Anshen on Bakhtin: serious laughter

Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

Chapter Two: Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO CATEGORISING MARXIST LITERARY THEORY

Anshen continues discussing some of the categories of critics Eagleton and Milne introduce in their anthology Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996).

Here he touches upon Bakhtin:

     Another great work of 'anthropological' Marxism that illuminates Eagleton's concept is Mikhail Bakhtin's study Rabelais and His World (1965). In this work Bakhtin, whom we encountered earlier in relation to Dostoevsky, provides an impressive analysis of the Renaissance and the function and role of laughter, carnival, the grotesque and the 'lower body'. Bakhtin argues that in the repressive climate of the feudal period 'Medieval laughter is directed at the same object as Medieval seriousness'. He goes on to argue that 'One might say that it [laughter] builds its own world versus the official world, its own church versus the official church, its own state versus the official state' (88).

....Bakhtin points out that the laughter had an 'indissoluble and essential relation to freedom' and that it particularly developed during the 'feast' and periods of carnival. 'The comic rituals of the feasts of fools, the feast of the ass, and the various comic processions and ceremonies of other feasts enjoyed a certain legality' although 'the legalization was forced, incomplete, led to struggles and new prohibitions' that in turn led to a situation where 'the Church and state were obliged to make concessions'.

....This spirit of rebellion against authority, religious dictates, dismissal of the body, and denigration of the popular masses, were captured in the novels of Rabelais, according to Bakhtin. Such a spirit, however, does not only exist in Rabelais. Bakhtin could have expanded his analysis

and considered Boccaccio's Decameron or even Chaucer to find similar processes. Indeed, the Marxist-influenced critic and anthropologist Georges Batailles writes about similar carnivalesque or Dionysian ceremonies elsewhere, stressing their link with death more than rebellion but observing similar phenomena as an almost universal process.

....multiple voices compete, which makes discourse into something between a symbolic form of class struggle and literally the voices and elements of rival ideologies clashing.

....When we combine this analysis with Bakhtin's treatment of medieval laughter, we get a class struggle of the body, the parody, the dirty joke and flatulence. The only danger with this kind of analysis is that if the class struggle is everywhere, critics might argue, it effectively is nowhere.

....there have been centuries of avant-garde provocations, whether Dadaist or more political, like the Surrealists or the later French group, the Situationists, that have disrupted cultural/political events in the name of rebellion, living 'authentic lives' or forming alternative lifestyles. At times this leads to various utopian communes and collectives setting up to withdraw from capitalist society, usually for short periods of time, and these gestures seem easily absorbed by mainstream culture and even become commodified.

....Slavoj Žižek has often ridiculed such pretensions, claiming that the surplus we get when buying these products, the 'moral' surplus of contemporary 'responsible' capitalism, already gets figured into the price, and in the case of 'healthy' alternatives such as caffeine-free coffee, actually just diminishes pleasure. So from the vantage point of the present, ideas of cultural resistance to capitalism from within capitalism seem doomed to failure except as minor gestures more designed to assuage guilt more than to change anything (The Pervert's Guide to Ideology).

....Bakhtin's attention to the subversive qualities of laughter, satire, popular theatre and Dionysian revelries in the medieval period play a different function than the prevalence of pseudo-cultural rebellion offered for sale in our contemporary state of capitalism as a world system.

....these gestures meant something specific. The ruling class attempted complete control, not only over society but also over the souls of the common people. The rulers functioned as both the state and the dominant 'ideological apparatus' (to borrow the term from Louis Althusser). The tone they attempted to impose on daily life saturated daily life with the strains of sombre, bitter, 'nasty, short and brutish' (to paraphrase Hobbes) existence that, not surprisingly, required some cathartic relief....

     What we get from Bakhtin's analysis is....  that no matter how oppressive, bleak and fearful existence was, the oppressed masses found methods of expressing their discontent and hostility to a social order that tried to control not just their lives but impose itself on their dreams, in the form of nightmarish visions of hell, demons, monsters and worse lives to come in an afterlife dominated by fear, should they (the masses) act in ways that the authorities disapproved of and tried to suppress. Rather than submit to fear and a lifetime of misery, the popular masses found any excuse to poke fun at the authorities, challenge the official dogma, and assert that the lower body, meaning both the organs of reproduction and excretion, and the lower classes in the social body of society, had their say.

....What is important in Bakhtin's analysis, which, not coincidentally, developed in the darkest nights of Stalinist Russia, when Zhdanovism and 'socialist realism' maintained a puritanical attitude to sexuality as well as non-proscribed politics, remains the demonstration that the human spirit of rebellion was not squashed.

....no matter how authoritarian the conditions, something rebellious broke out, sporadically but reliably, to assert fundamental unhappiness with a social order that basically forbade happiness. Rather than looking to the past and seeing an unending succession of oppressive conditions, Bakhtin finds those moments, again probably somewhat fleeting, where rebellion and resistance, while hidden, eventually come to the surface of society.

Jay

4 November 2021

Anshen on defamiliarization, Shklovsky and Bakhtin

Reading notes on: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theory by David Anshen (2017)

Chapter Two 

Major Marxists' Approaches to Literature and Culture

THE EFFORT TO DEVELOP A MARXIST THEORY OF ART

Initiating a discussion of formalism, Anshen looks at Cleanth Brooks' defense of New Criticism.

....So, according to this view, attempts to situate the artistic politically or historically are not necessarily wrong, but they are not the job of literary critics.

....one might note that they find a unique function for themselves in the academic division of labour.

....it remains questionable whether analysis ever escapes political and social concerns; to avoid even explicit politics only happens in certain political situations and what constitutes politics derives from historically determined conceptions of the political.

Anshen then expands focus from formalism to discuss criticism that combines formalism and concerns of perennial interest to Marxists.

....to give the New Critics their due, they raised the rigorous question of what makes things 'literary' or 'poetic', and many Marxists have adopted this concern. This was a creative process which began in the early twentieth century, in the period surrounding the Russian socialist revolution, when critics known as the Russian Formalists developed ideas in conflict with, and in relationship to, Marxism. Interesting discussions and debates broke out about what comprises 'poetic' or 'aesthetic' language in contrast to everyday speech. Marxists threw themselves into these debates and much from this period remains interesting and relevant. For example, one of the most significant Formalist theorists, Victor Shklovsky, in his essay 'Art as Technique' (1917), argues that things and social relations appear normal due to their everyday familiarity, becoming 'habitual' and 'automatic' (778) in perception. Artistic phenomena 'defamiliarised' these everyday objects, thereby also negating automatic responses to the world around us.

....For Shklovsky, art challenges the standard experiences of the world, disrupting conventional impressions through the aesthetic or artistic experience. Interestingly, Shklovsky stressed the purely aesthetic nature of his concerns, yet many of his examples borrow from literature depicting directly political questions. It almost seems that when Shklovsky strives to determine the precise nature of pure aesthetic criteria, the political world sneaks in. For example, he illustrates the aesthetic power of defamiliarisation through a short story by Tolstoy, told from the point of view of a horse. The horse, in Tolstoy's story, observes a servant receiving a beating by his master and cannot understand how this happens. The horse also cannot understand his own status as property and ponders, 'But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called me "man's property"....

....Shklovsky's concern with what techniques make language artistic or poetic leads to the conclusion that the artistic can be defined as the presentation of the normal in a new way that 'makes [it] strange'. Art thereby transforms our perceptions of the world by its very nature as art.

....Shklovsky's contemporaries such as Mikhail Bakhtin merge aspects of Russian Formalism with Marxism to produce very interesting results. Bakhtin argues in his study Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1972) that Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels display polyphonic features (a formal innovation), which means they contain no singular viewpoint on the world, and certainly not one related to Dostoevsky's poetics, which were conservative if not reactionary. Despite Dostoevsky's personal views, Bakhtin notes: '[…] Dostoevsky found and was capable of perceiving multi-leveledness and contradictoriness not in the spirit, but in the objective social world. In this social world, […] opposing camps, and the contradictory relationships among them were not the rising or descending course of an individual personality, but the condition of society' (27).

....Bakhtin, like the Formalists, starts with the artistic structure of texts in their formal specificity before moving to content or sociological analysis. Bakhtin notices how formal devices in Dostoevsky unpack a critique of society, despite Dostoevsky's personal convictions.

....Bakhtin does not feel compelled to separate literature from social life, but rather builds from the narrative features of Dostoevsky's novels to explain how real-world historical, social and political struggles find themselves embedded in aesthetic features. Dostoevsky's works remain dialogic or structured along dialogues that form the conflicts the novels play out. Such conflicts get verbally fought out, offering contrary ideological positions ultimately reducible to different class reactions within a distinct historical period and its changing values. Bakhtin doesn't begin with the political, ideological views of the author, but rather moves from the text, beyond and against the author to what presents itself as the underlying 'polyphonic' or multiple voices within the text. These opposing viewpoints given voice in the novel are articulations of differing class viewpoints. In this way, the political and the formal complement each other.

....Despite Dostoevsky's intentions, the different ideas receive fair treatment. As Bakhtin explains, 'Dostoevsky […] creates not voiceless slaves [….] but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even rebelling against him' (6) [italics in original]. Characters fight out their views and no narrative perspective firmly dictates the readers' judgment. The result is that a war of ideas is presented through the novel, though the genre has been taken, traditionally, as imposing a viewpoint on the ideal reader. This illustrates that the naïve view of Marxist approaches to reading, which assumes the Marxist critics should reproduce the world view and social milieu of the writer to explain the text, misses some of the complex interplay between author, text and reader that sophisticated Marxism considers and allows.

....Shklovsky's concept of 'defamiliarisation' remains very close to the aesthetic theory and practice of one of the most significant and influential Marxist aesthetic theorists and practitioners who was discussed in Chapter 1, Bertolt Brecht....

Jay

2 November 2021