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points, as they engage each other, but with no special privilege or
prevailing authority.
Where voices meet and engage, there is dialogue. The engage–
ment is creative and produces change, but it is not to be regarded as
"dialectic." Indeed, dialogue is the opposite of dialectic. Nothing is
"subsumed," multiplicity and openness rather than unity and closure
are the product of this interaction and development.
In
more "mono–
logic" or homophonic novels, like those of Tolstoy or Turgenev,
many voices may be reproduced with sensitive detail, nuance and
inflection - authentic voices - but they are "objectified," treated as
objects, rather than endowed with a full, free and equal subjectivity.
The Soviet Dostoevsky scholar, G. M. Fridlender, has taken
issue with Bakhtin on the notion of "polyphony," indicating in
scrupulous detail a number of important places in Dostoevsky's
novels where the authorial voice intervenes actively in the course of
events. Yet Bakhtin never denied "intervention" - on the contrary ,
he stressed it. What Fridlender fails to demonstrate is the "finaliz–
ability" of that intervention. Yet it must be admitted that Bakhtin's
notion of polyphony, attractive and productive as it is, retains
something of the metaphysical. Cautious scholars, especially those
who stress a "common sense" approach
to
literary texts are uneasy
with
i~-Rene
Wellek, for instance, or Joseph Frank , in the first
volume of his Dostoevsky biography.
Russian thought has traditionally taken shape through the veil
of literature. That is, thinking about the nature of reality has been
expressed far more than elsewhere in terms of literary reference.
Vladimir Soloviev is unthinkable without Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Merezhkovsky, Shestov, Berdiaev, Rozanov, all fashioned and ex–
pressed their worldviews
through
explications of texts by Dostoevsky,
and other literary figures, too, of course, but Dostoevsky was cen–
tral. In a way, Bakhtin belongs to this tradition , yet he also
transcends it. As befits a philosopher of the word, he takes seriously
the study of linguistics and literary theory.
If
there is anything dis–
tinctively un-Marxist about him, it is his distaste for the Hegelian
dialectic, but his distaste is not based on ignorance. His great an–
tagonist, after all, was Lukacs. Bakhtin's essay, "The Epic and the
Novel" is a direct (if unstated) polemic with Lukacs, but indirectly
and perhaps unintentionally, the polemic can be heard in many
places in the work of both men.
As a sharp critic of the Russian formalists, Bakhtin at the same
time absorbed their basic terminology and a good deal of their "pro–
fessional" approach to literary texts. While they attempted, however,
