Mikhail Bakhtin

Start Free Trial

Strange Synchronies and Surplus Possibilities: Bakhtin on Time

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Morson, Gary Saul. “Strange Synchronies and Surplus Possibilities: Bakhtin on Time.” Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (autumn, 1993): 477-493.

[In the following essay, Morson discusses Bakhtin's fascination with indeterminism and his concept of “open time” in narrative.]

We live forward, but we understand backward.

—Kierkegaard

Bakhtin must surely be regarded as the most remarkable modern thinker to examine time in narrative.1 For him, the problem was no mere exercise in literary theory. Rather, it was a way to examine ultimate questions—or in the Russian phrase, “accursed” questions—about human existence. In this respect, his work is representative of the Russian tradition, in which literature and criticism served as forms of—a skeptic would say, substitutes for—philosophy. In this Russian view, the task of philosophy is to examine the relation of ideas to the way people live.2 Novels are a supreme form of philosophy because, unlike the terribly thin accounts of life found in philosophical tracts, they offer a rich and “thick” description of human thinking and action. The great novelists philosophize not with a hammer but with a feather. As for criticism, its primary purpose is to clarify and elucidate—to “transcribe,” insofar as that is possible—the elusive wisdom of great literature; perhaps that wisdom might even be extended and enhanced. If we appreciate this tradition, we will understand why it is possible to read Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky in either of two ways: it may either be taken as an examination of that writer, with digressions into broader issues concerning psychology, language and ethics; or it may be taken as a work primarily about those broader issues, illustrated “with constant reference to Dostoevsky.”

Like Dostoevsky, Bakhtin was centrally concerned to demonstrate the reality, and explore the nature, of open time. He was deeply committed to the view that for human life to be meaningful, events must be capable of going in many directions. For a determinist, there are only two types of events—actualities and impossibilities. What happened had to happen. To us it may sometimes appear that there were real possibilities that remained unrealized, but for the determinist that impression is the mere effect of our ignorance of basic laws and important facts. If we had complete knowledge, we would see why nothing else was possible.3

Strictly speaking, time is empty for the determinist, by which I mean that it is a mere parameter rather than an operator.4 It figures in equations but is not itself a force. Second, for the determinist time is symmetrical; the future is as unchangeable and as much a given as the past. Much as the equations of classical physics can be run either way to allow for either prediction or retrodiction, so for someone who could overcome the limitations of ignorance the future would be as knowable as the past.

Determinism here translates the insight of numerous theologians, for whom time affects nothing because God, who exists outside of time, can grasp the whole sequence of the universe in a glance. “Thus also the divine mind contemplates everything in one altogether simple act at once and without succession, that is, without the difference between the past, present and future; to Him all things are present,” wrote Giordano Bruno. Such a God contemplates history as we view a painting or think about a novel we have finished. Leibniz held that someone with sufficient insight “would see the future in the present as in a mirror.”5

Anyone who knows Dostoevsky's novels is aware that they are dedicated to showing that such a view is fatal to ethics, which depends on the reality of real choice and genuine alternatives. Human freedom is not just the elimination of compulsion—if that were all it were, it would be compatible with determinism—but also the ability to actualize one possibility rather than another. Bakhtin added that if time has only a single path then creativity is reduced to mere discovery—to “the extraction of square roots,” as Dostoevsky's man from underground says.

I think Bakhtin would have pretty much accepted William James's description of the essential difference between determinism and indeterminism. For both, the real issue concerns the nature of time. For the determinist, the universe is all of a piece, which means that the future can be one and only one thing. Determinism professes

that those parts of the universe already laid down absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The future has no unambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb; the part we call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning.6

By contrast, the indeterminist sees a world in which the fit between parts and whole is not so perfect. There is “loose play” among the parts, so that “the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be” (“DD” [James, William “The Dilemma of Determinism”], 150). As a result—and this is the crucial point—“possibilities may be in excess of actualities … actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist and form part of the truth” (“DD,” 150-51). Even if not “actual,” such possibilities are real.

James went on to argue that ultimately there is no way of proving either vision. Determinists must face the fact that just because something happens does not demonstrate something else could not have; and indeterminists obviously cannot show any example of an unactualized possibility that did happen because then it would not be an unactualized possibility. What makes us determinists or indeterminists is a matter of faith, in James's view. He therefore defended his belief in indeterminism by deepening our sense of what determinism entails: a loss of the sentiment of regret, an inability to wish the world were otherwise and a tendency to view the world as if moral judgment could be easily replaced by mere gnostic contemplation of what had to happen.

