Chapter 11

Parody and Double-Voiced Discourse: On the

Language Philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin
Lars Kleberg

In his studies of literature and the philosophy of language Mikhail Bakhtin sees
parody not as a criticism of an original but a "dialogical" dimension in literature
closely related to intertextuality. The parody is not seen as a "form"; it is a function-
a relation between one text and another. All language is related to other language
and the deeper consequences of Bakhtin's thinking bring one face to face with the
impossibility of monological, monolithical approaches to literature and other human
expression - to all forms of culture. Man is characterized by ambivalence, dialogue
and multiplicity.

What is a parody? How do we recognize one? Let us listen to a voice of

authority, The Oxford Dictionary (second edition, 1989):
A composition in prose or verse in which the characteristic turns of thought and phrase in an
author or class of authors are imitated in such a way as to make them appear ridiculous,
especially by applying them to ludicrously inappropriate subjects; an imitation of a work more
or less closely modelled on the original, but so turned as to produce a ridiculous effect.

Classical examples of parody in accordance with this definition can be

found, for example, in Dwight Macdonald's anthology Parodies (London:
Faber & Faber 1960). Let us take a closer look at the following fragment:
Sunday is the dullest day, treating
Laughter as a profane sound, mixing
Worship and despair, killing
New thought with dead forms.
Weekdays give us hope, tempering
Work with reviving play, promising
A future life within this one.
Thirst overtook us, conjured up by Budweisserbrau
On a neon sign: we counted our dollar bills.
Then out into the night air, into Maloney's Bar,
And drank whiskey, and yarned by the hour.
Das Hcrz ist gcstorbcll, swell dame, echt Bronx. I
For the intended readers of this parody, there could be no doubt that the
target of the parody is the introduction to T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
96 Dialogue and Technology: Art and Knowledge

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dry tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Stambergsee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. 2

The text by "Myra Buttle" fits exactly into the traditional definition of
parody as a ridiculing imitation of the style of a work, through which the
latter's content is being degraded.
At the same time, there is something awkward about this definition of
parody. There are formal criteria that allow us to recognize a poem in iambic
pentameter, a tragedy or a short story. An advanced computer would
probably be able to classify texts in accordance with these criteria and
perhaps even generate such texts if it had a sufficiently detailed set of rules.
But how do we recognize a parody? It cannot be described independently or
classified as part of a group of similar texts, i.e. a genre. That is, it would of
course be possible to classify Sweeney in Articulo as a poem, in which case it
would fall into precisely the same category as The Waste Land. This would,
however, mean that the very quality we are attempting to delineate, the
quality of parody, would be lost. In this descriptive system, the parody is an
elusive shadow or a kind of "double" stalking a text or class of texts with
which it overlaps and yet from which it is distinguished. Without its pro-
totype The Waste Land, Sweeney ill Articulo ceases to be a parody. Thus when
we read it as a parody, i.e. in a meaningful way, we are reading not one
text, but two simultaneously.

Parody is therefore not a form, but rather a relation between one text and
another; it is a junctioll. It was thus described by the Russian formalists in
the 1920s with critics like Viktor Shklovsky and Yuri Tynyanov at the fore.
They paid a great deal of attention to the parody as a literary phenomenon
indicative of a crisis, symptomatic of the breakdown of an established formal
system, style or school. They studied parody as the lever in the process by
which a new stylistic development wrests the power from an old one. Take,
for example, the battle of the romanticists against the classicists. In the
parodies of the young romantics the forms of classicism were "laid bare",
shown to be cliches, and forced to abandon their hold on the centre of the
literary canon and retreat toward the peripheries (where they were, inciden-
tally, soon joined by the cliches of the romantics, when they were, in turn,
attacked by the next generation). The formalists drew attention to the func-
tion of the parody in the perpetual war being waged between old and new.
Yet while the formalists did make the parody visible, they also reduced it to
the rank of saboteur or private in the perpetual battle between old and new,
centre and periphery.
Parody has a very different status in the philosophy of literature and
language developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, a contemporary and fellow coun-
tryman of the formalists. To Bakhtin, the fact that when we read a text we are
actually dealing with two or more texts is not a quality peculiar to the parody,
Parady and Double-Voiced Discourse: On the Language Philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin 97

making it unique, or an elusive shadow or saboteur. Just the opposite.

