Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity"

Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's "Author and Hero inAesthetic Activity"Author(s): Ilya KligerSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 67, No. 3 (Fall, 2008), pp. 551-566Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27652939 .

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Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's Author and

Hero in Aesthetic Activity

Ilya Kliger

The nature of Mikhail Bakhtin's engagement with modernist literature

has been a subject of debate for some time. Caryl Emerson gives voice to

a kind of consensus when she writes that "as far as we can tell [Bakhtin] was profoundly unresponsive to the major works of twentieth-century modernism."1 To be sure, we have Bakhtin's brief lectures, flickering with

enthusiasm, on more than a dozen contemporary poets and prose writers.

We also have intriguing notes toward an essay on Vladimir Maiakovskii, occasional admiring references to Thomas Mann, and even a few sug

gestive remarks on James Joyce.2 Still, the main point holds: nowhere in

his work does Bakhtin's treatment of modernist authors approach the in

tensity of his engagement with the Hellenistic novel, with Rabelais, Fe

dor Dostoevskii, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or, for that matter, with

Aleksandr Pushkin, Charles Dickens, or Nikolai Gogol'. One might be

tempted to conclude from this relative lack of attention to modernist

works that Bakhtin was essentially opposed to the fundamental presuppo sitions underlying literary modernism as such. And the temptation would

only intensify in the view of his critique (and the critique by members

of his circle) of formalist literary theory, which might be seen as devel

oping the theoretical groundwork for some crucial aspects of modernist

writing. Yet one might also argue, conversely, that Bakhtin's distaste for for

malist theory and relative inattention to modernist literary practice should not prevent us from recognizing an essential affinity between his

philosophy of the novel and certain key features of modernist novelistic

representation. One might assert in fact that it is precisely the modern

ist novel that is most consistently guided by the narratological principles elaborated by Bakhtin. Thus, one might understand Bakhtin's theory as

capable of refocusing "readings of modernism on the 'difficult' [that is,

An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference "The Long Silver Age" at the University of Chicago, whose organizers, Robert Bird and Lina Steiner, I would

like to thank for their hospitality. I am also grateful to those present at the panel for the

discussion that followed. In addition, I would like to thank Hiba Hafiz and Nasser Zakariya for several illuminating conversations on the subject of this essay, and I am especially in

debted to Michael Holquist, Harsha Ram, Galin Tihanov, and the two readers for Slavic

Review for their helpful comments on the later versions.

1. Caryl Emerson, "Introduction: Dialogue on Every Corner, Bakhtin in Every

Class," in Amy Mandelker ed., Bakhtin in Contexts: Across the Disciplines (Evanston,

1995), 17. 2. For a discussion of Bakhtin's views of Joyce in the context of his theories of the epic

and the novel, see Galin Tihanov, "Bakhtin, Joyce, and Carnival: Towards the Synthesis of

Epic and Novel in Rabelais," Paragraph 24, no. 1 (March 2001): 66-83.

Slavic Review 67, no. 3 (Fall 2008)



552 Slavic Review

processual, open-ended] parts of texts that have been explicated, closed

off, even mystified, but not theorized."3 What follows is an attempt to address the question of the nature of

Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a strategic step back from his views?both explicit and implicit?on modernist litera

ture and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the

modernist condition as characterized by what he calls "a crisis of author

ship" (krizis avtorstva). In order to do this I will focus on his early work in

narratological aesthetics and situate it within the longue dur?e context of

debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more

generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originat

ing at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the

intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist?by contrast with

what will be called transcendental and realist?critique, a critique not

limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of

thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on

modes of synthetic reconciliation. In conclusion, I will explore the pay offs of this analysis for the more limited debate on Bakhtin's conception of literary modernism by suggesting the outlines for a quasi-Bakhtinian

reading of Andrei Belyi's Petersburg, a reading intended to exemplify the sort of engagement with modernist texts encouraged by the discussion that follows.

During a conversation with one of the incognito pedagogues he en

counters in the course of his travels, Wilhelm Meister confesses that among all the paintings in his grandfather's large collection, his favorite depicted "a sick prince consumed by passion for his father's bride." The stranger

replies: "It wasn't exactly the best painting in the collection: the composi tion was not good, the colors were nothing special, and the execution was

mannered." Wilhelm naively admits that he does not understand. What

appeals to him in painting is the subject matter, not the artistry. But the

stranger insists: "Your grandfather seemed to think otherwise, for the ma

jor part of his collection consisted of excellent things in which one always admired the merits of the painter without reference to the subject. And

that particular picture was hanging in the anteroom to show that he did not value it highly."4

The stranger's way of thinking about the painting, privileging compo sition, color, execution, and the merits of the painter over subject matter,

compassion for the sick prince, and especially identification with him? all this would not come as a surprise to the contemporary reader. After all,

only five years earlier, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment had outlined a similar understanding of the properly aesthetic experience: "Every in

3. Stacy Burton, "Paradoxical Relations: Bakhtin and Modernism," Modern Language

Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 2000): 536.

4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A.

Blackall in cooperation with Victor Lange (Princeton, 1989), 37-38.



Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity 553

terest [desire, emotional investment] spoils the judgment of taste." Or:

"That taste is always barbaric which needs a mixture of charms and emo

tions in order that there may be satisfaction."5

Now Kant, much like Goethe's emissary from the mysterious Society of

the Tower, in expelling subject-matter and emotion, posits the aesthetic

situation as essentially dualistic: the viewer is confronted by the painting, the reader by the author's design, the subject of disinterested contempla tion by the beautiful, which "properly is only concerned with form."6 And

I would suggest that we read the following puzzling claim by Bakhtin as

addressing itself precisely to this dualistic understanding of aesthetic ex

perience: "When I am in the presence of a simple figure, color, or com

bination of two colors?in the presence of this actual cliff or this surf on

this particular seashore?and I attempt to find an aesthetic approach to

them, the first thing I must do is vivify them, make them into potential heroes?the bearers of a destiny."7

This statement from an early unfinished essay, Avtor i geroi v esteticheskoi

deiateVnosti (Author and hero in aesthetic activity, early to mid-1920s), has as its proximal context a polemic with what Bakhtin calls "impressive aes

thetics" (impressivnaia estetika), a contemporary philosophical tendency that conceives of "the artist's act of creation ... as a one-sided act con

fronted not by another subiectum, but only by an object, only by material

to be worked."8 Indeed, it is easy to see that Bakhtin's setting, the situation

into which he inserts the figure of the hero, would appeal not only to

Kant but also to more contemporary theorists of art, or even to such later

champions of modernist painting as Clement Greenberg who frequently invokes Kant as the founder and unsurpassed theorist of properly mod

ernist aesthetics. For we have here not only a cliff and a surf, but also fig ures and colors?not just nature, but also nonrepresentational art. And it

is into this setting that Bakhtin interpolates the hero. He could have made

things easier for himself by sticking closer to the subject of his inquiry and

speaking, less controversially perhaps, of the importance of sympathizing with the hero of a novel. But his claim is more radical: for experience to be

properly aesthetic, he argues, even the most abstract and lifeless of objects must be vivified and endowed with a temporal trajectory of a hero.

The question of abstract or "objectless" art, as exemplified by orna

ment, arabesque, and music, is raised explicitly later in the essay as well

5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), 58.

6. Ibid., 66.

7. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," Art and Answer ability:

Early Philosophical Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapu nov (Austin, 1990), 66.

8. Ibid., 92. To be sure, Bakhtin's defense of the opposing "expressive" aesthetics, the

aesthetics of sympathy, to which Goethe's naive Wilhelm gives voice, is only provisional. In

the very next sentence he goes on to say that vivification, though necessary, is insufficient

for proper aesthetic experience. In order to be aesthetic, sympathy (vchuvstvovanie) must

be consummated, rounded off, made whole. But there is nothing controversial in this de

mand; insofar as Bakhtin makes it, he positions himself on the side of Kant and Goethe's

stranger from the Tower. It is the peculiar demand for vivification, in other words, that

requires closer attention and will receive it in what follows.



554 Slavic Review

as in the roughly contemporaneous work, Problema formy, soderzhaniia i

materiala v slovesnom khudozhestvennom tvorchestve (The problem of form,

content, and material in verbal art, early to mid-1920s). And what is more, it is raised in the language that explicitly invokes Kantian aesthetics: "But

there is after all, free or unbound beauty, and there is objectless art, in

relation to which material aesthetics would seem to be perfectly legiti mate."9 Free, independent beauty is, for Kant, the paradigm of beauty as such. It is nonrepresentational, the beauty of nature and ornament; for according to Kant, as soon as we are guided by a concept of what the

thing represented must be like, of what its purpose for being is, our ex

perience is no longer just aesthetic?it is also cognitive or moral.10 Thus

Bakhtin's unequivocal rejection of the applicability of material (that is,

author-centric) aesthetics to?even to?objectless art, his insistence that

vivification, "the hero" be regarded as a necessary condition for the possi

bility of aesthetic experience is a rejection of the principles underlying the

alliance, staged by his very formulation, between Kantian and modernist

theory of art.

Bakhtin's polemic here is therefore two-pronged: with the Kantian

aesthetic tradition on the one hand and with a prominent tendency in

the aesthetics of his time on the other.11 But perhaps the most immediate

antagonist here is a certain modernist narratology itself, as it was being de

veloped in the work of Russian formalists.12 Indeed, for Viktor Shklovskii, Iurii Tynianov, and Boris Tomashevskii debunking the category of the

hero appeared to possess the significance of a foundational act. Shklovskii treats the hero as an epiphenomenon of composition. Tynianov refers to him as an "illusory focus of the novel" (mnimoe sredotochie romana) and

declaims: "Enough! The hero is fired! "13 Tomashevskii's account is cited at

length in Bakhtin and Pavel Medvedev's Formal'nyi metod v literaturovedenii

(Formal method in literary scholarship) from 1928: "Story [fabula], as a

system of motifs, can even do completely without the hero and his person

ality. The hero is the result of the plot development of the material and is, on the one hand, the means for the stringing together of motifs and, on

the other hand, the personified or, as it were, the incarnate motivation of

the connection of motifs."14

9. Bakhtin, Art and Answer ability, 265.

10. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 66.

11. In discussing expressive aesthetics, Bakhtin mentions Kant and remarks, some

what mysteriously, that he occupied an ambivalent position in this context. Art and Answer

ability, 92. I can only offer a conjecture that this ambivalence refers to Kant's distinction

between free and dependent beauty, with the latter producing limitations on the aesthetic

activity of the subject. 12. In referring to the formalists here and below I do not presume to exhaust the

complexity and heterogeneity of the school, but only to treat certain, admittedly crucial,

aspects of their theory as

giving voice to a more general modernist condition, diagnosed

in Bakhtin's work.

13. Iurii Tynianov, Poetika, istoriia literatury, kino (Moscow, 1977), 146.

14. P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A

Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Baltimore, 1978), 137.

