Abstract
The Bakhtin we know best is something of a lyricophobe and theatrophobe. This is surprising, since he loves the act of looking. His scenarios rely on visualized, collaborative communion. He cares deeply about embodiment. Does he care about the tasks that confront the actor? Not the improvising clown of carnival (carnival is theater only in the broad sense of performance art), but the trained artist who performs a play script on stage? In discussing these questions, this essay draws on two suggestive places in Bakhtin’s writing where he addresses the actor’s art. One is from the mid-1920s; the other (1944), is on Shakespearean tragedy. If Bakhtin has a theatrical imagination, it will be found here. His grasp of an actor “living in” to a role and his comments on the evolution of the European stage cast his better-known ideas of dialogue, comedy, seriousness and the sacred into unexpected perspective.
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Notes
Bakhtin defended his “Rabelais in the History of Realism” as a dissertation at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in 1946, after several fruitless years seeking a publisher for it. The transcript is published in full in Bakhtin (2008, pp. 985–1065). Quote on p. 1063.
For a probing discussion of the advantages of muteness, iconic perception, and forms of intellectual silence within Russia’s non-Classical tradition that encouraged hesychastic practices of prayer over voiced public declamation, see Lock (2001), especially pp. 55–56.
See McCaw (2004). To my knowledge, this is the first full-length study of the topic by a theater professional. Part I, “Bakhtin,” traces early theories of author-hero relations in the context of staged art and how they depart from Stanislavskian method, and then follows the theatrical metaphor as it survives in Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s characters and scenes, the history and theory of the novel, the chronotope, the mask-bearing performative aspects of carnival, and the hermeneutics of speech genres. Part II, “Theatre,” applies Bakhtinian concepts to five schools of actor training: Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Grotowski, Mladen Materic, and Anatolij Vasiljev. The forthcoming book, which omits discussion of the last two directors but engages profoundly with Stanislavskian psychology and practice, is an invaluable guide to the potentials, as well as the limits, of Bakhtin’s stage imagination. See Dick McCaw, Bakhtin and Theatre. Dialogues with Stanislavski, Meyerhold and Grotowski (forthcoming Routledge 2016). For a preview of his comparison of Bakhtin with Stanislavskij on the tasks of the actor, see McCaw (2014).
The central texts are three wartime fragments, none prepared for publication by Bakhtin himself: “Rhetoric, to the extent that it lies” (1943), the paragraph-long “Person at the mirror” (Bakhtin 1943–1944a) and “On questions of self-cognition and self-evaluation” (Bakhtin 1943–1944b). For explication see Nikulin (2011; a reading of “The Person at the Mirror”) and Sandomirskaja (2004; a postmodern treatment of Bakhtin’s dark texts in light of Konstantin Vaginov’s novels of the 1920s).
An exegesis of Bakhtin’s wartime notes, focusing on the role of writing in modernist aesthetics through texts by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky and Osip Mandelstam, has been undertaken by Alexander Spektor (2014–2016).
For this formulation I am grateful to Denis Zhernokleyev, whose generous attention to this essay over several drafts is reflected throughout, but especially in the ontological and religious hypotheses at the end.
For a persuasive study of the logic and ethics of comedy from this perspective by an experienced Bakhtin scholar, see Nikulin (2014), especially ch. 3, “Everyone Joins the Fight: the Dialectic of Comic Action,” and ch. 5, “The Catastrophe of the Good Ending.” Nikulin argues that the usual comedic denouement is unexpected (an overturning or “catastrophe”), other-oriented, democratic, deeply invested in cooperation of an ad hoc and non-ideological sort. But it is neither chaotic nor mindlessly impulsive: comedy is the thinking person’s genre of choice, “a carefully calculated solution to a problem within a complex comic ‘argument’” (p. 93). Like carnival, comedy deals with the vulgar and base. This need not make it happy in any utopian sense—only fertile, communal, and pragmatically committed to optimal well-being in a flawed world. “The goodness of comedy consists, then, in its capacity to overcome suffering and to suggest ways of doing so” (p. 95).
In his early essay responding to the Formalists (1924, first publ. 1975), Bakhtin makes a distinction between architectonic and compositional form: the former bestows value, the latter merely describes the distribution of parts. See Bakhtin (1924, pp. 276–77), in English Bakhtin (1990c, pp. 268–269). Bakhtin notes this distinction as it applies to genres of staged art: “Drama is a compositional form (dialogue, division into acts, etc.), but the tragic and the comic are architectonic forms of completion” (Bakhtin 1924, p. 277, 1990c, p. 269).
