On Bakhtin's Discourse of a Novel

8/12/2019 On Bakhtin's Discourse of a Novel

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Adam HammondUniversitv of Toronto

The Honest and Dishonest Critic: Style andSubstance in Mikhail Bakhtin's '^Discourse inthe Novel and Erich Auerbach's imesisI. Similarities

On January 7, 1929, Mikhail Bakhtin was arrested on a set of charges increasinglycommon in Stalin's U SSR . His name was reportedly discovered on a list of counter-revolutionaries in Paris; he was accused of membership in the Brotherhood ofSaint Serafim, an underground religious order; and he was cited with corrup tingthe you th in the course of private lectures. On the latter Socratic charge he wassentenced to ten years' labor at the notorious Solovetsky Island gulag. Thanks tothe intervention of some well-placed ftiends, Bakhtin's sentence was reduced tosix years' exile in K azakhstan, wh ere he worked as a bookkeepe r for the KustanaiDistrict Consumers' Cooperative. He helped calculate agricultural quotas andwitnessed the famine that resulted when these quotas were not significantly reducedduring the poor crop of 1932-33. In 1934, Bakhtin published his first work since1929'sProblems ofDostoevsky sArt:an articleinSovietTrat eentitled Exp erienceBased on a Study of Demand amo ng K olkhoz Workers. At the same time he was atwork on som ething very different, Discourse in the No vel, which he was unableto publish until much later.While Bakhtin was writing Discourse in the Nove l, Erich Auerbach w asleading a different sort of life in Germ any. He held the chair in Rom ance Philologyat Marburg, and in this enclave lived as he told Walter Benjamin in a letter writtenin 1935 among honorable people, who . . . all think as I do (748). It was an.existence as precarious as pleasant. In April of 1933 the newly-elected Nazishad enacted a law banning Jews from the civil service, which with Hitler's selfpromotion to Fhrer in 1934 was being enforced with increasing strictness. Lifein Marburg, Auerbach recognized, was untenable: it conduces to foolishness,he wrote to Benjamin: it leads to the belief that there is som ething on which onecould buildwhile the opinions of individuals, even if there are many of them,do n't matter at all (748). Auerbach w as dismissed from his position on October

638 Style Volume 45 , No. 4, W inter 2011


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Style and Substance in Disco urse in the No vel and Mimesis 63916, 1935, and left the next year with his family for Istanbul. There, cut off fromhis colleagues and without a proper library, he wrote Mimesis

Many parallels tempt the critic of Bakhtin and Auerbach. Both were exilesexiles of the most notorious totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Bothwro te their best-known works in exile: Bakhtin wro te Discourse in the Novel in1933-34 in Kazakhstan and Auerbach wroteM imesisin Turkey from 1942 to 1945.The works themselves have much in common: both are analyses of literary style,and both carry out their analysis by means of a grand oppositionfor Bakhtin,the distinction between poetic and novelistic style; for Auerbach, the oppositionof Homeric and Old Testament style. The conclusions of the two works are alsoremarkably similar: both favoram ultivoiced , multiperspectival style, which Bakhtincalls dialogism and Auerbach mu ltipersonal representation of consciousn ess(536). We can also speculate about a common historical motivation for theirchampioning such styles. Faced with parallel experiences of exile fi-om authoritarianstates, it seems reasonable that these trained literary analysts should have soughtto understand their predicament in its linguistic basis, and should have sought inresponse to theorize a linguistic style capable of defeating or upsetting the stylesof those in power.

II.Honesty in Literary StyleBut what of these terms honest and disho nes t ?' Later I will use them todistinguish the critical styles of these two stylistic critics: to determine whetherBakhtin or Auerbach is the more honest critic the one who comes closest towriting in the style he advocates. But initially I want to argue that the question ofhonesty supplies further common ground between Disco urse in the No vel andMimesis Honesty in literary style, I contend, is the central preoccupation of both.In Disco urse in the Nov el, honesty undergirds Bakh tin's structuring dichotomyof poetic and novelistic style. Bakhtin praises novelistic prose because it is honest:because it acknow ledges and reproduces the dialogism the ineradicable conditionof interactivity and responsiveness in all significationthat he sees as the naturalcondition oflanguage.He attacks poetry because it is dishonest: because it activelysuppresses and conceals dialogism. For Bakhtin, the route from any word to theobject it represents is necessarily complex, qualified, and contested. The word, hewrites, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filledenvironment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out ofcomplex interrelationships, merges with som e, recoilsfi omothers, intersects withyet a third group . . . (276 ). The prose writer acknow ledges this. He confrontsa multitude of voices, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by


