Bakhtin, Joyce, and carnival: towards the synthesis of epic and novel in "Rabelais"

Author(s): GALIN TIHANOV

Source: Paragraph , March 2001, Vol. 24, No. 1 (March 2001), pp. 66-83
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43263621

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43263621?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Paragraph

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Bakhtin, Joyce, and carnival: towards
the synthesis of epic and novel in
Rabelais

In this article I explore an alternative line of Bakhtin's theory of the

novel. As I will be concerned to demonstrate, Bakhtin's book on
Rabelais, which had been intermittently occupying him for almost
thirty years from the mid-1930s until 1965, offers a view of the novel
that goes against the grain of Bakhtin's own mainstream fashion of
theorising the genre in stark opposition to the epic. In carnival, I
argue in this text, epic and novel are posed as complementary rather
than as mutually exclusive entities. The balance of epic and novel,
I claim in a second step, was an occurrence that Bakhtin was able
to discern in the literature of his own time, Joyce's Ulysses being a
particularly significant exponent of this trend. Therefore in the final
part of this essay I briefly trace, on the basis of recendy published
texts in Russian, Bakhtin's reactions to Joyce and then conclude with
remarks on the significance of Bakhtin's Rabelais book for his own
evolution as a thinker.
By way of introduction, let us consider two significant and indis-
putable facts of Bakhtin's intellectual career. The first one is that in
the first 10 years after the publication of his debut article 'Art and
Answerability' in 1919, he did not write anything on the novel. The
second one is that in the last 10 years after the publication of Rabelais
in 1965, he remained equally silent about the novel and the novelistic.
Are we then not to conclude that his theory of the novel is only the
result of other anxieties, which, before being sufficiendy rationalized,
could not yield a theoretical discourse on the novel, nor could they
do so once they were felt to be resolved?
In an earlier text I have argued that the perpetuum mobile of Bakhtin's
writings, the thread that holds together his early and mature texts, is
the fundamental problem of the relations between culture, form, and
life.1 Simmel, undoubtedly, emerges as the supreme Master of Bakhtin
and his generation of philosophers of culture: Lukács, Bloch, to a great
extent also Benjamin. I have also suggested that the point where this
problem finds a solution is reached in the book on Rabelais. There
Bakhtin is adamant to suggest that culture can flow unhampered from

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 67

life. Laughter is seen in Rabelais, one would remember, as the desired

coincidence of body and spirit, of culture and life. But in Rabelais, I
wish to argue in this article, we witness another synthesis as well: the
synthesis of epic and novel which completely exhausts the potential
for theorizing the genre of the novel and thus seems to close for
Bakhtin the field of genre theory for the remainder of his life.
I start by placing the issue of epic and novel in its natural
context - that of Bakhtin's reflections on genre. The opposition
between epic and novel is a late occurrence in Bakhtin's intellectual
career, simply because throughout the first decade of his intellectual
life, which was spent to a considerable extent under the sign of neo-
Kantian ideas, Bakhtin regarded the problem of genre as aesthetically
irrelevant. This was the case largely due to the fact that genre was
supplanted in his early writings by a broader notion of form. Bakhtin's
central text on aesthetics, 'The Problem of Content, Material, and
Form' (PCMF),2 for all its similarities with his other significant text of
the 1920s, 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity' (AH),3 introduces
a sharp dualism (of a neo-Kantian and phenomenological brand) into
his ideas about form, which cannot be found in the more integrated
and ethical approach to form in 'Author and Hero'.4 This dualism
is predicated on the differentiation between aesthetic activity as such
and the work of art. The essence of aesthetic activity is contemplation
'directed toward a work' (PCMF, 267). The work of art, then, is only
an external materialization of the intentionality of aesthetic contem-
plation. Process and result are thus divorced from one another, and the
work of art is implicidy inferior to the activity which generates it. The
division is reinforced by the use of two different terms ('architectonics'
and 'composition'), of which the first denotes the structure of the
content of aesthetic activity per se, whereas the second serves to address
the structure of the work of art as the actualization of aesthetic activity
(PCMF, 267). Hence Bakhtin's discontent with 'material aesthetics':

There is in the works of material aesthetics an inescapable and constant confusion

of architectonic and compositional forms, so that the former are never clarified in
principle or defined with precision, and are undervalued (PCMF, 268). 5

The outcome of this division is surprising for those wont to see in

Bakhtin the great theoretician of genre and the novel. Genre is reduced
to an external compositional form (PCMF, 269). Unlike architectonic
forms, which are 'forms of the inner and bodily value of aesthetic
man', compositional forms have an 'implementai' character and are

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
68 Paragraph

'subject to a purely technical evaluation: to what extent have they

adequately fulfilled their architectonic task?' (PCMF, 270). Drama,
for example, is a compositional form, while the forms of aesthetic
consummation are the tragic and the comic (PCMF, 269). The novel
does not enjoy a higher status either:

The novel is a purely compositional form of the organization of verbal masses;

through it, the architectonic form of the artistic consummation of a historical or
social event is realized. It is a variety of the form of epic consummation (PCMF,
269).

We can observe in this passage a dramatic devaluation of genre,

and, consequently, a refusal to draw a clear line of demarcation
between the novel and the epic.6 Like Lukács, who in his Theory of
the Novel considers the novel a generically distinct but weak link in
the great chain of the epic tradition, Bakhtin seeks to accommodate
the novelistic within the epic. Following his dismissal of genre as a
secondary compositional form, he goes even further than Lukács in
this direction by demonstrating a complete lack of interest in the
generic specifica of the novel.7
Thus throughout Bakhtin's early intellectual career, epic and novel,
rather than being contrasted, are reconciled as narrative forms of the
epic tradition. This subsumption of the novel under the umbrella
notion of the epic can be argued to have been the result - at least in
part - of Bakhtin's serious acquaintance with the work of Friedrich
Schlegel.8 Although the impact of the German Romantics remains
strong in Bakhtin's later work, especially in the essays on the novel
(1935-41), the overall climate of discussion changes, with Lukács
gradually emerging as one of the most significant players on the
Moscow theoretical scene.9 Lukács insisted that epic and novel be
viewed in opposition and dialectical sublation. The novel cancels the
epic in the age of capitalism and becomes the representative genre
of what Lukács, borrowing from Fichte, called in his Theory of the
Novel the epoch of 'absolute sinfulness'; with the destruction of the
capitalist mode of production and the transition to communism, the
epic overthrows the novel and is fully restored in its rights. It is against
this understanding of the two forms that Bakhtin seeks to emancipate
himself as a theorist of the novel in the 1930s. While he succeeds in
overturning the balance of epic and novel in favour of the novel, he
nevertheless remains caught in the framework of binary opposition set
up by Lukács. Bakhtin's essay 'Epic and Novel' is the most striking
evidence of his changing stance: from a reconciliation of epic and

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 69

novel in his early work (and also in the essay on the Bildungsroman) to
their rigid juxtaposition in the 1930s.
Thus it would be fair to say that the confrontation of epic and novel
is indeed a late phenomenon in Bakhtin's intellectual career. Hence,
the enterprise of seeing in Bakhtin's book on Rabelais an attempt at a
theoretical synthesis of epic and novel is substantiated with reference
to his texts of the 1920s and the study of the Bildungsroman in that it
clearly demonstrates continuity with these texts. In the remaining part
of this article I analyse Bakhtin's Rabelais from the point of view of
the reconciliation of epic and novel and I also briefly discuss Bakhtin's
engagement with Joyce and Ulysses in the light of the suggested
synthesis of epic and novel.
The sharp contrast between epic and novel established in Bakhtin's
essays of the 1930s has long provoked scepticism. To start with,
Bakhtin's notion of epic was found by some commentators deficient
and impoverished in that it does not discuss in detail any specific
examples. Bakhtin cites only textbook cases like Homer's Iliad or
Dante's Divine Comedy ,10 but he does not engage in analyzing later
epic writing that could compromise its neat separation from the genre
of the novel. On examining closely the importance of chronotope in
Bakhtin's definition of genre, Rachel Falconer has concluded that a
contingent relation obtains between epic, novel, and romance. The
novel, therefore, should not be regarded as a singular phenomenon.
Falconer endorses this conclusion with an analysis of the aspect of
'becoming' and subversion in epic with particular reference to Iliad
and Aeneid. Homeric time is, pace Bakhtin, fragmented in itself, while
the mediation between past and present is a distinguishing feature of
Roman epic.11
A more speculative, if also deeper running, disagreement with
Bakhtin's rigid juxtaposition of epic and novel can be discerned in
Franco Moretti's influential account of the ideology of the modern
European novel. Moretti examines Bakhtin's opposition of epic
monologism versus novelistic polyphony to conclude that 'up to
the eighteenth century, this is a convincing counterposition. But then
things change, and literary evolution seems precisely to refute it.'12
Moretti, in what could be seen to be an ambitious move designed
to set him apart from the too straightforward Hegelian-Lukácsian
veneration of the novel as the emblematic genre of capitalist moder-
nity, argues that over time the novel ceased to represent variety and
polycentrism and was supplanted in this capacity by the genre of the
modern epic. The nineteenth-century novel, for example, instead of

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
70 Paragraph

standing for the centrifugal drives promoting locality and difference,

becomes increasingly expressive of the processes of centralization
characteristic of the bourgeois nation-state. Ousted from the novel,
the impulses of decentralization find refuge in the polyphonic form of
the modern epic, whose canon comprises Goethe's Faust and Joyce's
Ulysses. Attractive as it is, Moretti's criticism can be perceived to rest
on a somewhat inflexible notion of the novel which takes it to be
lawfully represented by the nineteenth-century English and French
realist narrative but not by complex mutants such as Joyce's work.
Ultimately, Moretti seems to be productively challenging Bakhtin not
on Bakhtin's own ground. While Bakhtin's vision of Dostoevsky's
polyphonic novel is inspired above all by a consideration of the
presumed poetological novelty of his prose, Moretti's claims remain
informed by a much more direct expressivist assumption about the
correlation of artistic and political regimes: 'Against the Bakhtinian
idea of a natural alliance between polyphony and democracy (...)
the advent of the latter encouraged monologic tendencies: a common
culture, not innumerable different cultures.
Problematic though it may be, Moretti's criticism alerts us to the
need of rethinking the opposition between epic and novel along the
intersecting lines of poetics and ideology. Long before him, attempts
had been made to view both genres as inherendy connected, if
opposed. A classic example comes, as I have suggested earlier, from
Lukács's Theory of the Novel (TN), where Dostoevsky is projected
as an author who lingers profitably on the threshold of novel and
epic. When first publishing the essay in 1916 in journal form, Lukács
appended an introductory note (dropped in the 1920 book edition)
stating that 'the following presentation was written as an introduc-
tory chapter to an aesthetic and historico-philosophical work about
Dostoevsky'. In the same prefatory note Dostoevsky is introduced 'as
the herald of a new man, the portrayer of a new world, someone who
finds but also retrieves a new-old form ( als Finder und als Wiederfinder
einer neu-alten Forni)'.14 This 'new-old form', as The Theory of the
Novel argues, is the genre of the epic. The novel - one should
remember - is the form of the epoch of 'absolute sinfulness', and 'it
must remain the dominant form so long as the world is ruled by the
same stars' (TN, 152). A world that could 'spread out into a totality,
would be completely inaccessible to the categories of the novel and
would require a new form of artistic creation: the form of the renewed
epic' (TN, 152). The state of the epic as a 'new-old form' occasions
an overall uncertainty as to whether Dostoevsky's work should be

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 71

regarded as 'merely a beginning or already a completion' (TN, 153).