Such a purely negative defense of indeterminism was evidently insufficient for Bakhtin. He seems to have believed that, for intellectuals at least, the greatest obstacle to an acceptance, or even serious consideration, of open time was the intuitive sense that no other vision of the world is conceivable or makes sense. For if an exception to lawfulness could happen, what holds the universe together? We would have not a universe but a nulliverse, intellectuals tend to feel. The prestige of science over the past few centuries has given us a very definite sense of what it is to think deterministically, to imagine laws behind apparent contingencies, chances and choices, but what would a non-deterministic universe even look like? We have no such pictures, so there really is no choice. Bakhtin came to the conclusion that in fact we do have such pictures, and they are to be found in many works of great literature, if only we could attend to them properly. That should be a task of criticism.

Many literary works give us a rich description of a world where contingency and choice play a part. They picture a world governed by a combination of broad regularities in the background but considerable contingency or freedom in the foreground.7 The very existence of works of this sort shows that an indeterministic world is at least conceivable: for what has been conceived is manifestly conceivable. Shown such pictures, people who have accepted determinism by default would then actually have to choose between visions. They would cease to view time as if it could be one and only one thing. Or to use Bakhtin's favorite analogy, just as Galileo showed that the earth was only one of many planets, so determinism would become only one of several kinds of temporality. Intellectuals would develop a “Galilean” temporal consciousness.

Thus narrative literature was to be an important philosophical weapon for Bakhtin. His thought on time and narrative went through three stages, and in the remainder of this essay I would like to point out the essential features of each. Bakhtin began with a familiar analogy that he took with new seriousness: the relation of a character to an author is similar to the relation of an individual to the world's design and of a person to God. That is, if one could show that a literary hero could somehow be free and unpredictable to its author, one could imagine that a similar relation obtains between each person and the laws of the world or the knowledge of God.

To explore this analogy is a key purpose of Bakhtin's earliest writings, especially his long essay, “Author and Hero in Esthetic Activity.” Here Bakhtin examined the relation of hero to author with broader philosophical and theological issues in mind. Unfortunately, the model he developed wound up explaining why a hero could not be free. In his own terms, therefore, this experiment turned out to be a failure.

I need only sketch the very broadest outlines of Bakhtin's early argument. He discovered that authors have what he was later to call “an essential surplus of knowledge” with respect to their heroes. They know what is going to happen later to each hero; and the reader also knows that the hero's fate is already determined because it has already been planned and written down. Thus, however much we may project ourselves into a hero's world and identify with his or her agonies of choice, we also know, when we consider the fact that we are reading a completed artifact, that the choice is an illusion and that any hope or regret we may experience is pointless because the hero's destiny is already fixed. One and only one thing can happen. This closedness of time is particularly apparent when we reread a work, but the mere knowledge that the work is already written and would not change when reread infects even a first reading with some qualities of rereading. For the author and reader, though not for the character, it really is possible to “contemplate everything in one altogether simple act at once and without succession, that is, without the difference between the past, present and future … [Upon re-reading,] all things are present.” Formalism and structuralism rely precisely on the presence of such design, and one reason Bakhtin distrusted these movements is that they abolish real temporality.

The point is that the world looks different from inside and from outside; from outside, it is already over. For the author, Bakhtin observed, “always encompasses the whole temporally, he is always later, not only in time but in meaning as well.”8 If our own lives should be discovered to resemble literary structures, then each present moment, in which choice seems so palpable and time appears so rife with possibilities, would be recognized as something resembling the part of a film we just happen to be watching or the page in a novel we have just reached: we may not know the outcome of events but they have already been decided, in a sense have already happened. They are virtually there. There is no hope. This is what Bakhtin meant when he wrote that the life of a hero—and of ourselves, if the world resembles a narrative—is accompanied by “the tones of a requiem” that the hero does not hear (“AiG” [“Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel nosti”], 115).

It follows that art (like determinist philosophy) allows for only chimerical freedom: “The aesthetic embodiment of the inner human being anticipates from the beginning the hero's hopelessness as far as meaning is concerned; artistic visualization gives us the whole hero, enumerated and measured to the full extent; there must not be for us any meaning-related secrets to him, our faith and our hope must be silent” (“AiG,” 115). To use Bakhtin's terminology, art gives us a “soul”—a finalized image of a person—but not “spirit,” the active energy experienced from within as each of us enters a world that is open, “yet-to-come” and unfinalizable. Unfinalizability is apparently banished from art and therefore art would seem incapable of providing a concrete image of an unfinalizable world. For art has structure and closure, a teleology making all parts fit into a predetermined whole: and in this way philosophical determinism is mirrored by “aesthetic necessity,” as Bakhtin called it. “Ethical freedom (the so-called freedom of the will) is not only freedom from cognitive (causal) necessity, but also freedom from aesthetic necessity” (“AiG,” 105). And aesthetic necessity seems to be essential to art.