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640 Adam Hammondsocial con sciousness. In novels, the objects revealsfirstof all precisely the sociallyheteroglot mu ltiplicity of its names, definitions and value jud gm en ts (331). Thisis not the case in poems. Thou gh a poem 's words too must break through to itsobject, pene trate the alien w ord in which the object is en tangled (331), it is muchless interested in the journey than the destination, the inexhaustible wealth andcontradictory multiplicity of the object it.sclf with its 'virginal,' still 'unuttcrcd'natu re (278). Bakhtin cha racterizes the poem as ernbarrassed at having to run thecom plicated gauntlet of word to object at all. The prose art, Bakhtin says,

pres um es a deliberate reeling lor the historical and social concrcten css of living discou rse,as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in socialstruggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility, as yetunresolv ed and still fraught with hostile intentions and accen ts. (331)

In poetty, on the other hand, the records of the passage remain in the slag of thecreative process, which is then cleared away (as scaffolding is cleared aw ay on ceconstruction is finished), so that the work may rise as unitary spee ch (331).

Dialogism is the stylistic feature that keeps novelistic discourse warm fromstruggle: metaphor and rhythm are the cooling elements poured over the dishonestedifice of the poem. Metaphor, Bakhtin says, is specifically incompatible withdialogism : Soc ial diversity of speec h, were it to arise in the [poetic] work andstratify its language, would make impossible both the normal development andthe activity of sym bols within it (298 ). He illustrates this by distinguish ing p rosedialogisjTi frotn poetic ambiguity. While the poetic word can possess multiplem ean ings , the difference from dialog ic prose is that the poetic word is a trope ,requiring a precise feeling for the two m eanings contained in it. He continues, it is impossible to itnagine a trope (say, a metaphor) being unfolded into the twoexchanges of a dialogue, that is, two meaning parceled out between two separatevoice s (328). As for rhythm , Bakh tin says that /;y creating an unmediatedinvolvement in every aspect of the accetitual system of the whole, it destroysin embryo those social worlds of speech and of persons that are potentiallyembedded in the word (298). Poetic language is not only m imctically false butactively dish onest; its patterns of rhythm deliberately reduce the stratified linguisticuniverse to a com mon denotninator. By stripping all aspects of language of theaccents and intentions of other peop le, destroying all traces of social hctcroglossiaand divetsity of lang uag e, Bakhtin says, a tension-filled unity is achieved in thepoetic wo rk (298 ). The honest prose writer welcome s the heteroglossia andlanguage diversity of the literary and cxtralitcrary language into his work not onlynot weakening them but even intensifying them (298). In a statement that goes


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Style and SubStance in Discourse in the Nove l and Mimesis 641some way toward associating the poet with the Stalinist state, Bakhtin adds, Theprose writer does not purge words of intentions that are alien to him, he does notdestroy the seeds of hctcroglossia embedded in words, he does not eliminate thoselanguage characteristics and m annerisms glimmering behind the words and forms(298). The dishonest poet does all this: refusing to recognize that language in itsnatural state is made up of opinions, ideas, and mannerisms opposite to his own,he labors to make his words express only his own one-sidedness.

The question of honesty is also central to Auerbach's analysis of Homeric andOld Testamentstylesin Odysseu s' Scar, theirstchaptero M imesis. Butit ismuchmore difficult than with Bakhtin to say which ofthe two styles Auerbach considershonest. At first it seems that he is on the side of the Old Testament. UnderlyingAuerb ach 's opposition of Homeric and Old Testament styles in Ody .sscus' Scaris his distinction between legend and history. History is literal truth: things as theyactually happen, in all their contingent, confused meaning lessness. Legend, on theother hand, arranges material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches itfrom its contem porary historical context so thatthelatter will not confuse it; it knowsonly cleariy ouUined men who act from few and simp le motives (19). O fthe tw o,history is the more honest, and at first it seems that Auerbach is on the Elohist'sside against Hom er for this reason: Ho mer remains within the legendary with allhis material, he says, whereas the material of the Old Testament com es closerand closer to history as the narrative pro ceed s 19).Between the clearly outlined,brightly and uniformly illuminated style of Hom er and the fraught, my steriousstyle of the Old Testament, Auerbach prefers the latter because it is truer to life.