Mikhail Bakhtin is generally considered the main source of inspiration for
contemporary research on intertextuality which, greatly oversimplified, con-
siders a work of literature not as one fixed point but as the juncture of
various contexts. Bakhtin spoke not of intertextuality, but of "dialogue" and
"dialogicity" .
For Bakhtin, as for Martin Buber, with whose work he was very familiar,
dialogue is a basic philosophical concept, in fact the fundamental concept. In
an essay on intertextuality and the concept of dialogue as it is used by Buber
and Bakhtin, the Swedish critic Mona Vincent writes:
How do they use dialogue in their theories of linguistic utterances?
They see language as the bearer of the experience of the subject and the relation between an
interpreting subject, and the world of phenomena is maintained. All reality is interpreted
reality. The subject endows the world with meaning while simultaneously being the source and
origin of all meaning. The units that structure a literary text are semantic units, in which every
utterance is directed and illil'lltiollally ddcrl11illcd J
I will now attempt to exemplify Bakhtin's view of language and then indi-
cate the ways in which this view leads to a conception of parody as central
to literature and even to culture in the wider sense of the term.
In his Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin gives a very simple example,
consisting of two sentences:
"Life I'; good" and "Life is good"
From the point of view of logic or grammar, these sentences are identical.
But if we assume that they are uttered by two different subjects, then we are
dealing with two different utterances: "Life is good" and "Life is good". To a
logician or grammarian, the sentence is identical with itself. But to a philo-
sopher or linguist who considers every utterance to be directed and inten-
tionally determined, as Mona Vincent says, these are two different utter-
ances in a dialogical relationship (provided they are uttered at the same
place and time). The second is a response to the first, a confirmation, a
query, or an ironic pique - depending on the intention underlying the two
utterances. In intentional space there is no repetition.
In order to become dialogical, according to Bakhtin, the logical and
semantic relationships pertaining in a given sentence "must be embodied,
that is, they must enter another sphere of existence", 4 become a dynamic
utterance giving expression to the position of its author. Bakhtin goes on to
state that there may be a dialogical relationship not only between utterances,
but also permeating any given utterance or even individual word "the
moment two voices meet there, in a microdialogue". 5
For an actor, of course, this is no news. Actors work continually with
words inhabited by various, often contradictory, intentions. On the other
hand, it has taken nearly fifty years for literary theory and linguistics to
realize the consequences of Bakhtin's concept of dialogue, presented in his
book on Dostoevsky in 1929. Yes, for literary theory and linguistics. Bakh-
tin's concept of dialogue is in no way limited to the smallest building blocks
of language:
dialogic relationships are also possible between language styles, social dialects, and so forth,
insofar as they are perceived as semantic positions, as language world views of a sort, that is, as
something no longer strictly within the realm of linguistic investigation."
98 Dialogue and Technology: Art and Knowledge

In his book on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin applies his theory of "dialogicity" to

literature, particularly the novel. Bakhtin asserts that in a novel there are
actually no monological, univocal words or utterances. Every utterance is
full of intentions: the words are "inhabited", they can hold other words,
they are words about words. Particularly important forms of intentional or
dialogical language are stylization, imitation of foreign styles, and polemical
stylization or parody.
Thus, in Bakhtin, a parody is not a particular kind of literary work, but
rather a mode in which the dialogical receives special emphasis. An indi-
vidual word, a phrase, an utterance, a character, a course of events or a
whole work may be guided by parodic intention. Later, in the context of his
1930s study Discourse ill the Novel, in which the ideas from his Dostoevsky
book are further pursued, Bakhtin says:
Except in those cases where it is grossly apparent, the presence of parody is in general very
difficult to identify (that is, difficult to identify precisely in literary prose, where it rarely is
gross), without knowing the background of alien discourse against which it is projected, that is,
without knowing its second context. In world literature there are probably many works whose
parodic nature we do not even suspect. In world literature in general there are probably very
few words that are uttered unconditionally, purely single-voiced. 7

Bakhtin deals with the tradition of the parodic novel beginning with Apu-
leius via Cervantes and Rabelais, Sterne and Diderot, Gogol and Dostoev-
sky, through to Thomas Mann in several contexts. In his book on Rabelais,
written in the 1930s but not published until 1965, he relates the parodic novel
to the popular carnival culture.
Bakhtin's book on Rabelais is a remarkable work, written in the midst of
the terrors of Stalinism as a celebration of laughter, the anarchy of the
popular festival, fun and games and blasphemy: creative chaos. It contained
a tremendous challenge to the monolithic, instinct-denying, totalitarian cul-
ture of Stalinism:
True ambivalence and universal laughter does not deny seriousness but purifies and completes
it. Laughter purifies from dogmatism, from the intolerant and the petrified; it liberates from
fanaticism and pedantry, from fear and intimidation, from didacticism, naivete and illusion,
from the single meaning, the single level, from sentimentality. Laughter does not permit
seriousness to atrophy and to be torn away from the one being, forever incomplete. It restores
this ambivalent wholeness'"
But above all, Bakhtin's book on Rabelais is a work with a revolutionary
theoretical value of its own. Not only because it places the works of Rabelais
into a tradition and a context of cultural history, showing the "dialogical"
nature that permeates individual words, phrases and images, but also and
primarily because it reconstructs the ambivalent nature of the carnival in a
way that has affected almost every work on popular culture written in the
last decade, in both east and west.
Let it suffice to cite one element of the Bakhtinian reconstruction: the
ambivalent nature of the carnivalesque culture. The fopperies of the carniv-
al, its grotesque practical jokes, its role-switching, are a celebration of death
and chaos that permits the reincarnation of life and cosmos. The ultimate
aim of the profanation of all that is sacred is to maintain the distinction
between the sacred and the profane, rather than to do away with it. A
culture requires this dynamism, the double modality. A culture which is
incapable of blasphemy is equally incapable of sanctity.
Parady and Double-Voiced Discourse: On the Language Philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin 99

