Menteur 2019

[Eliz Mettert]

Thepublication of Bakhtine dmasqu, written by Jean-Paul Bronckart and Cristian Bota1 1 This review was first published in French in 2012 in the journal Semen n. 33, pages 209-217, , brings to mind the various recent exegeses by French-speaking academics of the works of the "Bakhtin Circle," especially the new translation of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language by Patrick Sriot published in 2010. These two independent works, nevertheless, have different objectives: Whereas Sriot's preface dealt with the historical and epistemological recontextualisation of Valentin Voloinov's work, the main thrust of Bota and Bronckart's book is to restore the truth regarding the authorship of Mikhail Bakhtin's "disputed texts." Three texts published in the USSR at the end of the 1920s namely Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and Freudianism, A Marxist Critique published under Voloinov's name, and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, published under Pavel Medvedev's name were, from the 1970s onwards, attributed to Bakhtin in many of their editions and translations. This was the consequence of Russian linguist Vjačeslav Ivanov's statement that these texts had obviously been written by Bakhtin (IVANOV [1973] 1975; KULL & VELMEZOVA, 2011). This unsubstantiated claim was rapidly accepted and relayed, notably in their translations into French, leading to readings and interpretations of these works as a single unified corpus produced by one and the same author. As a result, their scientific appropriation established theoretical connexions, which went largely unquestioned, between autonomous texts. Bronckart and Bota claim that these texts were in fact written by their respective signatories, Voloinov and Medvedev, claim which is now shared by a number of researchers. Their book, however, offers to push the "unmasking" of Bakhtin even further with what is this time an original thesis: The famous Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics2 2 Henceforth Dostoevsky , first published in 1929 under Bakhtin's name, and whose authorship had never been called into question up till now, would in fact be a patchwork of different texts written not only by Bakhtin but also by Voloinov.

Bronckart and Bota's book is divided into two parts: The first is concerned with the successive receptions of Bakhtin, Voloinov and Medvedev in the Western world (mainly English and French-speaking), by comparing the different reactions which preceded and followed the announcement of Bakhtin's all-encompassing authorship, and by pointing out their contradictions and inconsistencies. This panorama is supplemented by a study of Bakhtin's own declarations late in his life. In the second part, Bronckart and Bota return to Bakhtin, Voloinov and Medvedev's major texts and, through a comparative textual analysis, attempt to bring out the deep formal, methodological and theoretical differences that distinguish these authors from one another. They then use this as evidence in support of the idea that Dostoevsky was written by two different authors. If it is impossible to account in full for the wealth of information contained in this weighty book (600 pages), I will now draw up a necessarily incomplete review of the major ideas it contains.

The first part of this book, thus, focuses on the case of the "disputed texts," that is, how the three texts considered here were attributed to Bakhtin and how this claim was then, in most cases, accepted, repeated, and backed up by Western researchers. Bronckart and Bota operate using complex chronological loops, comparing the ways in which these texts were received both after and before the case broke out in the 1970s, and comparing the biographies of Bakhtin which were written in the 1980s with factual data available in later sources. These multiple perspectives reveal the many contradictory arguments that were put forward to prove the coherence and the importance of a body of work supposedly written by a single author.

French-speaking readers will thus find in this book an account of how the texts of the "Circle" were received in France after Marina Yaguello's translation of Marxism and the Philosophy of Language was published under Bakhtin's name in 1977, with a preface by Roman Jakobson. Bronckart and Bota focus in particular on Tzvetan Todorov's Dialogical Principle published in 1981, which greatly helped popularise the works of Voloinov and Bakhtin in France, while at the same time turning into fact Bakhtin's authorship of all three texts: These are presented as a single corpus, thanks in part to the organisation of Todorov's book into thematic chapters in which excerpts from texts signed by different authors are grouped together.

Careful attention is also paid to the work of American slavists Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, whose Mikhail Bakhtin, published in 1984, represents the "hagiographic apex"3 3 "l'acm hagiographie" (p. 133). All quotes have been translated from French by the translator of this review of Bakhtinian studies. The glorification of Bakhtin's work is paralleled by the denigration of Voloinov and Medvedev, dismissed as a mediocre thinker for the former and a cynical careerist for the latter. If this hagiography had a long-lasting influence over the field of literary studies, it was nevertheless followed by several more sceptical texts that denounced the development of the Bakhtin Industry, such as the important counter-biography of Gary S. Morson and Caryl Emerson (1990). Bronckart and Bota underline the importance of this latter work that points out the inconsistencies behind the idea of Bakhtin's all-encompassing authorship. However, at the same time, they expose the ideological stance of its American authors, which certainly played a role in their desire to distinguish between the works of Voloinov (which were more Marxist at first glance) and those of Bakhtin.

Finally, Bronckart and Bota examine some of Bakhtin's last declarations before his death in 1975, which were published by his publishers and advocates at the beginning of the 1990s. Far from providing us with new data that could help determine the authorship of the disputed texts, these interviews and second-hand remarks instead add to the numerous contradictions that pepper Bakhtin's successive accounts of the conditions in which these texts were written at the end of the 1920s. Furthermore, they do not reveal any new information regarding the existence of the alleged intellectual circle subsequently christened the "Bakhtin Circle" and only confirm Bakhtin's fluctuating vision of his own personal history, of which he gave varying accounts throughout his life.

In this first part of their book, Bronckart and Bota, thus, draw up a panorama of the factual inconsistencies and contradictory justifications that were, since 1975, supposed to back the idea of Bakhtin's all-encompassing authorship. The fact that Bakhtin refused all along to sign a document officially recognising his authorship of these works, the lack of direct accounts regarding the writing of the disputed texts other than Bakhtin's and his wife's, and the biographical inconsistencies (such as Bakhtin's alleged productivity he would have written four books and nine articles between 1926 and 1929, thus displaying a rhythm of writing which he never matched either before or after this period) are thus all factual arguments which tend to disprove the idea of his all-encompassing authorship. Bronckart and Bota also underline the lack of data in support of the existence of the said "Bakhtin Circle" or of the influence which the supposed master Bakhtin would have had over his disciples: If several Soviet thinkers, including Bakhtin, Voloinov, and Medvedev but also Matvej Kagan or Lev Pumpjanskij did regularly meet and work together during the 1920s, it appears first of all that they each were active in several different groups and not in a single circle, and secondly that none of these circles was under the patronage, whether material or intellectual, of Bakhtin.

The idea of Bakhtin's sole authorship is further discredited by the accumulation of contradictory explanations which were called upon to justify it: The publishing of these texts under the names of Voloinov and Medvedev was in turn analysed either as a "gift" from Bakhtin to his friends, or on the contrary, as a strategy set up by a destitute Bakhtin to be able to publish his works and thus receive his royalties, argument which is itself contradicted by the publication in 1929, that very same year, of Dostoevsky under his own name. Bronckart and Bota also reveal the strange system of argumentation, which they call "specular hermeneutics"4 4 "hermneutique spculaire". , that Bakhtin's Western exegetes used to support the idea of his all-encompassing authorship: This hermeneutic approach entails justifying the substitution of authors using concepts taken from Bakhtin's own texts as if the story of his publications served as an embodiment of the content of "his" work. Thus, Bakhtin would have published texts under the names of Voloinov or Medvedev because of his taste for masks, because of the carnivalesque atmosphere that suffused his circle or because his work was addressed to its authors in a case of dialogic interaction... When assembled and confronted to each other, as Bronckart and Bota have done, these multiple and contradictory justifications only illustrate the fragility of the statement according to which Bakhtin is the author of these disputed texts.

The second part of Bronckart and Bota's book is a detailed analysis of respectively Bakhtin, Voloinov and Medvedev's texts. Each text is examined in a linear fashion "as a whole and in its general coherence"5 5 "dans leur globalit et dans leur cohrence gnrale" (p. 336). . Far from the patchwork of excerpts that Todorov assembled, here is a study of the "Bakhtinian corpus" in its entirety so as to trace its theoretical and stylistic outline.

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