I Contain Multitudes

Terry Eagleton

Mikhail 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?

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Vol. 29 No. 12 · 21 June 2007 » Terry Eagleton » I Contain Multitudes (print version)
Pages 13-15 | 3125 words

Letters

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