[In the following review, Kershner offers a positive evaluation of After Bakhtin. Though noting that the volume offers few new observations concerning Bakhtin's work, Kershner praises Lodge's analysis and recommends the collection for general academic readers and students of dialogic criticism.]

A review should be, in principle, a dialogic rejoinder to one’s own discourse, but that discourse did not want or expect a rejoinder, it pretended to render all further discussion of the matter superfluous, to leave the reader in a state of dumb admiration. Hence, if your reviewer agrees with you, he seems to be stating the obvious, which is boring, or he agrees with you for the wrong reasons, which is embarrassing, and if he disagrees with you, it is because he has missed the point, or is airing a view of his own, which is irritating.

This passage from David Lodge’s new book [After Bakhtin] would be a good example of what Bakhtin calls the “word with a sideward glance,” except that it is closer to a “sideward glare.” Lodge is an intelligent and elegant enough writer to put me into a state of acute self-consciousness even before I realized my choices were to be boring, embarrassing, or irritating. All the more so since this is purportedly Lodge’s farewell to academic criticism. Several years ago he retired from his position at the University of Birmingham, and since then has gradually felt himself increasingly removed from academic literary criticism, which he sees as a more and more arcane metalanguage, less and less relevant to his own work as a practicing novelist. He admits, accurately enough, that there is a certain “elegaic ring” to a number of the essays.

In staking out his critical position, Lodge, I think, finds himself in somewhat the same situation as Wayne Booth: both, having produced a sort of summa for their respective generations—Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction, Lodge’s Language of Fiction—now find that Bakhtin has caused them to rethink important aspects of their positions.¹ Lodge, trained as a New Critic, was attempting to demonstrate that the novel form is capable of the same sort of subtlety, ambiguity, and formal coherence that the New Critics had found in lyric poetry, and in general he sought his evidence in passages of authorial narrative, what Plato called the diegesis. All critical questions about the novel, he then believed (though he no longer does), were reducible to questions about language. During his career Lodge has been more informed about and open to Continental criticism than most of his British contemporaries, and has been able to make very practical use of structuralism and narratology, especially the work of Todorov and Genette. He has been far less sympathetic to post-structuralism, with its demolition of individual subjectivity, especially that of the Author, and its reduced reliance on close reading. Still, the challenge of post-structuralism obviously has bothered him, and he is delighted to find that “if we are looking for a theory of the novel that will transcend the opposition of humanist and post-structuralist viewpoints and provide an ideological justification for the novel that will apply to its entire history, the most likely candidate is the work of Mikhail Bakhtin” (21).

As Lodge points out, one of the reasons for Bakhtin’s popularity is that aspects of his thought can be adapted by critics of widely varying persuasions, from classical humanists to post-structuralist Marxists. Each creates his or her own Bakhtin, generally in his or her own image, and this problem has been exacerbated by the fact that few critics are competent to read Bakhtin’s works in the original Russian or to evaluate their original context (even if we knew for sure which are his works). Thus most of us are at the mercy of Bakhtin’s interpreters, such as Tzvetan Todorov with his rather structuralist Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva with her post-structuralist Bakhtin, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist with their Christian, non-Marxist Bakhtin, Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson with their evolving, linguistically-based Bakhtin, or Ken Hirschkop with his maverick Marxist Bakhtin.² Of these, Lodge most often invokes Todorov and Clark and Holquist as authorities; of course, some of the essays collected here were written in the early eighties, when few other sources were available. His own Bakhtin is rather formalist, despite his awareness of Bakhtin’s fundamental disagreements with the Russian Formalists. Thus Lodge repeatedly invokes well-known binary oppositions such as fabula/suzhet, diegesis/mimesis, and metonymy/metaphor throughout the essays in ways that will be familiar to readers of The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), even as he admits that they are of limited utility. In After Bakhtin his most frequent use of Bakhtin’s own critical procedure is in analyzing the dialogical interactions between “authorial language” and “character language” in a wide span of novels, and this he does as well as anyone now writing.

