Characters in Bakhtin's Theory

A common focus in many modern theories of literature is a reassessment of the traditional view of the character in a narrative text. The position that this article defends is that a revised conception is necessary for an understanding of the means by which dialogism is said to function in novelistic discourse. Revising the notion does not, however, involve discarding it outright as recent theories of the subject would have us do. Nor can we simply void it of all "psychological" content as suggested by many structuralist proposals. To retain Bakhtin's concept of the notion of character, we must understand the term "psychological" in the context of his early book on Freud. In artificially combining Bakhtin's isolated remarks on the literary character, we arrive at a view which postulates textualized voice-sources in the novel. In such a schema, maximum variability and freedom is afforded to each separate source. Yet we must use the term "separate" with extreme caution, for in Bakhtin's writings all those beings which we might wish to view as separate entities are in fact intricately intertwined and inseparable. Viewing something as absolutely separate implies knowing intimately all of its boundaries and possibilities. This is surely a capacity which Bakhtin would deny us when it comes to human figures in texts. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol9/iss1/5 CHARACTERS IN BAKHTIN'S THEORY ANTHONY WALL Queen's University The present essay explores the nature of characters and narrators in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle.' Our project is a hazardous one because Bakhtin's texts do not provide us with a systematic discussion of this problem. As a consequence, it must be understood that the passages we have selected for discussion are taken out of a variety of contexts in his essays. As well, they come from all of his various intellectual periods. We have tried to systematize the concept of character in a series of texts where no such system exists, and we can only hope that ours is the position that Bakhtin would have espoused. In order to understand his concept of character we must first discard all notions of language as langue and think of it rather as parole, that is, as a pure product of interpersonal contacts. Bakhtin's conception of character is so original that we feel compelled to define it first by saying what it is not, before being able to explain what it is. When we try to make sense of Bakhtin, it is advisable to approach his texts with a particular question in mind and to let them answer. In Bakhtin's eyes, this is the way that Dostoevsky, his favorite author, treated the characters of his novels. Once created, they seemed to speak for themselves. The responses obtained from any interview with Bakhtin's texts contain just as many questions as they do answers. Consulting Bakhtin does not simply consist of looking up "character" or "hero" in an index at the back of his books, for Bakhtin does not provide us with indices. It can never be like feeding a question into a computer, because no separate piece of data in the hypothetical print-out would be a logical extension of the others. Bakhtin-data qualify and/or contradict each other when used to answer a single question or a series of questions.