Historically understood, this hostility toward the hero can be read as a reaction against a

tradition of nineteenth-century literary criticism that focused almost exclusively on the

sociopsychological analysis of represented characters. But a synchronie look will reveal




We are now in a position to appreciate the full polemical force of

Bakhtin's insertion of the hero into the aesthetic situation. The Kan

tian model of aesthetic experience?as the passage from Wilhelm Meister

makes vivid?relies on the expulsion of the category of the hero. There, all we have is a synthesizing transcendental self, the subject-author

contemplator, confronted by sensible impressions to be synthesized, oc

cupied with the task of relating parts to other parts in an attempt to make a whole. The early formalist reduction of character to composition par takes of "the Kantian aesthetics of authorial form,"15 while Bakhtin's at

tempt to rehabilitate the hero appears to be motivated by the need to

think of aesthetic experience as capable of grasping its object as a "con crete totality," that is, not merely as a whole, but as a whole in process.

Thus, once again: "The first and foremost condition for an aesthetic ap

proach to this world is to understand it as a world of other people who

have accomplished their lives in it?that is, to understand it as the world

of Christ, of Socrates, of Napoleon, of Pushkin, etc."16

"Concrete totality" is not Bakhtin's language here, but I invoke this

Hegelian battle cry to suggest that one?provisional and ultimately

wrongheaded?reading of Bakhtin's defense of the hero brings him close to the position of retrograde clear-sightedness from which Georg Luk?cs's

late work launches its critique of postrealist literature. But before setting up a confrontation between these two quarrels with modernism, and in

order to be able to do so, it will be necessary to take a closer look at

some of the key categories of Bakhtin's early work on the aesthetics of

narrative.17

Bakhtin begins Author and Hero by positing that all experience is medi

ated by the transcendental poles of self and other. The ^//names the mode

of "intentional" comportment in the world that treats it as a horizon for

action. It is spatially, temporally, and axiologically open to the surround

ing world. It always projects: in space toward the object of its intentional

ity, in time toward goals that recede into a boundless future. In fact, the

structure of the relationship of the self to the world is so radically open ended that it even appears to effect a certain blurring of the Kantian a

priori forms of space and time. The self's spatial relation to the objects in

the world is mediated by time. The center of gravity of this relation lies in

the future. The self relates to the object not as a given but as a task, a call

for future acts.18 The temporal relation between the self and the world is,

this formalist predilection as part of a larger modernist logic, privileging media-specific

form over representation, synthesizing subjectivity over objective sociohistorical content,

linguistic in transitivity over reference, and "discourse" over narrative.

15. N. D. Tamarchenko, "Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva" Bakhtina i russkaia religioznaia

filosofiia (Moscow, 2001), 87. 16. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 111.

17. A consideration of Luk?cs's more sympathetic account of modernism in the early Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass., 1974) is beyond the scope of this

article.

18. This is of course a prominent neo-Kantian tenet. For an account of Bakhtin's

neo-Kantian heritage, see James M. Holquist and Katerina Clark, "The Influence of Kant

in the Early Work of M. M. Bakhtin," in Joseph P. Strelka ed., Literary Theory and Criticism:



556 Slavic Review

in turn, axiologically mediated. The future as the center of gravity of my

(the self's) relation to the world is not understood here mechanically as

some point in time after the present but rather as the future invested with

"intentional" meanings and values. If the category of the self is developed along phenomenological, "ex

pressive" lines, that of the other, as the other for a self seems to emerge out of an "impressive" conception of the relation between subject and

object developed in transcendental idealism. Briefly, the others relation to the world is one not of horizontal movement but of location within an

environment (okruzhenie). In space, the other is externalized as a bounded

body among other physical objects. In time, the other exists as temporally bound by birth and death, in fact, as always already dead and brought to life again as a subject of a biography. The bounded space and bio

graphical time of the other is, furthermore, filled with a stable meaning, a determinate, unchangeable, fated manner of being in the surrounding

world.

For Bakhtin, the hero-as-a-self in narrative treats the world as a ho

rizon for his activity. He experiences himself as radically open and free,

always in the absolute future of his project. The authorial mode, on the

other hand, presupposes a stable position outside the hero's conscious

progress, a position from which the hero's relation to the world is figured in terms of a neat, finalized biographical narrative, his actions somehow

predetermined, necessarily flowing from his nature. The author, in other

words, converts the hero from the category of the self to that of the other

and thus finds herself in the position of remembering the hero after his

death, a metaphor resonant with Walter Benjamin's famous claim that

"what draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shiver

ing life with a death he reads about."19 Thus, while the hero-for-himself leads a shivering life, where meaning is always unstable and existence is

constantly becoming, the author, by representing the hero's life as fate

and the flame that consumes it as the flame of meaningful necessity, gives us access, albeit a highly mediated one, to the experience of wholeness

and stable being. For Bakhtin then, properly aesthetic experience con

tains both "impressive" and "expressive" elements, involving as it does a double operation whereby the reader or viewer aligns herself with the "intentional" perspective of the hero and simultaneously recoils back into

the totalizing outsideness of the author.

Needless to say it is a condition for the possibility of experience as

well as of narrative that both of these poles be functioning simultane

ously. Otherwise we would end up either in such dizzying openness that

forward-looking action itself would be rendered impossible or with life

fossilized into absolute meaning and thus unlivable and untellable. One

important consequence of this narratological schema, and a consequence

Festschrift to Ren? Wellek in Honor of His Eightieth Birthday (Bern, 1984), 1:299-313. See also a more recent discussion in Craig Brandist, "Two Routes 'to Concreteness' in the Work of

the Bakhtin Circle," Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 3 (July 2002): 521-37.

19. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), 101.



Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity bbl

that Bakhtin himself does not always appreciate, is the nonidentity of the

category of the hero with depicted character. In other words, and this

will become important shortly, character should be understood as consti

tuted in the activity of both the authorial and the heroic poles of narra

tive, representing a particular historically variable ratio of selfhood and

otherness.

Thus, having elaborated his notion of aesthetic experience as a pro

jection of authorial synthesis upon heroic openness, Bakhtin attempts a

classification of narrative modes according to the degree of "surplus of

vision" that the author possesses in relation to the hero. The range of this

surplus and the stability of authorial outsideness extends from apparently total authorial control over a thing-like, unself-conscious hero to what

Bakhtin calls "a crisis of authorship."

It is this crisis of authorship that will concern us here, and in particular that form of it, which, according to Bakhtin, characterizes modern prose

narrative. He describes this form of the crisis as follows: "The background, the world behind the hero's back is unelaborated and is not distinctly seen by the author/contemplator; instead it is presented suppositionally,

uncertainly, from within the hero himself, the way the background of our

own life presents itself to us."20 And later in the essay: "The very position of the author's outsideness is shaken and is no longer considered essen

tial: one contests the author's right to be situated outside lived life and to

consummate it. All stable transgredient forms begin to disintegrate (first of all in prose?from Dostoevsky to Bely)."21

In his discussion of the crisis of authorship, then, Bakhtin stages a

kind of traumatic, disorienting liberation of the category of the hero from

authorial constraints. But toward the end of the discussion he also points out that the obverse side of this crisis actually consists in the loss of the

hero, with the purely formalist, "aestheticist" author reigning over emp tiness. The two sides of the crisis, insofar as they diagnose not merely

possible narratological maladies but the "current cultural situation" as a

whole, delineate the modernist disjunction par excellence, an either/or of author-centered form and hero-centric process.22 And insofar as this is

Bakhtin's diagnosis of modernist narrative, it is not unlike the one made

by Luk?cs, who understands modernism as positing a rift between action

and thought, between "man's animal nature" and "his denaturized, subli

mated thought-processes."23 We shall soon see that Bakhtin's understand

ing of process differs in crucial ways from that of Luk?cs. For now, it is

20. Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, 19.

21. Ibid., 203.

22. This phrase, "sovremennyi moment v kul'ture," appears in Sergei Bocharov's

commentary on Bakhtin's lectures on Andrei Belyi. Mikhail Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii v

semi tomakh, ed. S. G. Bocharov, and N. I. Nikolaev (Moscow, 1996- ), 2:454. Indeed, while

pointing out crucial stylistic affinities between Belyi and Dostoevskii, Bakhtin remarks:

"But this is not borrowing, but the influence of the world in which they live." Ibid, 2:338.

23. Georg Luk?cs, "The Ideology of Modernism," The Meaning of Contemporary Real

ism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London, 1963), 27.



558 Slavic Review

sufficient to point out that while Luk?cs's solution is to retreat to the aes

thetics of the typical, the specifically realist synthesis of the general and

the particular, Bakhtin hopes to heal dialectically, with the very spear that

inflicted the wound.

In other words, I am suggesting that Bakhtin inserts the hero into the

Kantian-modernist aesthetic situation not out of Hegelian-realist nostal

gia for concrete totality but because he detects within modernism itself

the heroic in addition to the authorial, the realm of open-ended, future

directed activity in addition to abstract timeless synthesis and contempla tion of static shapes.24 And while Luk?cs tends to cast modernist subjectiv ism univocally (as positing a Kafkaesque rift between the near-cataleptic self and the hostile, ghostly world it inhabits),25 Bakhtin's "phenomeno

logical" method allows him to distinguish two processes of modern sub

jectivization: the inflation of the self-as-hero on the one hand and, on

the other, the post-Kantian formalist and abstractionist aesthetic with its

valorization of the self in the authorial, synthesizing function.

In accordance with the historiographie principle that has been re

ferred to as "the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous," a nuanced anal

ysis of a single synchronie cross-section tends to reveal the concurrent

presence of multiple historical phases.26 And in fact, with the help of the

distinction between authorial and heroic tendencies within modernism, we

can discern a certain history of modernity as it is played out synchronic

ally in debates about the aesthetics of modernism: First, the transcen

dental, Kantian moment, with the aesthetic subject as the pure function

of synthesis, the formalist self cum author.27 Second, Luk?cs's critique of

that Kantian-formalist self as too "contemplative" and abstract, a critique that brings against modernist art many of the charges that Hegel brings

against Kant and proposes a Hegelian alternative, the realist aesthetic of

the concrete universal, and the artwork as an epistemological tool, good if realist and, if modernist, bad.28 And third, Bakhtin's immanent critique

of modernism, which appears to embrace the more uniquely contem

porary tendencies, particularly evident, according to him, in modernist

narrative.

24. Perhaps some of the most suggestive of Bakhtin's statements on the specifically

heroic, future-centered features of modernity appear in his notes toward an essay on Maia

kovskii. See Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 5:51-57.

25. Thus, "the diabolical character of the world of modern capitalism, and man's

impotence in the face of it, is the real subject-matter of Kafka's writings." Luk?cs, Meaning

of Contemporary Realism, 77.