But in the first of many argumentative reversals, Auerbach turns on theElohist. W hile the historical style of the Old Testament is to be com mended for itshonesty, its teleological narrative structure forces its reader into acts of interpretivedishonesty. Hom er's story coexists happily with others: before it, beside it, afterit, other com plexes of events, which do not depend on it, can be conceived withoutdifficulty 16).The Biblical narrative, however, insists on its literal, exclusive truth:

T h e Bible's claim to truth is not only lar more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical ilexcludes all oth er claim s. Th e world of the Scri ptu re storie s is not satisfied w ith claim ingto be a historically true reality it insists that it is the only real world, is destined forau to cr ac y. (1 4- 1 .*>)

Au tocracy and tyran ny are not epithets we would expect Auerbach to applyto his preferred style, especially given his historical situation. If the world of theOld Testament is more realistic and complex than Hom er's caricatures, ourinterpretation of this world is much less free than in Homer. Because it presents


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642 Adam Hammonditself not merely as "realistic" but as exclusively true, everything must be fitted,however awkwardly, into its interpretive framework.

Having made this argument, Auerbach again changes direction. His hextargument is that, because the Old Testament employs the techniques of historyrather than legend, the conflicted decision-makers that populate its narrative arefar more compelling than anyone in Homer. "What a road, what a fate," Auerbachexclaims, "lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out ofth e blessing and theold man w hose favorite son had been torn to pieces by a wild beast " The h istoricalBiblical narrative shows its reader that real personalities develop from a processand do not arrive ready-made as in legend:

The old m an, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individualthan the young man; for it is only during the course of neventful life than men are dif-ferentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of personality which the OldTestament presents us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to beexamples. (18)

What road, what fate lie between the com peting valuations ofthe Old Testament'shistorical styleinAuerbach's openingchapter Itispraised foritsrealistic com plexity,condemned for its tyrannical attachment to truth, and praised again for its truthfulportrayal of personality as a process.

Auerbach's next critical move confuses things further. Turning from theancient world to the p resent day, Auerbach asks whether a Biblical historical styleor a Homeric technique of legend would better be able to explain the Nazis. Hisanswer is "neither":

Let the reader think ofthe history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, forexample, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups ofmenat the time oftherise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and statesduring the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent h istorical themes in general,and how unfit they are for legend; the historical comprises great number of contradictorymotives in each individual, a hesitation and an ambiguous groping on the part of groups;. . . and the motives ofthe interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propagandacan be composed only through the crudest simplification. (19)

"To write history," Auerbach concludes, "issodifficult that most historians are forcedto make concessions to the technique of legend" (20). History is still the honeststyle;it would be better if historians d idn 't need to resort to legend. Faced with thetask of representing the vast panorama of futility and anarchy that is contem poraryhistory, however, Auerbach argues that writing honestly is actually impossible.


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Style and Substance in Disco urse in the N ove l and Mimesis 643III Differences

There exist, s wehave seen, many similarities between the works of Bakhtin andAuerbach. Discourse in theN ove l and M imesisare both interested in discov eringand promoting honest literary styles, and both do so by means of stylistic contrast.But already an important difference has presented itself while Bakhtin is able tolocate honesty absolutely in an existent style (and dishonesty absolutely in ano ther),Auerbach is not. For Bakhtin, dialogic novelistic style as practiced by Dostoevskyand others is the stylistic Jerusalem; the style of poetrythough few concreteexam ples are providedis Babylon. For Auerbach, things are much less clear-cut.His argument repeatedly changes its mind about whether Biblical style is morehonest than Homer's. Then, with his reference to the rise of fascism in Germany,he questions wh ether honest writing is possible at all.

Bes ide this difference in their respective analyses of literary s tyle, there isalso the difference of their own critical styles. From the passages I have cited, itis already possible to derive what I regard as the major difference between them :that Bakhtin is qu otable and Auerbach is not. I mean two things by this. First,Bakhtin's prose is more exciting, dramatic, and memorable than Auerbach's.^ Letus recall, for instance, his remarks about the normalizing effects of poetic rhythm: Rhythm , by creating an unm ediated involvement in every aspect ofthe accentualsystem ofthe whole . . . destroys in embryo those social worlds of speech and ofpersons that are potentially embedded in the wo rd (298). Bakhtin com mandsattention. His tone is aggressive, determined, merciless, and unequivocal; in theitalicized portions and beyond he seems tobeyelling; his metaphors (the destructionof wo rlds and em bryos) are violent and lurid; he speaks in sw eep ing, unqualifiedterms ( unm ediated involvement, every aspect, the wh ole, social worlds,

persons ). Auerbach's prose, by contrast, is hesitant and full of qualifications. Heintroduces a long paragraph on the differences between Hom eric and Old Testamentstyle by stating It would be d if fi c u lt .. . to imagine styles more contrasted thanthose of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts (11). This is the mostpositive statement ofthe gap between the poles of Auerbach's stylistic binary;yet he spends more ofthe sentence drawing similarities ( equally ancient andequally epic ) than contrasts. Later, discussing the mu ltipersonal representationof con sciou snes s in the mod ernist novel, Auerbach says it yield[s] somethingthat we m ight call a synthesized cosm ic view or at the very least a challenge to theread er's will to interpretive synthes is (549). Beginning by asserting that mod em iststyle is syn thetic, he finishes by stating that it also resists sy nthesis. Bakhtin is full


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644 Adam Hamm ondof memorably worded, strongly phrased positive statements; Auerbach is lucky toget through a sentence without changing his mind.