If he 'did not write novels' (TN, 152), it was only because the novel
itself was seen by Lukács to exhaust itself and to flow organically into
the renewed form of the epic that was bound to come as a sublation
of the no velis tic.
Lukács's hope that the novel can be dialectically transcended and
succeeded by a new epic has been, however, seen as naive and even
misleading. Theodor Adorno, in a piece written at the time Bakhtin
was revising his dissertation on Rabelais for book publication, argues
that the 'unfettered subjectivity' ( entfesselte Subjektivität) of the modern
novel flows over in a state in which the individual cancels itself and
encounters the pre-individual. This makes the modern novel resemble
a 'negative epic '. Thus the modern epic form, which Lukács was so
eager to see evolve from the novel, cannot convey freedom and
enlightened collectivity; rather, it stands for the debasing condition of
dehumanised mass existence.
If we now turn to Bakhtin, we shall notice that he, too, seems to
have captured in his theorising the condition of the pre-individual that
motivated Adorno's criticism of Lukács. Despite his attempts to find
examples of the return of the epic in the literature of his own time,
Bakhtin decided to look back to the juncture where High Middle
Ages and Renaissance intersect. Even a relatively recent example,
that of Gogol's Dead Souls, is found deficient by Bakhtin. Gogol's
attempt to combine epic and novelistic genres failed because the
'distanced images of the epic and images of familiar contact can never
meet on the same field of representation', and so Gogol - Bakhtin
charges - 'got muddled somewhere between memory and familiar
contact'.16 Rather than serving as a model of an organic synthesis of
epic and novel, Dead Souls is thought by Bakhtin as an illustration of
incongruent cohabitance of elements of either genre.17
Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel provide Bakhtin with a better
and more suitable example. In carnival, Bakhtin believes, the memory
of the 'body of the species' ( rodovoe telo) and the familiar contact of
human bodies are not opposed to one another. I submit here that
Bakhtin recognized in Rabelais's text a synthesis of the novelistic and
the epic, which in his theoretical essays on the novel he deemed
impossible; the epic made its return in Rabelais simultaneously with its
expulsion and castigation in Bakhtin's essay 'Epic and Novel'. But by
now we have sufficient evidence of Bakhtin being perfectly capable
of holding different, and even contradictory, views at the same stage
of his evolution as a thinker. Suffice it to point to his notions of

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
72 Paragraph

collective and/versus individual identity championed in Rabelais and

in the essay on the Bildungsroman, respectively.18 Yet before I move
to a closer analysis of Bakhtin's Rabelais book from the perspective of
the synthesis of epic and novel, let me first briefly revisit Bakhtin's
own criteria of epicness, which, as we have demonstrated, have been
felt by some commentators to be underlying too rigid an idea of the
epic.
Four features of the epic, despite some inevitable overlap ensuing
from Bakhtin's rhetoric of repetitiveness and modulation, can be
gathered with certainty from the 'Epic and Novel' essay:19
1. The subject of the epic is the heroic national past; epic time (the
national past) is severed from anything after it, particularly from the
time in which the 'singer and his listeners' are active (EN, 16). The
past is valorized and cannot be approached with criticism or doubt.
The epic hero is an epitome of distance and an object of veneration.
2. The source of the epic is the 'national tradition' (predarne) rather
than the personal experience of the self. Epic relies on an exclusively
'impersonal and sacrosanct tradition'.
3. Epic subsists on a type of 'memory' that is markedly different
from the deheroizing personal memory of autobiography and memoir
or from novelistic 'memory', which will comprise only a single human
life: 'there are no fathers or generations' (EN, 24, n. 2) in this latter
treatment of memory, or if there are, they are rivals rather than a
harmonious kindred tied together by a totemic veneration of the
predecessors.
4. The content-related element of distance in the epic, based as
it is on the preponderance of past events that are well known to
the audience, means that it is impossible for the listener/reader to
become genuinely interested in the plot of the epic. The epic audience
treasures repetition and familiarity over surprise and novelty.
How does Bakhtin's book on Rabelais relate to these criteria?
In what follows, I argue that Bakhtin's interpretation of carnival in
Rabelais acts in a two-fold manner: while strengthening the presumed
(and at times even overtly voiced) correspondence between carnival
and novel as promoters of freedom born in the experience of cultural
interaction, it also erodes the features of the novelistic and restores epic
collectivity as an essential constituent of the continuum between the
epic and the novelistic as primordial cultural principles. The idea of
carnival in Bakhtin's Rabelais reshapes the relations of epic and novel
from mutual animosity and exclusion into serene complementarity.
To lend support to this claim, I will re-examine in a four-step analysis