26. See Ernst Bloch's elaboration of the principle in Heritage of Our Times, trans. Nev

ille and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley, 1991), 37-184. See also Reinhart Koselleck's more re

cent discussion in his essay "The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity," The

Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner

etal. (Stanford, 2002), 166.

27. Thus, in J. M. Bernstein's formulation, "theoretical modernism fails to interrogate the ideality of [Kantian] transcendental subjectivity." See J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Luk?cs, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis, 1984), 235.

28. Thus, as Galin Tihanov points out, "Luk?cs's conservative Marxism and his heavy debt to Hegel always kept him away from a radical assertion of the new." Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Luk?cs, Bakhtin and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford, 2000), 293.




In what does this critique consist, more specifically? We recall that for

Bakhtin the hero is the bearer of a future-directed, open-ended temporal dimension. To understand aesthetic experience as inconceivable without

the hero, then, is to understand it as dependent on the experience of

time. Conversely, to understand it as hero-less is to privilege the detempo

ralizing poles of narrative, to privilege, as the formalists tend to do, sjuzhet over fabula. Twentieth-century narratology went on to develop a number of dichotomies that, on the whole, recapitulate the formalist hierarchy. In G?rard Genette discourse supersedes narrative; in Iurii Lotman, se

mantic space is logically prior to the event; in Roland Barthes, integration contains distribution; and even in Paul Ricoeur, who is so preoccupied

precisely with questions of temporality, the configurational reigns over

the episodic.29 Ricoeur's case is particularly instructive as an example of what happens

when we try to understand time in narrative without the support of some

thing like the category of the hero. Here, despite a painstaking thematiza

tion of temporality in its relation to narrative, we end up with results that are difficult to distinguish from formalist statements on sjuzhet and fabula,

with the logical and chronological chain of events bent into a teleological

signifying shape. In fact, defining plot as "a synthesis of the heteroge neous," Ricoeur restages the affinity between this author-centric modern

ist way of thinking about narrative, and Kantian philosophy of the subject.30 This development is particularly illuminating, then, in allowing us

to specify what is gained by thinking of narrative time as produced in a

tension between two perspectives: heroic, forward-looking, open-ended, and authorial, finalizing, retrospective. What is gained is the sense that

signification, synthesis, form are not all on the side of the self as author, that the author gains access to temporal movement as already preformed

by the activity of the hero; that there is no such thing as merely episodic time, that therefore the opposition between meaningless time and time

less meaning itself is nowhere to be encountered and should not serve as

constitutive of the distinction between life and art.

Again, the aesthetic situation with which we began, where the author

contemplator, the subject in its synthesizing function, is confronted by an object of disinterested pleasure?this situation is, at its limit, timeless.

It is essentially timeless, in fact, precisely in its capacity to redeem our

experience to eternity, or, in Arthur Schopenhauer's influential formula

tion, to "pluck the object of contemplation from the stream of the world's

course," to stop "the wheel of time."31

29. G?rard Genette, "The Frontiers of Narrative," Figures of Literary Discourse, trans.

Alan Sheridan (New York, 1982), 140-42; Iurii Lotman, Struktura khudozhestvennogo tek

sta (Providence, 1971), 288; Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of

Narratives," The Semiotic Challenge, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, 1994), 132-33; Paul

Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chi

cago, 1984-1988). 30. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:66.

31. Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New

York, 1966), 1:185.



560 Slavic Review

Once again, Wilhelm Master's Apprenticeship can be called upon to

render this logic more vivid. Toward the end of the novel, the lesson in

aesthetics given to Wilhelm by the mysterious stranger, the demand that

he refuse the temptation to identify with figures depicted in the paint

ing, is subtly recalled. Here, Wilhelm is confronted by the account of his own apprenticeship put together by the Society of the Tower. As he reads

through the scroll, he realizes that the odd experience of gaining access to

an account of his life is comparable less to looking at himself in the mir ror and more to being confronted by his portrait painted by the masterful

hand of a superior talent. In other words, Wilhelm sees not a second self, but a different self, a self with which he altogether fails to identify, and

it is certainly not surprising that what compensates for this failure is the

knowledge that the alienated image will survive him.32 The episodic story of his life, then, is projected metaphorically onto the spatial medium of

painting; it is estranged from him, but in exchange it acquires what Joseph Frank has influentially called "spatial form," it is rendered timeless.33

And so if the widespread modernist deheroization of narrative at

tempts to fold it into a classical aesthetics of disinterested and timeless

contemplation, one of the unspoken aims of Bakhtin's unfinished treatise

appears to consist in assimilating aesthetics to narrative and thus imbuing it with a properly temporal dimension. By interpolating the hero into the aesthetic situation, Bakhtin refuses to imagine both aesthetics and narra

tive as (to invoke Walter Benjamin's figuration of the collector) "liberat

ing things from the curse of being useful."34 Rather, he conceives of it as

liberating things precisely as already in use. The operation here at stake is not one of endowing what is unformed with significant form but rather one of wresting significant form out of what is already preformed in the

activity of the hero.

Still, it would not be accurate to say that the modernist spurning of

the hero should be seen exclusively as linked to the project of aesthetic

detemporalization of narrative. For this detemporalization is itself part of an often explicit critique of the hero as linked to the historically dated

figure of the biographically bound individual. Thus, in a 1933 essay "Ve nok na grob romana," Petr Bitsilli announces the death of the historico

biographical conception of the hero and elaborates on the changes this death has necessitated in novelistic form.35 In a 1927 lecture, another

critic, Konstantin Mochurskii, complains about the dearth of "living he roes" in contemporary novels and the resulting shift of focus to storyline (fabula), ideology and descriptions of everyday life (bytopisanie) .36 Still ear

32. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship, 309.

33. See Joseph Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature (New Brunswick, 1963).

34. Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Ronald Taylor (London, 1977), 113.

35. Petr Bitsilli, Tragediia russkoi kul'tury: Issledovaniia, stat'i, retsenzii (Moscow, 2000), 472-73.

36. Konstantin Mochul'skii, Krizis voobrazheniia: Stat'i, esse, portrety (Tomsk, 1999), 395.




lier, in 1922, Osip Mandel'shtam proclaims the end of the novel brought about by the historically conditioned exhaustion of the biographical form:

"Today, Europeans have been ejected from their biographies like billiard

balls from billiard pockets, and the laws of their activity, like the laws of

billiard balls on the billiard table, are determined by one principle: the

angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection."37

Luk?cs, in his critique of modernism, objects precisely to this sort of

mechanistic obviation of represented subjective agency. He believes that

the biographical form must be preserved because it alone possesses the means of refracting dialectically the relations between society and the in

dividual. For him, the hero must be presented as active in historical and

biographical time; otherwise naturalist or expressionist decadence reigns. Thus, true realism "opposes

... the destruction of the completeness of the

human personality and of the objective typicality of men and situations

through an excessive cult of the momentary mood."38

But Bakhtin's reasons for preserving the hero appear to be different

and, at least at first glance, somewhat more paradoxical, for while insist

ing on the aesthetic necessity of the category of hero, he at the same

time shares modernist skepticism about the biographical subject. Indeed, those narratives that Bakhtin characterizes as shaped by a crisis of author

ship also, and perhaps for related reasons, undergo a crisis of biography. Thus, again and again Bakhtin returns to Dostoevskii's inability to locate

characters in biographical time.39 And according to Bakhtin, this is also

true of Belyi, who realizes that the biographical novel is no longer possible and thus, like Dostoevskii, tends toward the hagiographie form.40 Even

his most "biographical" novel, Kotik Letaev, turns out to break free from

the biographical form.41 And all this is also true of Evgenii Zamiatin, who, for Bakhtin, represents a continuation of the novelistic line developed by

Dostoevskii and Belyi, the line, incidentally, to which he promises a great future.42

How is it, then, that Bakhtin is simultaneously defending the hero and

accepting the historical unfeasibility of the biographical subject? I would

suggest that one interesting as well as apparently inevitable consequence of this paradoxical position?its price as well as its payoff?is the disas

sociation of the category of the hero from that of represented character.

Indeed, we have seen that already in Author and Hero the two are not

37. Osip Mandel'shtam, "Konets romana," in G. A. Belaia and E. Trubetskova, Es

teticheskoe samosoznanie russkoi kul'tury: 20-egody XXveka. Antologiia (Moscow, 2003), 95; my translation. If a number of critics also noted the rising popularity of biography

as such, it

was not, I believe, in contradiction with the above testimonies, but rather in indirect con

firmation of them, documenting the migration of the biographical form ("the living man")

out of the serious novel, which becomes "formless" as a result. Hence, the disjunctive title

of Boris Eikhenbaum's intervention on the topic: "Roman ili biografiia," in O. B. Eikhen

baum and E. A. Toddes, eds., O literature: Raboty raznykh let (Moscow, 1987), 288.

38. Gy?rgy Luk?cs, Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of

Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki, and Others, trans. Edith Bone (London, 1950), 6.

39. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:73.

40. Ibid., 2:339.

41. Ibid., 2:334.

42. Ibid., 2:384-86.



562 Slavic Review

consubstantial. There, character is understood as arising at the crossing

point between projection and retrospection, the activity of the hero and

that of the author. In other words the herois a category of existence and nar

rative, the category of future-directed, processual preformation, and not

a person, biographical or otherwise. And in the very passage from which

this discussion began, Bakhtin does not speak of character but only of hero, of vivification (ozhivlenie), of endowing something at rest and abstract with

the trajectory of becoming. Bakhtin is not always clear on this in the early

essay, slipping now and then between the categorical and the mimetic, or traditional, understanding of "hero," but during the rest of his life, he

goes on to develop a number of categories, aesthetic, epistemological,

linguistic, and arguably even ontological, each of which can be read as re

encoding, restaging in differing contexts the primal modernist inflation

of the heroic and simultaneously, extricating narrative temporality from

the confines of individual biography. To be sure, the first decisive foregrounding of the category of the hero

in Bakhtin still takes place within the confines of its anthropomorphic in

stantiation. This is Dostoevskii's unfinalizable hero, successfully resisting the author's synthetic function, giving voice to the crisis of authorship

narratively understood. But Dostoevskii's hero-centrism is only the begin

ning. In his later essays on the novel, Bakhtin is not merely concerned to show how heroes in polyphonic texts deprive authors of their stable

outsideness, but also of how novels themselves volatilize the relation be tween writer and style or, more generally, between the aesthetic act and

its medium. Thus, in Epic and Novel, he writes: "The novel has become the

leading hero in the drama of literary development in our time precisely because it best of all reflects the tendencies of a new world. ... In the

process of becoming the dominant genre, the novel sparks the renovation

of all other genres, it infects them with the spirit of process and incon

clusiveness."43 Here, the reference to the novel as a hero is not merely

metaphoric, I would argue; it is also more strictly terminological. As a

hero, the novel introduces the dimension of unfinalizable becoming into

the static system of genres, interferes between the speaker and the liter

ary utterance, thus preforming (which is of course not to say completely

determining) what will be tellable in a narrative or a poem and how it will be told: "The novelization of literature does not imply attaching to already

completed genres a generic canon that is alien to them, not theirs. The

novel after all has no canon of its own. It is, by its very nature, not canonic. It is plasticity itself."44

In a similar vein, heteroglossia, a wide range of discourses carrying within them their own ideological evaluations and intentions, swarms be tween word and thing, interfering with the "authorial" speaker's hopes to

have direct or Adamic access to the world.45 Later still, Bakhtin makes a

43. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael

Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 7.

44. Ibid., 39.

45. Ibid., 278, 284.




similar move in the context of a critique of modern linguistic theory, in

serting speech genres, or "relatively stable types of. . . utterances," between

the supposedly free speaker and the supposedly neutral and passive lin

guistic field. Thus, speech genres come ("heroically") to mediate between

langue and parole, necessity and freedom, object and subject.46 Finally, the

concept of the grotesque possesses for Bakhtin a similarly "heroic" func

tion, introducing unfinalizability, becoming, and temporal flow into an

otherwise statically, "formalistically" conceived image of the body.47 These later categories, then, despite obvious differences between

them, can be understood as instantiations of Bakhtin's modernist critique of modernity, interpolating modes of ceaseless impersonal "heroism" into a series of reified oppositions, which ultimately reenact the fundamen

tal opposition between subject and object. As such the "heroic" does not

refer to undifferentiated, irrational flow, does not name pure chaos, di

rectionless becoming, untheorizable heterogeneity. Rather, it names the

activity of extrapersonal but meaningful preformation, and what I have

referred to as Bakhtin's modernist, hero-centric critique is precisely the

work of detecting it and setting it up for exploration.

In his lecture on Belyi (1926), Bakhtin says: "Since the narrator is al

ways located at the level of his heroes, Dostoevskii lacks a language of his

own: the language of the author starts sounding like the language of the

hero of whom he speaks. . . . The same, down to minute features of style,

holds for Belyi. This is not the result of mere borrowing but the influence

of the world in which they live."48 Thus, here too, Bakhtin brings Dos

toevskii and Belyi together as articulating in their fiction the modernist

crisis of authorship.49 Soon after delivering these lectures, Bakhtin said a great deal more

about Dostoevskii. As for Belyi, he will be relegated to the vast category of twentieth-century authors of whom one can only wish Bakhtin had

said more. In recent years attempts have been made to extend Bakhtin

ian analysis to modernist novels, primarily by adopting the strategies that

best apply to the analysis of specifically realist dialogism, with the he

roic function fulfilled by unfinalizable characters and their open-ended

heterogeneous perspectives.50 The preceding analysis has prepared the

46. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Mi

chael Holquist, trans. Vern McGee (Austin, 1986), 60, 81.

47. Mikhail Bakhtin, TvorchestvoFransua Ruble i narodnaia kul'tura srednevekov'ia i renes

sansa (Moscow, 1990), 33.

48. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, 2:338; my translation.

49. V. V. Babich makes a highly intriguing observation that the very categories of

author and hero could have become central to Bakhtin's poetics as a result of his thoughts

about Dostoevskii and symbolist prose. See Babich, "Dialog poetik: Andrei Belyi, G. G.

Shpet i Mikhail Bakhtin," Dialog, Karnaval, Khronotop, 1998, no. 1:15.

50. See, for instance, Stacy Burton's analysis of The Sound and the Fury in "Bakhtin,

Temporality and Modern Narrative: Writing 'the Whole Triumphant, Murderous, Unstop

pable Chute,'" Comparative Literature 48, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 39-65, or, with more rel

evance to the following discussion, Roger Keys, The Reluctant Modernist: Andrei Belyi and the

Development of Russian Fiction, 1902-1914 (Oxford, 1996), pt. 3.



564 Slavic Review

ground for a different approach, one that would recover the categorical,

non-anthropomorphic understanding of the "heroic" dimension of ex

perience and of narrative?the dimension that, I have argued, needs to

be resuscitated if we are to appreciate the nature of Bakhtin's diagnosis of the modernist condition. Thus, in conclusion, I would like to take up a novel that, according to Bakhtin, represents one of the supreme instan

tiations of the crisis of authorship and, setting aside the standard toolkit

of Bakhtinian analytical terms, focus on the way it dislodges the category of the hero from that of character and thus represents a modernist, that

is, an immanent critique of modernity, parallel to the one elaborated by Bakhtin.

At the end of the first chapter of Belyi's Petersburg, the narrator exposes the underlying metaphysical crux of his narrative: "In this chapter, we

have seen Senator Ableukhov. We have also seen the idle thoughts of the senator in the form of the senator's house and in the form of the senator's

son, who also carries his own idle thoughts in his head."51 But Senator

Ableukhov, we immediately find out, also possesses only a shadowy being, because he, too, is the fruit of someone's fantasy, namely the author's.