In his book, Bakhtin shows that it is from this cultural ambivalence, this
double-voicedness, that the parodic novel has gleaned its nourishment,
from the ancient Greeks to modern times. Actually, Bakhtin does not deal
with twentieth-century literature, either in this book or elsewhere. There are
several explanations. The most obvious is that if Bakhtin had gone into the
literature of the twentieth century he would have had to deal explicitly, and
not only implicitly as he does, with Soviet literature and the exceptionally
monolithic and monological cultural model of socialist realism. It must be
kept in mind that although authors like Mikhail Bulgakov were Bakhtin's
contemporaries, Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, like Bakhtin's book on
Rabelais, was not published until twenty-five years after it was written.
Many of Bakhtin's followers have, however, dealt with contemporary
literature. One example is Bertel Pedersen, whose Parodiens teori 9 (The Theory
of Parody, carnivalesquely subtitled Teoriens parodi, The Parody of Theory),
anyone with an interest in the subject at hand has good reason to examine.
It is a work well deserving of translation for a wider audience.
Pedersen pursues intertextuality, showing how nearly every great con-
temporary work of literature, including Joyce's Ulysses, Mann's Doctor Faus-
tus, and Eliot's The Waste Land, not to mention the theatre of the absurd or
the works of Borges, Nabokov and Gombrowicz, are examples of parody in
the extended sense of the term in which Bakhtin uses it. According to
Pedersen, the mode of parody is the mode of modern literature, indeed of
modern times. And from behind this literature and this way of reading it,
Nietzsche, with his huge moustache, can be seen hovering with an awe-
some, bellowing laugh.
The reader of Pedersen's book may be tempted to wonder whether there
is any great work of contemporary literature, art, theatre or music that is not
parodic. It is evident that we have come a long way from the dictionary
definition of parody as a ridiculing imitation of a work by contrast between
high style and low contents. Instead, parody has become an ambivalent
mode, in which high and low are indissoluably united in dialogue, in which
we cannot have one without the other, and the only sure thing is that
tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin. The question that gains
increasing importance, then, is the question of context, of which perspective
we adopt.

Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher, has written a fable that may
be read as a comment on the critical situation which arises when anything
and everything may be a parody. 10 He tells us that in the country of Lailonia
there once lived a man named Ajio who discovered one day that he was
growing hunchbacked:
The hump, in the meantime, continued to grow, and it grew with increasing speed. The
various parts of the body which branched out of it were forming themselves more clearly and
beginning to take on definite shapes .... Hardly had there been time to look around before the
hump became a fully developed human figure. And this figure was simply a second Ajio, as
like the first as two peas in a pod. Apart from the fact that it was joined to the first Ajio's back,
they were identical. It also began at once to talk. 11

Yet this was not the worst of it. While the first Ajio was a quiet man of
integrity, his double was a cruel man who showered criticisms and curses
on everyone. And even worse: he claimed to be the real Ajio, and shouted
100 Dialogue and Technology: Art and Knowledge

at the gentle Ajio, crying: "Just look at that - the hump wants to be
human! ... Excise that hump before I burst with rage."
The physicians, who had long puzzled over the problem, had now made
up a hump powder which, if taken three times daily, would get rid of
humps in a matter of days. As the real, good Ajio wept silently, his malevo-
lent double got hold of the hump powder. The medicine did work, and soon
there was only one Ajio. Only Ajio's young son could see that what was left
was not his father but the cruel hump.
But the worst was yet to come. Cruel Ajio began to terrorize the inhabi-
tants of the town, accusing them of being hunchbacks or at least of being
humps, who had managed to do away with their human beings. He, Ajio,
was the only human being left. What happened then? Well, the people of
the town took to the hump powder, and in the wink of an eye they began to
become hunchbacked.
and by the time people had realized this, it was too late. Everyone had gown doppelganger-
humps, which, as in the case of Ajio, immediately began to insist, screaming loudly, that they
were the real people and the things on their backs mere humps.12

These humps were just as cruel, insolent and prone to yelling as Ajio. In the
end they declared that they had had enough of being hunchbacked and did
away with their human doubles by taking the hump powder.
This was how there came to be, in Lailonia, a town of humps where there
was not a single human being. The only one who refused was Ajio's little
son. He left town dreaming that he would return one day and give the
humps what they deserved. But, the story ends, he was full of grief.
Now isn't that an awful story? Doubles are upsetting, but doubles with no
originals are really far worse.