In the second stage of his thinking, Bakhtin at last found a solution. He discovered a writer—Dostoevsky—who had invented a way to represent indeterminacy and to populate his work with “spirit” rather than with “souls.” “Dostoevsky made spirit, that is, the ultimate semantic position of the personality, the object of contemplation, he was able to see spirit in a way in which previously, only the body and soul of man could be seen.”9 He did so by inventing a whole new genre, which Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

I imagine that no concept of Bakhtin's is so often misunderstood and misused as polyphony. I hardly ever read an article in which it is not confused with heteroglossia, which (I suppose) is something like confusing polygamy with heterodoxy. Polyphony and heteroglossia refer to quite different concepts and works can exhibit one without the other. Indeed, Bakhtin contended that all realistic novels before Dostoevsky exhibit heteroglossia but not polyphony. Polyphony does not mean mere multiplicity of voices.

As Bakhtin coined the term, polyphony defines a special relation between author and hero that allows the hero to be truly free. By “truly free” Bakhtin meant that no advance design or structure predetermines what the hero will do. In order to create characters capable of surprising him, the author surrenders his essential surplus of knowledge. He knows no more than other characters what a given character will do; that is, the author deliberately places himself on the same level as heroes within the novelistic world. In this way, a hero acquires a life of his or her own. The peculiar excitement of Dostoevsky's novels, which everyone experiences, derives primarily from this ability of characters partly to escape the author's control. Sensing a character's relative independence, readers often respond to him or her in ways usually reserved for real people. Thus Bakhtin noted the odd phenomenon that generations of highly sophisticated readers, who would not think of arguing with the ideological heroes of Turgenev or Conrad—who know that such characters have meaning only as parts of a whole work—have directly polemicized with Raskol'nikov and Ivan Karamazov. For Bakhtin, such critics are responding to something genuinely in the work, the fact that these characters are unlike those in other novels because they have real freedom. They can say a word of their own surprising to their author.

Thus Dostoevsky's major characters are truly unfinalizable in a way previously impossible. The plot of the work does not constrain them in advance; there is no question of foreshadowing here. They do not fulfill an advance design; on the contrary, the plot turns out to be the mere record of what they happen to do—as is the “plot” of our own lives. We sense Dostoevsky's characters as liberated from both causal and aesthetic necessity, and so we palpably sense human freedom in a way absent from all earlier literature.

We might put the point this way: Generally speaking, literary structure is not neutral with respect to philosophies of time. It strongly favors closed temporalities.10 It is therefore comparatively easy and common to make the shape of a work reinforce a fatalistic or deterministic view of time; as in Oedipus, the hero's fate is a given, known simultaneously by the oracles and the author, who, we are aware, has already recorded it. Moreover, if the work is well written, there are no loose ends; literary closure ties everything up. In this way, the structure of the work and the world can readily be made isomorphic (of the same shape).

But it is much harder for an author who believes in freedom and contingency to create a work isomorphic with such open temporality. For to be effective art would seem to require structure and closure, a place and meaning for every detail. We need to see why everything had to be the way it was or the work will seem flawed and out of control. But perfect fit, where everything is so arranged as to tend to a final goal and pattern, is just what the doctrine of open temporality denies. How then to make a work that is isomorphic with open time? Can one construct an artifice not of eternity but of temporality? Bakhtin's answer is that the polyphonic novel does just that. It overcomes the predisposition of art toward closed views of time.

If we return to the theological analogy with which Bakhtin was working, the polyphonic novel alters both people and God. As for people, they become capable of being many different things, as choice and contingency dictate. Leibniz believed that everything each of us does is already virtually present in us (although we don't know it). All our attributes and actions are present within us from the start. That Caesar would cross the Rubicon is and always was given in the very idea of Caesar; God sees it and sees things could be no other way, as surely as He recognizes that the sum of a triangle's angles must equal one straight angle. Leibniz views the real world the way a structuralist views a literary work. And we may perhaps add that those who have tried to view culture as a coherent system, to read it as they would read a poem, are willy-nilly reproducing many Leibnizian difficulties. We may recall that Candide was an answer to Leibniz and that Dostoevsky hoped to write “the Russian Candide”; from a Bakhtinian perspective, some contemporary cultural theories, which read a culture as if it were a poem, seem like varieties of panglossism.

In Dostoevsky's world, each person could be many things, as we can be if our world resembles Dostoevsky's. We are, as Bakhtin said, “non-coincident” with ourselves:

A man never coincides with himself. One cannot apply to him the formula of identity A e A. In Dostoevsky's artistic thinking, the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of all that he is as a material being, a being than can be spied on, defined, predicted apart from his will, “at second hand”.

(Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 59)

In most novels, the authorial point of view, or the point of view imminent in the structure, is the organizing point of the whole, and the meaning of each character's words and actions is to be understood indirectly in terms of that structure. But in Dostoevsky there is no prior structure, no single authorial perspective for the whole. We sense instead that each major character could be such an organizing perspective, and so a novel by Dostoevsky gives us not a universe but what I prefer to call a heteroverse.