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 73

Bakhtin's criteria of epic in their confrontation with the idea of

carnival. But I shall first briefly dwell on the point of convergence
between carnival and novel.
Like the novel, carnival is expanded in Bakhtin's Rabelais to shed its
rigid identity as a particular cultural form and to become the epitome
of ramified social practices, of culture as such. It is declared to be the
point at which all impulses of popular energy flow together, much
like the novel which accommodates the roaming power of the word:

This process of bringing together under the rubric of 'carnival' heterogeneous

local phenomena and of unifying them in a single concept corresponded to a
process taking place in life itself; the various forms of folk celebration, as they were
dying or degenerating, transmitted some of their traits ( momentov ) to carnival:
rituals, paraphernalia, images, masques. (. . .) [C] arni val became the reservoir
into which the forms of folk celebration, which ceased to exist on their own,
emptied.20

Moreover, carnival is endowed with the same colonizing force as the

novel. Not unlike the novel which tends to novelize all other genres
(precisely because it is thought of as something more than genre),
carnival does not get on well with other forms of popular culture:
'when carnival flourished (...) and became the centre of all popular
forms of amusement, it weakened all the other feasts to some extent
by depriving them of almost every free and Utopian folk element. All
other feasts fade when placed alongside carnival' (R, 220). 21
We thus arrive at the conclusion that the novel and carnival function
in the same way in Bakhtin's theoretical discourse. They absorb
previous historical experience and sublate genres and cultural forms
that otherwise cannot obtain, or are doomed to lose, independence.
By retaining the features of past forms on a higher level, the novel and
carnival, Bakhtin believes, become the embodiment of a new stage in
the development of consciousness.
Having drawn attention to the points of convergence between
carnival and novel, we can now proceed to examine the aspects of
their divergence in Bakhtin's book on Rabelais. To do so, we need
to revisit Bakhtin's criteria of epicness in their relation to the concept
of carnival articulated in Rabelais.
The first criterion of epicness, as we have seen, addresses the status
of the hero as an epitome of distance and an object of veneration.
In 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel' (FTCN),
Bakhtin asserts that both Homer and Rabelais build their worlds upon
'the immanent unity of folkloric time', which, moreover, is 'not yet

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
74 Paragraph

defined against the backdrop of another and fallen time' (FTCN,

218). Extending the idea of a common ground embodied in the
folkloric chronotope of Homer and Rabelais, Bakhtin further refers
to Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel to label them 'fundamentally
folkloric kings and giants -bogatyri'. He regards them as a sublimated
version of the great heroes of the Homeric epic, about which Hegel
says in his lectures on aesthetics that they were selected as heroes
' not because of any sense of superiority, but because of their absolute
freedom of will and the creativity they demonstrate in establishing
their kingdoms' (FTCN, 241, my emphasis). Thus Bakhtin abandons
the principle of superiority and the ensuing necessity for the hero
to be venerated by the listener/reader; instead, Bakhtin arrives at the
conclusion that 'the great man' in Rabelais is 'profoundly democratic',
'an ordinary man raised to a higher power'. Rabelais, in other words,
supplies the everyday copy of the epic hero. The novelistic (the idea
of the 'profoundly democratic' nature of the hero, of his heroism
being clad in everyday dress) and the epic (the retention of the idea of
a 'higher power' that confirms the hero in his status of exceptionality)
seem thus to be joining forces to produce a contradictory image of
Rabelais's characters. Neither exclusively novelistic nor exclusively
epic, they are both at the same time and at all times, a desired synthesis
of principles which Bakhtin himself in the 'Epic and Novel' essay
tends to see as opposed to one another beyond reconciliation.
The second criterion brings to the fore the fact that epic depends on
a 'national tradition' which is always 'impersonal and sacrosanct'. But
so does carnival, where the forms of experience are utterly impersonal,
while - at the same time - being far from sacrosanct. Bakhtin's vision
of carnival in Rabelais, then, spells out the contours of this very same
unity of epic and novel, which remains unfeasible in his essays on the
novel.
The substratum of these forms of experience which synthesize the
impersonal (as in the epic lore) and the irreverent (as in the novel)
is sought by Bakhtin in what he calls the collective body of the
people. In his early treatise 'Author and Hero', Bakhtin had analysed
the individual human body, the body of a certain 'I'. While the
'Author and Hero' essay sought to outline the boundaries of this
individual body, in the 1930s Bakhtin turned to a different idea of the
human body. He arrived at it not without the impact of contemporary
physiology and biology exercised through Ukhtomskii's lectures and
his friendship with Ivan Kanaev. In Rabelais Bakhtin is already busy

