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ridicule, derision, and parodistic desublimation of authority that he
defends throughout these essays. One is tempted, therefore, to view
the very grandiosity of his enterprise
~s
a parody of the methods of
scholarship and science alike. The Rabelaisian excesses of the results
could be taken as implicit indications of the absurdity of any attempt
to conceive a history of language and literature in general. This
"serious," scholarly, even pedantic celebration of laughter, this
"high" consideration of "low" and indecorous genres, this epical
overview of an anti-epical tradition of discourse-do they not invite
a carnivalesque inversion of their own claims to authoritativeness?
Such a conclusion would not be inconsistent with what we know
about Bakhtin's life and other works . During some sixty years as a
scholar, Bakhtin assumed many masks, spoke in many voices,
published under a number of different names, parodied many
methods. Is there any reason to believe that these essays, published
under the name of Bakhtin, represent the fixed position, the
real
center of his thought, by which to measure the merely parodistic
dimensions of his other works, both those recognized as having been
written by him and those only
thought
to be from his hand?
Recall, too, that these essays were written while he was in
political exile in "the wilds of Kazakhstan," working as a book–
keeper in the town of Kustanaj, and then teaching in a pedagogical
institute in Saransk. Viewed from this perspective, the undeniably
political aspects of these seemingly scholarly reflections on "novel–
ness" -dialogue, heteroglossia, hybridization, laughter, the folk tra–
ditions of farce, etc.-come to the fore. The "seriousness" of these
essays is a
political
seriousness, a reminder of what is lost when a soci–
ety comes under the rule of the police, when politics becomes the
policing of thought as well as of public demeanor. As thus conceived,
these essays are not to be taken as representing a truth to be con–
firmed or denied on the basis of empirical tests designed to deter–
mine its adequacy to the (literary) objects of which it speaks. Read
against its own grain, this work is nothing less than a phenomenol–
ogy of the lie on which every claim to authority is based. And if its
implication is that the theses argued in this book are themselves pre–
varications, insofar as they seem to claim an authority of their own,
this gives place to the much more general implication that the
political authority of Stalin and his cohorts is nothing but a lie that
deserves the ridicule authorized by its denial of the gross realities of
life and the needs of human community.
HAYDEN WHITE
