Terry Eagleton is, among other things, professor of cultural theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His latest book is Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.
MORE BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR
RELATED ARTICLES
8 March 2001
On D.S. Mirsky
26 November 1998
On Isaiah Berlin
17 February 2005
Charting Chekhov’s career
10 August 2000
Hairy Humbert
13 May 1999
Akhmatova, Brodsky and Me
21 August 1997
A Snack before I Die
12 December 1996
Sycophant-in-Chief
RELATED CATEGORIES
Biography and memoirs, Biography, Philosophy, Literature and literary criticism, Critical theory, 1900-1999, Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia
Vol. 29 No. 12 · 21 June 2007
pages 13-15 | 3125 words
I Contain Multitudes
Terry Eagleton
- BuyMikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World by Graham Pechey
Routledge, 238 pp, £19.99, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 415 42419 6
For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting chief executives, global conventions and its own in-house journal. In the field of cultural theory, this victim of Stalinism is now big business. Most of the mouth-filling terms he coined – dialogism, double-voicedness, chronotope, heteroglossia, multi-accentuality – have passed into the lexicon of contemporary criticism. A cosmopolitan coterie of scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime to his texts, have long since struggled to appropriate him for their own agendas. Is he a Marxist, neo-Kantian, religious humanist, discourse theorist, literary critic, cultural sociologist, ethical thinker, philosophical anthropologist, or all these things together?
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 29 No. 14 · 19 July 2007
From Graham Pechey
It is simply not the case, as Terry Eagleton claims in his review of my book Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World (LRB, 21 June), that I equate the Russian Formalists with their adversaries in the Soviet state. In Chapter 2 I float this idea – of the complicity of artistic and political vanguards – as a possible explanation of Bakhtin’s early critique of the Formalists’ elevation of ‘method’ into ‘truth’, their consecration of literary means as aesthetic ends. That I neither wholly agree with this critique nor regard it as Bakhtin’s only response to the Formalists is clearly indicated by my description of it as ‘precociously magisterial, provocatively monological, without a hint of play’. This criticism is underlined by the rest of the chapter: I charge Bakhtin with conflating two incompatible senses of ‘material’; with being linguistically naive in his equation of language with the inert media of the plastic and visual arts; and with ‘a perilous overreaching of theoretical discourse’.
There is nothing in the book to suggest, as Eagleton does, that I equate the new South Africa with the old apartheid state; indeed, most of it was written before the transition to democracy and has not been revised since. As the first endnote to Chapter 5 makes explicit, the remarks on which Eagleton founds this misconception were written in late 1993, a few months before the first democratic election (in which I voted for the ANC). The reference is not to the situation after the inauguration of the democratic order but to the last phase of the struggle before 1994.
I am not the only victim of Eagleton’s uncaring way with other people’s words: Bakhtin is misrepresented too. One instance must suffice: the monological and the ‘heteroglossic’ (Eagleton means ‘heteroglot’) cannot be counterposed because they are the terms of two quite different oppositions. Not to have understood this is not to have grasped a fundamental point in the book on Dostoevsky: that the linguistic uniformity (or monoglossia) of Dostoevsky’s novels, far from being inimical to dialogism, is actually the condition of their polyphony. A Wuthering Heights in which Nelly’s narrative was rendered in the broad Yorkshire of Joseph would not have given her the semantic parity with her interlocutor Lockwood on which that novel’s polyphony crucially depends.
Graham Pechey
Cambridge
