Bakhtin on Dostoevsky

[Germ]

Bakhtin claims that Dostoevsky created a new genre. He names this genre the "polyphonic novel."

Was Dostoevsky merely adding ephemeral elaborations to already existing genre conventions, or was he basically doing something original? If so, is Bakhtin's characterization of the new genre accurate? And if that is so, there must be new authors who have developed this genre further, and I'd like it if someone could identify these "polyphonic" authors.

Bakhtin himself suggests Thomas Mann. I'm not sure, myself.

[Charles Darnay]

I'm not sure if Dostoevsky was the first to use it. I would argue that some of Dickens works could be considered Polyphonic. A Tale of Two Cities, The PIckwick Papers and Bleak House are the first ones that come to mind.

A Polyphonic novel is one that has multiple point of views that work towards separate "ideas". There is a distinction between the multiple narratives in Brothers Karamazov and let's say Richardson's Clarissa. In the latter, even though there are different p.o.vs, they are all focused on a singular subject: Clarissa.

Brothers Karamazov deals with several completely different narrative threads and philosophies.

Notable post-Dostoevsky polyphonic novels are To The Lighthouse and Ulysses.

More recently, we have polyphonic novels that are not so much different streams of ideas, but are basically a series of different stories crammed into a book. G.R.R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series is a good example - there is constantly a multitude of stories happening at once.

[JCamilo]

I would argue Brothers K is polyphonic, Dickens is multiple, but his own voice is stronger than Dostoievisky open, multiple views.

Anyways, the answer is that he was doing both something original and working on previous elaboration of the genre. I would not call it a new genre completely and Thomans Mann, Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce did it quite good.

[Germ]

A Polyphonic novel is one that has multiple point of views that work towards separate "ideas".

I'm not sure that I agree with this. Look at Karamazov: so much of this novel revolves around one idea (with almost infinite, kaleidoscopic complexity, but still, there is only one basic center that everything revolves around): If there is no God, then everything is permitted. We get to see this idea played out from the "point of view" of a dozen different characters, we are allowed to follow every complex permutation in its utmost subtlety, but it is still one basic idea.

One identifying characteristic of the polyphonic novel is the attitude of the author towards his characters, and specifically, what kind of narrative structure the author creates to display and offset these characters. On the less theoretical side, I would say that it boils down to the author's attitude towards his major villains and heroes. Dickens is too judgmental towards his villains and too forgiving to his virtuous heroes, in order to be considered truly polyphonic.

Richardson has a somewhat complex and ambivalent attitude toward his great villain, but the heroine is a little too pure and perfect (hence, not polyphonic).

[Germ]

I would argue Brothers K is polyphonic, Dickens is multiple, but his own voice is stronger than Dostoievisky open, multiple views.

Yes. Dickens is a master of characterization. It is as if he created real individual people, each with their own utterly and irreducibly unique POV (a rare talent)! But his own unique authorial perspective is too dominant; Dostoevesky is able to draw the authorial POV in a more equal juxtaposition to the protagonist POV.


Anyways, the answer is that he was doing both something original and working on previous elaboration of the genre. I would not call it a new genre completely and Thomans Mann, Woolf, Faulkner, Joyce did it quite good.

I don't see Faulkner as polyphonic, but perhaps I am reading him wrong (I read him as the inventor of the Southern Gothic, a somewhat different genre). Mann is not strictly polyphonic, because his narratives stretch out over several years or decades, whereas Dostoevsky generally compresses the major narrative events into a few fateful days.

[IntravenousJava]

Bakhtin claims that Dostoevsky created a new genre. He names this genre the "polyphonic novel."

Was Dostoevsky merely adding ephemeral elaborations to already existing genre conventions, or was he basically doing something original? If so, is Bakhtin's characterization of the new genre accurate? And if that is so, there must be new authors who have developed this genre further, and I'd like it if someone could identify these "polyphonic" authors.

