Perceptions on a Variety of Subjects

A literary critic wanting “the truth”? What does literature have to do with such “ideology”? It becomes merely its style and adjunct to that which is its only reason to be in the first place. Rather, one might describe this as either defining “style” in philosophy as one of its fundamental techniques of presentation and approach, or the raising of “genre” from mere literary category to a logically valid mode of investigation through intuition and understanding based, exactly as it is in Kant’s CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, upon the fundamental category of imagination. It acknowledges passion as the ground of morality and action as in the CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON and even intuition and reason as Martin Heidegger so definitively defined it in KANT AND THE PROBLEM OF METAPHYSICS. It becomes a matter of aesthetics, retaining that word’s root meaning as “sensation,” and the acknowledgment of a desire for purpose and design that is in the teleology that Kant describes in the CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT. Philosophy is the goal of literature. Philosophy as how to live is the only goal of literature, especially if it is ‘just’ to – laugh!

3. The first characteristic of all gendres of the serio-comical is their new relationship to reality: their subject, or – what is more important – their starting point for understanding, evaluating and shaping reality, is in the living present, often even the very day. For the first time in ancient literature the subject of serious (to be sure, at the same time comical) representation is presented without any epic or tragic distance, presented not in the absolute past of myth and legend but on the plane of the present day, in a zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries. In these gendres, the heroes of myth and the historical figure of the past are deliberately and emphatically contemporized; they act and speak in a zone of familiar contact with the open ended present. In the realm of the serio-comical, consequently, a radical change takes place in that time-and-value zone where the artistic image is constructed. (Ibid., pg. 108)

In RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD, Bakhtin talks about the “laughing principle” (“The ever-growing, inexhaustible, ever-laughing principle which uncrowns and renews is combined with its opposite: the petty, inert ‘material principle’ of class society.” trans. Iswolsky, M. I. T. Press, 1968, pg. 24) and:

Let us stress the special philosophical and utopian character of festive laughter and its orientation toward the highest spheres. The most ancient rituals of mocking at the deity have here survived, acquiring a new essential meaning. All that was purely cultic and limited has faded away, but the all-human, universal, and utopian element has been retained. RABELAIS, pg. 12

To put the extremity of Bakhtin’s statements about “reality” and now the relativization of “time-and-value” where “the artistic image” becomes a, or the, crucial element, let us quote from the first volume of Heidegger’s NIETZSCHE:

4. Demonstration of will to power as the basic character of beings is suppose to expunge the lies in our experience of beings and in our interpretation of them. But not only that. It is also supposed to ground the principle, and establish the ground, from which the valuation is to spring and in which it must remain rooted. For “will to power” is already in itself an estimating and valuing. If beings are grasped as will to power, the “should” which is supposed to hang suspended over them, against which they might be measured, becomes superfluous. If life itself is will to power, it is itself the ground, principium, of valuation. Then a “should” does not determine Being; Being determines a “should.” “When we talk of values we are speaking under the inspiration or optics of life: life itself compels us to set up values; life itself values through us whenever we posit values. . . .” (Nietzsche, VIII, 89), THE WILL TO POWER AS ART, trans. Krell, Harper-Collins, 1991, pg. 32

And –

4a. What is decisive is not production in the sense of manufacturing but taking up and transforming, making something other than . . . , other in an essential way. For that reason the need to destroy belongs essentially to creation. In destruction, the contrary, the ugly, and the evil are posited; they are of necessity proper to creation, i. e., will to power, and thus to Being itself. To the essence of Being nullity belongs, not as sheer vacuous nothingness, but as the empowering “no.” (Ibid., pg. 61)

This relates to Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism” in RABELAIS –

4b. The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity . . . All the . . . forms of grotesque realism degrade, bring down to earth, turn their subject into flesh . . . Laughter degrades and materializes . . . Degradation means here coming down to earth,, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better . . . Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down into the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving . . . Bodies could not be considered for themselves; they represented a material bodily whole and therefore transgressed the limits of their isolation. The private and the universal were still blended in a contradictory unity . . . The grotesque image refers to a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one determining trait of the grotesque image. The other indispensable trait is ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis. ¶ The relation to time, its perception and experience, which is at the basis of these forms was bound to change during their development over thousands of years. At the early stage of the archaic grotesque, time is given as two parallel (actually simultaneous phases of development, the initial and the terminal, winter and spring, death and birth . . . ¶ . . . In the famous Kerch terracotta collection we find figurines of senile pregnant hags. Moreover, the old hags are laughing. This is typical and very strongly expressed grotesque. It is ambivalent. It is pregnant death, a death that gives birth. There is nothing completed, nothing calm and stable in the bodies of these old hags. They combine a senile, decaying and deformed flesh with the flesh of new life, conceived but as yet unformed. Life is shown in its two-fold contradictory process; it is the epitome of incompleteness. And such is precisely the grotesque concept of the body ¶ . . . It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world . . . The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation. This is the ever unfinished, ever creating body, the link in the chain of genetic development, or more correctly speaking, two links shown at the point where they enter into each other . . . ¶ . . . It is the dying and yet unfinished body that stands on the threshold of the grave and the crib.