From a polyphonic perspective, God also changes. In theological terms, traditional poetics with its single “ultimate semantic authority” and modern “ideology” with its newtonian unity correspond to a particular understanding of the monotheistic God Who is both omnipotent and omniscient. In particular, poetics and determinism correspond to the God for Whom all time is present before His eyes, and for Whom time is therefore either an illusion or an empty form. God sees the whole pattern of history as the poet can in an instant contemplate the whole pattern of his poem; surprise is inconceivable for both.

But Bakhtin's God implicitly created the world the way Dostoevsky created his novels, polyphonically. In order to create truly free people, God surrendered his essential surplus of knowledge. What this means is that God subjected himself to time. As it happens, William James also saw that such a temporal God would be the consequence of indeterminism and he, too, imagined the Creator deciding in advance to make time not illusory but real. Let us suppose Him to say, James suggests, that “At various points, ambiguous possibilities shall be left open, either of which, at a given instant, may become actual” (“DD,” 181-82). Then God Himself becomes, by His own choice, historical:

This of course leaves the creative mind [of God] subject to the law of time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I have no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneously present must see all things under the form of eternity. … So that none of his mental judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one from which chance is excluded. Is not, however, the timeless mind a gratuitous fiction? And is not the notion of eternity being given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?—just the point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance is only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality and that the frame of things is an absolute unity. Admit plurality and time may be its form.

(“DD,” 181 n1)

Properly conceived, time is the form of plurality; and freedom can only exist if time is so understood. If God creates us free, He created the world so that time matters.

In the officially atheist Soviet Union, Bakhtin could of course not make such theological arguments explicit. But he hinted at them when he used the “time-honored” technique of referring to literary representation of pagan deities rather than to an existing Christian God: “Dostoevsky, like Goethe's Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside of their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him” (PDP [Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics], 6). Elsewhere Bakhtin alludes to the influence of the Book of Job on Dostoevsky, that is, of a character wanting to confront his Creator as an equal and to compel Him to answer like a defendant in court. And we may also remember that in the Book of Job God makes a bet with Satan. By their very nature, bets depend on uncertainty.11

Two ideas of God, two ideas of authorship: for “it is one thing to be active in relation to a dead thing, to voiceless material that can be molded and formed as one wishes, and another thing to be active in relation to someone else's living, autonomous consciousness” (“TRDB” [“Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book”], 285).

For James, “the timeless mind [of God] is a gratuitous fiction”; in Dostoevsky's novels as Bakhtin read them, the timeless mind of the author is no less gratuitous. Polyphony banishes structure. Read polyphonically, Dostoevsky's novels cannot, without significant distortion, be contemplated as a synchronic whole nor grasped as a pattern displayed to the mind in an instant. Such reading, the only kind allowed by traditional poetics, banishes time and real “eventness.”

But how is it possible, we may ask, for an author not to know what his own creation, a mere character, is going to do? The answer is that Dostoevsky used a special creative process that is sensed and supposed to be sensed by the reader. This process captures the throb of presentness when the creating author does not know what he or she is going to do next and makes of that presentness the temporality of the created work.

Most authors publish their works cleansed of the loose ends and false starts of the creative process. It is, of course, by no means uncommon for authors to be surprised by their characters, in the sense that in the course of writing it turns out that characters would not plausibly do what the author's advance plan demands; when this happens, authors typically change their plan. Such surprises are unwelcome, and before the work is published it is revised so that the new plan governs the whole. Otherwise the work would seem flawed. As I write this essay, I do not know, except in a vague way, just where I will end or what its precise shape will be; but before you read it, I will have cleaned all that up and tried to produce a structure where everything fits. Bakhtin spoke of authors removing the “scaffolding.”

By contrast, in polyphonic creativity, characters acting in surprising ways is the whole point. Surprise is planned—not any particular surprise, for then it would not be surprise at all, but situations that favor surprise. What for other authors is an unfortunate accident to be concealed is for Dostoevsky the very point of what he is doing, and it produces the work's central energy. He therefore did not clean up the text before publishing it but let the energy and suspense of creativity in process infect the depicted world with a truly processual temporality. Of course, such a method has its risks. It may lead to chaotic and barely readable works—anyone who knows Dostoevsky's unsuccessful novel The Raw Youth will be aware that this danger is real—but when the method succeeds (as it did in The Idiot and The Possessed), it creates a thrilling sense of freedom and palpable temporal openness unmatched by any other method.