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 75

analyzing the collective body, whose identity is shaped not by drawing

a boundary between the self and the other, but in an experience of
trangressive togetherness. This collective body denies the value of the
individual appropriation of the world. Its overwhelming collectivity
rests on its 'non-classic' constitution; it is grotesque in the sense of
not knowing beginning or end, exterior and interior, depths and
shallows. All this makes the grotesque body insusceptible to the grand,
the historically intransient, and the monotonously 'serious'. Hence
its aversion to the pious cast of mind and to the acts of veneration
reproduced in the bosom of a 'sacrosanct' tradition is paradoxically
welded to an organic mistrust of individual forms of experiencing the
world.
The third characteristic of the epic, not unlike the one discussed
above, emphasizes the close connection between epic and 'collective
memory'. This 'collective memory' is capable of working across
generations; it is not confined to a single human life and, unlike
the 'personal' memory of the novel, it captures in its folds the
unadulteratedly heroic aspects of the characters' careers. One would
expect Rabelais's book to be treated by Bakhtin as a model for
the individualistic and 'deheroizing' memory of the novel which
opposes the collective culture of remembrance. However, we are
confronted in Bakhtin's interpretation with what he terms the memory
of the 'body of the human species' ( rodovoe telo chelovechestva), the
protoimage of which ought to be sought in Bergson's Matter and
Memory. The body of the humankind, a Hegelian extension of the
communal body of the people, is shown by Bakhtin to grow in
strength by suppressing and expelling through laughter its 'obscure
memory of cosmic perturbations in the distant past'.23 The capacity
of boundless memory is a distinctive attribute of the 'body of the
species'; this memory processes the menacing events of the deepest
past into a joyful celebration of resilience and longevity, without
any reference whatsoever to individual existence. Thus the body in
Bakhtin's Rabelais is poised between the process of materialization
(objectification) in self-sufficient acts of abundantly physical character
and the condition of an abstract identity which is revelatory of powers
of a higher order: limitless memory and 'courage' in the face of nature
and death, epic immortality, and endless regeneration. The concept
of the body proves, then, to be endowed with two different meanings
by Bakhtin: the first one represents its verifiable physicality; the other
one looks out over a state of collectivity where the bodily eventually

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
76 Paragraph

comes to represent the spiritual in the guise of an all-encompassing

memory and inextinguishable valour.
Finally, the fourth criterion of epicness discards the possibility that
the epic plot may arouse interest in its own terms. Based on repetition
and formulaic accounts of the past, the epic remains in the grip of the
familiar and the predictable. It lacks the open vistas of the novelistic,
where, Bakhtin asserts (following Friedrich Schlegel and Lukács),
everything is in the process of becoming.
Yet carnival in Rabelais can be argued to be a converted version
of the epic - in a perhaps not readily recognizable but nevertheless
legible form - and thus to preserve some of its features, including
the preference for a plot that seeks support in the repetitive and the
familiar. The viewer of carnival cannot be devotedly interested in
what happens in the carnival procession, for the actions performed
there are not those of individual will or destiny, but rather those of
indiscernible collective experience. That is to say, our interest in the
practices of carnival as described by Bakhtin is of a different nature: not
an interest in novelistic plot or novelness (what one may have expected
to attract Bakhtin to Rabelais's book), but rather an interest in what
appears to reconcile flamboyant statements of extraordinariness with a
prevailing framework of ritual repetitiveness. The excesses of carnival
make it unapproachable from a spectatorial stance, because carnival, as
well as the other festive practices analysed by Bakhtin, obliterates the
boundary between viewer and participant. Referring to the wedding
feast as a carnivalesque event, Bakhtin asserts: 'during that period
there are no footlights, no separation of participant and spectators.
Everybody participates' (R, 265). 24 Hence it proves impossible to
generate and sustain an interest in the 'plot' and the 'narrative' novelty
of carnival, for this would have amounted to the adoption of a point
of view that invites appreciation based on the position of outsideness
championed in Bakhtin's early 'Author and Hero' essay but vigorously
denied in Rabelais.
In the light of the fading opposition between epic and novel in
Rabelais, argued for in the revision of Bakhtin's criteria of epicness,
there is one particular function of the human body, and at the same
time a vital aspect of culture, - laughter - that needs to be examined
in order to reveal Bakhtin's transformation of novelistic attitudes
into epic reactions to the world in Rabelais. Bakhtin inherits two
European traditions in theorising laughter: the neo-Kantian and that
of vitalism and philosophy-of-life. The views of Bergson were of
special importance to him. For Bergson, laughter is the 'corrective' of

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 77

automatism and mechanization; it helps society to get rid of rigidity

'in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of
elasticity and sociability'.25 Implicitly evoking the theory of laughter
as a means of struggle and browbeating in disputation, Bergson arrives
at a conclusion that is not far from Hobbes's: 'Its function is to
intimidate by humiliating' (L, 188). Bakhtin is indebted to Bergson
for the notion of laughter as 'social gesture' (L, 73), which alway
originates in a group. However spontaneous it might seem, Bergson
stresses that 'laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry,
or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary' (L, 64).
Bakhtin's notion of laughter radicalizes this idea: for him laughte
originates in the opposition of groups representing popular culture
in its clash with official ideology; but laughter is soon to shed this
identity and become social and collective to the point of transcending
all group divisions. In Rabelais, laughter tends to be thought more as the
emblem of the united body of the people, the cohesive bond between
various layers of society than as a dividing practice. Everyone laughs
in carnival to ridicule the otherwise all too serious style of practical
everyday life. From a group phenomenon called to rectify the faults
of other groups, laughter is transformed into a collective power tha
emanates from the whole of the people's body and spreads throughout
the universe. Thus we see how instead of being drawn upon as a
mechanism of constructing group/class differences, which would
constitute the pith of the novelistic, laughter in Rabelais is redefined
as an epic device that eradicates individual or group dissimilarities
Small wonder, then, that Bakhtin, effacing the difference between
epic and novel, reproaches Hugo for 'never understanding the epi
quality ( epichnosť ) of Rabelaisian laughter' (R, 128).
The rapprochement of epic and novelistic, the case for which we
find subterraneously yet vigorously made in Rabelais, was above all
a trend of Bakhtin's contemporary culture noticed, as we have seen,
by Lukács and Adorno, among others. Joyce's Ulysses is a particularly
visible embodiment of this trend, and it should come as no surprise
that over the last fifteen years a growing industry has been busy estab-
lishing links between Bakhtin and Joyce. As late as 1989 R.B. Kershner
anxiously points to Joyce as a 'striking absence in Bakhtin's work'26 only
to conclude that despite the lack of references to Joy ce in Bakhtin's work
the two emerge from the test of history as kindred spirits. Even mor
to the point, Clark and Holquist, the first biographers of Bakhtin, draw
attention to the unexpected - and for them illogical - fact of Bakhtin
remaining silent about Joyce's Ulysses in Rabelais :