Bakhtin himself suggests Thomas Mann. I'm not sure, myself.

I love this thread! I've always been awed by the way Thomas Mann borrowed musical devices and forms to lend his greatest works a sort of symphonic character. Being a lover of music and literature, The Magic Mountain and its kin are a dream come true.

At the same time, though I immensely enjoy the application of these and similar techniques applied in writing, I always cringe a little when I hear a musical metaphor or template imposed onto literature. Music, as arguably the most dynamic of all the art forms, is unlike the others in that its elements (notes, chords, phrases, etc.) will not hold still long enough for us to contemplate them as we might words on a page. While I am still "feeling" the effects of a particularly stirring phrase of music, the next phrase impresses itself onto my consciousness, interrupting any attempt I might make at "thinking" about what it might mean.

[Charles Darnay]

I don't see Faulkner as polyphonic, but perhaps I am reading him wrong (I read him as the inventor of the Southern Gothic, a somewhat different genre).

The two are not exclusive. I don't think polyphony is a genre in the same way Southern Gothic is. I would say that Sound and the Fury is polyphonic.

[Charles Darnay]

I would argue Brothers K is polyphonic, Dickens is multiple, but his own voice is stronger than Dostoievisky open, multiple views.


I suppose this is true.

[Germ]

I couldn't finish The Magic Mountain. Doctor Faustus was a chore, but I somehow made it through. The Buddenbrooks was superlative, however. It had that "effortless" feeling which I associate with great art. As I approached the end, I found myself wishing it were a thousand pages longer.

The musical thing, as Bakhtin employs it, is merely a metaphor. It is difficult to avoid extending the metaphor further, however. It's been many years since I studied music theory, but to make the metaphor even more literal, Dostoevsky is contrapuntal. It is not strictly speaking harmonic (or should I say, symphonic).

I am thinking of Helmholtz and his three stages in the evolution of music: monophonic-polyphonic-harmonic. In this scheme, I am tempted to say that Dostoevsky is even further advanced: post-harmonic. Or, as Ornette Coleman called his music, harmelodic.

[JCamilo]

The two are not exclusive. I don't think polyphony is a genre in the same way Southern Gothic is. I would say that Sound and the Fury is polyphonic.

Yes, and what make Brothers K polyphonic is that altougth they all may be running in circles around the same question, each has a different way addressing to Dostoievisky central question that you can have the whole bit by bit (like the blind monks and the elephant) and the reader has a dialetic approach to the problem. Maybe unlike Dickens, where the characters are so alive that they leave to room for dialetics. they are. (dialetic maybe an imperfect word).

[Germ]

I don't think polyphony is a genre in the same way Southern Gothic is.

Without doubt. I just threw that out there without too much deep thought.


I would say that Sound and the Fury is polyphonic.

I've got to think about that. Interesting question.

[Germ]

...altougth they all may be running in circles around the same question, each has a different way addressing to Dostoievisky central question that you can have the whole bit by bit (like the blind monks and the elephant) and the reader has a dialetic approach to the problem...

Yes. Your use of the word circles shows some understanding. Bakhtin calls them loopholes. Everybody always leaves themselves a loophole (all of the big protagonists, anyway, and especially the narrator).

[JCamilo]

This is what is somehow different with Dickens. They characters are so definitive that we feel them sometimes more than their ideas. They are, maybe in the archetype sense, very definitive and full of Dickens own certainty and clarity. Perfect, maybe, characters of novela. A bit like, when Pip meet Estella, he is Pip, he is his vision and all and Estella is Estella, she has her vision and they do not argue so we have a vision of the whole, the truth is given with the narrative.

Considering of course, Dickens is a model of Dostoievisky, so it is like the russian feels Dickens is the truth but had to ask how and why.

[Germ]

Dickens' characters are sharply drawn with the definitive confidence of a gifted and perceptive artist.

Dickens shares many characteristics with Dostoevsky. They both deftly handle themes of madness and crime. Both seem obsessed with the motif of the humiliated and abused child. I see some similarity in plot structure (strange adventures, sudden reversals of fortune, etc.).

In Dickens, however, the heroes are kind of bland. The side-characters and villains are hypnotically good (in all those novels, not a single such character is repeated!). But all of those ever-so-virtuous heroes and heroines just bleed together into one big, unoffensive blob of pure amnesia.

These hyper-pure super-virgins don't exist in Dostoevsky. The closest you get is the idiot; and think of how much more complex and compelling this hero is, when compared to any of the central heroes and heroines of Dickens.

[WyattGwyon]

No one here has gotten the essence of what Bakhtin meant by polyphony (which is a global consequence of dialogism.) What makes Dostoyevsky's novels polyphonic is that the author addresses his characters as autonomous discourses whose voices are on an equal footing with that of the author. The author retains no surplus of information beyond that available to the characters. The author does not finalize his characters at second hand—doesn't show what they are, but rather, only how they are conscious of themselves. His novels therefore comprise multiple fully formed consciousnesses—multiple fully-formed and independent voices.

One great illustration of this in practice is Dostoyevsky's struggle with Raskolnikov's motivation. In his notebooks the author reminds himself that he must try to pin down exactly why Raskolnikov did what he did. Ultimately, however, he fails to do so. Essentially, Dostoyevsky never did know exactly what motivated the murders—or, more precisely, he didn't know which among the many motives was the dominant or controlling one. Philip Rhav, in a seminal essay, argues that this lack of knowledge is precisely why the character is a great fictional creation.

This attitude toward the unknowability of motivation was acknowledged in every one of the major novels: The narrator of The Idiot urges us not to "forget that the motives of human actions are usually infinitely more complex and varied than we are apt to explain them afterward, and can rarely be defined with any certainty," and therefore "it is sometimes better for a writer to content himself with a simple narration of events." The narrator of Devils has this to say of a plan hatched by Varvara Stavrogin: "I won't attempt to explain exactly what was in her mind when she conceived it, nor can I account for all its contradictory elements. I'll content myself with describing events just as they happened, and I decline any responsibility if they appear too incredible." One might also note the undisguised contempt for forensic psychology expressed in later portions of The Brothers Karamazov.

Polyphony comes down to this: His novels are a welter of independent voices and discourses all on an equal footing with that of the author. Dostoyevsky approached his fictional creations with the same fundamental respect accorded living beings: he did not pretend he could get at their internal lives and so had to let them define themselves in their own voices.

As for the genre question: In Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, which is the essential text for comprehending all of Bakhtin's basic concepts, Bakhtin thought that polyphony was more or less new with Dostoyevsky and largely exclusive to his work. In later writings, however, including those in The Dialogic Imagination, he seems to have come to believe that, while Dostoyevsky was the quintessential practitioner of polyphony, in fact, many other authors employed it as well. He notably cites Dickens in this regard.

[JCamilo]

There is others, Aliocha is somehow pure too, but the point is complex or compelling to be used only towards the doubtful and not towards clarity and idealization is something I avoid. I think those caracters just do another function in the story. Dickens seems to have no doubt, he is clear, he is compelled to show what is true. He does not mind why a character is this way, they must do their role and do good. With Dostoievisky, we have a person how is in doubt, who thinks truth may have some relative meaning, and his characters must help us to see the how. Dickens is somehow mythinc, he show us Ulysses. Dostoievisky shows us Plato's dialogues.

But i think the rest is as you said.

[Germ]

What makes Dostoyevsky's novels polyphonic is that the author addresses his characters as autonomous discourses whose voices are on an equal footing with that of the author.

I would only add that it is the narrator that addresses the characters in such a way, not precisely the author. A fine point, perhaps...

