Raging in Poetics: A Study of Bakhtin's Literary Thought

Author: Wang Jiangang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-01-01
Features: Just as the academic world was experiencing a general silence about the carnival, Bakhtin emerged. The Bakhtin phenomenon, which has puzzled the world, also appeared. In a certain sense, Bakhtin was a carnivalized figure. In the Silver Age of Russia, such figures were not uncommon, such as Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Shostakovich, and even Gorky. Bakhtin's interpretation of the carnival itself seemed to be a theoretical exposition of his own life. His examination of the carnival was based on the concept of "long time," placing the carnival within the unified cultural context of humanity, and even placing it at the origin of human culture. Bakhtin did not acknowledge the superiority of official culture. In his view, the carnival was an unrecognized, intense life consciousness, the core of folk culture, while official culture was merely a corner of folk culture that had emerged above sea level like an iceberg. As a force that could both create and destroy, the carnival was forced underground or into folk culture under the conditions of civilization, where class and the state were formed, existing in weakened forms in various rituals or performance forms, in humorous linguistic works, and in unbound public language. The marginalization and exile of the carnival implied a transformation in its cultural function, from then on, it was seen as an alienating force with centrifugal effects on official culture. However, the marginalization and functional transformation of carnival culture did not equate to a change in its cultural essence. It could still exist at the level of essence within the unified cultural whole with official culture. Essentially, culture is discourse about humanity and its existence. The difference is that official culture is a monologic, single-voiced discourse, while the carnival is a polyphonic, multi-voiced discourse. Discourse not only has material attributes such as phonetics but also conveys certain social evaluations. It is social evaluation that gives discourse its weight and value. Discourse is ubiquitous in human society, not only referring to specific speech acts but also to other human-created material and spiritual activities, behaviors, processes, and products that have a uniquely human character. In short, everything that carries social evaluation falls under the category of discourse and is within the scope of the concept of culture. The internal structure of discourse is always dialogic, even monologic discourse. The literal level of dialogue is a conversation between two people. But more often, dialogue is expressed concretely, such as body language, technical or material symbols, and ideological materials. These are essentially a de-crowning of the narrow definition of "a conversation between two people," reducing discourse to life itself and bringing it back to the real, material, even physical level. De-crowned dialogue can place the entire world in a state of intimate proximity, making the world visible, audible, touchable, and tangible, dissolving cold boundaries, breaking down hierarchies, allowing everything to move freely, thus creating an atmosphere close to that of a carnival. In this sense, we can say that the carnival is the profane and corporeal form of dialogue, a de-crowning of the structure of the signifier and signified in discourse, and it can reorient human life back into the material and sensory world. Bakhtin's de-crowning of dialogue is based on a re-examination of folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as well as a dialectical analysis of the grotesque realist style of Rabelais' works. The de-crowning of dialogue reveals the carnival essence of the world. Throughout Bakhtin's entire intellectual journey, this de-crowning was temporary and expedient, aimed at revealing the cultural connotation of the carnival, analyzing its inner texture, and thereby providing an internal validation for the emergence of his dialogue theory, finally crowning the dialogue theory. This crowning was carried out in three steps: First step, exploring the underlying structure of the dialogue theory: the carnivalized world perception; second step, exploring how the carnivalized world perception transforms and permeates into various ideological forms, particularly how it permeates into the literary field to form carnivalized literature; third step, providing a theoretical interpretation of carnivalized literature, thereby establishing carnivalized poetics. Of course, Bakhtin himself did not explicitly propose the concept of carnivalized poetics, but he did consistently strive to establish a new poetics, consciously taking a path different from the traditional rational poetics. If rational poetics is metaphysical, then this carnival poetics is profane, he attempted to lead poetics toward folk culture and the margins, using folk humorous culture as the core of carnival poetics. The originality and universal character of folk culture, which remains unbounded, can infuse infinite vitality into carnival poetics, because folk culture is the culture of the people, the culture of the square, it does not face the elite, nor the temples or halls. The popular nature of carnival poetics undoubtedly gives it a broader survival space than rational poetics. In a sense, Bakhtin's work was pioneering. Because of its pioneering nature, it has given us a vast interpretive space. This means that any interpretation of Bakhtin's poetics theory still remains exploratory or even hypothetical in nature. Given this, we do not expect this book to fully align with Bakhtin's poetics thought, as long as it even vaguely outlines the trajectory of Bakhtin and his thought as understood or comprehensible by the author, it would still be a meaningful endeavor. In this book, what we can do is try to trace Bakhtin's spiritual journey in the humanities, especially in poetics, according to the three steps he took to crown the carnival. He said, the carnival is the second form of life composed of humorous elements for the masses, the festive life of the people. This life cannot be derived or explained from the purpose and actual conditions of social labor, nor from the physiological or life needs of periodic rest; otherwise, it would either devolve into the superficiality of vulgar sociology or lapse into the absurdity of modern life philosophy. As a cultural phenomenon, the carnival has significant and profound ideological and worldview connotations. Without this connotation, any "practice" of organized and refined social labor processes, any labor games or labor breaks, would never become a festival but only constitute the material foundation of the festival. They must be permeated by another realm of existence, the spiritual and ideological realm, to soften their rigid material. Therefore, festive life is always a convergence of two different realms of existence, the secular and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, meeting at a specific time and space. Thus, festive life is an edge life, primarily manifested in two aspects: first, its distinctive temporality, a specific natural time, biological time, and historical time constitute the immediate reality of the carnival, the