The Nevel newspaper “Den’” reported on these dramatic activities. See Clark and Holquist (1984, p. 42).
It appears that Boris Eikhenbaum, by this time a major Tolstoy scholar as well as a discredited Formalist and no stranger to political harassment, courageously offered this commission (Prefaces to the dramas and to the novel Resurrection) to the threatened and ailing Bakhtin. See Bakhtin (1930a, pp. 176–84).
More appears in Bakhtin’s notes to the Tolstoy Prefaces than made it into the published text. See Bakhtin 1930b. “Why Tolstoy arrived at the dramatic form,” Bakhtin jots down in his opening paragraph. “The crisis of the narrating word” (p. 205).
Konkin and Konkina (1993, pp. 268–69). Bakhtin’s review of Hugo’s Marie Tudor in Sovetskaja Mordovija (12 December 1954) is very politically correct: commenting on the gloomy realism of the set, he notes that “prison is not only the Tower… but the Queen’s palace, and the banks of the Thames, and London and the entire life of England during this epoch, with its executions, hangmen, gallows, bonfires, with its monstrous violence and eternal terror” (qtd. p. 269).
See the welcome discussion in Peeren (2008), especially her chapter 3, “The Intersubjective Eye: The Look Versus the Gaze,” (pp. 73–82).
See Laroque and Hall in Knowles, ed., (1998). These essays exhibit the conventional fixation on traditionally tabooed words, body parts, and glee at defecation, gluttony, carefree sloth, etc., that Bakhtin’s Rabelaisian carnival also celebrates. Both underplay the drunkenness, sexual abuse and violence of the “carnival interval.”
For a rich sample of these enactments arranged as an exemplary textbook (with follow-up on each topic arranged as “Talk about,” “Perform,” and “Read”), see Schechner (2006).
In his comparison of Bakhtin and Stanislavsky, Dick McCaw acknowledges several areas of overlap—in their concepts of experience [pereživanie], double life, acting as authorship, the boundary between playing and imagination. But McCaw is brought up short by the fact that Bakhtin always cares most about the “production of meaning” and Stanislavsky, unsurprisingly, about the practicalities of mounting a show. See McCaw (2014, p. 37).
In viewing Bakhtin as a phenomenologist, I follow the lead of Poole (2001). As a problem of apperception and creation, the coexistent duality (or feedback loop) in a single person between inside and outside when the actor creates a role could only have intrigued Bakhtin.
For the foundational texts in the secular-psychological-practical group, see Wilshire (1982), States (1985), Garner (1994), Zarrilli (2004, 2013) and Rayner (2006). Important discussions of theater from the religious realm (in addition to the technical subfield of theo-drama, or theological dramatic theory, founded by Hans Urs Von Balthasar in the 1980s), are Harris (1990; on theater as incarnation), Harris (2003; on Christian aspects of Latin American carnival), and Bouchard (2011; on theater and integrity).
Overall, Bakhtin writes, a character will end up either “author-centric” or “hero-centric.” Author-centric heroes are sharply delineated, easy to recognize, relatively unself-conscious, tied in tightly to ancestors and kinship systems, and behave as their plots tell them to. Hero-centric heroes, in contrast, are innerly, unpredictable, solitary, hard to pin down, rebellious: the Romantic hero. The outwardly molded, author-centric Classical hero dominated ancient epic and Greek tragedy, which is where Bakhtin’s theatrical concepts are grounded and from where they never strayed. For an excellent account of Bakhtin’s early views on character-building based on the “Author and Hero” essay in the context of the classicist Lev Pumpianskij, see Kliger (2011, pp. 78–79).
McCaw (2014) elegantly approaches this question in terms of Bakhtin’s evolving use of the concept of image [obraz], which at this early period signifies a plastic, pictorial representation that is available for another to see and love. This image is spatial and dynamic, in the Aristotelian sense of imitation not only as appearance but as action. The artistic image is “the form in which a character is authored” (p. 30).
Thus distancing becomes “the hinge upon which everything phenomenologically observable swings” (Poole 2001, p. 118). Crucial for Bakhtin was the work of Max Scheler and the Marburg philosopher Nicolai Hartmann on the need to leave and return to the self for any reliable act of cognition. The best discussions of Bakhtin’s “living-into” and its Schelerian implications for ethics and novels remain Wyman (2008) and (2015).
“From within lived experience, life is neither tragic or comic, neither beautiful nor sublime, for the one who objectively experiences it himself and for anyone who purely co-experiences with him. A soul living and experiencing its own life will light up for me with a tragic light or will assume a comical expression or will become beautiful and sublime—only insofar as I step beyond the bounds of that soul, assume a definite position outside it, actively clothe it in externally valid [lit. signifying] bodiliness [aktivno obleku ee vo vnešne značimujiu plot’] (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 145, 1990b, p. 70).