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
78 Paragraph
One of the many enigmas about Bakhtin is that he makes no mention in Rabelais
of James Joyce's Ulysses, a book that might be described as a celebration of
heteroglossia and of the body as well. This is especially surprising since Joyce was
known to several of Bakhtin's associates. Pumpiansky was at work on a book on
Joyce in 1932, and V.O. Stenich (. . .) translated Joyce. (. . .) [But as] of at least
the First Writers' Congress in 1934, Ulysses could no longer be praised in print,
and this was still true in 1965 when [Bakhtin's] dissertation was published as a
book. Thus, Bakhtin effectively had two choices as regards Joyce, to attack him
or not to mention him.27

The picture of the Russian reception of Ulysses in the 1930s- 1940s has
been amplified and somewhat modified over the fifteen years since
the publication of Clark and Holquist's book. Portions of the novel
were published in Russian translation between 1925 and 1936, 28
and articles on Joyce, though at best mixing relentless criticism with
cautious recognition of Joyce's significance for 'bourgeois literature',
kept appearing in the Soviet Union until 1941. Recent publications
of Bakhtin's work have also corrected the notion of Joyce's total
absence from Bakhtin's writings.29 In the late 1930s, Joyce features
in an entry in one of Bakhtin's working notebooks on the theory
of the novel, and he is also mentioned in the 1940 text of Rabelais,
which Bakhtin submitted as a doctoral dissertation but later had to
modify under duress. The new version of 1949/50, just like the 1965
published text, no longer contained a reference to Joyce.30 More
importantly, in a text on Flaubert, dated by its editors 1944-45
and first published in 1996, Bakhtin speaks of two main lines in
the evolution of the European novel - 'the Hne of Proust, and
especially Joyce, and the line of the great Russian novel, of Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky'31 - granting their highest achievements equal value.
Bakhtin's inclination to find in Flaubert the germs of either tradition
echoes the connections between Flaubert and Joyce established by
influential Soviet critics, notably Count Sviatopolk-Mirskii,32 in the
1930s. However, while Mirskii sees in Flaubert the progenitor of
European decadence, whose peak is to be located in Joyce's novels,
Bakhtin seems to deliver Joyce from associations binding him to
the decadent and the historically retrograde. By praising together
Proust and Joyce, Bakhtin also replies, albeit belatedly, to Lukács's
accusations that Proust and Joyce are exponents of the 'decomposition
of all content and all form in the novel.'33 Lukács, one would
remember, was a major player on the Moscow critical scene in the
1930s and Bakhtin had several occasions to engage, without explicitly
mentioning Lukács's name, with his work on the novel.34 Unlike the

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 79

text of 1944-45, however, Joyce resurfaces in Bakhtin's lectures on

West European literatures of 1958-59 in a less favourable and more
dogmatic light. Addressing an undergraduate audience under stringent
ideological control, he may have felt compelled to simplify his view
on the subject and this may well have led to his qualification of Joyce
as a 'ferocious nationalist' (strashnyi natsionalist) and a decadent writer,
who believes that 'the decomposing European culture will be reborn
under the banner of the Celts.'3 Admittedly, even here Bakhtin
stresses Joyce's significance and tells his audience that it is impossible
to understand contemporary prose, e.g. Hemingway, without Joyce.
All these recently established details set the background for a fuller
appreciation of the extent to which the idea of the fusion between
epic and novel in Bakhtin's Rabelais was paralleled and nurtured by
congenial developments in the 20th century novel. When Joyce's
Ulysses first appeared, it was precisely the problem of the relation
between myth and modernity - as expressed in the forms of the
epic and the novel - that focused the polemics. In an immensely
important short article, T.S. Eliot drew attention to the 'continuous
parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity' and argued that the
application of myth is 'simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility
and anarchy which is contemporary history'; Eliot summarises the
significance of myth as 'making the modern world possible for art'.36 In
other words, one may conclude, myth (the epic) sponsors an ennobling
order that redeems the otherwise blind chaos of reality portrayed in
the novel. This view is surprisingly close to Lukács's conservative and
elitist belief that the epic will eventually make a glorious come-back
to put an end to the novelistic age of 'absolute sinfulness'.
However, one can also think of the role of myth and epic in
Ulysses in rather dissimilar terms. On this alternative view, epic and
novel do not appear as opposed nor is the novel the sole benefi-
ciary of the exchange between the two genres. As has been stated
by a recent commentator on Bakhtin and Joyce, ' [t] he rhetorical
complexity of Joyce's texts is such that one can produce a great deal
of evidence (none of it conclusive) to support either the conservative
[i.e. Eliot's - G.T.] or the subversive reading of Joyce's use of the
mythic method.'37 One could argue with equal vigour and persua-
siveness that Joyce is appealing to Homer in order to stabilize his own
text and 'dignify' his heroes; but also that he is doing this in order
to parody Homer and thus to challenge the authority of the epic. It
is of paramount importance to stress the moment of undecidability:

