SOURCE: Todorov, Tzvetan. “History of Literature.” In Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, translated by Wlad Godzich, pp. 75-93. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

CATEGORIES

An initial hypothesis concerning the history of literature is formulated by Voloshinov/Bakhtin in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language; it is a pure projection of the typology of styles that he had just drawn up (which follows Wölfflin and his opposition of the linear versus pictural). The variants of these two great stylistic types correspond to well-delinated historical periods.

Summing up all we have said about the possible tendencies in the dynamic relation between authorial discourse and the discourse of the other, we can distinguish the following periods: authoritarian dogmatism, characterized by a linear and impersonal monumental style in the transmission of the discourse of the other (the middle ages); rationalist dogmatism, with an even clearer linear style (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries); realistic and critical individualism, with its pictural style, and a tendency to inject, into the other's discourse, the replies and commentaries of the author (late eighteenth century and nineteenth century); and finally, relativistic individualism, with the disintegration of the author's own context (contemporary period).

(12:121)

These four great periods of literary history betoken, in effect, a moderate and an extreme form of each of the two styles, the linear and the pictural.

The context of this opposition will remain relatively stable throughout Bakhtin's work; but its role will begin to alter as early as in the next text devoted to a study of the same issue, namely “Discourse in the Novel.” It could be said that a hypothesis concerning history places itself, depending on its ambitions, in one of three stages or degrees: either, in the case of a weak hypothesis (degree zero), one limits oneself to a history of events, that is to the simple recording of facts, without worrying about their articulation; or—next degree—one develops an analytic history, where one makes use of a limited number of categories to describe historical facts; or finally, in the case of the strongest hypothesis, one practices systematic history, and one is no longer content to analyze events by means of the same categories, but one asserts the existence of an order in change, which, ultimately, could lead to foreseeing the future: the Hegelian model is the best known example of such a hypothesis.

The formulation advanced by Voloshinov/Bakhtin put him in the ranks of the proponents of the systematic approach: not only were all styles defined by the opposition linear-pictural, but there was also a direction to the evolution: we go precisely from medieval linearity to modern picturality. It will be noted, though, that for Voloshinov/Bakhtin there is no third, synthetic term as we find in Hegel, and this fact is revealing; for him, oppositions will always have an unsurmountable character.

Still, in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin moves from the strong, systematic hypothesis to a weaker, analytic one. There are still two stylistic poles, but both have been present since Antiquity: the “linear” is exemplified by the Hellenistic novel (Bakhtin's favorite example is Leucippe and Clitophoń of Achilles Tatius); the “pictural” by a series of lesser genres that lead, in Antiquity, to two famous works, the Satyricon of Petronius and The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Each of these two styles undergoes multiple transformations, instances of which can be found equally in all periods. For example, the medieval romance, the Baroque novel, the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century, all belong to the first pole; the fabliau, the picaresque novel, the comic novel, though their contemporaries, all belong to the second pole. The only exception to this nonsystematic schema, and it is far from insignificant, is to be found in the present period, which, according to Bakhtin, is dominated entirely by what he called the pictural.

The tenor of the opposition may have remained that of the conceptual duality introduced by Wölfflin, but it has become, at the same time, more precise and more specifically literary. Bakhtin believes that, in every epoch and in all circumstances, there occurs a dialogue of styles, based on heterology. But this dialogue can take place in absentia, that is between the homogeneous style of the work and the other dominant styles of the period (external heterology); or in praesentia, within the work, which thus contains the heterology within itself; the first dialogue obviously corresponds to linear style and the second, to the pictural.

The primary characteristic [of the first tradition] is that it is monolingual and stylistically monolithic (in a more or less consistent fashion); heterology remains outside the novel; nonetheless it determines it, acting as a dialogical background to which the language and the world of the novel react polemically and apologetically. … The second lineage, to which belong the greatest representatives of the novel as a genre (its greatest subgenres as well as the greatest individual works) injects social heteroglossia into the body of the novel and leaves to it the orchestration of its meaning, frequently giving up altogether any pure and unmediated authorial discourse.

(21:186)

This opposition could also be described in the dynamic of its becoming:

Novels of the first stylistic lineage approach heterology from above, it is as if they descend unto it (the sentimental novel stands apart here, somewhere between heterology and the higher genres). Novels of the second lineage, on the contrary, approach heterology from below: they rise from the depths of heterology to overtake the higher spheres of literary language. In both instances, the point of view of heterology prevails upon that of literariness.

(21:211)

I shall make an exception here to my rule of avoiding comparisons between Bakhtin and later writers because a comparison seems so much called for. In Mimesis, written some ten years after “Discourse in the Novel” (but published thirty years earlier), Erich Auerbach also reviews the history of European literature in the light of the opposition of two stylistic attitudes: the separation of styles (Stiltrennung) and the mixture of styles (Stilmischung); both are equally present since Antiquity, their prototypes being the Iliad for the first and the Bible for the second (Auerbach does not confine himself to the novel); at every moment of history one can find representative examples of each of the two attitudes, but modern times are marked by a victory of the mixture of styles. Naturally, Auerbach could not be ignorant of Wölfflin's opposition, where the second term goes beyond the Baroque to characterize the modern period). The closeness between Bakthin and Auerbach is also apparent in their common, and continuing, interest in the problem of the literary representation of the real. The author of Mimesis would not have disavowed the titles that Bakhtin was giving to his manuscripts: “The Bildungsroman and its Signification in the History of Realism”; “Francois Rabelais in the History of Realism.”

In subsequent works, Bakhtin will again alter his formulations while retaining the opposition. The same penchant for hypothetical reconstructions of a past inaccessible to observation—a penchant that led him, a few years earlier, to embrace the theories of Marr upon the origin of language, leads him, at the time of his work on the chronotope, to an image of primitive man and the distinctive features of his mental life. This primitive world is characterized by working and living collectively; by the importance of the role granted to natural rhythms (the growth of plants, the change of the seasons); the orientation toward the future; the domination of the concrete; continuous and cyclical time; the equal value of the elements of life. With the rise of class society, this model of life will be abandoned and repressed; but it will reemerge in the form of a popular culture opposed to official culture (cf. 23:356-66).