(pp. 19-26)

And --

This echoes Bakhtin’s “the living present,” “in a zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries,” “a zone of familiar contact with the open ended present,” innocuous enough phrases standing by themselves, but if they must justify themselves in using such big words – “big” in the sense of encompassing all “life” and “reality” in its present and personal (your) act of existence, they either must be a) empty bombast, or b) truly philosophical statements defining a fundamental way of acting toward and in the world. So either we are involved with ‘literary criticism’ as an overly self-important bombastic silliness or we are concerned with how we should live or even if should has rational meaning. Bakhtin has struck above straight to the real point in 3., “the subject of serious (to be sure, at the same time comical) representation.” It is seriousness itself that is brought into question, not any ‘type’ or style or specific verbal representation. It is not a linguistic analysis but an analysis of “experience”:

5. The second characteristic is inseparably bound up with the first: the gendres of the serio-comical do not merely rely on legend and do not sanctify themselves through it, they consciously rely on experience (to be sure, as yet insufficiently mature) and on free invention; their relationship to legend is in most cases deeply critical, and at times resembles a cynical exposé. Here, consequently, there appears for the first time an image almost completely liberated from legend, one that relies instead on experience and free invention. This is a complete revolution in the history of the literary image. (PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS, pg. 108)

Thus, paradoxically, the serio-comical becomes, in a sense, more serious than the great tragedians and epic writers. This is specifically and precisely reflected by Heidegger’s discussion of the reappropriation of tradition, the retrieval of history, as truly “mine”:

6. Retrieve is the explicit handing-down, that is, going back to the possibilities of the Da-sein that has been there. The authentic retrieve of a possibility of existence that has been – the possibility that Da-sein may choose its heroes – is existentially* grounded in anticipatory resoluteness; for in resoluteness the choice is first chosen that makes one free for the struggle to come, and the loyalty to what can* be retrieved. The handing down of a possibility that has been in retrieving it, however, does not disclose the Da-sein that has been there in order to actualize it again. The retrieve of what is possible* neither brings back “what is past,” nor does it bind the “present” back to what is “outdated.” Arising from a resolute self-projection, retrieve is not convinced by “something past,” in just letting it come back as what was once real. Rather retrieve responds to the possibility of existence that has-been-there. But responding to the possibility in a resolution is at the same time, as in the Moment [Augenblick, see Macquarrie & Robinson, B&T, 376/SuZ 328, footnote 2], the disavowal of what is working itself out today as the “past.” Retrieve neither abandons itself to the past, nor does it aim at progress. In the Moment, authentic existence is indifferent to both of these alternatives. (BEING AND TIME, Stambaugh 352-353/M&R 437-438/SuZ 385-386)

This ‘indifference’ of ‘authentic’ Dasein in Heidegger is, in its own way, far more extreme than Bakhtin’s “relationship to legend [that] is in most cases deeply critical, and at times resembles a cynical exposé.” But Bakhtin did not have the latitude of philosophical expression that Heidegger had. Bakhtin had to have had a deep understanding of Nietzsche, intensely popular in Russia in the first thirty years of the twentieth century, and though it is improbable but not impossible he knew about Heidegger (via Lukacs in some fashion?), as he said of Dostoyevsky and menippean satire, “Speaking somewhat paradoxically, one could say that it was not Dostoyevsky’s subjective memory, but the objective memory of the very genre in which he worked . . .,” the phenomenological observation of existence itself as one’s ownmost, as the most present, as experience as far as possible non-discursive, beyond words, existential and ontological (the asterisked words in the B&T are technical and literal terms):

7. Carnival itself (we repeat: in the sense of a sum total of all diverse festivities of the carnival type) is not, of course, a literary phenomenon. It is a syncretic pageantry of a ritualistic sort . . . Carnival has worked out an entire language of symbolic concretely sensuous forms – from large and complex mass actions to individual carnivalistic gestures . . . This language cannot be translated in any full or adequate way into a verbal language, and much less into a language of abstract concepts, but it is amenable to a certain transposition into a language of artistic images that has something in common with its concretely sensuous nature; that is, it can be transposed into the language of literature. We are calling this transposition of carnival into the language of literature the carnivalization of literature . . . ¶ . . . Carnival is not contemplated and, strictly speaking, not even performed; its participants live in it, by live by its laws as long as those laws are in effect; that is, they live a carnivalistic life. Because carnivalistic life is drawn out of its usual rut, it is to some extent “life turned inside out,” “the reverse side of the world” (“monde à l’envers”). ¶ The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is non-carnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first of all is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it – that is, everything resulting from socio-hierarchical inequality or any other form of inequality among people

(including age). All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people. ¶ . . . Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid . . . ¶ . . . These carnivalistic categories are not abstract thoughts about equality and freedom, the interrelatedness of all things or the unity of opposites. No, these are concretely sensuous ritual-pageant “thoughts” experienced and played out in the form of life itself, “thoughts” that have coalesced and survived for thousands of years among the broadest masses of European mankind. This is why they were able to exercise such an immense formal, genre-shaping influence on literature. (PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S POETICS, pg. 122-123)