I thank Susanna Weygandt for this cautionary note. In addition to McCaw (2014), who urges us to move beyond cliché in assessing the sophistication and flexibility of Stanislavsky’s method, see also Carnicke (2009, ch. 7), “Stanislavsky’s Lost Term,” and the glossary entries on pp. 213–14. For more on Stanislavsky’s ideas in the other-oriented context of Gustav Shpet, Russia’s accomplished phenomenologist and student of Husserl, see Matern (2013).
Such is the theme of a fine close reading of a tiny Bakhtin text from our second period (1943–1944), “The Man at the Mirror”; see Nikulin (2011).
See Bakhtin (1924, p. 314, 1990c, p. 306). Here Bakhtin provides his own equivalent to phenomenological theories of distancing developed by Russian critics in the 1920s: Viktor Shklovsky’s device of ostranenie or estrangement, and Gustav Shpet’s concept of “detachment” in his “Theater as Art” [Teatr kak iskusstvo]. Shpet argues that actors live in a “detached reality” [dejstvitel’nost’ otrešennaja] of their own, not correlated with pragmatic life or pre-existing literary texts except through freely-chosen personal work (see Shpet 1922).
The Oedipus digression is in turn preceded by a digression on play [igra] (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 150, 1990b, p. 74). Key for him is the difference between a game that is imagined [voobražaetsja] from within, “played at” (say, by unselfconscious children) and thus admitting of no actors, and a performed spectacle, acted because it is “imaged forth” [izobražaetsja]. Only this act of creating an image is genuine authorship, and images are always constructed on the outer boundary. Bakhtin builds on earlier distinctions drawn between “imagining” and “producing an image of” for someone else: to the extent that aesthetic activity must create wholes, co-experiencing is inadequate for art. I might be moved by the sight of a menacing sea, but as an artist “what I must do is paint a picture or produce a poem or compose a myth (even if only in my imagination), where the given phenomenon will become the hero of the event consummated around him. So long as I remain inside the given image or configuration (co-experiencing with it) this is impossible to do” (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 141, 1990b, pp. 66–67, trans. adjusted).
See McCaw (2004) for an exasperated discussion of the Oedipus example: “Bakhtin has failed to mention one significant thing about Oedipus—he isn’t an actual act-performing person but a character in a play!” (p. 37).
“The actor is aesthetically creative only when he is an author,” Bakhtin writes, “—or to be exact: [when he is] a co-author, a stage director, as well as an active spectator of the portrayed hero and of the whole play (after discounting certain mechanical factors, we could even use an ‘equals’ sign here: author = director = spectator = actor)” (Bakhtin 1922–1926, p. 150, 1990b, p. 76). The English text here contains a typographical error: the sequence reads “author = director = actor.” Zritel’ (the spectator) is omitted.
McCaw (2014, pp. 34–37) defends Stanislavsky’s manifestly “Tolstoyan” approach to co-feeling and co-experiencing emotional memory as more likely to train actors for the rigors of sustaining a role over multiple performances, a question that interests Bakhtin not at all.
“At the moment of reincarnation [perevoploščenie], he [the actor] becomes passive material (passive in relation to aesthetic self-activity)—he becomes a life within that artistic whole which, earlier, he had himself created, and which is now being actualized by the spectator. In relation to the aesthetic activity of the spectator, all the life-activity of the actor [as] hero is passive” (Bakhtin 1922–1926, pp. 77–78, 1990b, p. 151).
See Bakhtin (1944b, p. 137). Bakhtin insists on Flaubert’s “extraordinary importance for the fates of realism, its transformation and degeneration… the definitive dying-out of two-bodiedness [dvutelost’] and two-tonedness [dvutonnost’] in the novelistic-prose image” (p. 130). Flaubert—like modern theater—is contributing to the de-carnivalization of the world.
See Ostrovsky (2006) for an overview of the Stalinist Shakespeare industry. Bakhtin’s interest in the Bard might have been triggered by this campaign. In 1970 Bakhtin wrote a very positive reader’s report for his friend Leonid Pinskii’s new book on Shakespeare, Šekspir. Osnovnye načala dramaturgii, noting (in addition to the carnival spirit of the comedies) Pinskii’s understanding of freedom in the tragedies as “personal caprice” serving a “demonic violation of justice” (Bakhtin 1970, p. 445). Pinskii’s volume was published in 1971.