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
80 Paragraph

either statement could enjoy strong textual corroboration. This unde-

cidability appears to be suggestive of the intricate balance and fusion
of epic and novel in Ulysses in a fashion that enables the reader of
Bakhtin's Rabelais to comprehend better the tenor and the significance
of Bakhtin's suggested synthesis of epic and novelistic.
Thus the analysis of the points of divergence between carnival and
novel and of the proximity between novel and epic in Bakhtin's
book, in the light of cognate occurrences in the modern European
novel exemplified here by Joyce's Ulysses , necessitates a conclusion
that emphasizes the crucial role of Rabelais in Bakhtin's evolution as
a thinker. In Bakhtin's book, one could see in carnival a synthesis
of the large-scaleness and 'naivety' of the epic (a vital precondition
for the staging of carnival) with the elusive, fluctuant, self-ironic and
contradictory nature of the novelistic. The epic never really disappears
from Bakhtin's thought; it is sublimated in carnival, where it is mixed
and 'fertilized' by the novelistic. Like the epic, carnival is about the
maintaining of traditional practices, but in an open and charitably
'insecure' way. Thus Rabelais seems to be the point where, after
reconciling and synthesizing culture and life, epic and novel, Bakhtin's
interest in genre, particularly in the genre of the novel, appears finally
quenched. His last writings after the mid-1960s of necessity take a turn
in a different direction: back to the beginnings of his career, where the
methodology of cognition as a social phenomenon has been among
his major concerns.

GALIN TIHANOV
Lancaster University

NOTES

1 See G. Tihanov, 'Culture, Form, Life: The Early Lukács and

Bakhtin', in C. Brandist and G. Tihanov (eds.), Materializing Bak
Bakhtin Circle and Social Theory , Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000, pp
also G. Tihanov, 'Voloshinov, Ideology, and Language: The Birth
Sociology from the Spirit of Lebensphilosophie' , South Atlantic Quart
Vol. 97, Nos. 3-4, pp. 599-621.
2 Quoted here from the English translation in Art and Answerab
Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist and V. Liapun
K. Brostrom, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp. 257-3
3 Quoted here from the English translation in Art and Answerab
Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist and V.
trans. V. Liapunov, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, p

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 81

The question of the precise dating of AH remains open. N. Nikolaev

locates it somewhere between the summer of 1922 and the spring of
1924 (N. Nikolaev, 'Izdanie naslediia M.M. Bakhtina kak filologicheskaia
problema', Dialog. Kamaval. Khronotop , 1998, No. 3, p. 120). In support of
this dating he claims a close textological connection between AH and PCMF,
which was written in 1924 (see N. Nikolaev's notes to Bakhtin's lectures of
1924-25, M.M. Bakhtin kak filosof, ed. L.A. Gogotishvili and P.S. Gurevich,
Moscow, 1992, pp. 247-48, n. 6). B. Poole, on the other hand, suggests 1926
as the year in which the texts of both Toward a Philosophy of the Act and AH
were still being revised by Bakhtin (B. Poole, 'Bakhtin's Phenomenology
of Discourse', unpublished paper at the Eighth International Conference
on Mikhail Bakhtin, Calgary, 1997, p. 2). Recently, even the year in
which PCMF was written was questioned (see L. Matějka, 'Deconstructing
Bakhtin', in Fiction Updated. Theories of Fictionality, Narratology , and Poetics ,
ed. C. Mihailescu and W. Hamarneh, Toronto and Buffalo: University of
Toronto Press, 1996, pp. 257-66, esp. pp. 257-58).
4 Commentators on Bakhtin's early works, fascinated as most of them are
with Bakhtin's 'architectonics of responsibility', remain untroubled by this
dualism. As a rule, they fail to discriminate between the ethical meaning of
'architectonics' in AH and the neutrally phenomenological meaning of the
term in PCMF; see e.g. Nataliia Bonetskaia, 'Bakhtin's Aesthetics as a Logic
of Form', in The Contexts of Bakhtin, ed. D. Shepherd, Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1998, pp. 83-94.
5 The English translation weakens and unduly qualifies Bakhtin's criticism by
adding a non-existing 'thus' before the last word of the sentence; cf. also
pp. 270-71 where Bakhtin castigates the tendency of Russian Formalism to
'dissolve architectonic forms' into compositional ones.
6 The same phenomenon can be observed in 'Author and Hero': 'In the epic,
this degree of visual actualization is higher: the description of the hero's
exterior in the novel, for example, must necessarily be recreated visually,
even if the image (...) will be visually subjective with different readers' (AH,
95). The English translation, on which the above text is based, unfortunately
distorts the meaning of the passage by translating the Russian 'V epose' with
'In narrative literature'.