The first essay in the book, “The Novel Now,” which appeared three years ago in Novel, is a short, lucid, but somewhat dated discussion of the critical controversies of the sixties and seventies and an introduction to Bakhtin’s significance in that context. The next, “Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction,” argues that the “classic realist” novel intermixed diegesis and mimesis, which the modernist novel moved almost entirely toward mimesis (or at least away from the “authoritative” authorial voice), and the postmodern novel (by which Lodge seems to mean the novel since the second World War, including Waugh and Isherwood) foregrounded diegesis, though without the classic implication of authority. In the next few chapters Lodge shows the workings of dialogism in a variety of places where one might not expect to find it; for instance, in George Eliot. Lodge convincingly demolishes Colin MacCabe’s argument in James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word that in the “classic realist text” Middlemarch the authorial voice overwhelms all other languages represented within it. He even finds dialogism working in Lawrence’s Women in Love, although here I think he is confusing Lawrence’s ability to represent seriously the position of characters other than the Lawrence-figure Birkin with a genuinely dialogical interaction of voices that would affect the authorial voice as well. In “After Bakhtin” he tackles the problem of “monologism” in Bakhtin’s thought: since Lodge, like many critics, including myself, finds dialogical effects not only in the classical realist novel but in poets such as Yeats, where would we look for monologism? He suggests, reasonably enough, that the dialogical and the monological are two tendencies of writing, seldom if ever found in a pure state.

The essays in the second half of the book are less focussed on Bakhtin; some concentrate on familiar issues like structure and indeterminacy, and a few, like “Crowds and Power in the Early Victorian Novel” introduce a social or political element into Lodge’s critical perspective. This might well be another aspect of Bakhtin’s legacy by way of his concept of carnival, although in general Lodge pays little attention to the fundamental role Bakhtin assigns to the ideological element in language. The depth and breadth of Lodge’s reading in the novel are, as always, impressive; he is equally good on Austen, James, Kipling, and Kundera. His last two essays in the collection are especially energetic. The first of these appreciatively reviews a radical critical text by Bernard Sharratt entitled Reading Relations which is itself apparently one of the few genuine examples of dialogical criticism, in that it includes within itself hostile “reviews,” relevant “seminar” records, anthologies of quotations from critics, take-home examination questions, and so forth. The last reviews Imre Salusinsky’s collection of interviews with “star” critics (Kermode, Said, Lentricchia, Bloom, Miller, etc.) entitled Criticism in Society. This book too, in a different sense, might be said to represent dialogical criticism, in that critics interviewed later were able to read the comments of their predecessors and respond to them, and also in that the personal and institutional situation of each of the critics tends to enter the discussion, clearly affecting the “abstract theorizing” that Bakhtin so hated. Both of these essays deal with the frightening degree of self-consciousness that has recently been brought to the professional critic’s vocation—a self-consciousness that Lodge, in a less overtly disturbing way, himself shows throughout these essays.

The audience of After Bakhtin is hard to determine: perhaps the “general academic reader,” if such a creature exists. The specialist in theory will find few new ideas here, although the specific readings of texts are both exciting and elegant. For the benefit of the non-specialist, Lodge has tried to define his terms as he goes, not always successfully; “metalanguage,” for example, is defined on its first usage but not “aposiopesis.” There is a good deal of redundancy among the essays in the material introducing Bakhtin’s ideas (although, to be fair, there is a good deal of redundancy in Bakhtin as well). Because Lodge is primarily interested in only a few of the ways in which Bakhtin’s thought can be used in literary studies, this is probably not the best introduction to the Russian thinker available. It is, however, the first place I would send students interested in how to apply the concept of dialogism to literary texts. It is also well worth anyone’s time for its wit, grace, and clarity, for its demonstration of how a master analyst of the novel reads, and for its provocative implications on the state of the profession.

Notes

1. See Booth’s “Freedom of Interpretation: Bakhtin and the Challenge of Feminist Criticism” in Gary Saul Morson, ed., Bakhtin: Essays and Dialogues on His Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 145–76.

2. See, e.g., Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (New York and London: Routledge, 1990); Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd, eds. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).