festival itself is a time, such times usually enter festive life in the form of crises or turning points, they are times worth remembering and celebrating, different from ordinary times. Crises and turning points are the junctions between two successive or opposing states, with two opposite directions and tensions. Unlike the center-dominated stable state, they are uncertain, and precisely because of this uncertainty, they carry potential spatial generativity; second, its distinctive spatiality, the spatiality of the festival is primarily manifested in the folk square. Square life has no authority, no center, it is the market, the village fields, the ridges, even the hearth of the farmhouse, it is a place where everyone can participate, with an original democratic spirit, different from the solemn and serious demeanor of the official halls. Just as time takes the form of crises and turning points in festive life, the spatiality of the festival takes the form of squares, markets, roads, deck of ships, and banquets. Bakhtin believed that the time of the festival or carnival life transcends the natural biological meaning and enters the historical cultural category. The reason why the festival time is perceived by people is that it breaks free from the originally uniform, monotonous cycle of the flow, even cutting off the smooth continuity of natural time, making it suddenly, making it strange, thus leading people beyond ordinary life; similarly, the festive square is not a natural physical space or a leisure space where people usually roam, but a paradise where people can freely vent after shedding the burdens of life, filled with passion. In this way, the extraordinary time and the passionate square in carnival life coalesce into clusters of life. These clusters are the images of clowns, tricksters, fools, and a series of carnival figures. Bakhtin believed that this special spatiotemporal body and the figures were particularly striking in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when carnival life reached its peak. Therefore, examining folk life during this period helps us better grasp Bakhtin's carnival theory. In the Middle Ages, festival activities of the carnival type, as well as various humorous performances or rituals related to them, played an important role in people's lives. Here, in addition to the literal carnival activities such as square, market, and street performances, there were also,. Even in religious venues, one could see the humorous activities of folk squares adorning religious festivals; moreover, harvest festivals and grape festivals, originating from agricultural activities, also transcended regional limits and entered urban life; above all, the humorous spirit permeating various festival activities even extended to daily family life and wedding and banquet customs. The Middle Ages can be said to have been a fully carnivalized world, where secular festivals touched on religious life, parodic literature, religious mysteries, and satirical plays flourished, with some activities and works directly targeting the then-dominant religious circles and clergy. In the Middle Ages, where religious control was extremely strict, this phenomenon seemed difficult to understand. So how can this be explained? First, carnival poetics is an edge poetics, and marginality is a fundamental characteristic of carnival poetics: this marginality is primarily manifested in three aspects: first, relative to traditional rational poetics, carnival poetics has not yet been universally recognized or accepted, traditional rational poetics remains the dominant poetics, and is still the main reference for literary research and interpretation; second, the entire carnival poetics is constructed on the edge. This point is very clear from the previous discussion. The idea of marginality can be said to be a red thread throughout Bakhtin's entire theory: from his definition of culture to his analysis of the internal structure of discourse. Marginality allowed Bakhtin to glimpse the openness, unfinished nature, and non-finished characteristics of the world, discovering the carnival essence of its existence. Carnivalized literature, which truly represents the carnivalization of the world in the form of discourse, undoubtedly also possesses this marginality; third, and most importantly, carnival poetics is based on the interpretation of marginal genres, such as folk jokes, obscene discourse, and other satirical and long novels, which together constitute the family of carnivalized literature. In the existing literary order, carnivalized literature also has a topographical marginality, that is, it is far from the aesthetic tastes of the official or mainstream, dwelling on the edge of the mainstream literary scene. It is precisely all of this that determines the marginality of carnival poetics. As we said earlier, the edge is not a delimitation of a certain territory, but rather an opening up of it: the existence of the edge allows the world to operate on a centrifugal, dispersing trajectory, unable to reach a final completion. This situation determines the second fundamental characteristic of carnival poetics: dynamism. This characteristic makes it fundamentally different from traditional rational poetics, which is static. The origin of traditional rational poetics is Aristotle's poetics, which, after being passed down through Horace, Sidney, Boileau, and 19th-century positivism, formed a powerful poetic tradition that dominates Western poetic models. Historically, the emergence of Aristotle marked the arrival of a great age of synthesis in human knowledge. In his interpretation of the world, Aristotle combined the natural science views of the Pythagorean school and Heraclitus with the social science views of Socrates and Plato, extracting his unique logical analysis method to achieve the purpose of knowledge. He applied this method to the field of poetics as well. In his view, poetics, on the one hand, differs from disciplines such as ethics, metaphysics, politics, and rhetoric in terms of its object, the imitation nature of literary works, and thus has its own unique disciplinary positioning; on the other hand, the object of poetics research (literary works) is not uniform, it is a general term for various genres, and in specific poetics research, they should be treated separately. Aristotle's poetics revolves around the three genres of tragedy, epic, and comedy, with a focus on tragedy. He analyzed tragedy through definitions, seeking patterns, and conducting a dissection-like, step-by-step analysis, forming a relatively complete poetics system. This step-by-step logical analysis is guaranteed by rational confidence. Aristotle's poetics research served as a model, and his research approach laid the basic direction for Western poetics and literary criticism thereafter. Mr. Yeh Weilian believes that Western literary criticism after Aristotle was based on the idea that "literature has a traceable logical structure," it used the law of causality as its basis, and the "statement—proof" as its core, forming a critical model of "beginning, narration, proof, argumentation, conclusion." The research method that permeates the entire criticism, whether inductive or deductive, tends to emphasize logical analysis, with the purpose of explaining specific experience as a process of abstract ideas.