As Bakhtin described Dostoevsky's creative process, he worked by first imagining “voice-ideas”—characters whose identity was fused with an ideology—often based on real Russian thinkers. He then brought these characters into dialogue, argued with them himself and imagined what replies they would make to a multitude of questions or pressures in a variety of agonizing situations. They would wind up saying things their real-life models never did and perhaps never would say. In the process, the characters changed, deepened, grew more complex and acquired new potentials. He repeated this deepening process several times. Only when Dostoevsky sensed characters as sufficiently rich in potential for the unexpected did he sit down to write. They palpitated with life; he knew they could do many surprising things, could behave radically differently depending on the situation and only needed richly described circumstances to propel them into unexpected actions and professions of belief. That is what the actual process of writing provided: not a predetermined design but a series of provocations.

Composition therefore involved bringing characters together in extreme situations and then, without knowing what would happen, guessing at what they would say or do. In this sense, Dostoevsky did not lead his characters anywhere, did not put words in their mouth, but listened to them and gave them new opportunities to speak. Above all, he did not “ambush” them by using advance knowledge of their destiny. They behave as they wish and the plot is just the record of what they say and do. And whatever they do, we sense that they could well have done something else.

In fact, the notebooks of some of Dostoevsky's novels sustain Bakhtin's analysis. Consider The Idiot.12 Typically for Dostoevsky—who was always in debt and barely able to meet the most pressing deadlines, who took advances and signed contracts that involved serious risks, and who was struck down suddenly by epileptic fits that left him inactive for days—he published the first part of this novel, the temporality of which conveys the frenetic pace at which it was written, without the slightest idea where the novel was to go next, much less how it would end.13 When an author does not have an advance plan, serial publication ensures that he cannot go back and make the earlier parts fit the ultimate design. There are bound to be loose ends, and there are; but somehow this novel seems all the better for them. After Part One, Dostoevsky struggled to continue. He did not figure out what the ending to this four-part novel would be until he had almost finished writing part three. In his notebooks we find the passage at which he at last breathlessly sketched out the ending we know—which has often been described as one of the most powerful in world literature—after which he appended the words: “not bad.14

I am therefore always amused when I read analyses of The Idiot (or other similarly composed Dostoevsky novels) in which the critic praises the artful way in which, from the very first page, the author foreshadows the ending. The ending of The Idiot, as everyone will recall, brings the rivals Myshkin and Rogozhin together over the corpse of Nastas'ia Filippovna, whom both have loved and whom Rogozhin has murdered. As it happens, the novel opens with Myshkin sitting opposite Rogozhin in the train on which Myshkin is returning from abroad; and critics have therefore seen the ending as already immanent in the beginning. That is, they read this novel as if time were abolished; they read it as a structure in which (as in all structures) all actions are ultimately simultaneous. Bakhtin's point is that this method, while appropriate for many works, is just what is inappropriate for Dostoevsky. It is imposed by the critic out of habit and out of failure to suspect that a work could be anything but a structure or a botch.

But we know as a matter of fact that the end of this novel was not immanent in the beginning. We know that Dostoevsky feverishly sketched out many courses of action; at each point he projected several possible futures. In fact, that is one way in which Dostoevsky understood time. Each moment can lead in many possible directions. To understand a moment is to understand not only where it did lead but where it might have led. To use the language I have coined, we must see the moment not under a foreshadow but under a sideshadow; Dostoevsky casts on each moment not the shadow of an inevitable future given by the structure, but a shadow “from the side,” from the other possibilities that might just as well have happened.

The point is a difficult one, so let me expand on Bakhtin's reasoning to explain it. In life, most of us believe, no advance plan dictates what will happen to us, though such thinking is tempting. We would smile at someone who imagined that he was immune to misfortune on a given occasion because then his life would not make a good story.15 Our lives, we know, are lived forward, not backward, and they could develop in many directions depending on our own choices and on contingencies beyond our control. And yet, it is always possible when we look back on our own or on someone else's life to make a coherent story out of it, to retell it so that it seems to fit an advance pattern. We can even find instances of what look like foreshadowing, although we know that in actuality events did not happen because later events were destined to happen (which is how foreshadowing works). Looking backward, earlier presents can always be given narrative pastness.

Why is this possible? Because even life lived forward involves repetitions, if for no other reasons than that we all have bad habits—we keep on making the same old mistakes—and there is a certain rough regularity in any social environment that keeps reproducing similar sets of circumstances. Such repetitions happen forward, not backward, and they require no underlying structure; but once they happen, they can always be narrated as if a plan were simply revealed over time. In fact, the conventions of narrative favor such a presentation, because narratives are told after the fact. To repeat: narratives are predisposed to understanding in terms of structure.

It would obviously be a fallacy in real life to assume that a mistake we made at age eight happened because a later mistake we were to make at age 48 was sending a sign backward, as in literary foreshadowing. We could make such a narrative of our lives but it would be false to real temporality. It would be false because it excludes the possibility that many other things could just as well have happened. We could have lived more lives than one. Many are offered, though one is chosen. The implicit determinism of foreshadowing closes down time. Had one of those other lives been lived, we may reflect, it would have been just as easy to read it as if it manifested foreshadowing and as if it happened inevitably according to a structure given in advance.

Those who read structure into The Idiot see the cases where early events did have consequences but they typically overlook the places where they did not. For example, Part One of the novel has written all over it signs of a future conflict between Myshkin and Gania, who repeatedly offends him, threatens him, and ominously (not just eponymously) calls him “an idiot.” The notebooks confirm that Dostoevsky, not knowing what was going to happen, was planting many diverse potentials that could be exploited or neglected as needed in the process of writing. But as the novel actually developed, Gania turns into a minor character and all of these hints remain loose ends. The final meeting with Rogozhin was just such a planted potential that happened to be exploited, but it might just as well have been left unactivated, as the parallel possibilities for Gania were. If in writing the novel Dostoevsky had arrived at a major conflict between Gania and Myshkin, critics would doubtless have discovered foreshadowing and ascribed inevitability. As it is, they simply overlook the possibility of this sort of plot. They see evidence of structure or of nothing. They do not conclude, as they should, that the novel they have does not trace an inevitable plot according to an advance structure with foreshadowing. What they should conclude is that in a polyphonic novel (as in the open temporality of real life) “the plot … is in any case conceived as one of many possible plots and is consequently merely accidental for a given hero” (PDP, 84).

Bakhtin also phrases his point this way: a Dostoevsky novel “takes place not in the past, but right now, that is, in the real present of the creative process. This is no stenographer's report of a finished dialogue, from which the author has already withdrawn and over which he is now located as if in some higher decision-making position” (PDP, 63). I would paraphrase this idea by saying that, in a peculiar way, the author's time and the character's time are simultaneous; the author decides on what the character does as the character does it. I say “in a peculiar way” because this simultaneity pertains to two distinct ontological realms, the real time of the author and the fictive time of the characters. The clocks of parallel universes tick in unison. This is a simultaneity not in time but of times.

If Bakhtin's literary history is accurate, then prior to Dostoevsky, these kinds of time were brought together only for comic and metaliterary effect, as Sterne sometimes does in Tristram Shandy.16 In such a situation, wit depends on the jolt produced and thereby testifies to its artifice. We must perceive the juxtaposition of times as a device for it to have its effect. But in Dostoevsky's case, our attention is not called, as it is Sterne, to the fact of synchronization. We may be entirely unaware of it and, presumably, critics before Bakhtin were unaware of it. Rather, the novel depends on the effect of synchronization. That effect pertains to our experience not of the device but of the characters. We respond to them as free because we sense that they are not preordained to act as they do. They make—are making—the work as they live and choose.

If the author's and character's time are made “simultaneous” in this strange way, what about the reader's time? Bakhtin did not address this question but it is not very difficult to extend his reasoning. In reading a work with structure—a “monologic” work, as Bakhtin called it—the reader relies on the knowledge that the author controls all details and events, on what Bakhtin called the author's “lateness.” Of course, only when the reader has completed the novel will that structure be apparent. The reader will be able to approximate the author's position (with its “essential surplus of knowledge”) only when rereading the work. By contrast, the reader of a polyphonic novel is closest to the author's position and temporality during a first reading. For then the reader's ignorance of the outcome is made to correspond with uncertainty of outcome, the uncertainty experienced by both characters and polyphonic authors. Thus a strange (if partial) triple synchronization takes place (of author, characters and reader).

In most novels, the implicit equation of ignorance of outcome with an outcome still undetermined—a key convention of novelistic reading17—is what allows readers to identify with characters. In a polyphonic novel, this sort of identification extends to the author in the process of creation as well. In non-polyphonic novels, the contemplation of the work from the author's perspective (as a completed structure) weakens suspense. In a polyphonic novel, one can adopt the author's and characters' perspectives together. This extension of Bakhtin's analysis suggests that it is perhaps to such tripling that the amazing power of Dostoevskian suspense may be attributed.

These observations also suggest that readers of Dostoevsky may experience less of the work's essential quality when rereading, which would not be the case if the work depended on structure rather than on eventness. This difference may be one reason why critics, who are almost by necessity rereaders, have somehow seemed especially remote from the experience of reading Dostoevsky. Perhaps special effort should be taken to recapture the thrill of first exposure.

In the third period of his thinking, Bakhtin returned to the problem of narrative temporality by a different route. The solution of polyphony evidently was not entirely satisfactory to him. The reason is that Dostoevskian time depends on a highly intensified present. In order to render choice palpable, Dostoevsky focused everything on those few critical moments when cataclysmic choices are made. We get what Bakhtin calls “the cross section of a single moment” (PDP, 29) and a presentness so dense that it resembles the moment before an epileptic fit as Myshkin experiences it—a moment when time itself is overcome and when (as Myshkin remembers the line from the Apocalypse) “there shall be time no longer.”