At first sight, the setup is classically modernist, modernist in the author

centered inflection, guided by the Kantian maxim that we "know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them."52 Instead of a crisis of

authorship, perhaps we have here the very opposite: its inflation. In other

words, if one were to insist on the link between the hero and character, then the novel would appear to have no heroes at all, no characters en

gaged in genuine forward-looking process and becoming, only authors,

creating the world they live in through acts of Kantian spontaneity.53 But in Petersburg idle thoughts (mozgovaia igra) are only half of the story; in

fact, the less essential half. For this quasi-divine capacity to author some

thing out of nothing is only a mask. "Under way beneath this mask is the invasion of the brain by forces unknown to us. And granting that Apol lon Apollonovich is spun from our brain, nonetheless he will manage to

inspire fear with another, a stupendous state of being which attacks in the

night."54 Between the character-authors and the products of their supposedly

free creation something else interferes, the true hero, the hero whose

name, appropriately enough, changes throughout the novel. It is this hero and not the Kantian philosopher's or the bureaucrat's or the young

society lady's all too easily universalizable synthesizing subjectivities that

ultimately interest the novel and drive its plot. Perhaps this hero is most

properly understood as vivification itself, in the sense Bakhtin intended in the quote with which we started: vivification, rendering real the ghostly

51. Andrei Bely, Petersburg, trans. Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad (Bloom

ington, 1978), 35. It should be added here that Nikolai Apollonovich, the senator's son,

keeps a bust of Kant in his study.

52. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York,

1965), 23. 53. Ibid., 92.

54. Bely, Petersburg, 35.




reality of a world brought into being through cerebral play. The vivified hero is Peter the Great, who appears in pubs during the fall months of

1905, drinking with sundry Dutchmen; it is the great monument to Peter, the Bronze Horseman galloping through the streets of the city and pay

ing death-dealing visits to its denizens; it is the general strike, the human

myriapod, a terrorist's bomb that in the course of the novel receives an

unlikely name, Pepp Peppovich Pepp; it is, in short, the very history of

Russia's modernization and its great symbol, the vivified city itself.

The "heroic" activity of the vivified city culminates in the scene during which the Bronze Horseman melts into Aleksandr Dudkin's veins, turn

ing the anarchist into a kind of medium for dark unknown forces, lead

ing him to murder the provocateur Lippanchenko and, straddling him, to

freeze in cataleptic imitation of the Falconet monument. Thus, characters

become mere vivified husks, ventriloquists of the hero transcending their

understanding. In his essay "Poetika russkogo simvolizma: Personologicheskii aspekt,"

Vladimir Papernyi comments on some central representational tendencies

of Petersburg: "The 'de-crystallization' of characters, objects, and events in

the surface referential layer of the novel is necessitated by the presence of

the deep referential layer made up of a complex of citational, mythopo etic motifs and considerably 'obstructing,' deforming the picture formed

by the elements of the surface layer."55 The deep layer, citational and mythopoetic, subverts, "de-crystallizes"

all distinct character identities in the novel, makes it impossible to say

definitively who is who.56 In the same move, it "heroically" delimits the

activity of authoring, predetermines what can and cannot be said, so that

the very author-centered modernist framework with which we began the

discussion of the novel is revealed to be merely illusory. But?and in this

Belyi simultaneously performs a Bakhtinian critique and dodges a Luk?c

sian criticism?the deep layer is by no means reducible to undifferenti

ated flow. Closer to Sigmund Freud's Unconscious than to the symbolist

Dionysian or to Henri Bergson's duration, it possesses a structure, an in

tentionality of its own. As the vivified city of Petersburg, the Bronze Horse

man, the Flying Dutchman, it is meaningful and meaning-giving. And in

rendering that "heroic" (preformative) dimension of existence visible, in

exposing "authorial" cerebral play as no more than a mask, Belyi's novel

instantiates a specifically modernist critique of modernity.

My purpose in the above has been to bring together a number of

issues?narratological, epistemological, and aesthetic?clustering around the problematic figure of the hero in modernist aesthetics and

fiction. I have used a few puzzling passages from Bakhtin's early work in

55. Vladimir Papernyi, "Poetika russkogo simvolizma: Personologicheskii aspekt,"

in A. G. Boichuk, ed., Andrei Belyi: Publikatsii, issledovaniia (Moscow, 2002), 152; my

translation.

56. In this regard, see also Lidiia Ginzburg's suggestive discussion that some twentieth

century prose is engaged in an attempt to replace the hero (as character) with process in

O literaturnom geroe (Leningrad, 1979), 129-43.



566 Slavic Review

order to bring into focus a triad of contemporary views on subjectivity and

its representation in narrative. The author-centered, de-temporalizing

conception of the self has emerged as instantiated in formalist and, more

generally, modernist narratology. Parallel to Kantian transcendental cri

tique, it inquires into the formal conditions for the possibility of coherent

narrative and finds them in the synthetic, "authorial" activity of the sub

ject. Luk?cs's attempt to preserve a concept of the self circumscribed by

biographical time (mediating between history and individual existence) harkens back to Hegelian realism with its emphasis on the inseparability of subject and object, self and history. Finally, Bakhtin's position, as I have

presented it here, has emerged as in some ways the most complicated. Far from being an antimodernist, he affords us a perspective from which the means for an immanent critique of contemporary modernity can be found within modernist fiction itself, where the modern world becomes

intelligible only from the perspective of the hero "in the value categories of my I-for-myself." And in the same gesture, he allows us to characterize certain author-centric aspects of modernist theory and practice as con

taining residual elements of eighteenth-century idealist epistemology and aesthetics. One conceptual reward of this binocular vision of modernism, then, is that it enables a disjunction between the hero as a category of ac tive temporal preformation, embodying meaningful collective, historical

(in any case, suprapersonal) processes, and character as a narratively de

picted individual. This disjunction in turn contributes to our understand

ing of the process whereby modernist narrative temporality is extricated from the bounds of biography and becomes amenable to extraindividual

dimensions, both radically vaster (as in Petersburg) and uncannily smaller than the span of a lifetime.



Documents

Heroic Aesthetics and Modernist Critique: Extrapolations from Bakhtin's "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity"