Bakhtin and Popular Culture

Bakhtin and Popular Culture
Author(s): Mikita Hoy

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 23, No. 3, History, Politics, and Culture (Summer, 1992),
pp. 765-782
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Bakhtin and Popular Culture

Mikita Hoy
HeteroglottalNovelization
IKHAIL BAKHTIN is acknowledged in increasinglywide circles

as a sensitiveobserverof popular culturein itssociohistorical
context.His acute studyof the folkloricritualsof carnival-from the phallophors of epic Saturnalia, whose role was to joke
and cavortobscenely,to the rogue comedians at turn-of-the-century
countryfairs-uncovers a vast and fertiledialogue of heteroglossia.1
Not only at the carnivalbut pervading all levels of language, Bakhtin
identifiesinfinitelyshiftingheteroglottalstrata made up of loosely
bound generic wholes, subgeneric wholes, accents, systems,dialects,
and constantlyfragmentedlayers of language workingtogether,or
at battle, or at play. This dialogic scheme covers, in The Dialogic
Imaginationand Rabelaisand His World,most epic drama and Russian
and European nineteenth-centuryrealist literature and invites its
own extension into areas of recent Western popular culture.
Although Bakhtin insists that the novel is the key form of the
time, his advantage over everyone else working on novel theoryis
his appreciation that the novel, ratherthan assimilatingits language
to form,shapes its form to languages and consequentlyappears as
what Michael Holquist describes as a "supergenre," ingesting and
engulfingall other genres. Therefore the range of textscomposed
of a series of differentlanguages interpenetratingone anotherBakhtin's classificationof "novelness"--mustclearlybe immense. In
fact, rather than limitingthe term novel to a narrow definitionof
a piece of textual fiction,Bakhtin uses it to name the interplayof
heteroglottalstrataat work withinany given literarysystemin order
to reveal the artificiallimits and constraintsof that system; for
"novelization" as Bakhtin sees it is fundamentallyopposed to the
orderinginto genres and canons thatis characteristicof most literary
systems.
Bakhtin's version of novelization does not permit generic monologue, but ratherinsistson an interplayof dialogues between what
any given systemwill admit as literature,or "high culture,"or art,
New Literary
History,1992, 23: 765-782

766
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HISTORY
or "good writing,"and on the other hand all those texts excluded

from these definitionsas nonliterature,"low culture," popular culture, or subculture.All writingfeaturesthis interplay,and therefore
all kinds of language, even those which might not be classed as
"higher literaryforms"by the traditionalcritic,such as musical lyrics
or advertisementlogos, to Bakhtin represent importantforms of
novelization. That piece of textual fictionmore conventionallydescribed as the "novel" is merelythe mostrefinedand distilledversion
of this definition,which spills over into other kinds of texts and
novels in other times. As Bakhtin himself writes in The Dialogic
Imagination,"texts continue to grow and develop even after the
moment of their creation. . . . they are capable of being creatively
transformedin differenteras, far distant from the day and hour
of their original birth."2
Bakhtinian analysis of the novel represents then a theoretical
system to which it is not only possible but criticallyessential to
submit today's magazines, comedy, advertisements,popular music,
art, and fashion,since in theircontinual interchangeand deliberate
fusion of high and low styles,politics,parody and pastiche, comic
stripand literature,haut couture and streetfashion,theyconstitute
a singular shiftingdialogism whose rich carnival of discourse lies
open to Bakhtin'sradical definitionof "novelness,"and theirinstances
of language, say in rock lyricsor advertisements,are in this way
very similar to the instances of language that Bakhtin finds in the
novel.
Bakhtin and Genre

It is vital however to realize that, according to Bakhtin, in any
analysis of the social ideology of genres such as "high" and "low"
styles,"politics,""parody," "pastiche,"and so on, it is impossible to
escape the factthatthe author/artist/designer is Russian or Polish,
Jewishor Catholic, male or female,old or young, formallyeducated
or formallyuneducated, and so on. Bakhtin finds it difficultto
identifyspecificgenres beyond "relativelystableformsof construction
of thewhole"in every discourse and utterance,from the literaryand
the rhetoricalto the spontaneous and the everyday-hence his theory
of "sociopoliticalgenre," or "generic wholes." Real "genres" as such
do not actuallyexist;rather,theyplay at being all-encompassingand
"total." Consequently, the very notion of a "unity" is false, since
that supposed "unity" encompasses infinitestrata of other, autonomous unities. Absolute, ideal extremes are illusory-it is possible

BAKHTIN
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to theorize and quantify only, according to Bakhtin, in terms of