We may well question both the mythical image reconstructed by Bakhtin, and its identification, in the historical period, with a popular culture (wasn't culture, in the strict sense, especially in those times, the preserve of an elite fundamentally alien to the “people”?); but we must take note of the shift away from a stylistic opposition between the linear and the pictural, or between a dialogism in absentia or one in praesentia, to an anthropological and cultural opposition between official and popular culture, or, as Bakhtin puts it in his Rabelais, where the most complete description of this popular culture is to be found, between serious culture and the culture of laughter (smekhovaja).

[In the Renaissance and the Middle Ages] an immense world of forms and manifestations of laughter opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture.

(25:6)

In the chapter added to the second edition of the Dostoevsky, devoted to the problem of genre, we can find Bakhtin's last formulations on this issue:

It can be said, with some restrictions to be sure, that medieval man in a way led two lives: one official, monolithically serious and somber; beholden to strict hierarchical order; filled with fear, dogmatism, devotion, and piety; the other, of carnival and the public place, free; full of ambivalent laughter, sacrileges, profanations of all things sacred, disparagement and unseemly behavior, familiar contact with everybody and everything.

(32:173)

This popular and comic culture is apparent in several forms: (1) rites and spectacles, such as carnival; (2) comic verbal works; (3) the familiar discourse of the public place. Of these forms, Bakhtin has a special appreciation for carnival, because it concentrates and reveals all the features of comic popular culture. “Carnival, with its whole complex system of images, was the purest and fullest expression of comic popular culture” (25:90). Hence, the frequent use of the term “carnivalesque,” applied by synecdoche to the whole of this culture. A synonymous expression, to be found in the Rabelais, is “grotesque realism”; the strong term here is “grotesque,” which is opposed to “classical” (making the latter a member of the series: “official,” “serious,” etc.).

The Rabelais provides a list of characteristic features of popular and comic culture: a material and corporeal principle of life; disparagement and debasement, hence parody; ambivalence: confusion of death with rebirth; the necessary relation to time and becoming. In the book on Dostoevsky, nearly the same table can be found; its elements are: free and familiar contact between persons; the attraction of the eccentric, the surprising, the bizarre; misalliances, the reunion of opposites; profanation and debasement (see 32:164-65). The essence of carnival lies in change, in death-rebirth, in destructive-creative time; carnivalesque images are basically ambivalent.

These characteristics are most directly observable in a certain period: the Middle Ages (and, in part, the Renaissance). They can be extrapolated, however (we are still in analytic history), and their avatars identified in any period: the carnivalesque is foreshadowed by the comicoserious genres of Antiquity (the most important of which are the Socratic dialogues and Menippean satire), and its highest expression is to be found in the modern period in the polyphonic novel of Dostoevsky.

In his evocation of two stylistic lines, turned into two forms of culture, Bakhtin does not act like an impartial historian; his sympathies for the mixture of styles and for “popular” culture are obvious. He justifies himself in part by recalling that the popular and heterogeneous tradition has been largely ignored—for reasons easily comprehensible: history and scholarship partake of the same “official,” “serious,” and “classical” ideology; as a result they insist on those things that approximate their ideal. In this view, Bakhtin's work would remedy a lacuna, hence his concentration on the description of “popular” culture.

But this explanation of a quantitative predominance does not justify the value judgments that always favor the same cultural pole, and neither does the frequent implication that the “people” constitute a supreme value. Were we to accept it, it would be easy to assert that leaving the “safety valve” of the carnivalesque open is the best means for the dominant class to perpetuate its tyranny. The explanation of Bakhtin's obvious preference is, I think, somewhat different, and calls into play his epistemological, psychological, and aesthetic beliefs: human existence itself is a “mixture of styles, an irreducible heterogeneity.” The representation will work only if there is an analogy between the represented object and the representing medium; art and literature, forms of representation, will work better the truer they are, that is the more they resemble their object, heterogeneous human existence. That is the reason why, ultimately, the “pictural” tradition is preferable to the “linear” one.

GENRES

“Poetics must begin with genre” (10:175).

This precept occurs as early as the Medvedev/Bakhtin book of 1928; genres are a constant preoccupation of Bakhtinian thought and come to figure for it as the key concept of literary history. It will be recalled that one of Bakhtin's projects of the fifties and sixties was entitled The Genres of Discourse (only a brief sketch remains). The attraction of Bakhtin in his youth for this notion is easily explainable: it fits in well with his two initial methodological choices; the nonseparation of form and content, and the predominance of the social over the individual. Because genre is, first of all, on the side of the collective and the social. And Bakhtin will explain his interest in the “stylistics of genre” in the following terms:

The separation of style and language from genre is largely responsible for the fact that only individual overtones of style, or those of literary currents, are the privileged objects of study, while the basic social tone is ignored. The great historical destinies of literary discourse, tied to the destiny of genres, are overshadowed by the petty vicissitudes of stylistic modification, themselves tied to individual artists and particular currents. For this reason, stylistics has been deprived of an authentic philosophical and sociological approach.

(21:72-73)

Stylistics must become a stylistics of genres, and thus integrate itself into sociology. “The true poetics of genre can only be a sociology of genre” (10:183).

Genre is a sociohistorical as well as a formal entity. Transformations in genre must be considered in relation to social changes.

All these particularities of the novel … are conditioned by a moment of breach in the history of European humanity: the breach by which it emerges from a socially closed and semipatriarchal state, to enter new circumstances that promote international and interlinguistic links and relations.

(27:455)

Second, the notion of genre is more fertile, and therefore more important, than those of school or current; precisely because, one could imagine, it always has a formal reality as well.

