for Derrida the difference is so radical that it even may make communication impossible, and at the other extreme, in a canonical, classical approach the sameness and identity is so radical that communication becomes unnecessary, for Bakhtin, certain shared economic, social, and historical backgrounds make a shared identity possible. At the same time, allowing that a complex set of economic, social, historical factors together with some psychological and historical ones are at work to make the identity of the different people different. This share in some features and difference at others makes dialogue and communication both possible and necessary.
It is quite natural that in the long and forceful repression of the essential difference of people that happened during the Stalin regime, for Bakhtin to pay more attention to this repressed side in favor of the ruling idea that called for an absolute identity in ideology of the people. Derrida did the same, but in spite of his efforts, his attempt is a Romantic one, since, ignoring the possible sharing of identity, he raised the concept of différance to another absolute position. Despite living in a more authoritarian society than Derrida, Bakhtin does not fundamentally reject the possibility of an identity, he only considers identity a relative one. Indeed these two approaches can be compared to the two approaches in the contemporary physics. The dialogism of Bakhtin is very similar to the Relative Theory of Albert Einstein; actually Bakhtin was familiar with the works of Einstein and even borrowed one of his key terminology, the concept of 'chronotope' from the physics of Einstein. Derrida, on the other hand, can be compared with the physics of Werner Heisenberg who introduced 'the principle of uncertainty' to the contemporary physics. According to this principle, the certain position of a physical object is impossible to be determined objectively. Derrida, like his counterpart in the world of physics, believes in the absolute freedom of affairs, of their unrelatedness, of their essential différance ; for Bakhtin, in a different way, the affairs and things are related to each other, and the true object of knowledge is the relation that these things have with each other.
Bakhtin, however, shares with Derrida and other poststructuralist intellectuals the conviction that the meaning of a text is neither specified with the intention of the author nor with any specific force outside or inside the text. He agrees with their anticanonical aims, but uses a different set of strategies. Derrida deconstructs any possible center of power in the text (in the broad sense of the text); Bakhtin novelizes and carnivalizes these centers of power. The only way to fight against any authoritarian center, in Bakhtin's strategy, is to pluralize it. He praises the novel as an 'anticanonical genre'. The novel, for Bakhtin, is privileged because it works against any totalitarian system, whether social or literary. It is the genre that decanonizes all the ideas that are present in the society and re-presents them in a new form, so that no discourse, no ideology can find any superiority over the others. Novel and most especially Dostoevskian, polyphonic novel is that unique form in which the author and his discourse cannot be the totalitarian of the text. He or she is neither excluded from the text, nor is the dominating voice of the text; rather, the author is present in the dialogues of the text, questioning and under question.
The polyphonic novel does not have one specific ruling ideology; there are many ideologies present there. Besides, they are not there in a monadic, atomized way; they are, rather, in a constant process of reciprocity with each other:
The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. . . .The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by types and by differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of the narrators, inserted genres, the speeches of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities that with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). (Dialogic Imagination 262-63)
In this definition one of the most powerful and consistent theories of novel exists. On the one hand, Bakhtin insists on the diversity of social speeches, but sees this diversity alone as inadequate, because it leads to uncertainty and a radical form of impressionism; on the other hand, he insists on artistic organization, but this literary aspect alone also leads to either art for art's sake or the authoritarian position of the author. Only these two elements hand in hand with each other can lead to the production of a dialogic work of art, a work in which a multiple of ideas are not only present but have some sort of interrelationship with each other, thus no articulation in such a work goes unanswered.
Bakhtin maintains that when novel becomes a dominant genre, the other genres become 'novelized' "[t]he novelization of the other genres does not imply their subjection to an alien genric canon; on the contrary, novelization implies their liberation from all that serves as a brake in their unique development" (Dialogic Imagination 63). In the process of novelization, therefore, the other genres assimilate the dialogic approach of the novel, so that, the epic becomes more relative in point of view, and poetry becomes more polyphonic.
One of the main anticanonical elements in any culture that leads to the production of polyphonic-dialogic texts, according to Bakhtin, is laughter. His book on Rabelais begins with a quotation from Herzen: "It would be extremely interesting to write the history of laughter" (59). Laughter for Bakhtin is very important as it ridicules all those who claim some sort of superiority and power over the others. It is anticanonical, anti-authority, anti-nationalistic:
Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact with the reality where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and bellow, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety, before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. . . .< . . Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization. (Dialogic Imagination 23)
In a sense laughter can be considered as more fundamental, more subversive and more essential than dialogue; it is a centrifugal element that dethrones all the things that have some sort of power, all the things that because of some nationalistic, religious, or cultural reasons have found an established position with a halo of majesty, grandeur and sanctity around them. Laughter brings down these established institutions into the 'crude zone of contact' with everyday reality. Without this bringing down of the powerful and canonical elements in culture, true dialogue is impossible.
Associated with laughter in the theories of Bakhtin is the carnival, which like novel and laughter, is another centrifugal element in culture. The carnival is an event in which all the established norms and institutions of the society are satirized. In this event 'the people' with all their diversity and plurality find power, and the King along with the other canonical institution of the society becomes just one among the many. The people show themselves as they really wish themselves to be: rogues, clowns, and the fool become the privileged figures of this cultural event. (One should remember that these figures had also a special role to play in the history of the novel.) This is not an exact reversal of values. The new privileged figures are not as tyrannical and monologic as the King (or the other established authorities); they laugh at everything and satirize everything, including themselves. Therefore, there would be no point of authority for one specific person or ideology. During this popular cultural event the people experience an alternative form of identity for themselves. Those who are in power try to impose the socially identified identity as the true one. This new identity, however, is more true than their established one as it is free from the dominant ideology. Their previous identity has been determined and dictated by the ruling institutions of the society to them; therefore, it cannot be a true identity.
The suspension of all hierarchical precedence during the carnivals was of particular importance . . . all were considered equal during the carnival. .< . . . . People were, so to speak, born for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind. (Rabelais and His World 10)
In a Foucaultian approach, carnival and all the other centrifugal and anticanonic forces in culture, are more like a licensed fool, a safety valve, working mechanically for the ultimate needs of the dominant 'discourse.'
Foucault argued that 'where there is power, there is resistance', that power depends for its existence on the presence of a 'multiplicity of points of resistance' and that the plurality of resistances' should not be reduced to a single locus of revolt or rebellion. (Smart 77).
Therefore, like any other resisting point, carnival is at the service of power. In a Bakhtinian approach, however, carnival, like laughter "remained outside the formal falsifications" of the society "which were coated with a layer of pathetic seriousness" (Dialogic Imagination 236). It is an event in which the people in their own way experience the things, without the need for a socially higher rank to teach them how to see. Actually they dismantle the logic of the ruling system, the dominant discourse. This has a close relationship with the rise of the novel, which rejects all the institutional ways of knowledge and begins to experience the things in its own 'novel' way.
Carnival is anti-systemic; it is highly critical of the ranks and hierarchy, it emphasizes contradiction and plurality rather than consistency, unity and synthesis; it paves the way for a "Parodic-travestying literature" which:
introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, of a critique on the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word, and the corrective of reality that is always richer, more fundamental and most importantly too contradictory and heteroglot to be fit into a high and stightforward genre.(Dialogic Imagination 55)
What Bakhtin is searching for is a real (not idealistic) utopia, and he saw this in novel, which, having its roots in 'the way of the people,' in plurality, and in 'dialogue,' can provide a realistic space in which no institution is overcapitalized. In practice, nobody can claim that all the 'novels' of history have proved the ideas of Bakhtin as correct (and Bakhtin with his redefinition of genres proves to be aware of this fact). This resistance of novels to theory, however, may be taken both as the fundamental irreduciblity of novel to 'theoretical' investigation, and, the plural and protean character of novel, the facts that Bakhtin himself showed and praised. Yet, with few exceptions (see Caryl Emerson's "The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin" for the most important exception), almost all the novels of the history of the genre have shown themselves as plural and dialogic. Chaucer, Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Stern, Fielding, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, and Dickens among the ancestors of the contemporary novel can be read and discussed from a Bakhtinian approach, without contradicting his ideas--provided that dialogism is taken as a relative term not an absolute one.
Americans as a profoundly plural nation, have also produced a great variety of dialogic texts. Melville, Hawthorne, Twaine, Henry James, Henry Adams, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Nabokov are among the dialogic authors of this nation. The works of the contemporary Jewish novelist, Saul Bellow, are of exceptional merit among others. Perhaps this is because the author is theoretically very similar to Bakhtin. The early works of Bellow are philosophical, but being at the service of one philosophy, they are not fully dialogic examples. The most popular novel of Bellow, Herzog, however, can be read as a dialogic text. Being a novel of ideas, a plurality of ideas are presented in this novel that makes it worth reading in the mirror of Bakhtin's theories.