7 This attitude will later resurface in Bakhtin' essay on the Bildungsroman.

8 On Bakhtin and Schlegel see, among others, T. Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin:
The Dialogical Principle, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984;
G. Tihanov, 'Bakhtin, Lukács and German Romanticism: The Case of Epic
and Irony', in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, ed. C. Adlam et
al., Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997, pp. 273-98.
9 For a recent study of Lukács's theory of the novel during his Moscow
years, see G. Tihanov, 'The Novel, the Epic and Modernity: Lukács and

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
82 Paragraph
the Moscow Debate About the Novel (1934-35), Germano- Slavica, 1998,
Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 29-42.
10 Cf. the objections in Sue Vice, Introducing Bakhtin, Manchester and New
York: Manchester University Press, 1997, p. 78.
11 Cf. R. Falconer, 'Bakhtin and the Epic Chronotope', in Face to Face: Bakhtin
in Russia and the West, ed. C. Adlam et al., Sheffield: Sheffield Academic
Press, 1997, pp. 254-72, esp. pp. 255 and 263.
12 F. Moretti, Modern Epic , London: Verso, 1996, p. 56.
13 Ibid., p. 74.
14 Georg von Lukács, 'Die Theorie des Romans', Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und
allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 1916, Vol. 11, p. 226.
15 Th. Adorno, 'Standort des Erzählers im zeitgenössischen Roman', Noten zur
Literatur, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981, p. 47.
16 M. Bakhtin, 'Epic and Novel' (EN), The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist,
trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994,
p. 28.
17 For more on this see G. Tihanov, 'The Ideology of Bildung : Lukács and
Bakhtin as Readers of Goethe', Oxford German Studies, 1998, Vol. 27,
pp. 102-40.
18 On this see more in G. Tihanov, 'The Ideology of Bildung ' (n. 17 above).
19 I follow here, with some modification, the helpful summary in S. Vice, op.
cit., pp. 79-80.
20 Here I offer my own translation of a passage from the Russian edition
(M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rabie i narodnaia kuVtura srednevekov'ia i
renessansa, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965, pp. 236-37).
21 The existing English translation gives 'develop' instead of 'flourish' for the
Russian 'rastsvetal'. The last sentence ('Vse ostal'nye prazdniki bledneiut
riadom s karnavalom') is rendered simply as 'The other feasts faded away'.
22 For an overview of Bakhtin's interest in biology, see M. Holquist, 'Bakhtin
and the Body', in The Bakhtin Circle Today, ed. M. Diaz-Diocaretz ( Critical
Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2), Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1989, pp. 19-42;
for Bakhtin and Ukhtomskii, see N. Marcialis, 'Michail Bachtin e Aleksej
Uchtomskij', in Bachtin, teorico del dialogo, ed. F. Corona, Milano: Angeli,
1986, pp. 79-91. For a recent enjoyable and provocative interpreation of
Bakhtin, medicine and the problem of the body, see P. Hitchcock, 'The
Grotesque of the Body Electric', in Bakhtin and the Human Sciences, ed.
M. Bell and M. Gardiner, London: Sage, 1998, pp. 78-94.
23 M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (R), trans. H. Iswolsky, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 335.
24 Undoubtedly, Bakhtin is following here Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, most
likely through the mediation of the Russian symbolist poet and philosopher
of culture Viacheslav Ivanov. In section 8, Nietzsche stresses the absence of
differentiation between viewer and actor in Greek tragedy.

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival 83

25 H. Bergson, 'Laughter' (L), in Comedy, ed. W. Sypher, Baltimore and

London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 74.
26 R.B. Kershner, Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Culture , Chapel Hill and London:
The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, p. 17.
27 K. Clark and M. Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin , Cambridge, Mass. and London:
Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 317.
28 For more on the Russian reception of Joyce in this period, see N. Cornwell,
James Joyce and the Russians, London: Macmillan, 1992, esp. pp. 103-13;
Cornwell gives precise bibliographical data (pp. 153-54) about the Russian
translations of Joyce. Ulysses did not appear in full Russian translation until
1993.

29 This belief was still to be found as late as 1995 in an article written by the
Russian translator of Ulysses (cf. S. Khoruzhii, 'Bakhtin, Dzhois, Liutsifer', in
Bakhtinologiia, ed. K. Isupov, St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 1995, p. 17).
30 More on the details of Bakhtin's engagement with Joyce see in the commen-
taries to M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, Vol. 5, Moscow:
Russkie slovari, 1996, p. 503.
31 M. Bakhtin, '[O Flobere]', Sobranie sochinenii v semi tomakh, Vol. 5, Moscow:
Russkie slovari, 1996, p. 134.
32 See D.S. Mirskii, 'Ob 'Ulisse' ', Literaturnyi sovremennik , 1935, No. 5,
pp. 131-35, esp. p. 135; on Mirskii's role in the early Soviet appropriation
of Joyce see G.S. Smith, D.S. Mirsky. A Russian-English Life, 1890-1939,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 263-65.
33 G. Lukács, 'Roman', Literatumaia Entsiklopediia, Moscow, 1935, Vol. 9,
p. 826.
34 More on this see in G. Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin ,
and the Ideas of their Time, Oxford: Oford University Press, 2000, pp. 11-16.
35 M. Bakhtin, Lektsii po istorii zarubezhnoi literatury. Antichnosť. Srednie veka,
Saransk: Izdatel'stvo Mordovskogo universiteta, 1999, p. 42; in tagging
Joyce a 'ferocious nationalist', Bakhtin reproduces in the 1950s another
cliché of Soviet Joyce criticism of the 1930s (cf. R. Miller-Budnitskaia,
'Filosofiia kul'tury Dzhemsa Dzhoisa', IntematsionaV naia literatura, 1937,
No. 2, pp. 188-209, esp. p. 194, where Joyce is called 'a fanatic of
Irish reactionary nationalistic tendencies').
36 T.S. Eliot, ' Ulysses, Order, and Myth', in The Modern Tradition, ed. R. Ellmann
and Ch. Feidelson, Jr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 681.
37 M. Keith Booker, Joyce, Bakhtin, and the Literary Tradition. Toward a Compara-
tive Cultural Poetics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p. 20.

This content downloaded from

195.221.72.173 on Thu, 19 Jan 2023 10:45:26 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms