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.