My second mean ing for quotable is closely related. Because of the differentshapes of their argumentsBakhtin's static, Auerbach's always in motionit isvery difficult to quote Auerbach in a way that captures his meaning. In makingmy argument about Bakhtin thus far, for example, I have drawn quotations fromall over Discourse in the No vel : a passage from theend of the book is put nextto another from the beginning to support a third from the middle. This is possiblebecause Ba khtin's argumen t does not really progress. He begins Disco urse inthe Nov el by immediately identifying his prey, and spends the rest of the workcircling and swooping. Ken Hirschkop remarks, 'Disc ourse in the No vel' is inessence one cla im 'the novel is an artistic genre'justified and explained formo re than 150 pages (77). You can be quite certain that if you open any pageat random, Bakhtin will be at work either debasing poetic style to praise thenovelistic or praising novelistic style to debase the poetic. As a result, it is nearlyimpossible to take a quotation out of context in the user-friendly Discourse in theNovel. With Au erbach it is a different matter. In explaining Au erbach's valuationof the Old Testament and Homeric styles, for example, I was forced to follow hisargument a lmost page-by-page. This is because Auerbach sconstantly questioninghis provisional hypotheses, qualifying them, and then arguing against them onlyto return eventually to something resembling the original position. One can citeAuerbac h's rem arks on the mimetic faithfulness of the Old Testam ent style anduse this to support a claim that he is anti-Homer. But this would be an act ofcritical dishonesty, for on the previous page Auerbach attacks the Old Testament'styrannical attachment to truth. If one is to cite Auerbach, one must be prepared todevote several pages to explaining what qualifications and antithetical argumentsmodulate the quoted passage. Quoting from imesis requires effort.

IV. Honesty in Critical Style Discou rse in the No vel and imesisthese two otherwise similar works ofstylistic criticismare written in very different styles. But which of these stylesis more ho nest ? Which of the two works is closer in its own style to the style itargues for? Let's begin with Bakhtin, and ask what an honest critical style wouldlook like in the context of Disco urse in the Novel. I earlier quoted Bakhtin'sremark, Th e prose writer does not purge words of intentions that are alien to him,he does not destroy the seeds of heteroglossia embedded in words, he does noteliminate those language characteristics and mannerisms glimmering behind thewords and form s (298 ). A style that does not purge words of intentions that are


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Style and Substance in Discourse in the N ovel and imesis 645alien to it would acknowledge the inescapable seman tic openn ess of (dialogic)language, and would not attempt to force or control meanings. We might expect itto be playful, hesitant, self-conscious, or diffident maybe funny, silly, difficult,obscure , evasive, or indirect. A style that does not eliminate those characteristicsand mannerisms glimm ering behind words and forms would ventriloquize in avariety of voices serious academic language would give way to buffoonery,poetry, slang , official pronouncem ents, song , etc. Bakh tin's style, as we have seen,is nothing like this. He is clear, purposeful, uniform, and persistent.

We would further expectastylethat docs not destroy the seeds of heteroglossiaembedded in word s willingly to admit opposing voices. It would acknow ledgedissent and adm it coun terargum ents to its own assertions. If the thesis of Discoursein the Nov el is,asIhave represented it, that dialogic novelistic styleistotally honestand poetic style totally dishonest, thenwecan imagine three such counterargum ents.The first, facile riposte would be the inverse of Bakhtin's: that poetry is totallyhonest and the novel totally dishonest. More serious would be the following: (2)that neither form is totally honest or dishonest, and instead both poetry and proseare occasionally honest and occasionally dishonest, dialogic and monologic; and(3) that Ba khtin's terms poetry and pro se arc meaningless in practice, wheremany poems contain elements of what he calls novelistic style, and many novelsexhibit what he calls poetic style. am not aware that Bakhtin entertains this firstobjection in the pages of Discourse in the No vel, though certain critics of poetryhave made the argument on his behalf. Bakhtin does, however, acknowledge themore serious second and third objectionsthoughhedoes so in a way that manifestsa clear critical dishonesty. It comes in the form of a footnote.

Disco urse in the Novel, so critical of poetic tropes, finally succumbs to one.In an exemplary demonstration of bathos, justashis argum ent against poetry reachesone of its passionate crescendoes, it awkwardly overshoots the mark. Bakhtin hasjust stated that the language of poetic gen res, when they approach their stylisticlimit, often becomes authoritarian, dogmatic, and conservative, sealing itself offfrom the influence of literary social dialects (287) when he add s the followingin a footnote:

It goes without saying that we continually advance as typical the extreme to which poeticgen res aspire ; in con crete exa m ples of poetic works it is possib le to find features funda-men tal to pro se, and num erou s hybrid s of various gene ric types exist. (287n 12)

Itisa brazen ad mission. On the nextpage,while castigating the poet forhisspuriousattempts to present unitary language, Bakhtin com plains that poetic language isunitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation


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646 Adam Hamm ondfrom the concre te, ideological formulations that fill it (288). Bakhtin admits inhis footnote to treating poetry the same way: as an abstraction deliberately isolatedfi-om the real world an ex trem e withou t clear relevance in practice . Central to D iscou rse in the N ovel is the assertion that poetic and novelistic discourses areirreconcilable sides of a binary oppo sition. He calls nove listic style the expressionof a Galilean perception of language, one that denies the abso lutism of a single andunitary lang uag e (366) and says that poetry presen ts a unitary and singular andPtolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed(286).There is nothing to be gained from dialogue between Ptolemy and G alileo:one is right and one is wrong . And yet Bakhtin admits in his footnote that in practicethere is no Galilean or Ptolemaic style, only hybrids. The footnote is an admissionof critical dishonesty one whose m anner of confession only comp ounds this fact.Why does B akhtin m ake his confession in a footnote? Because his critical style inthe body of his work his quo table, determ ined, forceful, militant, straightforwardstyleis not dialog ic, and cannot support counterargum ents. Even though theseobjections go without saying , Bakhtin must exile them from his argum ent andrelegate them to a paratext.

Is this not unavoidable in literary criticism? Mu stn't one sacrifice dia log ismto the imperative of m aking a com prehensible a rgument? Is not the attempt to w rite hon estly about non-straightforward literary style responsible for much obnoxiousand incomprehensible criticism? And, anyway, does the fact that Bakhtin doesn'twrite in the style he advocates som ehow invalidate his findings? Sidney and Shelley,after all, wrote their respective defenses of poetry in prose. Whatever the validityof these concems, Auerbach does prove that honest literary criticism is possible:that one can w rite in the style one champions , even when this style is dialo gic.Consider his treatment of Woolf and Proust in the final chapter o Mimesis TheBrown S tocking. Auerbach begins by praising two stylistic features of modem istprose: its dialogic multipersonal representation of consciousn ess (536) whereby the writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished; almosteverything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness ofthe dramatispersonae (534); and its interest in representing minor, unimp ressive, randomevents (546). By focusing on everyday events, modernist writers reject the grand,tyrannical, crudely simplified master-narratives of the Bible and twentieth-centurytyrants. By dethroning the author as the arbiter ofmeaning, these modemists givevoice to a wider social spectrum of characters and allow for the competition ofdifferentiated voices whose interactions preclude reduction to a single truth. Thereader of a mod emist novel sthus confronted with not one order and interpretation,


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Style and Substance in Discourse in the No vel and imesis 647and interpretation, but many, whose mutual overlapping, com plementing, andcon tradiction both tempt and frustrate the reade r's desire to make sense. To repeatA uerb ach 's pointedly contradictory phrase, mode rnist style yieldfsl somethingthat we m ight call a synthesized co smic view or at least a challenge to the read er'swill to interpretive synthesis (549). Th ese narratives synthe tic but resistant tosynthesisteach their reader an important skill for survival in the modern world. There is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretationwh ose subject matter is our own life, Auerbach writes, .

We are constantly endeavoring to give meaning and order to our lives in the past, thepresent, and future, to our surroundings, the world in which we live; with the result thatour lives appear in our own conception as total entities which to be sure are alwayschanging, more or less radically, more or less rapidly, depending on the extent to whichwe are obliged, inclined, and able to assimilate the onrush of new experien ce. (549)

These are the forms of order and interpretation the modern writers here underdiscussion attempt to grasp in the random mom ent, he conc ludes. Staging theinteraction of multiple, contradictory narratives irreducible to simple interpretation,the style ofthe modernist novel trains its readers both to reject disho nes t, spuriouslycoherent narratives and to construct flexible, honest narratives of their own.

Auerbach would not be an honest critic if he did not immediately followthese coherent assertions by challenging his reader's will to interpretive synthesiswith another of his argumentative reversals. This twist comes in the course of hissecond reference to contemp orary history. The reading of modernism he has beenadvancing would be a very optimistic one if applied historically: modernism,training its readers to be suspicious of grand triumphant narratives, would teachthem to suspect, for instance, those of Stalin and Hitler. He follows this optimisticreading with a demonic one, however. He turns on the very stylistic devices uponwhich he has built his positive account: modernist attention to the ordinary andthe multipersonal representation of consciousness. Reading the development ofthe latter historically, he concludes that multiperspectivalism is not an ingeniousinvention of modernism so much as an inevitable symptom of modernity. Mo derniststyle simply m irrors a modern world characterized by the violent clash ofthe mostheterogeneo us ways of life and endeavo r (549):

At the time of the first World War and after ina Europe unsure of itself overflowingwith unsettled ideologies and ways of life, and pregnant with disaster certain writersdistinguished by instinct and insight find a method which dissolves reality into multipleand multivalcnl rcflections of consciousness. That this method should have been developedat this time is not hard to und erstand. (551 )


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648 Adam Hamm ondThe other stylistic feature, the focus on the everyday, is re-read as quietism.

Modernist writers are like stubborn historians who refuse to condescend tothe techniques of legend, and so deal only with the narrow slice of reality thatcan be represented honestly. They "prefer the exploitation of random everydayevents, contained within a few hours and days, to the complete and chronologicalrepresentation ofatot lexterior continuum " and "hesitate to impose upon life, whichis their subject, an order which it does not possess in itself (548). The modernistnovelists Auerbach discusses are entirely honest;but thisstubbom honesty, Auerbachcharges, actually abets the rise of fascism. In the chaos of competing ideologiesthat characterized the early twentieth century, he says.

The temptation to entrust oneself to sect which solves all problems with single formula,whose power of suggestion imposed solidarity, and which ostracized everything that wouldnot fit in and submit this temptation was so great that, with many people, fascismhardly had to employ force when the time came for it to spread through the countries ofold European culture, absorbing the smaller sects. (550)

Modernist style is exempt from the fascist techniques of clich, hypnosis,and directed interpretation . But if the role of fascism is to quell the interpretiveunease of mod ernity, then m odernism serves to amplify the confusion that fascismemploys as a pretext for control. In Auerbach's pessimistic reading, modernismreproduces in its readers the ontological state that made Mussolini's and Hitler'srise to power so effortless.

Auerbach briefly twists out of this gloomy reading of modernism, only totwist again. Reading W oolf's treatment ofthe eponym ous brown stocking in otheLighthouse Auerbach produces an apostrophe as enthusiastic as that about Jacob:"what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example, themeasuring ofthe stock ing " Woolf's focus on the random, everyday particularfreefrom the grand narratives and social hierarchies of contemporary historyattainsrenewed Utopian social promise:

In this unprejudiced and exploratory representation we cannot but see to what an extent below the surface conllicls tbc differences between men's ways of life and formsof though t have already lessened . . . . It is still a long way to a com m on life of mank indon earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in theunprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation ofthe random moment in thelives of different peo ple. (552)

This is yet another false apotheosis. Woolf's style seems to provide a way ofappreh ending latent com monality behind the ravages and enmities of Europe duringthe Second World War, and thus also seems to promise an escape from it. Butwithout taking a breath or inserting a paragraph break, Auerbach makes his final


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Style and Substance in Discou rse in the N ove l and Mimesis 649argumentative turn. He does this by re-reading his own phrase, a comm on life ofmankind on earth. Losing its associations with horizontality and dem ocracy, thephrase com es to mean dishonesty, legend, crude simplification :

So the complicated process of dissolution which led to fragmentation of the exterioraction, to reflection of consciousness, and to stratification of lime seems to be tendingtoward a very simple solution. Perhaps it will be too simple to please those who, despiteall its dangers and catastrophes, admire and love our epoch for the sake of its abundanceof life and the incomparable historical vantage point which it affords. But they are fewin number, and probably will not live lo sec much mt)rc than Ihc lirsl lorcwarnings of theapp roac hing unification and simplification. (552 -3)

Thus ends Mimesis Praised as an antidote to the simplifications of fascism,then maligned as a reproducer of the chaos that fascism feeds on, then praised asa style that overcomes the divisions of contemporary history, modernism is finallycharged with complicity in the simplifying project of fascism.'

This pessimistic conclusion only provides further evidence of Auerbach'scritical honesty. He too, like Bakh tin, makes an important confession in the courseof his work : that he is himse lf a modernist. It is possib le, he coyly admits, tocom pare the technique of modem writers with that of certain m odern ph ilologists :

ndeed thepresentbook may be cited as anillustration. couldnever havewritten anythingin the nature ofahistory ofEuropeanrealism; the material would have swamped me.. ..as opposed U) this sec the possibility of success and profil in Idling myself be guided bya few motifs which have worked out gradually and without a specific purpose . . . (548)

Like the modem novelists whose style he discusses, Auerbach is suspicious ofoverarching narratives. He prefers to focus on random particulars, on individualpassages, and not to force his reading of them in a prearranged narrative. H is styleis mo dernist a lso inits mu ltipersonal, multivoiced, twist and turn style.L ike themodem novels it alternately praises and blames.M imesis demands that its readerbe willing to engage actively in the production of meaning, and yet also be ableto accept that its message is not reducible to a single truth. Of course this meansthat Au erbach's judg ment of modernist style also applies to his own book: thoughit might in theory be construed as capable of opposing fascist modes of thought,it can just as plausibly be seen as implicated in promoting them, and in any casewas unsuccessful in preventing or halting fascism 's adv ance .

V. Con sequencesPerhaps it is hyperbolic to see critical style as an actor in defeating or p ropping

up totalitarian regimes. But one of the principal sim ilarities between these two critics and the similarities no doubt outweigh the differences is that both Bakhtin


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650 Adam Hamm ondand Auerbach ask us to make this leap. They both tell us that there are ways ofspeaking other than dishonestly, and imply that speaking thus can have profoundpolitical effects. B akhtin speaks of "poetic absolutism " (315) and of "the time whenpoetry was accom plishing the task of cultural, national and political centralizationof the verbal-ideological levels" (273). He calls the language of poetic genres"authoritarian, dogm atic and conservative" (287) and argues that "it]he poet mustassume com plete si ngle-personed hegemony overhisown language"(297).Thoughhe never states it directiypossibly because to do so would imperil his lifethelanguage of poetry is everywhere im plicitly linked to the Stalinist state. D ialogism,its opposite, is implicitly advanced as a strategy for defeating it. Auerbach's tworeferences to contemporary history are more directly concerned with the ability ofliterary styles to combat tyranny. In "Odysseus' Scar" he is interested in Homerand the Bible not only for their influence on the historical development of literarystyle, but also for the possibility that they might help us to explain the phenomenonof Nazism. In "The Brown Stocking," as we have seen, he investigates from manyangles the role of modernist style in defeating or abetting fascism.

Itisbecause they themselves take so seriously the political dimension of literarystyle that we must take seriously the question of their critical honesty. Bakhtin,who is so very sure that dialogic novelistic style can trump authoritarian poeticspeech, speaks like an autocrat. He is passionately opposed to monologic speech:he spends the entirety of his lengthy work attacking it and outlining the endlessways in which a dialogic style is more honest. But his stylistic techn ique is to invertmonologismto turn monologism against itself rather than write dialogically.Auerbach, who endsMimesis by admitting that his own modernist style probablycan't do anything to defeat fascism, nonetheless takes his own analysis seriouslyenough to learn ft om it. He seems to want nothing to do with the fascist voice, andso rather than inverting it writes in a completely different way. Where the fasciststyleiscoherent, simple, and straightforward, A uerbach'sisdiscontinuous, com plex,and travels in manifold byways.

But enough of these accusationsof ypocrite auteurLetusleave Bakhtin alonein frozen, remote Kustanai and play instead the better-known but far less populargame. ypocrite lecteur For the question remains: why is Bakhtin so much morewidely read than Auerbach?' Why, when they say such similar things, do we like"Discourse in the Novel" so much more than Mimesis ? It must have somethingto do with style. Bakhtin, after all, is so quotab le His prose is mem orab le; hisvoice IS passiona te and energetic; his argument is clear from beginning to end."As for Au erbach, ifo ne is to do justice to all the leversals and qualifications of his


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Style and SubStance in "Discourse in the Novel" and Mimesis 651tortuously-conducted argument, one must thoroughly bore one's reader: one mustlitter one's argument with endless unsightly block quotations and spend page afterpage just to explain his valuation of a single literary style. While we arc preparedto agree with Bakhtin and Auerbach that honest writing adm its counterargu ments,engages in dialogue with implicit objections, and avoids categorical declarationsof universal truthgiven the choice we are not terribly interested in reading orteaching suchstuff We are ourselves dishonest critics

NotesI would like to thank Melba Cuddy-Keane, Andrew DuBois, Malcolm Woodland,Greig Henderson, and Marta Balcewicz for their invaluable help with this essay.Thanks are due also to my anonymous reviewer at Sty le,whose helpful andenthusiastic comments spurred me on in my final revisions.

' What appeals to me about this pair of terms, "honest" and "dishonest," istheir adaptability to various needs and contexts. They can be neutral (expressingthe simple fact of accuracy or inaccuracy) or carry the strongest moral force. tooam trying to be an honest critic; I don't want to limit the many meanings of theseevocative words. Therefore I leave them undefined.

^ Remember that the subtitle ofMimesis is The Representation of Reality inWestern Literature.Auerbach values realism.'Th i shas,of course, m uch to do with their translato rs, and the different stylistic

possibilities and conventions of Russian and German prose. W h a tl am attemptingin this article, however, is primarily a syntax of critical attitudes and intellectualconceptsattitudes and concepts that survive a good translation. (The quality ofthe translations in question is evidenced by their stability; Trask's is now well overfifty years old, and Emerson's and Holquist's turns thirty this year.)'' Despite his opposition to the trope of metaphor, Bakhtin does frequentlyemploy it.

^ Several critics have attempted to "sa ve" Bak htinian analys is for poetry,and poetry from Bakhtin's analysis. In his "Bakhtin on Poetry," Michael Eskinargues, "far from being relegated to the realm of discursive and, by extension,sociopolitical monologicity, poetry may plausibly be construed asthe dialogically .and sociopolitically exemplary mode of di.scoursc in Bakhtin's writing" (379).Mara Scanlon makes a similar case in "Ethics and the Lyric," arguing that onlyBakhtin himself can show us how thoroughly wrong he got poetry: she will"counter B akhtin's contention thatallpoetry is necessarily m onologic and thereforeunethica l" by counterintuitively "employing Bakhtin's own t;heories of dialogu e"


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652 Adam Hammond(1).A methodological flaw underlies these attempts to tescue poetry from Bakhtinby means ofaBakhtinian theory of dialogism predicated on the absolute rejectionof poetic discourse. Donald Wesling, caught between his love of poetry and hisbelief in dialogism, is particularly forthright in recognizing the dilemma: if he isto show that poe try as a form of utteranee should be reckoned into [B akh tin's]accou nt of speech genres, he says, then he must first rescue poetry from Ba kh tin'sstingy and grumbling description of it (17).

Sitnplification is not, in Auerbach's writing, an exclusively fascist project. Philology and ffe/////era/Mr (1952), for example, describesa process of imposeduniformity by which All human activity is being concentrated either intoEuropean-A merican or into Russian-Bolshevist patterns (2-3).In this final chapterof Mimesis, howeverso concerned with the relationship of modernist narrativeto the specific phenotnenon of fascism Auerbach seems to me to envision theappro aching unification and simplification as a consequence of fascism ratherthan of American or Soviet ways of life. Mimesis was written in Istanbul betweenMay 1942 and April 1945, during which period fascism was the more pressingthreat (the N azis began to surrender to the Allies only in late April 1945). By thetime Auerbach published Philology and Weltliteratur, he had been living in theUnited States for five years.

'A s an index ofthis, a search performed in the MLA database (2000-present)on March 15, 2010, for mikhail and bakh tin produced 999 results; the samesearch for erich and auerbach produced 73.

* Many other theorists, conversely, have achieved the ir celebrity throughmurkiness and obfuscation. Such obscurity at the micro-level seems to be moreacceptable in general than the macro-level complexity of Auerbach's Mimesis,whose individual sentenees are very clear. I can offer no explanation for thisperplexing phenomenon.

Works CitedAuerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in W estern Literature.

Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953. Print.. Philology andWeltliteratur. 1952. Trans. Maire Said and Edward Said.The Centennial Review 13.1 (Winter 1969): 1-17. Print.

. To Walter Benjamin. 6 October 1935. Letter6in Scholarship in Timesof Extremes: Le ttersofErich Au erbac h(19 33 -46). Tran s. Martin Elsky, MartinVialon, and Robert Stein.PMLA 122.3 (May 20 07): 742-62. Print.


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Style and Substance in Disco urse in the No vel and Mimesis 653Bakhtin, M ikhail. Discourse in theN ovel. TheD ialogic imagination: ourEssays

Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: Uof exas P,1981.259-422. Print.

Eskin, M ichae l. Bak htin on Poetry. PoeticsToday2 \ \ (Summer2000) :379-91.Print.

Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Dem ocracy Oxford: OxfordUP,1999. Print.

Scanlon, M ara. Ethics and the Lyric: Form, Dialogue, and Answ erability. CollegeLiterature 34 \ (2007): 1-22. Print.

Wesling, Donald. Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry Lewisburg, PA:Bucknell UP,2003. Print.

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On Bakhtin's Discourse of a Novel