approximate "wholes" and the generalizationof generic regularities.
Bakhtin'stheoryof heteroglossiarestsupon his vision of language
not as a static,communicable representationof the speaker's intention but as a systembearing the weight of centuries of intention,
motivation,and implication. Language can never be molded into
working for the speaker's unique purpose but can only be handed
back and forthlike printed books borrowed froma lending library.
Since it is already composed of weighted uses, grammaticalrules,
and agreed conventionallexis, Bakhtin sees all language as negating
the uniqueness of personal experience, and with it any possibility
of maintaininga connectionwithvalue and intention,as does Sartre
in Being and Nothingness:
"the 'meaning' of my expressions always
.
escapes me. I never know if I signifywhat I wish to signify
As soon as I express myself,I can only guess at the meaning of
what I express-i.e. the meaning of what I am."3
Within every single word, withinevery single utterance,Bakhtin
identifiesa large and ancient collection of ideas, motives,and intentionsutilized by centuriesof speakers and writers.All language,
into social dialects,characteristic
according to Bakhtin,is prestratified
group behavior, professionaljargons, languages of generationsand
age-groups, tendentious languages, languages of authority,and,
especially in recent media language, the discourse of various circles
and passing fashions of the day, even of the hour.4
Bakhtin finds himself unable to describe social forms and conventions (what most criticstoday would define as "genres") without
reducing them to the obviously individualisticcategory of voices,
and equally unable to imagine consistentdialogue among similar
genres, or among works withina genre, except as a kind of loose,
multiform"whole." Bakhtin reserves the term genre for obvious,
widelyaccepted generic structures--epic,myth,poetry,or the spacetime structuresof youth, age, the beginning, the end, and so on.
Essentially,genre in Bakhtin is something of a nonce-word. He
seems ultimatelyto suggest that it is possible--indeed, necessaryto reduce all forms, narratives, structures,and so on, to their
own "ideological languages." Nevertheless,he keeps the termsgenre
and genericwholesto identifyand theorize widely accepted forms,
partly in order to enable reference to wider literaryand narrative
traditionsthan his consistentreturn to sociological and ideological
theory would generate.
But as Ken Hirschkop points out, even the meanings of words
like dialogismand carnivalare "a sedimentationof past uses, current
and past social conflicts,the changing forms of ideological life; in

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short,these termsare themselvesdialogical."5Yet thisdoes not mean

that the schema at play in even the most basic language-unit are
too densely interwovenever to comprehend: "Such is the fleeting
language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a school
and so forth,"writesBakhtin,that "[i]t is possible to give a concrete
and detailed analysis of any utterance,once having exposed it as a
contradiction-ridden,
tension-filledunityof... embattledtendencies
in the life of language" (DN 272).
Style Magazines
In recentpopular culture,nowhereis the influenceof heteroglossia
more obvious and immediate than in so-called stylemagazines like
Arena, i.d., and The Face. Arena is a fairlynew magazine, on sale
mainlyin England, the United States,Germany,and Italy,published
and edited in England by Nick Logan, and specializingin "exclusive"
interviewswith filmand rock stars,upmarket articleson sport and
fashion, and pieces on politics and architecture.The market for Q
has similar international aspirations; this is also a relativelynew
publicationwhichaims to be "the modern guide to music and more,"
focusingmainlyon rock interviewsand reviews.i.d. has been around
for rather longer; it is marketed over most of Europe as well as
the United States,Japan, and Australiabut focuses mainlyon British
music, fashion, film,television,and so on.
Such forms of what Bakhtin would class as heteroglottalnovelization consistentlyobliterate the distinctions,on the writtenpage
and, it is suggested, in youth society,between high-artistic-noncommercialand mass-pop-consumerist,
between streetand Parisian fashions, art and advertising,pop and nonpop, poetryand lyrics,comicstripand literature,the marginaland the mainstream.It is impossible
to tell fashion shots from advertisementphotographs,virtuallyimpossible to distinguishbetween articlesand commercials.The prose
is a fusion of colloquial Americanisms,technicaljargon, black street
rap, quasi-academic analysis, and fashionable puns. In this extract
from The Face, Jim McClellan reviews a Percy Adlon film,Rosalie
Goes Shopping:
A comicfantasy
abouttheconsumercredittrapand thepersonalcomputer,
it starsMarianneSagebrechtas a Germanhousewife. . . determinedto
live life the shop-till-you-drop
postmodernAmericanway. Hubbie Brad
Davis's wages can't even pay the intereston all those afternoonsat the
mall, so she startsdouble-dealingwitha vast deck of creditcards and

BAKHTIN
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on her personalcomputer.Troubleis, her crimesdon't

number-crunching
feel wrong.Rosalieends up nearlysayingsomethingabout the hyperconformist
consumerand thedoublestandardsof thedebteconomy.Pityabout
the soundtrack,
though.'
Here the dialogue consists of a fusion of British middle-class
colloquialisms ("Hubbie") and ellipsis ("Pity about .. ."), fairly
respectableeconomic textbooklanguage ("the consumer credittrap,"
"the double standards of the debt economy"), the language of
nontabloid,ostensiblyapoliticalBritishjournalism ("A comic fantasy,
it stars Marianne Sagebrecht as a German housewife"), tabloid
language ("shop-till-you-drop"),American language--or, at least,
the Americanismscommonly used by Britishjournalists ("Trouble
is . . . ," "number-crunching")and a parody of current critical
sociologicaland literarydiscourse ("postmodernAmerican way,""the
hyperconformistconsumer").7
Each stratificationof discourse inevitably incorporates various
motives, leanings, intentions--unconscious,prereflectiveideologies
that are often defined as political. Bakhtin himself,in a stringof
dialogues from 1934 onwards, moves on to define dialogism as "the
unmaskingof social languages" (I 11). So whileJim McClellan's film
review-as a form of heteroglottal "novelization"-constitutes an
interweavingof leftisteconomics, anticapitalism,anticonsumerism,
fashionable British anti-Americanism(although the utilization of
American colloquialisms suggests, on another level, a certain subcurrent of pro-Americansentiment),what these strata most clearly
convey is the discourse of the white, Western, middle-class,male,
formallyeducated intellectual.Hirschkop develops this idea of conflictingideologies into straightpoliticaltendencies: "If each language
is a voice, then societyis a welterof intersectinggroups and different
ideologies, more or less the version of society on offer from liberalism. And yet thingsare in a way even worse than that. For each
point of view: it embodies
point of view is described as an interested
not just a perspectivebut a set of values or desires" (I 20).
By an interested
point of view, however, it seems more likelythat
Bakhtin is suggesting a subconscious, preexistent,unthinkingideological worldview rather than the active political aims Hirschkop
suggests in his use of evaluative terms like worse.In "Discourse in
the Novel," a similar point is made: "all languages of heteroglossia,
whatever the principle underlyingthem and making each unique,
are specificpoints of view on the world, formsfor conceptualizing
the world in words, specificworld views, each characterized by its
own objects, meanings and values" (DN 291-92).

770
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HISTORY
The main point about heteroglossia is that all language has a

sidewaysglance, and yetin Jim McClellan's filmreview,the sideways
glance seems to be partlydirected at itself.This kind of language
is self-referential,
self-regarding--aware,in a way,of its own shifting
The
result
of this self-parody,which in youth stylemagdialogism.
azines such as the self-confessedly
superficialThe Face seems almost
inevitable,is that the language loses much of its primaryintention
(here, the filmreview) and develops instead into a game of words,
a kind of linguisticsolitaire.This is the kind of discourse that "lives,
toward
as it were, beyond itself,in a living impulse [napravlennost]
the object" (DN 292). Ann Jeffersonwrites: "Looking (at yourself)
while you leap is a highly dangerous thing to do, and on the
figurativeplain the effectsof such self-regardingattitudescan be
just as devastating,because they empty acts of their substance and
turned into play or gesture."'
purpose, and actionis, significantly,
Popular Culture and Carnival

This kind of ironic,self-reflecting
parody of the dialogisminherent
in language is often the style of the traditional fool, who mocks
others' uses of words by using them himself.Shakespeare's Fool in
KingLear,forexample, is introducedinto the textpartlyforpurposes
of "making strange" (ostranenie)the world of conventional pathos
by making Lear's dramatic,aristocraticlanguage of sufferingseem
distantand unreal when it is cited beside similarmeanings couched
in the Fool's own folkloric,nurseryriddles.
And this is precisely the relation between dialogism-both lived
and textual-and the Bakhtinian notion of carnival. Carnival is the
time when all social groups and classes join together in a wild
Saturnalian celebration,which involves the fusion of each group's
dialogical stratum into a parodic, ironic festivalof language. According to Bakhtin,each level of heteroglossiais linked to the next
by a common folkloriclaughter, whose roots go back deep into
preclass folklore and which destroys traditional connections and
abolishes idealized strata,bringingout the crude, unmediated links
between words and concepts that are normallykept very separate.
Carnival, according to Bakhtin, represents "the disunificationof
what has traditionallybeen linked, and the bringing together of
that which has been traditionallykept distant and disunified."9
Carnival, in the writtentext as well as in lived language, brings the
everydayinto sacred life in the form of ritualisticviolations (skvernoslovie),causing ritualisticlaughterand clownishness.The slave and

BAKHTIN AND POPULAR CULTURE
771
jester become substitutesfor the ruler and god, various forms of

ritualisticparody make their appearance, and "the passions" are
mixed with laughter and gaiety.Bakhtinian carnival cavalierlysuppresses hierarchies and distinctions,"recalling us to a common
creatureliness."'0
So just as the courtjester's ironic repetitionof common language
estranges that language and alienates it, so at the carnival does the
riotous confusion of all varieties of discourse, both high and low,
make strange the similarlevel of dialogism preexistentin language.
Opposed to all those who are well-to-doin life, suggests Bakhtin,
comes the language of the merry rogue-streetsongs, folksayings,
anecdotes, a lively parody of the words of poets, scholars, monks,
knights,and others. Like the interplayof genres and levels within
the prose of popular stylemagazines such as The Face, the language
of the merryrogue parodicallyreprocessesother people's discourse,
but always in such a way as to rob them of their power, to "distance
them fromthe mouth,"as it were, by means of a roguish deception,
to mock their language and thus turn what was direct discourse
into lightself-parody."Falsehood is illuminatedby ironic consciousness and in the mouth of the happy rogue parodies itself" (DN
402).
"Permanent" Carnivalization
In this respect, much of recent popular culture appears as "permanent"carnivalization(though "permanent" in the sense of "permanently" ephemeral, constantlychanging). Style magazines consistentlyoffer a wide range of interweavingdiscourses, languages,
ontologies,and dialogues characteristicof the anticanonismBakhtin
defines as essential to the language of novelization,and the festival
of heteroglossia that results is not a mere sideshow at a traveling
carnival, but a "permanently"ephemeral, playful, self-referential,
self-parodyingcomponent of postmodernpopular culture.Bakhtin's
idea of carnival,both lived and textual,as the self-regardingparody
of differentlanguage stylesand levelsof dialogue, and his description
of the stock-in-tradecarnival jester who has to be able to mimic
"birds and animals, . . . the speech, facial expressions and gesticulation of a slave, a peasant, a procurer, a scholastic pedant and a
foreigner,"" are still relevant to mass culture's currentand continuous taste for impersonationand parody, as testifiedby the viewing
figuresfor stand-up comics keen on topical political subject matter
(like most of the comics at last year's Edinburgh Festival),and the

772
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
popularityof the politicalcaricatureson televisionprogramslike

"SpittingImage."
Carnivaland PoliticalConflicts
Yet it would be unwiseto emptyBakhtin'scarnivaltheoryof its
politicalconflict-toreduce it to an eclecticblend of stylesand
as genlanguages,to see it as conflationratherthan contention,
eralized indifference
ratherthan the clash of highlyinterested
standpoints.There is also much of the merryrogue in a number
ofpopularmusicians,
whereritualistic
notablyin thepunkmovement
are all partof theact.Likethecarnival
violationand culticindecency
jester,LordsofMisrulelikeJohnnyRottenand Sid Viciouscelebrated
a thoughtless
deceitopposed to everything
thatis conventional
and
forms
for
the
of
others.
As
the
false-synthetic
parodiedexposure
of
the
like
the
is
"the
clown,
carnival,
right
harbinger
punk,
granted
notto understand,the rightto confuse. . . the rightto parody
... the right
otherswhiletalking,therightnot to be takenliterally
to act life as a comedyand to treatothersas actors,the rightto
rip offmasks,the rightto rage at otherswitha primeval(almost
cultic)rage" (FT 163).
In popularstylemagazines,thisnotionof thecarnivalesquemanifestsitselfas parody,pastiche,or irony("thatwhichcannotbe put
inwordswithout
itself"[I 33])-a typeoffolkloric
laughter
betraying
"sacred"things
which,Bakhtinbelieves,worksto bring"official,"
such areas can be separated
(politics,religion,business--although
onlyinsofaras Bakhtin'stheoryof genericwholeswillpermit,since
all borders,accordingto Bakhtin,have alreadybeen crossedand
where
no "zone" is ever separate)to a place of maximalproximity
theycan be turnedinsideout and closelyexaminedfromall angles.
of the established
In The Face and i.d., in fact,all representatives
canonicalliterarysystemand the old, official,sacred world (the
the upper classes,well-estabbusinessmen,
royalfamily,politicians,
lished media figures)are treatedas absurd and ridiculousand
comedian,
laugheddownin favorof thelatesttopmodel,alternative
or cult musician,kingsand queens foran issue preciselybecause
of theirhip,chicephemerality
(lookat TheFace'soccasionalfeatures
on thelatestindependentbands such as Ride or Lush--spotlighted
usuallybecause theirrefusalto sign up to any major recordlabel
virtually
guaranteestheirstatusas flash-in-the-pan,
up-to-the-minute
underground fads, never likelyto become mainstreamacts).
At other times, this carnivalesque impulse will take the form of

BAKHTIN
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a mockery of academic prose and criticism. In such cases, the

language of the author strivesto overcome "literariness"and to get
away from outmoded stylesand period-bound language by fusing
this very "literariness"with folk language and, creating a dialogue
between the canonical literarysystemand the generic languages of
various subcultures in what is defined by Bakhtin as heteroglottal
novelization,thus making the language parody itself.
One importantfunctionof this spirited,self-consciousdialogism
is to reduce all false sublimationsback to theirearthy,earthlyroots.
As in Menippean satire, the cruder, more bawdy, brawling, more
obviously mocking forms of carnival bring everythingdown to a
single level-like the wave of new American comedians epitomized
by Andrew Dice Clay, whose "Comedy of Hate" consistsin ritualistic
abuse of audience members. Bakhtin points out that laughter is
associated with folklore and the gross realities of life, possessing
the capacity to strip the object of the false verbal and ideological
husk thatencloses it (see FT 158-224)-a carnivalesque performance
which realizes the theoriesof the textualand linguisticcarnivalesque
(embodied by, say, the style magazine).
Here it is important to distinguish between carnival as a vast
m6lange of styles,which lends itselfwell enough to postmodernism,
and carnival as politicalanimus. In other words, to graftBakhtinian
carnival onto postmodern culture without reservation brings the
latter out as rather more subversive than much of it actually is.
This second kind of political carnivalesque destroys epic distance
and restoresa "dynamicauthenticity""12to man, allowing participants
to investigatethemselvesfreely,to studythe disparitybetween their
potentialand theirreality,in the textas well as on the street.Bakhtin
talks about the performancesof obscenely cavortingphallophors in
religious processions, and deikilists(mimers) who both travestied
national and local mythsand mimickedthe characteristically
typical
"languages" and speech mannerismsof foreign doctors, procurers,
heterae, peasants, slaves, scholars,judges, and so on (see FPN 4183).
Bakhtin and Punk

The Sex Pistols sing about "bodies" and one of their slogans
declares "Fuck Forever." In fact, much of the punk movement's
motivationcentered around an impulse to disgust and appall by
reducing the sublimations of serious artists and musicians to a
celebration of what Bakhtin in "Forms of Time and Chronotope in

774
NEW LITERARY
HISTORY
the Novel" describes as the "series of the human body" (FT 170)
(a space-time which, for Bakhtin, seems to replace conventional
definitions of "genre"-in other words, an unbound "generic
whole")--vomiting (the food series), wearing dustbin-linersheld
togetherwithsafety-pins(the human clothingseries),"gettingpissed"
to "destroy" (the drink and drunkenness series), fucking forever
(sexual series), sporting "Sid Lives" T-shirts (death series). "The
pleasures of carnival,"writesKen Hirschkop, "are not the pleasures
of mere talk but those of a discourse that has rediscovered its
connectionto the concrete" (I 35)-thus, again, the fusionof textual
carnivalesque with the carnivalesque in performance to form the
heteroglottal"novelization" of texts and forms of language more
usually excluded from the literarysystem.
Much of this political kind of carnivalization,of course, revolves
around the destructionof images sacred in other, different,often
opposing cultural levels and dialogues. Just as magazine and television advertisementsthrough a process of ritual disembowelment
use celebrated and highly revered pieces of music (popular or
classical) and images (old masters,pieces of "high" art, and highly
paid popular musicians and media figures)for what is considered
to be the trivialprocess of selling,thingsheld sacred in one language
or discourse are inevitablyparodied in another. Much of the Sex
Pistols material is sacrilegious to other dialogues-their lyricsmake
parodyout of the monarchy("God Save the Queen"), the government
("Anarchy in the U.K."), the human body ("Bodies"), multinational
corporations ("EMI"), and the holocaust ("Belsen was a Gas"). Malcolm McLaren's sale of "Sid Lives" T-shirtsonly a couple of weeks
after Vicious's overdose smacks a great deal of Bakhtin's carnivalesque version of death, which he applies particularlyto Rabelaisian
burlesque ("in ... the grotesque [clownish]portrayalof death, the
image of death itselftakes on humorous aspects: deathis inseparable
fromlaughter"[FT 196]). Bakhtin'scelebrationof carnivalis perhaps
too undifferentiating,
since (as some criticshave pointed out) carnival
a
of violence and machismo.
involved
lot
actually
That once-taboo topics like sex and death can be treated with
such hilarityduring the carnival is a signifiernot just of the carnivalesque reduction of all cultural sublimationsto their folkloric
roots, but-even further-the desecration of all that a culture considers "sacred" or meaningfulto nothingmore than another of the
merryrogue's clownishjests. Everythingthat has been built up to
have significanceand moment for mankind is rendered absurd:
there is an emphasis in the carnivalesque on the healthyfailure of
the fool (the "man of the people") to understand accepted conven-

775
tionsand falsehoods(religion,the government,education,capitalism,

advertising,even the pretensions of the music industry itself)which exposes them for what they are. Here, again, there is little
differencebetween textual and lived carnivalesque. The carnivalesque of this textual heteroglossia-the fusion of canonical and
noncanonical literaryand subliterarysystems-is embodied in the
performanceof "real life." The punk and the skinhead "estrange"
the discourse of mass-appeal, major-label,commercializedchart music by means of an uncomprehendingstupidity(simplicity,
naivety)where the very aspect of not understanding,not graspingthe conventions of a society, not comprehending lofty,meaning-charged
lyrics,chords, words, labels, things,and events-remains vital.
PrettyVacant
But the key to popular culture today lies in the aesthetic (or,
of vacancy, of as little
often, anti-aesthetic)avowal of superficiality,
meaningas possible.Texts like the magazine The Face, its very title
are temples to ephemheralding an uncompromisingsuperficiality,
era, to the garish colors and images of a transient,driftingpop
life. These magazines, like many televisionand cinema commercials,
are not meant to be read or studied closely, but to be "cruised"
through,'3 looked at fleetinglywith a vague sense of admiration
and temptation,the same way you would look at a shop window
or an advertisementofferingseductive, brightlycolored consumer
goods in a plasticcarnivalwhere,like Rosalie in RosalieGoesShopping,
you become a "hyperconformistconsumer" in the "shop-till-youdrop postmodern American way" when "there is nowhere left to
go but to the shops.""
These formsof carnivalesque and examples of heteroglottalnovelization in text (magazine, soap opera, pulp novel) as well as in
reality(game show, rock concert,shopping spree) are characterized
by a self-evidentfailure to "stand up" to philosophical literary
theories, but of value for their capacity for "breaking down" into
infinitelayersof dialogical stratato reveal the limitsand constraints
of such definitionswhich restrict,for example, a varietyof heteroglottalnovelizationfrominclusion in a traditionallynarrow literary
canon. Like the anti-academic, anti-serious,anti-intelligentSaturnalian humor of the punk movement and its music, the popular
postmodern text is joyously aware of the inadequacies of its own
language. In its gleeful celebrationof pop art, pop journalism, pop
advertising,pop cinema, pop literature,pop feminism,and pop

776
NEW LITERARY HISTORY
shopping, every dialogue in the style magazine is a joke at the

expense of its own irrelevance, its own unimportance, its own
meaninglessness,its own ephemerality.
Heteroglottal dialogues and systemsof "novelness" like The Face
recognize the emptiness of society,the plasticityof consumerism
and, like the Sex Pistols singing about their own vacancy ("Pretty
Vacant") or theirmanager Malcolm McLaren makinga filmentitled
TheGreatRockand Roll Swindle(and, incidentally,profitingfinancially
from his rebellion), resolve that there is nothing left to do but to
celebrate that very vacancy, to go shopping. Terry Eagleton points
out that Bakhtin fails to stress the politically limited nature of
carnival,which is afterall licensedmisrule,a contained and officially
sanctioned rebellion, after which everythingreturnsto normal.'5
Comic-ironicCounterparts
Yet for Bakhtin, this ambivalent image of wise ignorance brings
to mind the self-praiseof the Socratic dialogue ("I am wiser than
everyone,because I know that I know nothing"),and the image of
Socrates ("a wise man of the most elevated sort," "wearing the
popular mask of a bewildered fool [almost a Margit]").'6There is
no sort of direct discourse, suggests Bakhtin--artistic,rhetorical,
philosophical, everyday ("styles"rather than "genres"; Bakhtin describes the novel as a "stylisticsof genre" and can never reconcile
the idea of genre with the idea of style,redeeming genreas a term
for describing"finishedand resolved wholes" and styleas designating
the syntacticand lexical patternsof identifiablesocial voices)--that
doesn't have "its own parodying and travestyingdouble, its own
comic-ironiccontre-partie"
(FPN 53).
In this light, popular culture appears as the reverse of "high"
culture, its alter ego, where all pretensions to meaning, relevance,
and aesthetic value are travestiedby a parodic, mocking dialogue
of vacancy,anti-aestheticism
and plasticity.In "From the Prehistory
of Novelistic Discourse," Bakhtin observes that the most wise and
revered figuresin epic have their comic counterparts,and become
themselvescomic: "Odysseus ... donned a clown's fool's cap (pileus)
and harnessed his horse and ox to a plow, pretending to be mad
in order to avoid participationin the war. . . . Hercules, who had
conquered death in battle . . . descended into the nether world [to
become] the monstrousglutton,the playboy,the drunk and scrapper,
but especially Hercules the madman" (FPN 54).
Popular culture, then-where pop art, music, fashion, and lit-

777
erature all parody their more serious counterpartsand where monarchs and politicalleaders are mocked by figureslikeJohnnyRotten,
the Lord of Misrule-becomes what Bakhtindescribesas the Holiday
a form of ludus in which everythingis
of Fools or 'festa stultorum,
reversed,even clothing;trouserswere wornon the head, forinstance,
an operation thatsymbolicallyreflectsin some measure thejongleurs,
who are depicted in miniatureshead-downward" (FPN 72): a dialogue between what the given systemwill admit into its canons, and
what it systematically
rejects-forms of language embraced by Bakhtin in his universal definitionof heteroglottalnovelization.
Everythingserious has to have a comic double, in text and in
reality.Justas in the Saturnalia the clown is the double of the ruler,
the slave the double of the master, similar comic doubles exist in
all forms of literatureand culture. And the funhouse of popular
images, pictures, commercials,music, art, and literaturedisplayed
in currentstylemagazines as in currentpopular culture represents,
in the same way that the Lord of Misrule doubles the king, the
carnivalesque counterpart to all forms of
parodic, self-referential,
"high" culture.
Carnival and Madness

Perhaps neither phenomenon-carnival nor popular culture-is
as unqualifiedlypositiveas it seems to be, since thissystemicreversal
or inversionfiguredby the carnivalesque can equally be interpreted
as madness. There is a constant similaritybetween the polyglossia
of the carnival,textual and nontextual,and the manifoldlayersand
levels of discourse within the madman's psychological dialogism.
Clair Wills,in her feministinterpretationof carnival,draws a parallel
between the carnival itself,which disrupts by juxtaposing public
indecencywithofficialorder, and women's textsconsidered hysteric
even by avant-garde writerssuch as Julia Kristeva. Wills charts a
connectionbetween carnival,which fuses common and officialtypes
of discourse as well as many othersin a polyglossia,and the hysteric's
relivingof past history,familysituations,and so on, in the present:
"her capacity for turning things 'upside-down' is contained within
the family.The . . . 'transgressive'nature of popular festiveforms
and hystericaldiscourse are connected not only in their similar
relationto history,but also in theircontent .... Freud's descriptions
of the hystericcall on popular festiveimagery: 'it is strikinghow
and disconnected,glide
the broken fragmentsof carnival,terrifying
of
the
the
discourse
hysteric.'"7
through

778
NEWLITERARY
HISTORY
This kind of hysteria-a form of Bakhtin's heteroglottalnovelization in its anticanonical dialogue between what the given system
admits as the language of "literature"and what it rejects as subculture--manifestsitselfnot only in the fusion of retrospectiveand
up-to-the-minute
language in stylemagazines and in popular culture
in particularbut, more clearlyperhaps, in the continuous,repetitive,
confused stream of discourse that comes from the radio deejay or
rap artist.Wills views the discourse of the hystericas "an attempt
to open up the protestsof the women of the past by seeing their
similaritywith the feministprotest of the present" (149), just as
Bakhtiniancarnivalbringstogetherthe crisesof the past and present.
"The crises of the past," write Wills, "live on in a separate area of
the psychelike the last vestigesof a small-townmarket-placecarnival"
(136). In The NewlyBorn Woman,Catherine Clment cites Marcel
Mauss to describe people with a "dangerous symbioticmobility"as
afflictedwithwhat she calls "madness,anomaly,perversion"-people
whom Mauss labels "neurotics,ecstatics,outsiders,carnies, drifters,
jugglers, acrobats."'8
This interpretation of carnival as insanity-where the fusing
strands of each type of heteroglottaldiscourse represent the madman's relivingof past events,emotions,lives, and dialogues-bodes
ill for recent popular culture. If the textual and nontextual heteroglossia of elements of today's popular cultural "novelness" and
dialogues--televisioncomedians, comedy shows, pop art, advertisements, films,and most of all magazines-is symptomaticof a carnivalesque madness, then that madness is accepted all over the
Westernworld as popular culture. If the interplaybetween official,
unofficial,academic, nonacademic, popular, parodic, journalistic,
artistic,vulgar,colloquial, and plentyof other formsof textual and
nontextual discourse is to be interpreted as symptomaticof the
hysteric'srevertive,transgressiverelivingof past and otherdialogues,
then the hysteriaof popular culture is a part of everydaylife. The
furthestextent of this argument is perhaps best illustratedby the
current debate over "fictionfactory"television,where fake footage
and false news reportshave been aired as real news. In one instance,
ABC staffmembers acted out a news story about a spy's alleged
dealings with Soviet agents, but "forgot"to label the footage as a
recreation. There is no distinctionto be made any more between
irony, pastiche, and fiction,on the one hand, and, on the other,
the realityit imitatesand mocks.

BAKHTIN
AND POPULAR
CULTURE
779
Popular Cultural Chronotopes

An article on the resurgentpopularityof the T-shirt in The Face
is accompanied by "artistic"photos of vague-looking models-and,
a few pages later, a nine-page photographic fashion supplement
featuressimilar images of slightlypuzzled, slightlyaloof "art" characters. The models chosen are always young and beautiful, the
writersaffecta youthfulidiom, the pop music featured is aimed at
the young, and played by young musicians. The filmsand books
reviewed are the latest hip releases, the outlandish clothes modeled
could be worn only by the young, the advertisements(for new bank
accounts, cosmetics, sound systemsand stereos, cigarettes,drink,
clothes,other stylemagazines) and notices (of forthcomingconcerts,
shows, new clubs, discos) are all aimed at an audience under thirty.
The Face seems permanentlysuspended in its own dream of youthtime, where the interestsand concerns of older and less chic generations (marriage, the family,jobs, health, finances,the home) are
featured only parodically,as subjects for comedy, and are otherwise
dismissed as of interest only to the readers of other, outmoded
or Vogue.
magazines like Cosmopolitan
This permanent existence in a vacuum of youth-timeresembles
a kind of generic whole which Bakhtin in his studies on the novel
refers to as the chronotope
(space-time: according to Bakhtin every
of
into
the
sphere
entry
meaning is accomplished only through the
of
the
chronotope). In the novel, the chronotope can take a
gates
of
forms-Bakhtin
mentions chronotopes of the road, the
variety
the
the
threshold,
castle,
familyidyll. The Face figures an eternal
of
of
chronotope
youth, youth adventure, the folkloricconception
of the idealized beginning,youth idyll with its magic costumes and
accoutrements-cosmetics, fashionable clothes, pop music, certain
brands of cigarettes,and so on. The youth idyll presented by The
Face is a characteristicof folklorictime charted against the background of the reader's own, contemporary perception of time.
Bakhtinpointsout in "Formsof Time and Chronotope in the Novel"
that our understanding of folklorictime is not a fact of primitive
man's consciousness, but rather something that must be adduced
from a study of objective material, since the chronotope is what
determines the unity of every motifand idea in a text, as well as
determiningthe logic by whichthese images unfold.The chronotope,
then, is artificial-the youthidyllof the stylemagazine, for example,
exhibitsno teenage suicide, no young people who are not beautiful,
no young classical artistsor musicians, no youthfuldepression or

780
NEW LITERARY
HISTORY
psychologicalbreakdown except when angst and neurosis are chic.

This filteringof momentsin chronotope,Hirschkopbelieves,takes
place not because all authors are necessarilyprejudiced, but because
"they must approach the object language with some task, project,
or aim in mind if speech is to exhibit its ideological structure"(I
23). The reasoning behind each motifof youthchronotope selected
for a style magazine article, pop song, or advertisement,then, is
connected to the capitalistnature of the marketin which these texts
are sold and the fact that they are almost universallyproduced as
commercial,consumerist,money-makingcommodities.
Text and Reality

And this is where any application of Bakhtinian analysis of the
carnivalesque to textual practices encounters a stumblingblock. So
far in this essay I have been referringto carnivalesque practicesin
text and in realityas realizing similar effects.However, the textual
carnival can never completelyrealize the dialogical strugglecurrent
in the social carnival. Although their effectsand implicationsmay
be similar,it will never be possible completelyto align the carnivalesque in text and the carnivalesque in performance,unless the
solitaryactivityof reading is regarded as a kind of performance.
However joyous and festivetheymay appear, commoditiesof the
textual carnivalesque-those artifactswhich emphasize words and
language rather than being and doing: the pop song, the advertisement,the magazine, the comic-are still no more than static
studies, inevitablyfar distanced from the active, nontextual,participatory reality of being and doing which they attempt to achieve
in print or on the screen. There is a vast differencebetween the
text which promotes the carnivalesque in linguisticterms,and the
actual carnival of being and doing itself (concert, festival,disco,
club, shopping, and so on). Clair Wills is hasty to criticizethe lack
of connections between the textual carnival and the carnivalesque
as a genuine social force. Similarly, Ann Jeffersonagrees that
authoring is by its very nature a decarnivalizingactivity,since the
authorial perspective and the demarcation between observer and
participantsare against the whole spiritof carnival.
So although Bakhtin's interpretationof what he refersto as "the
novel"-defined by a proclivityto display differentlanguages interpenetratingone another-allows examples of language outside
the bounds of what traditional scholars would think of as strictly
literary
history,such as pop lyricsand advertising,to be studied as

781
instancesof the languageuse he findsin heteroglottal

novelization,
the
of
the
despite
linguisticheteroglossia
stylemagazineand the
of
film
or pop record,no text
the
cinema
advertisement,
dialogism
can come closerto carnivalthanthe levelsof description,
imitation,
and representation.
There willalwaysbe some kind of dichotomy
discoursesofthetextand thesocialpower
betweenthecarnivalesque
for
of itsactualequivalent-thefestivals
at Woodstockor Altamont,
example,a Sex Pistolsgig or all-nightdisco,a consumerspree in
a giantshoppingmall,audienceparticipation
on a populartelevision
game show,the realitiesof being and doing.
it is important
to rememberBakhtin'swords:"great
Nevertheless,
novelisticimages continueto grow and develop even after the
momentof their creation;they are capable of being creatively
in different
transformed
eras, far distantfromthe day and hour
of theiroriginalbirth"(DN 422). Ratherthan simplysubscribing
Bakhtin
to the clicheof "different
times,different
interpretations,"
is suggestingthat the heteroglottal
novelizationof all language
in all dialogictexts,irrespective
of originand original
structures
purpose,allowsthemto be givennewrelevance,new meaning,new
interestas theyare subjected,like the textsused in thisstudy,to
new readingsand new analyses.
battleand playof different
It is thisindependent,
interdependent
levelsand layersof interested
dialoguethatgiveseverytexta variety
This qualityof inherentpolyof meanings,interpretations,
subtexts.
for
means
that
texts
produced
verydirectand immediate
glossia
of a Sex Pistolslyric
like
the
rebellion
and
purposes
outrageousness
of magazineslike The
or the hyped-up,overexposedcommercialism
Face can, in othertimesand contexts,come to assume a radically
differentmeaning.But theirmeaningis stilla textualmeaning,
theirdialogisma textualdialogism.In the place of the powerful,
social polyglossiaof the realcarnival,all we can observeinsteadis
the "lonelycarnivalof reading."19
ST. HUGH'S
COLLEGE
NOTES
I Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination,ed. and tr. Michael Holquist and
Caryl Emerson (Austin, Tex., 1981). In their glossary to The Dialogic Imagination,
Holquist and Emerson note that Bakhtin renders both polyglossiaand heteroglossia
I intend to
with the Russian word raznoreie,raznoreeivost'.
By the word heteroglossia,
referto what Holquist and Emerson describe in theirglossaryas "The base condition
governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the
primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be

782
NEW LITERARY
HISTORY
a set of conditions . . . that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that
time will have a meaning differentthan it would have under any other conditions"
(p. 428).
2 Mikhail M. Bakhtin,"Discourse in the Novel," in The DialogicImagination,p. 422;
hereaftercited in text as DN.
3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness,
tr. Hazel Barnes (London, 1957), pp.
373-74; cited by Ann Jefferson,"Bodymatters:Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre
ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd
and Barthes,"in Bakhtinand CulturalTheory,
(Manchester, 1989), p. 163.
4 See Michael Holquist's reference to Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel," in "Introduction"to The Dialogic Imagination,p. xix.
5 Ken Hirschkop, "Introduction: Bakhtin and Cultural Theory," in Bakhtinand
CulturalTheory,p. 11; hereaftercited in text as I.
6 Jim McClellan, rev. of Rosalie Goes Shopping,a filmby Percy Adlon, The Face, 16
(Jan. 1990), p. 22.
7 For some good examples of this type of language in recent literarytheory,see
Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern
Scene: Excremental
Cultureand HyperAesthetics
(New York, 1986) and Panic Encyclopaedia(London, 1989).
8 Jefferson,"Bodymatters,"p. 157.
9 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," in
The Dialogic Imagination,p. 170; hereaftercited in text as FT.
10 Terry Eagleton, "Bakhtin, Schopenhauer, Kundera," in Bakhtinand Cultural
Theory,p. 188.
11 Bakhtin,"From the Prehistoryof NovelisticDiscourse,"in TheDialogicImagination,
p. 57; hereaftercited in text as FPN.
12 Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination,p. 35.
13 See Dick Hebdige, Hiding in theLight:On Imagesand Things(New York, 1988),
p. 142.
14 The quotes "hyperconformistconsumer" and "shop-till-you-droppostmodern
American way" are in McClellan, rev. of Rosalie Goes Shopping,p. 22. "There is
nowhere left to go but to the shops" is a campaign slogan from the Situationiste
Internationale of the type cited in Greil Marcus, LipstickTraces:A SecretHistoryof
the Twentieth
Century(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), pp. 30-31.
15 Terry Eagleton, unpublished letterto the author.
16 Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel," p. 24.
17 Clair Wills, "Upsetting the Public: Carnival, Hysteria and Women's Texts," in
Bakhtinand CulturalTheory,p. 133; hereaftercited in text.
18 H'Zlne Cixous and Catherine Clement, The NewlyBorn Woman,tr. Betsy Wing
(Minneapolis, 1986), p. 7; quoted by Wills, p. 134.
19 Jefferson,"Bodymatters,"p. 174.


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