Then again, maybe it is better to say author. In any case, the monophonic novel (I forget what Bakhtin calls it exactly) generally has one privileged discourse around which all the other discourse in the novel is organized. The privileged discourse may not even be directly represented, but its influence can always be sensed by the perceptive reader: Look at Huckleberry Finn, in which the "skaz" narration is entirely in the represented words of the quasi-literate Finn. However, one can sense the thought of Twain himself always in the background: his views about life, society, childhood, slavery. This is the real animating principle, and not the discourse of Finn, Jim, and all the other characters; these other streams-of-thought are subsidiary appendages to one central, authoritative thought (Twain's own, even though it is not directly represented), like the branches of a tree.


One great illustration of this in practice is Dostoyevsky's struggle with Raskolnikov's motivation...

I had always assumed that the ambivalent depiction of Rasknolnikov's motive was part of the conscious design of the novel. It is interesting to hear that Dostoevsky himself honestly struggled with the question of motive; he actually tried to finalize the murderer's motive in a more conventional way, it sounds like. It's a good thing he failed, or we wouldn't have the subtly juxtaposed balance of motives that is one of this novel's most attractive features.

I would never have said, however, that Dostoevsky failed to represent a finalized motive (or a monological hierarchy of motives, in which each factor--the pecuniary motive, the ideological musings, the spiritual protest--is given a definite and singular value), but instead I would have said that he succeeded in representing a polyphonic balance of motives (a dialogical array of motives, in which no one, definite factor can ever gain the upper hand). The motives in a monophonic novel would be structured vertically, with various motives assigned unequivocal priority (given a higher or lower value). In a polyphonic novel they are structured horizontally, and the motives are hyper-equivocal and deeply ambivalent.


This attitude toward the unknowability of motivation was acknowledged in every one of the major novels... One might also note the undisguised contempt for forensic psychology expressed in later portions of The Brothers Karamazov.

This contempt can also be found in his first great novel, in the psychological speculations of Raskolnikov's buddy, for example. Here is another place where the analogy to Dickens becomes valid, since he was a master at the representation of complex motivations (I think of the patricidal son in Martin Chuzzlewit, who foreshadows Ivan Karamazov). Of course, Richardson is a master of motivation. But complexly intertwined motivations do not necessarily make for a true polyphonic of balance of motivations. The attitudes and life-feeling of Dickens, as embodied in his virtuous heroes and heroines, are evaluated at a higher level. It is subtly assumed at every point in the narrative that Dickens' bourgeoisie values are the only truly valid ones, and he would have never dared to place the values of a Fagin, or even of a Sam Weller, on the same plane as his own. Dostevesky does dare to do this (which must have been extremely difficult for him; it's not like he personally agreed with the values of a Raskolnokiv or an Ivan K., but for the purposes of his art, he could not allow his authorial evaluations to take monological priority).

[Germ]

Please consider this thought: 1984 as a polyphonic novel.

The first thing that strikes me in this novel is the complex orchestration of discourse. This is very vividly illustrated in the opening chapters, by Winston Smith's first experiments with the journal. At first, he struggles to find his own voice, but as the story progresses, the journal entries becomes increasingly more confident and articulate.

Winston Smith's environment is completely saturated with the discourse of IngSoc and newspeak. This is an aggressively monological discourse that seeks to penetrate and control all other discourse. In Air Strip One, every word has been finalized, and those words that can't be finalized are eliminated from the vocabulary (and the ban is enforced through terrorism). It takes great effort to detach your own unique, individual voice from the omnipresent discourse of Big Brother. The way Orwell depicts it (with honesty, sympathy and subtle insight), this is accomplished through an intense process of inner dialogue. Winston uses the journal to talk to himself, and through this process he is able to make his own thought separate and clear (to himself, but also unfortunately to BB).

The motives of O'Brien are very complex and ambivalent. Orwell even coined a term for the process by which two contradictory motives or ideas can be held in the mind at once: doublethink. How easily this concept could be used as a synonym for the "loopholes" that Bakhtin identifies as a fundamental to the construction of Dostoevsky's characters. Every hero of Dostoevsky is a victim of his own peculiar form of doublethink. O'Brien has mastered doublethink in it's most subtle variations. Hence his motives can not be reductively analyzed. Are they rational or deranged? Is he a madman, or a genius? Both, apparently, and neither.

The whole operation against Winston stretches out over several years and costs a considerable amount of money and manpower. It really makes no rational sense (if we're talking about more linear and conventional motives). Are they merely testing poor Winston, to see if he'll go over to the "other side"? But O'Brien already knows about Winston's apostasy; he understands his character perfectly and knows in advance everything he will do, say, or think. And the "other side" that Winston is being tempted to is a construction of BB themselves: they actually wrote the bible of the resistance (that book that Winston is allowed to peruse shortly before his capture).

One of the characteristics of the polyphonic novel is this: the author can present his own personal views, but only in an ambivalent and conditional form. There are many characters who represent the views of Dostoevsky himself (slavophilic, orthodox), such as Prince Myshkin or Alyosha. But, these views are placed on the same plane of dialogue with the world views of all the other characters. There is no assumption that these thoughts and opinions are the final word on the matter (within the context of the novel anyway; in real life, Dostoevsky did think that these views were the correct and final ones, but he was a very disciplined artist who could overcome such personal limitations). Something similar can be seen in 1984. The book by Goldstein reads like excerpts from the essays Orwell wrote in the years proceeding the publication of 1984. These are his own personal views and opinions, but they are given a dialogic twist, in the context of the novel, by being turned into the words of IngSoc (doesn't O'Brien tell Winston that he actually wrote the book himself?). Orwell makes his own thought provisional and limited, for the purposes of the novel (which are polyphonic, I believe).


...What makes Dostoyevsky's novels polyphonic is that the author addresses his characters as autonomous discourses whose voices are on an equal footing with that of the author. The author retains no surplus of information beyond that available to the characters...

I remember this point from Bakhtin. He illustrates it by a number of examples, which seem to be fairly easy to find. Many of Dostoevsky's characters have this peculiar trait, that they already somehow know in the beginning how everything is going to turn out in the end. Prince Myshkin, for example, not only knows, on some level, that Rogozhin will murder Nastassya Filippovna, he even knows the specific weapon that will be used. This can certainly be seen in 1984. O'Brien knows all about Winston's apostasy years before it even enters Winston's head. Winston is also aware, on some deep, inarticulate level, of the grim fate that is waiting for him.

I also see similarities of plot structure (or, to use the Bakhtinian jargon: similarities of chronotope), especially in the last section of the novel. Once Winston is captured, everything goes crazy, linear time begins to lose all meaning, and we enter a strange world of sudden reversals and coincidental meetings. In the dungeons of the ministry, the truth can finally be spoken. O'Brien holds nothing back. These sequences have the same feeling as those peculiar scandal-scenes that are so prevalent in Dostoevsky, in which anyone can suddenly pop up, and their every utterance can be an important revelation.

[WyattGwyon]

I would never have said, however, that Dostoevsky failed to represent a finalized motive (or a monological hierarchy of motives, in which each factor--the pecuniary motive, the ideological musings, the spiritual protest--is given a definite and singular value), but instead I would have said that he succeeded in representing a polyphonic balance of motives (a dialogical array of motives, in which no one, definite factor can ever gain the upper hand).

I too, like Rhav, believe the "failure" to represent a finalized motive inestimably adds to the realism of the portrait and the aesthetic value of the novel—I was just trying to capture Dostoyevsky's evaluation of his own efforts, not mine. I don't think it is clear whether the author finally and consciously came to appreciate the indeterminacy of characterization in the same way and to the extent that you and I do, but considering that it became his modus operandi in the later novels, I would assume he must have.