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to autonomize, to seal off the literary text from its broader sociohis–
torical contexts, Bakhtin attempted to open it out. Literary scholar–
ship, he insisted, must begin with the problem of genre, and genre
he saw as a choice and deployment of words clustered around spe–
cific kinds of historical human experience and the objects associated
with that experience. Bakhtin is not a provincial guru or a mystical
seeker of the Russian soul. He is a religious thinker of formidable
professional philosophical expertise and literary competence.
Bakhtin traces the generic sources of Dostoevsky's polyphony
back to the early Platonic dialogues, to Menippean satire, to the
European adventure novel and to the boulevard-adventure novel of
Dostoevsky's own time . His erudite search is both extremely in–
genious and convincing, especially with regard to the Menippea,
that hybrid form in which high and low styles mingle, high and low
society confront each other, people from different historical epochs
anachronistically converse, the living with the dead, and Dostoevsky
is seen to have roots in Lucian, Martial and Apuleius! Bakhtin "dis–
covers" also an extraliterary source in carnival- along with "poly–
phony," one of his key concepts.
For Bakhtin, drawing heavily on Frazer and
The Golden Bough,
carnival is folk culture, long antedating Christianity and having its
roots in preclass society as a celebration of the ongoing life of the
community; or, rather, celebrating at the same time the death of
the individual and his resurrection in the immortality of the group.
The key image of carnival is "pregnant death," and it is celebrated as
a "feast for all the world" in the public square. Its rituals involve pair–
ings of opposites and also reversals - crownings and uncrownings,
debasements and exaltations, fat-lean, male-female, king-fool, head–
backside, womb-tomb, etc. Bakhtin sees the late Renaissance, the
sixteenth century, as the latest great manifestation of carnival in
Europe, and its disappearance, or rather its fragmentation and
reduction as a public manifestation, with the establishment of ab–
solute monarchy and the hardening of the class structure in the
seventeenth century. Yet at the same time he sees a tranposition of
the spirit of carnival, most completely in the work of Rabelais, into
humanist literature, its "carnivalization." Carnivalization involves
not only laughter (the forms of laughter are reduced), a celebration
of the horizontal immortality of the folk, the equality of the public
square, the fertility and abundance of the earth, but also a pulling
down of established hierarchies and authorities, a celebration as well
of 'joyful relativity" for which many-voicedness is indispensable.
A third key concept of Bakhtin's is the chronotope. What he