Let's return to the parody. Let us, in fact, return to the very word "parody".
It is, of course, a Greek word, as is dialogue, that double word. Para denotes
alongside, and ode denotes song: Song alongside, sidesong; on its own it
does not exist. It is the slave in the triumphal chariot, the fool in the funeral
train.
As we have seen, the Russian formalists thought of parody as a crisis
phenomenon, signalling the fact that a style or genre was being pushed out
of the centre of literary action. We often encounter the idea that parody is
generally a late-occurring phenomenon, a mode that builds on the loss of
innocence. A parody comes into being when it is no longer possible to be
serious; in some people's opinion it is even a phenomenon of decadence.
Marx writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that Hegel's
comment that all events in world history occur, so to speak, twice, required
the following detailed explanation: "the first time as tragedy, the second
time as farce". We might also say: "the first time as tragedy, the second time
as parody". Milan Kundera seems to be an author virtually possessed with
this thought. All his protagonists are driven by the idea of revenging a
tragedy in their lives. Yet they always fail. The joke they would like to play
on history always backfires on them; the tragedy is repeated as a farce. The
gods or God has abandoned them.
This, according to Kundera, is also how the parodic novel arose, a tradi-
tion in which he is deeply rooted and of which he considers himself the
Parady and Double-Voiced Discourse: On the Language Philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin 101

ultimate defender. For Kundera the contemporary parodic novel begins with
Cervantes' Don Quixote, in which the crusade from the courtly tradition is
"repeated as a farce" under the silent sky of the new age:
As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had controlled the universe and its order of
values, told good from evil, and given a sense to each thing, then Don Quixote came out of his
mansion and was no longer able to recognize the world. In the absence of the supreme arbiter,
the world suddenly acquired a fearsome ambiguity. The single divine truth decomposed into
myriad relative truths shared among men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and
with it the novel - the image and model of that world - sprang to life.1J

Kundera celebrates the novel but is still longing to see a new beginning. Not
only his protagonists, but he himself appears to be battling with the dream
of being able to vanquish history. But the tragedy just keeps repeating itself
as a farce. And when the farce repeats itself, the vacuum appears, a gaping
abyss. The other side of that coin is nostalgia, the dream of the return of the
pastoral state of innocence.
In actual fact, though, the farce is just as old as the tragedy. At the theatre
in Athens, a satyric drama was performed after the three tragedies. The
parody is not an effort to reconcile man with the loss of the sacrosanct, not
solace for the death of the gods, but rather a prerequisite for solemnity.
Shakespeare does not "mix" the comic and the tragic. The comic and the
tragic were both there from the beginning, as two sides of the same coin, as
the two aspects of dialogue.
Mikhail Bakhtin shows that every culture, every language presupposes
this double modality, the ability to translate the comic into the tragic and
vice versa. In this perspective parody is neither a marginal phenomenon,
nor a late one. Parody is the retention of the double modality, the modality
which cannot be translated into an unambiguous language in which "life is
good" and "life is good" mean one and the same thing.

Notes
1 "Myra Buttle" (1960) Swee/ley ill Articulo. In: Macdonald 0 (ed) Parodies. Faber & Faber,
London, pp 219-220.
·2 Eliot TS, Collected Poems 1909-1935. Faber & Faber, London, 1951, p 6l.
3 Olsson, Anders and Vincent, Mona (1984) "Intertextualitet - mote mellan texter". Ball/lias
lilleriira magasill no. 4.
4 Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's porlics, ed and transl Caryl Emerson. Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, p 184.
5 ibid.

6 ibid.
7 Bakhtin MM (1981) The dialogical imagillatioll. Four essays, Holquist, Michael (ed), transl Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, Austin, p 374. (The translation has
been slightly amended here - L.K.)

8 Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabe/ais alld his wor/d, transl Helene Iswolsky. Indiana University
Press, Bloomington, p 123.
9 Pedersen, Bertel (1976) Parodiells teori. Berlingske, Copenhagen.
102 Dialogue and Technology: Art and Knowledge

10 Kolakowski, Leszek (1989) Tales from the killgdom of Lailollia mid the key to heavell. University of
Chicago Press, Chicago.
11 Op cit, P 19.
12 Op cit, P 17.
13 Kundera, Milan (1984) "The novel and europe". New York Review of Books, 19 July, P 15.

Translated by Hiikan Lovgren