The historians of literature do not see, beyond the surface agitation and splashes of color, the great and essential destinies of literature and language, whose chief, foremost characters are the genres, while currents and schools are lesser characters.

(27:451)

The privileged position of the notion of genre is linked to this mediating function.

The utterance and its types, that is, the discursive genres, are the transmission belts between social history and linguistic history.

(29:243)

At the same time, it could be asserted, with some regret, that Bakhtin seems unaware of the problem posed by the use of the same term (“genre”) for a linguistic and translinguistic reality on one hand, and a historical one on the other; he uses the word equally in both contexts, thus giving rise to some problems, as we shall see in the case of the novel.

The unseverable bond between a genre and its linguistic reality makes it always possible to relate literary genres to other discursive genres. For the notion of genre is not the exclusive prerogative of literature; it is rooted in the everyday use of language.

The question, the exclamation, the command, the request, those are the most typical everyday complete utterances. … In salon chatter, light and without consequences, where everyone is at home, and where the main differentiation (and separations) among those present (those whom we call the “audience”) is between men and women—in this situation a particular form of generic completion occurs. … Another type of completion is worked out in the conversation between husband and wife, brother and sister. … Every stable daily situation comprises an audience organized in specific fashion, and therefore includes a definite repertory of small everyday genres.

(12:98-99)

This omnipresence of genres has nonetheless not prevented widespread ignorance of their existence (particularly with respect to intimate and familiar genres); Bakhtin himself in fact did not go beyond the formulation of this general program; we find in his writings the recommendation to study “the preliterary germs of literature (in language and in rite)” (38:345) as well as the idea that a distinction must be drawn between the “primary” genres of language and the “secondary” genres of literature (a distinction that parallels Andre Jolles's opposition of “simple forms” and “complex forms”):

It is particularly important to draw attention here to the absolutely essential distinction between primary (single) discursive genres and secondary (complex) ones. This is not a functional distinction. The secondary (complex) discursive genres—novels, drama, scientific research of all types, great journalistic genres, etc.—emerge in conditions of more complex and relatively developed, organized, cultural communication: essentially written communication, of an artistic, scientific, social, and political, etc. kind. In the process of their formation, they absorb and transform the various primary (simple) discursive genres that arose in conditions of unmediated verbal communication.

(29:239)

But what exactly is a genre? It is one of the fundamental notions of translinguistics, the discipline that studies the stable, nonindividual, forms of discourse.

Every particular utterance is assuredly individual, but each sphere of language use develops its own relatively stable types of utterances, and that is what we call discursive genres.

(29:237)

How to analyze the notion of genre? The first elements of an answer are to be found in the Medvedev/Bakhtin book. Genre originates in the dual orientation of every utterance, orientation toward its object and toward an interlocutor.

An artistic entity of any type, that is, of any genre, is related to reality according to a double modality; the specifics of this double orientation determine the type of this entity, that is its genre. The work is oriented, first, toward its listeners, and recipients, and toward certain conditions of performance and perception. Second, the work is oriented toward life, from the inside so to speak, by its thematic content. Every genre, in its own way, orients itself thematically toward life, toward its occurrences, its problems, etc.

(10:177)

There follows a rapid examination of the forms taken by this orientation in both cases. But, although the two cases are set, in principle, on the same plane, Medvedev/Bakhtin's attention is already concentrated more upon the relation between work and world, and it is with respect to this relation that he introduces the notion, essential here, of completion. By definition, the world is unlimited, endowed with innumerable properties; genre makes a selection among them, sets a model of the world, and breaks up the infinite series.

For the theory of genres, the problem of completion is among the most vital (10:175). The subdivision of particular arts into genres is determined in large measure by the types of completion of the entire work. Each genre is a particular manner of constructing and completing the whole, since it is essential, let us stress this, to achieve thematic completion, and not a conventional one at the level of composition only (10:176). Every genre that is an essential genre is a complex system of ways and means of apprehending reality in order to complete it while understanding it (10:181). A genre is the set of means for a collective orientation in reality, aiming for completion.

(10:183)

Genre, then, forms a modeling system that proposes a simulacrum of the world.

Every genre has its methods, its ways of seeing and understanding reality, and these methods are its exclusive characteristic (10:180). The artist must learn to see reality through the eyes of the genre.

(10:182)

When Bakhtin returns to the question of genre, ten years later, his conception has become more focused and restricted. There is no longer question, with respect to genres, of an orientation toward the interlocutor, but only of a relation between the text and the world—of the model of the world put forward by the text. This modeling is analyzed at the same time into its constitutive elements, which turn out to be two: space and time.

The field of representation changes from genre to genre and among the periods of literary evolution. It is organized differently and it delineates itself differently as space and time. This field is always specific.

(27:470)

To designate these two essential categories that always occur in conjunction with each other, Bakhtin coins the term of chronotope, that is, the set of distinctive features of time and space within each literary genre. Given the definition of genre, the two words, genre and chronotope, will become synonymous.

In literature, the chronotope has an essential generic signification. It can be stated categorically that genre and generic species are precisely determined by the chronotope.

(23:235)

It must immediately be added that Bakhtin does not use the notion of chronotrope in restricted fashion, and does not limit it simply to the organization of time and space, but extends it to the organization of the world (which can be legitimately named “chronotope” insofar as time and space are fundamental categories of every imaginable universe). All the same, in the very text in which Bakhtin works out this notion, there is a noticeable process of amplification, since he begins with pertinent remarks on the organization of space and time in the Greek novel, and ends with a description of Rabelais's “chronotope” in which the relation to the temporal and spatial dimension is not always obvious.

Rabelais' varied series can be reduced to the following basic groupings: (1) series of the human body in its anatomical and physiological dimensions; (2) human clothing series; (3) food series; (4) drink and drunkenness series; (5) sex series (copulation); (6) death series; (7) excrement series.