See Commentary to Bakhtin (1944a, pp. 891–92), where Bakhtin, with some help from St. Augustine, intends to chart the following movement, with his peculiar sense of genre as something that has “eyes”: “the external person, as part of the ancestral folk body [rodovoe narodnoe telo] in the external topographical coordinates of the world in Rabelais—the discovery of individual life in the external world in Shakespeare—the discovery and justification of the inner person, of the soul, in the intensive coordinates of the ‘deepest possible innerness’ in the novels of Dostoevsky” (pp. 891-92).
Here is one of several places that Bakhtin resonates with Freud: A man who “patiently waits for the death of his father, is sincerely afraid of it and mourns it, sincerely loves his son and heir (and successor) and sincerely lives for his son: such a man is not fit to be the hero of a tragedy” (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 688, 2014, p. 528).
See Ivanov (1906). This essay, together with “On the Essence of Tragedy” (O suščestve tragedii 1912), traces the modern era’s loss of community to the emergence of the lonely (often criminal) tragic hero out of the ancient Greek chorus. Much in this theory of disintegration recalls Bakhtin’s later commentary, for example: “The chorus, long ago separated from the community, also became dissociated from the hero….The chorus then became utterly unnecessary and even restrictive. Thus arose the ‘theater’ (théatron), i.e. ‘spectacle’ (Schauspiel), only a spectacle. The ‘mask of the actor thickened, so that one could no longer glimpse through it the countenance of the god of orgies, whose hypostasis the tragic hero once was: the ‘mask’ condensed into a ‘character.’… In the age of Shakespeare, everything was calculated to reproduce this ‘character’” (Ivanov 1906, p. 102). In his 1911 lecture “Dostoevsky and the Novel Tragedy,” however, Ivanov anticipates the rebirth of community out of the chaos of Dostoevsky’s novels (where Bakhtin, significantly, does not follow him; see PDP, 10-11). For an intriguing discussion that unfortunately does not incorporate Bakhtin’s comments on Shakespeare, see Kliger (2011). Kliger concludes that “Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky as staging the tragedy of individuation on the level of every utterance” (83).
In their Commentary, the editors distinguish between ancient tragedy and more basic carnivalistic forms: “In the tragedies of Sophocles, death in the form of fate becomes a cosmic force and takes on the features of an individualizing universality, in contrast to mythological consciousness, in which time is experienced as an uninterrupted chain of births and deaths” (Bakhtin 1944a, pp. 888–89). Although the “liberating tones of Saturnalia and carnival” continue to sound even in the darkest tragedies (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 690), sooner or later absolute power will contaminate the public square and strip away the ambivalence of its signs.
See Bakhtin (1944a, p. 689, 2014, p. 528–29). In his discussion of Lear, Bakhtin makes much of the fraud attending “the superficial censorship-bound logic of feeling, thoughts, words” [podverkhnostnaja podcenzurnaja logika čuvstv, myslej, slov] marking the censored, although sincere, love that children bear their father; and it is unclear whether this censorship is meant to be political (imposed by the state) or psychological, as in a Freudian model.
See the editors’ summary of the “seriousification” project from just this “I-Other” perspective: “The line of serious culture, as it is presented in Additions [to Rabelais], from the tragedy of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex) to the tragedies of Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth), and from them to the novels of Dostoevsky (Brothers Karamazov) mark three stages in the becoming [stanovlenie/Werden] of personality in European culture. The path from the general sensation of life [oščuščenie žizni] to the cognizing of one’s own ‘I’ passes, on one hand, through the separation of the material [veščnyj] subject from the material object, that is, through cognition, and on the other hand through an opposition of ‘I’ to ‘other,’ that is, through self-consciousness. In ancient tragedy, what is required for the consciousness of the unity of a man’s personality is the ‘other’; in Shakespeare’s tragedies, individual life is discovered and justified in the external topographical coordinates of the world, and in Dostoevsky’s novels, in the discovery and justification of the inner man” (Bakhtin 1944a, pp. 888–89).
Quotes and conclusions taken from the final typescript draft of McCaw (2016) Bakhtin and Theatre (in press), Chapter 3, “Psycho-physical Acting,” subsection “Conclusion: A Body that Learns.”.
Bakhtin (1944a, p. 684, 2014, p. 526). The larger context of the passage suggests the emergence of disciplined actor out of carnival clown: “To make an image serious means to remove its ambivalence and ambiguousness, its unresolvedness, its readiness to change its meaning, to turn itself inside out, its mystifying carnival essence—it means to stop the turning of cartwheels, its tumbling, to separate front from rear (to stop it at a moment in which the face is up front), to separate praise from invective…”.
In a series of brief paradoxes, Bakhtin addresses death: “The arbitrariness [slučajnost’], the insignificance [ničtožnost’] of annihilation and death;… death is something transitory that essentially says nothing; there are no grounds for viewing it as absolute; viewing it as absolute, we turn non-being into bad being, absence into bad presence [nebytie v durnoe bytie, otsutstvie—v durnoe prisutstvie]… we know [death’s] effect only on the tiniest segment of time and space” (Bakhtin 1944a, p. 684, 2014, p. 525, transl. adjusted). Death in Shakespeare is a “catastrophe of individuality,” experienced either as a “violent or arbitrary change/shift [smena] coming before its proper time,” or as a “doubts about death,” existence understood as “an uninterrupted circle of becomings, becomings without end and consequently without purpose or sense” (889). In this context, Bakhtin notes, Hamlet’s “doubts about death” as a final threshold are shattering: constant change without purpose is no more satisfying than an arbitrary absolute end.
See Steiner (1996, p. 129), opening paragraph: “Absolute tragedy is very rare. It is a piece of dramatic literature (or art or music) founded rigorously on the postulate that human life is a fatality…. Original sin, be it Adamic or Promethean, is not a tragic category. It is charged with possibilities both of motivation and of eventual redemption. In the absolutely tragic, it is the crime of man that he is, that he exists. His naked presence and identity are transgressions”.
See Susanna Weygandt, “Embodiment in Postdramatic, Post-Somatic Russian New Drama and Theater,” Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Princeton University, defended June (2015), Ch. 2, “The paradigmatic shift from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s ‘Language of Gesture’ to Anatoly Vasiliev’s ‘Intonation as Gesture’,” especially subsections “The postdramatic theater of Anatoly Vasiliev” and “Performing a voice zone versus building a character.” Although Vasiliev does not explicitly cite Bakhtin in his interviews, Weygandt’s on-site research has confirmed his deliberate use of Bakhtinian categories.
See Sandler (2015). Sandler does not discuss Kierkegaard’s views on theater (sacred or profane) in connection with the early Bakhtin, but the theme is promising. In the first two stages of Kierkegaard’s life’s way (the aesthetic and the ethical), I can see only what presents itself to the “horizon,” krugozor, of my eyes—which means that I cannot see very much, and nothing in its full context. For that fuller picture, a third perspective, the religious, is required. Here again I am indebted to Denis Zhernokleyev.
Bakhtinian readings in medieval perspective have begun to supplement the secular, formalist cast of the Dostoevsky book. For one such revision of Bakhtin’s polyphony from a musicologist’s perspective, see Maxov (2005, pp. 119–21). Maxov argues that Bakhtin’s novelistic polyphony, with its medieval roots, has been severed by a secular readership from the two other values that Bakhtin ascribes to Dostoevsky’s world: simultaneity [odnovremennost’] and eternity [večnost’]. Both are in some tension with the forward-moving polyphonic line, but essential to it. Sacred polyphony was a musical equivalent to allegory, understood as mystical simultaneity. The horizontal movement of the plot (linear, responsive, contingent, open-ended) is thus but one component of Dostoevskian structure; vertical leaps and re-instantiations of eternal truths are equally necessary. This argument about the real, reminiscent of Erich Auerbach’s in Mimesis, has yet to be integrated into studies of Bakhtinian polyphony.
See Bouchard (2011), especially his “Introduction: Integrity, in personal and theatrical terms” (1–26). Several later chapters and chapter-prefaces can be read with exceptional profit in light of Bakhtin: “Integrity and Embodiment” (171–80), “The Empty Forms of Kenotic Integrity” (241–54), and the three case studies in Part III, “Who Has the Body,” “What Do You See in My Body?,” and “Do We Desire to Escape the Body?” For more explicitly Christian discussions, see Harris (1990) and Johnson and Savidge (2009). “Theo-drama,” revived as a field by Hans Urs von Balthasar in the 1980s, entertains a wide variety of behaviors for the actor.
Contemporary secular Western theorists of acting have come up with analogous frameworks to grasp “the actor’s embodied modes of experience.” See especially Zarrilli (2004, p. 657), his four-columned chart detailing the actor’s four bodies: the first “surface body,” second “recessive body,” third “aesthetic inner-bodymind,” and fourth “outer body,” the role that others watch.
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Emerson, C. Bakhtin and the actor (with constant reference to Shakespeare). Stud East Eur Thought 67, 183–207 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-015-9238-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-015-9238-1