For Bakhtin, such a temporality made it impossible to understand all those aspects of life (such as individual moral choice and social responsibility) that demand a rich sense of biographical and historical time. Bakhtin believed that choice, responsibility and everything else that make a life meaningful—that allow it to add up—are temporally extensive. Moreover, he apparently distrusted the idea conveyed by Dostoevskian plotting that choices and turning points occur only at intermittent and dramatic moments of crisis. For Bakhtin, as for Tolstoy, people develop continually and prosaically. Every ordinary moment contains sideshadows and some measure of freedom. By exercising the small range of choice we have at each moment, we make ourselves and shape our future. And this is the way history happens as well.

Hoping to locate a model of prosaically open time, Bakhtin set aside the problem of author and hero to examine the temporality of the world represented in different kinds of narrative. He discovered the model he sought in the great realistic novels of the nineteenth century. In his writings on “the chronotope,” Bakhtin approached narrative genres as grounded in a specific sense of time. He was interested not in the specific events of particular works but in the generically given sense of what events are possible and plausible—in the field of possibilities against which a given plot unfolds. Thus his technique is to read through the specific events of works to reach the field of possibilities constituting the genre's chronotope or sense of temporality.

I cannot offer here a detailed analysis of each chronotope that Bakhtin explored. I can, however, try to elucidate the underlying logic of his argument. We all know by experience that in different genres different sorts of events are plausible. In adventure stories, it is quite likely that rescues will happen in the “nick of time”; if the heroine is strapped to a bomb with a ticking clock, we may anticipate that the hero will manage to pull the right wires not when there are 24 seconds remaining but just as the clock is recording zero. Such a sequence is extremely unlikely in a realistic novel of the type written by Anthony Trollope, Jane Austen or Lev Tolstoy. Their time has no nicks. Or to take another example: reading ancient biographies, like Plutarch's Lives, we know that a hero's qualities are given from the outset and that the story will concern how those qualities manifest themselves in specific circumstances. People grow the way a seed develops into a plant—by entelechy, as Aristotle wrote. The oak is already immanent in the acorn. In works of this sort, things do not essentially change; rather, they unfold. But in realistic novels people do become different bit by bit, which is why incidents cannot be transposed as they can in an adventure story or in a life of an ancient hero. To use Bakhtin's terms, there is real becoming in the novelistic world because people could easily have turned out differently. We have potential to be many different things, not just one, and our potentials themselves change over time, as some are lost and new ones acquired. In a novel there is no question of entelechy.

In that case, what precisely shapes our lives? Bakhtin's answer is a complex combination of factors, including the contingent choices of others, accidental circumstances that could not have been foreseen, the specifics of our social milieu, the changing society in which we live and, above all, the small choices we make moment by prosaic moment. Our identity is therefore processual and to a great extent contingent. One reason for Bakhtin's (and my) distaste for freudianism is its sense of the essential completion of the personality at a young age. In Bakhtinian terms, freudianism relies on a rather primitive chronotope, much as its model of hydraulic pressures seeking release is a rather primitive and mechanical account of mental processes. For Bakhtin, unfinalizability is coterminous with life, and freudianism therefore appeared to him a philosophy of death. For real people as Bakhtin understood them, development does not cease. Perhaps one reason that freudian interpretations so often seem reductive is that they de-novelize the novelistic chronotope by substituting a much simpler one in which character is finalized.

For Bakhtin, the single most important feature of novelistic time is the new relation established between the hero and the plot, and therefore between an individual and his or her biography. Again, the problem of the Dostoevsky book is now approached in terms set internally by the work rather than in terms of the author's relation to the character.

In contrast to the hero of novels, the epic and tragic hero, in Bakhtin's view, is neither more nor less than what he is. There is nothing else he could be. “Hopelessly ready-made,” he completely “coincides with himself”; there is no “gap” between his identity and his life.18 Therefore the plot expresses him utterly. “Outside his destiny, the epic and tragic hero is nothing; he is, therefore, a function of the plot fate assigns him; he cannot become the hero of another destiny or another plot” (“Epic and Novel,” 36). By contrast, the life led by a novelistic hero or heroine does not exhaust his or her identity. The novelistic hero could have been different. We sense that, in potential, he has more lives than one.

One of the basic internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the hero's inadequacy to his fate or his situation. The individual is either greater than his fate, or less than his condition as a man. He cannot become once and for all a clerk, a landowner, a merchant, a fiancé, a jealous lover, a father and so forth.