(23:319)

When, in his last texts, he evokes again the problem of genre, Bakhtin rapidly passes by the general definition (“genre is defined by the object, the goal, and the situation, of the utterance” [38:358]), and lingers on another point: the reality of genre in the life of a society. Bakhtin appears to have considered two aspects of the problem. On the one hand, generic rules have, within a society, a reality comparable to that of linguistic rules: both may be unconscious but they exist nonetheless.

We speak only through certain discursive genres, that is, all our utterances have some relatively stable and typical forms enabling them to achieve totality. … Linguistic forms and the typical forms of utterances, that is discursive genres, integrate our experience and our consciousness, according to strict relation of one with the other.

(29:257)

And just as linguistic rules can be violated, generic rules can be ignored, but not without some consequences.

Many people with a remarkable knowledge of the language feel totally powerless in some areas of communication, precisely because they do not know all the practical forms of the genres that have currency in those areas. Frequently a man who knows remarkably well the discourse of different cultural spheres, who knows how to give a lecture, lead scholarly debate, and who is to be commended for his interventions on public issues, is reduced to silence or intervenes in a most awkward fashion in a social conversation.

(29:259)

On the other hand, genre has a historical dimension: it is not only an intersection of social and formal properties but also a fragment of collective memory.

Genre lives in the present, but it always remembers the past, its beginnings. Genre is the representative of creative memory in the process of literary evolution, which is precisely why genre is capable of guaranteeing the unity and the continuity of this evolution (32:142). The same generic universe is manifest at the beginnings of its evolution in the Menippean satire, and at its peak, reached in Dostoevsky. But we already know that the beginnings, that is, the generic archaisms, are maintained in renewed form in the higher levels of the evolution of the genre. Moreover, the more elevated the genre, the more complex it has become and the more, and the better, it remembers its past.

(32:161-62)

It is indeed a case of collective and not individual memory, and its content may even remain unknown to the individual; but this content is inscribed in the formal properties of the genre.

Does this mean that Dostoevsky took Menippean satire as his starting point directly and consciously? Certainly not. … Somewhat paradoxically, it can be said that it is not Dostoevsky's subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre he used, that preserved the particularities of Menippean satire (32:162). Cultural and literary traditions (including the most ancient ones) are preserved and continue to live, not in the subjective memory of the individual, nor in some collective “psyche,” but in the objective forms of culture itself (including linguistic and discursive forms); in this sense, they are intersubjective and interindividual, and therefore social; that is their mode of intervention in literary works—the individual memory of creative individuals almost does not come into play.

(39:397)

THE CASE OF THE NOVEL

Going from these general considerations to the genre on which Bakhtin focused his attention throughout his life, namely the novel, one cannot help but feel a certain malaise. We have already come across the novel in the course of the presentation of various of Bakhtin's theses: it is the highest incarnation of intertextual play, and it gives heterology the greatest room for action. But heterology and intertextuality are nontemporal categories that can be applied to any period of history; how is their omnipresence to be reconciled with the necessarily historical nature of the genre? Our malaise is likely to increase when we notice that Bakhtin's favorite examples—those that keep recurring in his writings and allow him to identify the genre specifically—are not works to which the genre of the novel is ordinarily associated (such would be works of Fielding, Balzac, or Tolstoy, authors barely mentioned), but those of Xenophon and Menippus, Petronius and Apuleius. If the novel is reduced to intertextuality and heterology, these works are certainly representative; but then, speaking of the novel in Antiquity, one can do no more than note, in that period too, the presence of intertextual play and heterological plurality. What is gained by this new designation? It seems that the concept of the novel is so essential to Bakhtin that it escapes his own rationality, and that the use of the term is due to an attachment of a primarily affective nature, that does not bother about the reasons of its fixation. So that a question is forced upon us: is the novel, in the Bakhtinian sense of the term, really a genre? We have seen, besides, that a genre is to be defined by its chronotope; yet, in Bakhtin, there is never question of a single novelistic chronotope.

This presumption of a singular status for the notion of novel increases when one notes that all of the characteristics of the novel are taken by Bakhtin, without notable alteration, from the great Romantic aesthetic, the reflections of Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, and Hegel, as if a failure to achieve genuine integration of the notion into his own system authorized such a massive and uncritical borrowing. Let us look a little closer at Bakhtin's description of the novel, and its relation to his Romantic predecessors.

For Bakhtin, the novel is a genre like no other, because each of its instances is ultimately irreducibly individual (a contradiction, indeed, of the very notion of genre).

The essential point is that, unlike other genres, the novel has no canon: only particular examples play a role in history, but not the canon of the genre as such.

(27:448)

This assertion is a direct reference to Friedrich Schlegel:¹

Every novel is a genre in itself.

(Kritische Ausgabe, XVIII, 2, 65)

Every novel is an individual entity for itself, and therein lies the essence of the novel.

(KA, III, p. 134)

Schlegel affirmed in addition, as does Bakhtin, that the novel results from the admixture of all the genres that existed before it.

The idea of a novel, as it is established by Boccaccio and Cervantes, is the idea of a romantic book, a romantic composition, where all the forms and all the genres are mixed and interwoven. In the novel, the principal mass is furnished by prose, more diverse than that of any genre set by the Ancients. There are historical parts, rhetorical parts, parts in dialogue; all these styles alternate, they are interwoven and related in the most ingenious and the most artificial way. Poems in all genres, lyrical, epic, didactic, as well as romances, are scattered throughout the whole and embellish it in a varied and exuberant profusion and diversity in the richest and most brilliant fashion. The novel is a poem of poems, a whole texture of poems. It is obvious that a poetic composition of this kind, produced from such varied elements and forms where external conditions are not strictly limited, allows a much more artificial poetic interweaving than the epic of drama, insofar as the first requires a unity of tone while the second must be easily summed up and apprehended, since it is to be offered to intuition.

(KA, XI, p. 159-160)

Or, more concisely: “The novel is a mixture of all poetic kinds, of natural poetry without artifice, and of the mixed genres of artistic poetry” (Literary Notebooks 1797-1801:55).

Socratic dialogues, Bakhtin will say, are the novels of Antiquity. Schlegel asserted similarly: “Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our day” (KA, II, Lyceum 26). According to Bakhtin, the novel is the youngest of the “great” genres (the category of “great” or “basic” genres will never be made explicit by him).

Among the great genres, only the novel is younger than writing and the book, and it is the only one organically adapted to the new forms of silent perception, that is reading. … The study of other genres is analogous to the study of dead languages; the study of the novel, to the study of modern languages, and young ones at that. … The novel is simply a genre among others. It is the only genre in a state of becoming among genres that have reached completion long ago and are already partly dead.

(27:448)

But the idea is already present in this manifesto of Romantic aesthetic that is the fragment 116 of the Athenaeum, whose author is again F. Schlegel.

Other poetic genres are now completed and can now be fully dissected. The poetic genre of the novel is still in becoming.

(KA, II, Athanaeum 116)

And it is known that for Schlegel (“Gespräch über die Poesie”) “a novel is a romantic book.”

Last born, the youngest of all, the novel is naturally the genre that does best today, and it dominates modern literature to the point that it is confused with modern literature. Bakhtin writes: “In some measure, it is with it and in it that is born the future of all literature” (27:481). And Schlegel: “All modern poetry draws its original coloration from the novel” (KA, II, Athenaeum 146).

In spite of the assertion that the novel is not really a genre, Bakhtin attempts to make more precise the opposition between the novel and the other “great” genres; and, at this point, he inevitably comes across the problematic triad of the lyric, the epic, and the dramatic.

We have already seen the difficulties encountered by Bakhtin, in his own perspective, in redefining the opposition novel-poetry (“poetry” in this context being the functional equivalent of “lyric”). If we take into account the distinction between two stylistic lines in the history of Western literature (in absentia and in praesentia dialogism), this opposition becomes even more fragile: isn't all of lyric poetry related to the first stylistic line, the one that maintains the homogeneity of the text while entering into dialogue with external heterology?

Bakhtin devotes the most attention to the distinction between epic and novel, in a text by that very name. To tell the truth, already the introduction to this debate is worrisome; for, as soon as he announces his project, Bakhtin refuses to grant the epic any specificity.

The three constitutive features of the epic that we have just described are equally proper, to a greater or lesser extent, to other high genres of classical Antiquity and of the Middle Ages.

(27:461)

But let us examine the definitions of the novel and the epic that are put forward. First, the novel:

I try to reach the basic structural features of this genre, the most plastic of all—features that have determined the direction of its own changes as well as the direction of its influence and of its action on the rest of literature. I find three such basic characteristics that distinguish the novel radically from all other genres: (1) the stylistic three-dimensionality of the novel, tied to the polyglot consciousness that actualizes itself in it; (2) the radical transformation of the temporal coordinates of the literary image in the novel; (3) the new zone of construction of the literary image in the novel, namely, the zone of maximum contact with the present (contemporary reality) in its openendedness.

(27:454-55)

The first of these characteristics is already known to us: discourse here is not only representing but also represented, object of representation; it is the question of the novel's tendency to reproduce a plurality of languages, discourses, and voices. This characteristic made an appearance in the opposition between the novel and (lyric) poetry, and it will not be commented upon here, in the confrontation with the epic. It is the two other characteristics (“already thematic moments of the structure of the genre of the novel,” 27:456) at work in the opposition of the novel and the epic, that receive further definition from Bakhtin:

(1) a national epic past—in Goethe's and Schiller's terminology the “perfectly past”—serves as the epic's object; (2) national legend (and not personal experience and the free invention that flows from it) serves as the source for the epic; (3) an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is from the time in which the singer (and author and his audience) lives.

It will be noted that “epic,” the term under definition, appears twice in the definition itself (“epic past,” “epic distance”); in sum, the category is an anthropological one before it becomes literary.

These features—two for the novel against three for the epic—that allow the setting up of an opposition between the novel and the epic, are not clearly distinguished among themselves later on, and, in fact, can be reduced to a single great opposition: possible or impossible continuity between the time of the (represented) utterance and the time of (representing) uttering. The other characteristics of the two universes, epic and novelistic, derive from there.

The formally constitutive feature of the epic as a genre is rather the transferral of a represented world in the past and the appurtenance of this world to the past. … To portray an event on the same temporal and axiological plane as oneself and one's contemporaries (and, therefore, from personal experience and invention) is to accomplish a radical transformation, and to step out of the world of the epic into the world of the novel.

(27:456-57)

A whole slew of other characteristics of the novel (and of the epic) are brought in relation to this basic opposition. The representation of the author within the novel becomes possible; the novel requires a well-delineated beginning and end, whereas the epic can do without them; the novel valorizes the couple knowledge—lack of knowledge; the epic embodies unity, the novel diversity, etc. These remarks are of considerable interest, but we may well wonder whether they are all applicable to a genre, to a historically circumscribed entity, or rather whether they are not universally transgeneric and transhistorical categories. The reference to Goethe in one of the quoted passages may help us answer this question. In the text entitled “Über epische und dramatische Dichtung,” written in 1797 and published in 1827, cosigned by Schiller and Goethe, but actually written by Goethe alone, the epic is indeed placed into an opposition, not to the novel, though, but to drama. “The epic poet relates the event as perfectly past, while the playwright represents it as perfectly present” (Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 36, p. 149).

The opposition between epic and drama is clearly rooted here in the dichotomy of “relating” and “representing” (which in turn refers back to Plato's opposition of diegesis and mimesis). But those are two modalities of discourse: how can one ask of them that they take on the status of historical and generic characteristics? Looked at from another perspective, the same distinction underlies parallel developments in Hegel, who is also mentioned by Bakhtin in these pages.

For the content as well as the representation of what he [the epic poet] narrates is intended to appear as removed from himself as a subject and as a closed reality in itself. The poet is not permitted to enter into a completely subjective unity with this closed reality—either with respect to the objective self, or with respect to its presentation. The third mode of representation [the drama] finally binds the two earlier ones together in a new totality, in which we see before us an objective development as well as its origin from within individuals. Thus the objective represents itself as belonging to the subject; simultaneously, however, the subjective is represented on the one hand in its transition to a real expression, and on the other hand as the lot which passion brings about as the necessary result of its own action.²

It is not only drama that thus shares the properties of the “novel” as defined by Bakhtin; so does the epic. I shall invoke but one example from Bakhtin himself. First, here is how, in the study on the chronotope, he characterizes the epic: “The internal aspect fuses with the external; man is wholly outside” (23:367).

Yet, in the same pages, Rabelais' work is presented as the purest incarnation of the novelistic; here is Bakhtin's description:

It must be stressed that in Rabelais there is absolutely no aspect of interior individual life. In Rabelais, man is wholly outside. A certain limit in the exteriorization of man is reached here. … Action and dialogue give expression to all that is within man.

(23:388)

In a text from the same period, the novelistic and the epic are no longer in a relation of opposition, but one appears to be a species of the other. “The great epic form (the great epic), including the novel … (22:224). The novel (and the great epic in general) …” (22:227).

Some twenty years later, Bakhtin seems to have reversed himself. Now it is the epic that is a single aspect of the novelistic:

In somewhat simplified and schematic fashion, it could be said that the novelistic genre has three basic roots: epic, rhetorical, carnivalesque.

(32:145)

On the other hand, we never find (unless it is in the unpublished materials) the confrontation we await, between the novel and drama.

The not very coherent, and ultimately irrational, character of Bakhtin's description of the genre of the novel is a strong indication that this category does not occupy its own place in the system. The intersection of two categories, present intertextuality and temporal continuity, does not provide a definition of a sufficiently specific object so that it may be located historically. Such a definition, which will inevitably be general, will not attain the complexity of the reality it is meant to apprehend; a genre appears at a certain period, and at no other. “Representing” or “relating” does not define a genre, but categories of discourse in general. The same applies to what Bakhtin had proposed as the constitutive features of the “novel.”

What he described under this name is not a genre, but one or two properties of discourse, whose occurrence is not confined to a single historical moment.

NOVELISTIC SUBGENRES

Bakhtin's generic analysis may be baffling with respect to the novel, but it proves apposite to the study of novelistic subgenres. They receive his attention during the thirties especially, in a series of investigations that could be divided into two groups: those bearing on the representation of discourse, and those devoted to the representation of the world. These two series are apparently independent of each other, and, in the end, we have three lists of the main novelistic subgenres.

In “Discourse in the Novel,” the enumeration of the subgenres occurs in the context of the discussion on the two stylistic lines whose conflict characterizes the history of the European novel. We get the following classification: (1) the minor genres of Antiquity that lead to the Satyricon and to The Golden Ass; (2) Sophistic novels; (3) chivalric romances; (4) the Baroque novel; (5) the Pastoral novel; (6) Prüfungsroman; (7) Bildungsroman; (8) the (auto)biographical novel; (9) the Gothic novel; (10) the Sentimental novel; (11) minor medieval genres (fabliaux, etc.); (12) the picaresque novel; (13) the parodic novel; (14) the syncretic novel of the nineteenth century. This list does not claim to be exhaustive. As an aside to the discussion, Bakhtin evokes the properties of the (English) humanistic novel, which is missing from the enumeration.

The study of the chronotope is explicitly dedicated to the description of the various models that have dominated the history of the novel. Actually it stops at the Renaissance (with Rabelais), but it does put forth some indications about later subgenres. Here the list runs more or less as follows: (1) the Sophistic or Hellenistic novel; (2) the novel of adventures and everyday life (Satyricon, The Golden Ass); (3) the (auto)biographical novel, with further subdivisions: (a) Platonic types or rhetorical novel; (b) “energetic” biography in the style of Plutarch or “analytic” biography following Suetonius; etc.; (4) chivalric romance; (5) lesser genres of the Middle Ages and Renaissance; (6) the Rabelaisian novel; (7) the Idyllic novel and its progeny: (a) the regional novel; (b) Sternian and Goethian novel; (c) Rousseauist novel; (d) the family novel, the novel of generations. Some additional subgenres, such as the Prüfungsroman, the Bildungsroman or Erziehungsroman, are also mentioned but not discussed.

In the fragments of the book on the Bildungsroman which have reached us (fragments that evidence their author's maturity of thought, and thus make even more regrettable the loss of the final manuscript), there is a third, shorter and synthetic listing, based on another criterion: the mode of representation of the main character; nonetheless, categories encountered previously, can be recognized here:

A classification according to the principle of construction of the image of the main character: the travel novel; the novel of the hero's trials [Prüfungsroman]; the biographical (autobiographical) novel; the novel of learning [Bildungsroman].

(22:188)

I won't go into the details of the descriptions of the subgenres thus advanced; they fall within the historians' area of competence. I shall limit myself to two broad comments. The first concerns the obviously open, nonstructured, character of these lists, which evidence Bakhtin's attachment to an “analytic history” in preference to a “systematic” one. It is significant that the search for a system becomes weaker with the passage of time. “Discourse on the Novel” (1934-1935) may have proposed still a weak form of systematization, with its distribution of genre into two stylistic lines, but no trace of it is left in the study on the chronotope (1937-1938). The various chronotopes are not classed in any way; the same applies to the modes of construction of the image of the character.