(“E&N” “Epic and Novel”], 37)

If the hero does become coincident with his condition, then he ceases to be a major character—by definition, perhaps, because in novels noncoincidence and the ability to “exceed” the plot is what defines characters as major.

It was in explaining these aspects of the novelistic hero that Bakhtin produced his most remarkable statement about the relation of character to time. He was clearly speaking not only of novelistic heroes but also of real people. Our defining quality as people is what Bakhtin calls “the surplus of humanness”:

An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing sociohistorical categories. There is no mere form that would be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities and needs, no form in which he could exhaust himself down to the last word … no form that he could fill to the very brim, and yet not splash over the brim. There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness; there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found. … Reality as we have it in the novel is only one of many possible realities; it is not inevitable, not arbitrary, it bears within itself other possibilities.

(“E&N,” 37; emphasis added)

The essay containing this passage was not published until 1975, more than three decades after it was written. For it is virtually impossible not to detect in these lines a critique of Soviet marxism, which asserted that individuals can indeed be exhaustively explained by existing sociohistorical categories and which sought to produce a “new Soviet man” without a “surplus.” The target of this passage is not only marxism, but all philosophies, sociologies and psychologies that close down time. It also runs counter, as Bakhtin generally did, to the prevailing theories influential in American literature departments today.

The idea of “many possible realities” deepens the polyphonic idea that the “plot is only one of many possible plots” by endowing it with a sense of process and ongoing history. By different routes, both theories—of polyphony and of the novelistic chronotope—arrive at the concept of noncoincidence and the existence of genuine alternatives. And yet neither of the two theories entirely succeeds in Bakhtin's terms. Polyphony, as Bakhtin described it, misunderstands the past by seeing the present as essentially discontinuous and therefore ahistorical. On the other hand, the chronotopic theory of the novel never addresses the problem of a work's already written quality and the sense of destiny that such a quality imposes.

Perhaps the value of Bakhtin's theories lies in their deepening of the problems to be solved in any attempt to represent time as open. I remain confident that, however far in the future one looks, there will always be many interesting solutions to be found.

Notes

  1. This essay is adapted from the third chapter of my recently completed book, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, forthcoming).

  2. Naturally, there are other traditions regarding criticism and philosophy in Russia.

  3. This, of course, is the view attacked by Dostoevsky's underground man. Slavic Review 52, no. 3 (Fall 1993).

  4. I adapt these terms from Ilya Prigogine. See Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980).

  5. These quotations from Bruno and Leibniz are taken from the article on “Time” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Weiner (New York: Scribner's, 1973), 4:393, 394.

  6. William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” “The Will to Believe” and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy and “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine” (New York: Dover, 1956), 150. Further references are to “DD.”

  7. For a consideration of how this formulation applies to evolutionary biology, see Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989); and the discussion of Gould in chapter six of Narrative and Freedom.

  8. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi deiatel'nosti,” Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, ed. S. G. Bocharov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1979), 104. Further references are to AiG.

  9. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book,” appendix 2 of Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 288. Further references to “Toward a Reworking” are to “TRDB”; references to this edition of the Dostoevsky book are to PDP.

  10. As Robert Belknap pointed out to me, my thesis here can be viewed as an extension or adaptation of Lessing's core argument in Laocoön. See especially chapters 16 and 17 of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78-90.

  11. In “TRDB,” Bakhtin directly compares polyphonic creative activity with God's relation to free people (“TRDB,” 285).

  12. The notebooks for The Idiot and The Possessed are yet to be examined with the attention they deserve, as documents in their own right and not as mere way stations toward these two novels. The American editions of these notebooks, which contain superb editorial commentary and material, are not mere translations but reflect considerable editorial effort and attention. See Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for “The Idiot”, trans. Katherine Strelsky, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); and Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for “The Possessed”, trans. Victor Terras, ed. Edward Wasiolek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). See also Robin Feuer Miller, “The Notebooks for The Idiot,Dostoevsky and “The Idiot”: Author, Narrator, and Reader (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 46-89.

  13. On Dostoevsky's creative process and methods of working, see Jacques Catteau, Dostoyevsky and the Process of Literary Creation, trans. Audrey Littlewood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  14. The Notebooks for “The Idiot”, 242.

  15. I recall that, as a college student taking one of my first airplane flights, I caught myself thinking that the plane could not crash because then what sense would my life make?—and then reflecting that planes are held up only by physics, not by metaphysics; or as I would say now, by causes, not destinies or pre-given narrative structures.

  16. That is pretty much how Shklovsky reads Sterne's play with temporality. See Victor Shklovsky, “Sterne's Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary” in Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 25-57.

  17. Shall we call this the suspense convention?

  18. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 34. Further references are to “E&N.”

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Is Dialogism for Real?

Next

Response and Call: The African American Dialogue with Bakhtin