The second comment has to do with the total autonomy of these lists: there is indeed no cross-reference among them. This is not surprising, since the three lists are extremely close to each other, not only in outline, but in details. For example, whether the problematic under discussion be stylistic or structural, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival stands apart from the subgenre of the “chivalric romance,” to which it is, in principle, attached, and it comes closer to novels whose prototype is The Golden Ass (21:188 and 23:301). Or again: the advent of the second stylistic line (heterology in praesentia), as we saw, was correlated to the great geographic and astronomical discoveries; but the same is true of the predominance achieved, in the Renaissance, by a new chronotope (exemplified by the same works).

In his novel, Rabelais opens our eyes in a way to a universal and unlimited chronotope of human life. In this he was perfectly attuned to the nascent era of great cosmological and geographic discoveries.

(23:391)

At first, one could say that this remarkable coincidence is evidence of the validity of Bakhtin's work: having undertaken three completely independent investigations, he ends with the same result each time, each inquiry confirming the others. Actually matters are simpler, yet quite revealing of Bakhtin's conception. In fact, none of these inquiries ends up with a list of genres; the list was actually given beforehand. We have seen that Bakhtin does not deduce genres from an abstract principle, in the manner of Schelling or Hegel; he finds them. History has left in its wake a number of works that have regrouped, in history as well, according to a small number of models. That is an empirical given. And Bakhtin's work does not consist in the establishment of genres, but, having found them, in their submission to analysis (which can be stylistic as well as chronotopic, or related to the conception of man revealed in them). Bakhtin's practice thus confirms his attachment to “analytical history,” and beyond, to his conception of literary studies as a part of history.

Notes

1. The references to Friedrich Schlegel are to the Kritische Ausgabe (abbreviated KA), followed by, first, the number of the volume and then that of the page or fragment; or to the Literary Notebooks 1797-1801 (LN) (London, 1957), followed by the number of the fragment.

2. Esthétique, La poésie, French translation, vol. 1 (Paris: Aubier, 1965), pp. 128-29. Translation from the German by Linda Schulte-Sasse.

Chronological List of the Writings of Bakhtin and His Circle

1. M. Bakhtin, “Iskusstvo i otvetstvennost” [Art and responsibility]. In (42), pp. 5-6. Earlier publication in: Den' iskusstva (1919) and in Voprosy literatury 6 (1977).

2. V. N. Voloshinov, “Recenzija na knigu I. Glebova o Chajkovskom” [Review of a book by I. Glebov on Tchaïkovski]. Zapiski peredvizhnogo teatra 42 (1922). With other texts by Voloshinov, Moussorgsky and Beethoven, published in the review Iskusstvo. Vitebsk, 1921.

3. M. Bakhtin, “Avtor i geroj v esteticheskoj dejatel' nosti” [Author and character in aesthetic activity]. In (42), pp. 7-180. Earlier partial publication in: Voprosy filosofii 7 (1977) and in Voprosy literatury 12 (1978). Written about 1922 to 1924.

4. M. Bakhtin, “Problema soderzhanija, materiala i formy v slovesnom khudozhestvennom tvorchestve” [The problem of content, material, and form in the verbal artistic creation]. In (41), pp. 6-71. Earlier partial publication in Kontekst 1973. Moscow, 1974. Written in 1924.

5. M. Bakhtin, “Iz lekcij po istorii russkoj literatury. Vjacheslav Ivanov” [Extracts from lectures on the history of Russian Literature. Viacheslav Ivanov]. In (42), pp. 374-83. Transcription by R. M. Mirkina, from a course taught in the 1920s, probably around 1924.

6. V. N. Voloshinov, “Po tu storonu social'nogo” [On this side of the social]. Zvezda 5 (1925):186-214.

7. V. N. Voloshinov, “Slovo v zhizni i slovo v poezii.” Zvezda 6 (1926):244-67. Eng. trans. “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Poetry” to appear in Writings by the Circle of Bakhtin. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, forthcoming.

8. V. N. Voloshinov, Frejdizm. Moscow-Leningrad, 1927. Eng. trans. Freudianism: A Marxist Critique. Translated by I. R. Titunik. New York: Academic Press, 1976.

9. P. N. Medvedev, “Ocherednye zadachi istoriko-literaturnoj nauki” [The current tasks of a historical literary science]. Literatura i marksizm 3 (1928):65-87.

10. P. N. Medvedev. Fromal'nyj metod v literaturovedenii (Leningrad, 1928). Eng. trans. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship. Translated by A. J. Wehrle. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

11. V. N. Voloshinov, “Novejshie techenija lingvisticheskoj mysli na Zapade” [The most recent currents of linguistic thought in the West]. Literatura i marksizm 5 (1928).

12. V. N. Voloshinov, Marksizm i filosofija jazyka. Leningrad, 1929. Eng. trans. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Translated by L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik. New York: Seminar Press, 1973.

13. M. Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo. Leningrad, 1929. Eng. trans. Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics. Translated by W. W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. A new English translation, including new materials, is available in the Theory and History of Literature Series: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson with an introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1984.

14. M. Bakhtin, “Predislovie” (Preface). In L. N. Tolstoj, Polnoe sobranie khudozhestvennykh proizvedenij, vol. 11, “Dramaticheskie proizvedenija” [Dramatic works], pp. 3-10. Moscow-Leningrad, 1929.

15. M. Bakhtin, “Predislovie [Preface]. In Tolstoj, Polnoe sobranie khudozhestvennykh proizvedenij, vol. 13, “Voskresenie” [Resurrection], pp. 3-20. Moscow-Leningrad, 1929. Eng. trans. in Writings by the Circle of Bakhtin. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, forthcoming.

16. V. N. Voloshinov, “O granicakh poétiki i lingvistiki,” in V bor'be za marksizm v literaturnoj nauke, pp. 203-40. Leningrad, 1930. Eng. trans. “On the Borders between Poetics and Linguistics,” in Writings by the Circle of Bakhtin. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Univ. of Minn. Press, forthcoming.

17. V. N. Voloshinov, “Stilistika khudozhestvennoj rechi. 1. Chto takoe jazyk?” [Stylistics of artistic discourse: 1. What is language?]. Literaturnaja uchëba 2 (1930):48-66.

18. V. N. Voloshinov “Stilistika khudozhestvennoj rechi. 2. Konstrukcija vyskazyvanija.” Eng. trans. “Stylistics of artistic discourse: 2. The Construction of Utterances,” in Writings of the Circle of Bakhtin. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, forthcoming.

19. V. N. Voloshinov, “Stilistika khudozhestvennoj rechi. 3. Slovo i ego social'naja funkcija” [Stylistics of artistic discourse. 3. Discourse and its social function]. Literaturnaja uchëba 5 (1930):43-59.

20. P. N. Medvedev, Formalizm i formalisty [Formalism and the Formalists]. Leningrad, 1934.

21. M. Bakhtin, “Slovo v romane.” In (41), pp. 72-233. Earlier partial publication in: Voprosy literatury 6 (1972). Written in 1934-1935. Eng. trans. “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 259-422. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981). Dialogic Imagination hereafter cited as DI.

22. M. Bakhtin, “Roman vospitanija i ego znachenie v istorii realizma” [The novel of apprenticeship and its significance in the history of realism], pp. 188-236. Written in 1936-38.

23. M. Bakhtin, “Formy vremeni i khronotopa v romane.” In (41), pp. 234-407. Earlier partial publication in: Voprosy literatury 3 (1974). Written in 1937-1938, except for “Concluding Remarks,” Eng. trans. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in DI, pp. 84-258.

24. M. Bakhtin, “Iz predystorii romannogo slova.” In (41), pp. 408-46. Earlier partial publication in: Voprosy literatury 8 (1965) and in Russkaja i zarubezhnaja literatura. Saransk, 1967. Written in 1940. Eng. trans. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in DI, pp. 41-83.

25. M. Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaja kul'tura Srednevekovija i Renessansa. Written in 1940 except for some additions. Eng. trans. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968.

26. M. Bakhtin, “Rable i Gogol” [Rabelais and Gogol]. In (41), pp. 484-95. Earlier publication in: Kontekst 1972. Moscow, 1973. Written in 1940, revised in 1970.

27. M. Bakhtin, “Epos i roman.” In (41), pp. 448-83. Earlier publication in: Voprosy literatury 1 (1970). Written in 1941. Eng. trans. “Epic and Novel,” in DI, pp. 3-40.

28. M. Bakhtin, “K filosofskim osnovam gumanitarnykh nauk” [Toward the philosophical bases of the human sciences]. In (42), p. 409-11. Earlier partial publication in: Kontekst 1974. Moscow, 1975. Written about 1941.

29. M. Bakhtin, “Problema rechevykj zhanrov” [The Problem of the discursive genres]. In (42), pp. 237-80. Earlier partial publication in: Literaturnaja uchëba 1 (1978). Written in 1952-1953.

30. M. Bakhtin, “Problema teksta v lingvistike, filologii i drugikh gumanitarnykh naukakh. Opyt filosofskogo analiza” [The problem of text in linguistics, philology, and the other human sciences: An essay of philosophical analysis]. In (42), p. 281-307. Earlier publication in: Voprosy literatury 10 (1976). Written in 1959-1961.

31. M. Bakhtin, “K pererabotke knigi o Dostoevskom.” In (42), pp. 308-27. Earlier publication in: Kontekst 1976. Moscow, 1977. Written in 1961. Eng. trans. “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book.” In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, appendix II. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1984).

32. M. Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo [Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics], 2nd ed. Rev. of (13). Moscow, 1963.

33. M. Bakhtin, “Pis'mo I. I. Kanaevu o Gëte” [Letter to I. I. Kanaev on Goethe]. In (42), p. 396. Written 11 October 1962.

34. M. Bakhtin, “Pis'mo I. I. Kanaevu o Gëte” (Letter to I. I. Kanaev on Goethe]. In (42), pp. 396-97. Written in January 1969.

35. M. Bakhtin, “Recenzija ma knigu L. E. Pinskogo Shekspir” [Review of Shakespeare by L. E. Pinski]. In (42), pp. 411-12. Written in 1970.

36. M. Bakhtin, “Otvet na vopros redakeii Novo go mira” [Response to the question of the editorial committee of Novyj mir]. In (42), pp. 328-35. Earlier publication in: Novyj mir 11 (1970).

37. M. Bakhtin, “O polifonichnosti romanov Dostoevskogo” [On polyphony in the novels of Dostoevsky]. Rossija/Russia 2 (1975):189-98. Earlier publication in Polish in: Wspólczesność 17-30 (October 1971). Interview from 1970 or 1971.

38. M. Bakhtin, “Iz zapisej 1970-71 godov” [Extracts from notes from the years 1970-71]. In (42), pp. 336-60.

39. M. Bakhtin, “Zakljuchitel'nye zamechanija” [Concluding remarks]. In (41), pp. 391-407. Conclusions to (23). Written in 1973.

40. M. Bakhtin, “K metodologii gumanitarnykh nauk” [Concerning methodology in the human sciences]. In (42), pp. 361-73. Earlier partial publication in: Kontekst 1974. Moscow, 1975. Written in 1974.

41. M. Bakhtin, Voprosy literatury i éstetiki. Moscow, 1975. Eng. trans. of four of the essays in DI.

42. M. Bakhtin, Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva [The aesthetics of verbal creation]. Moscow, 1979. Published by S. G. Bocharov.

43. “M. M. Bakhtin i M. I. Kagan (po materialam semejnogo arkhiva)” [M. M. Bakhtin and M. I. Kagan, materials from family archives]. Pamjat' 4 (1981). Letters and documents edited by K. Nevel'skaja.