I’ve been a huge fan of Gary Saul Morson for a long time (see my too-brief review of his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time here) and I’ve been interested in Mikhail Bakhtin for even longer, but I’ve found him a hard nut to crack, so I was delighted to find Morson’s NYRB review (June 25, 2026 issue; archived) of Sergeiy Sandler’s new translation of Rabelais and His World. In the best review-essay tradition, it covers much more than the book under review, and I found it eloquent and informative enough to post some passages. It starts off:
Scholars speak of two Mikhail Bakhtins—on the one hand, there is the author of Rabelais and His World (published in 1965, though he began writing it in the 1930s) and, on the other, the author of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art (1929; revised as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963), the essays on the novel in The Dialogic Imagination (1975), and various philosophical works. Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has occupied a perplexing place in his oeuvre because it seems to contradict just about everything else he wrote. Bakhtin’s other works focus on our “unrepeatable” individuality as the source of all morals and values, whereas the Rabelais book makes fun of everything of concern to individuals and celebrates instead the collective. Students of Adam Smith who wonder at the apparent discrepancy between his two masterpieces, The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), often consider the “Adam Smith problem”; in much the same way the Rabelais book poses a “Mikhail Bakhtin problem.”
After some background on Bakhtin, he continues:
Reflecting his neo-Kantian training, Bakhtin’s earliest works focused on the significance of the soul’s embodiment in a particular time and place, as well as the ethical demands on a person in the “unrepeatable” here and now. Concerned with how people try to avoid their obligations, he diagnosed a syndrome common in Russia: pretending that one is simply acting “representatively,” that is, as the agent of some church, institution, or party that is actually responsible for one’s actions. For Bakhtin, such excuses are always false. People must take responsibility for—in Bakhtin’s terms, they must “sign”—their actions. Responsibility can be neither postponed nor passed on to others because what “I” can accomplish now cannot be accomplished by anyone else. All “alibis” for responsibility fail because, in Bakhtin’s famous phrases, “there is no alibi” and people live in a state of “non-alibi.” When Bakhtin turned his attention to Dostoevsky and other realist novelists, he found these ethical tenets implicit in the very shape of their stories.
Since Bakhtin’s two philosophical treatises were the last to be published and translated, critics, especially in the West, have usually failed to appreciate how his literary criticism doubled as philosophical exegesis. Bakhtin was by no means the first Russian critic to mask philosophy as literary analysis. Before the revolution, almost all the greatest Russian thinkers did so, partly because Russians regarded literature as the most important cultural activity and partly because censors might overlook political ideas disguised as merely literary ones. […]
As Caryl Emerson notes in her superb foreword to the present volume, all Bakhtin’s works contribute to a coherent philosophical position, except the Rabelais book. In contrast to the earlier version by Hélène Iswolsky (1968), Sandler’s translation favors literalness—often wisely but sometimes at the expense of clarity. Where Iswolsky refers to the “bodily lower stratum” (for the Russian niz), Sandler renders the Russian opaquely as “the nethers”; and so the title of chapter 6 becomes the puzzling “Images of the Material-Bodily Nethers in Rabelais’s Novel.” The new version contains more than a hundred pages of notes, often on subjects so abstruse that even the most devoted Bakhtin scholar would skip them. Still, Emerson’s engaging foreword effectively orients first-time readers while offering insightful ideas for the specialist. The discrepancy between the Rabelais book and Bakhtin’s other studies has mystified Bakhtin scholars. Some who applaud one Bakhtin find the other unconvincing or even repellent. The new translation, coming some fifty-seven years after the first, offers an occasion for examining whether the discrepancy is as great as it has seemed.
In the Dostoevsky book, the studies of the novel, and the early and late philosophical essays Bakhtin argued for human freedom. People can never be reduced to causal, “historical-genetic” factors. No matter how much we know about a person, he or she retains the capacity to “surprise,” and this “surprisingness” constitutes the essence of humanness. Take that away, and you transform people into material objects.
As Bakhtin presents him, Dostoevsky discovered an entirely new way to foreground “surprisingness” and show people as maximally free. In most great novels, even those that endorse human freedom, readers cannot help seeing characters as constrained by the overall plan, designed by the author in advance. Characters may imagine they act freely, but the reader unavoidably knows that they must do what will create a structurally satisfying work. That is why readers, as they see a novel approaching its ending, can often guess where events are leading. In effect, characters are subject to a form of backward causation, as the predesigned end dictates what they will do to reach it; their actions are, so to speak, not only pushed but also pulled. The very fact that the author knows the character’s future as the character cannot—that the author has what Bakhtin calls an “essential surplus” of meaning—renders freedom and suspense illusory.
Dostoevsky discovered a way around this problem, which Bakhtin regarded as not only formal but also philosophical and theological. To show people as truly free, Dostoevsky surrendered his “essential surplus.” The author no longer exists above the characters but alongside them. He sets up situations that will provoke characters to act and then just sees what they do. There is no overall structure to fulfill, no ending with strong closure toward which events tend. What happens is what happens to happen.
When Dostoevsky submitted the first installment of The Idiot (1868–1869) to the journal in which it was serialized, he had no idea what would happen next. As this compulsive gambler wrote in one letter, “I took a chance, as at roulette. Maybe it will develop as I write it.” As the roulette player cannot predict the outcome of his bets, so Dostoevsky, as he himself emphasized, did not know (even unconsciously) where the work was going. To indicate as much, he made the plot turn on events in the real world that took place between installments—events that couldn’t have been part of an original plan with a foregone conclusion.
Somewhat misleadingly, Bakhtin calls this new technique “polyphony,” not because the work blends many voices—all novels and dramas do that—but because the author’s voice becomes just one among many. Rather than construct a dialogue that he controls from outside, he participates in it, with no guarantee that his point of view will triumph. Often enough, it doesn’t. In The Possessed (1871–1872), for instance, the character closest to Dostoevsky’s own opinions—about Russia’s God-given destiny—eventually recognizes them as simplistic. Since the author becomes one voice among many, the way Copernicus decentered the Earth and made it just one of many planets, Bakhtin credits Dostoevsky with “a small-scale Copernican revolution.”
Works written this way are bound to contain loose ends, and critics have faulted Dostoevsky’s novels—especially The Idiot—for such lapses. But these irregularities are lapses only if one presumes that successful works must have an overall structure and constitute a finished product in which everything fits and nothing is superfluous. To understand Dostoevsky, one must appreciate a fundamentally new poetics—the polyphonic novel’s poetics of process.
In most novels, suspense is illusory, since the author knows, and is presumed to know, what is coming next. The peculiarly intense suspense experienced by Dostoevsky’s readers reflects the fact that the author has no more knowledge of the future than the characters do. The suspense is genuine. That is why events in Dostoevsky’s novels can evoke what Bakhtin calls “eventness.” The Idiot is an extreme case, but all Dostoevsky’s novels are more or less polyphonic in this way (or so Bakhtin, with some exaggeration, maintains). Each novel constitutes a freewheeling, unplanned “great dialogue” that takes place, and is sensed as taking place, “right now…in the real present of the creative process.”
If God made the universe the way Dostoevsky created his novels, then people would be genuinely free. Bakhtin did not seem aware of twentieth-century “process theology,” but he arrived at some similar conclusions. We may recall that Bakhtin had been arrested for participating in a circle studying Russian Orthodoxy. It seems likely that, although unmentionable in the officially atheistic state, theological parallels to his literary ideas were never far from his mind. If so, then Bakhtin’s God deliberately creates people who are capable of surprising him. In such a world divine omniscience allows God to know everything that has happened but not everything that will happen, precisely because contingency and human freedom always allow many possible futures. In the Soviet Union, of course, Bakhtin could not offer theological arguments or speak of the Christian God, so he invokes the Greek pantheon: “Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.” […]
Above all, novels emphasize individuality, the way each personality differs from all that have been or ever will be—a difference Bakhtin calls “unrepeatability.” The personality is also “unfinalizable” in that it can always develop in surprising ways. It is never complete. Novels presuppose that people, unlike objects, cannot be exhaustively understood, and so Bakhtin’s first principle of ethics is: never treat another human being as wholly knowable and predictable, even in principle. The great social scientific systems presume that some set of causes shapes everything we do and think, including our mistaken idea that we choose freely. They contradict the worldview Bakhtin attributes to realist novels, especially Dos[t]oevsky’s, as he writes in the Dostoevsky book:
As long as a person is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered his ultimate word…. A person never coincides with himself…. The genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a person and himself, at his point of departure beyond the limits of all that he is as a material being, a being that can be spied on, defined, predicted apart from its own will, “at second hand.”
When you have applied all possible categories to a person—social class, nationality, historical period, ethnicity, even personality type as shaped by years of experience and patterns of behavior—there is still something left over. It is this “surplus,” as Bakhtin calls it, that makes a person human.
I find all that convincing and moving; it resonates with the outlook on life I myself have developed over the years, and now I will have to reread The Idiot with Bakhtin’s ideas in mind. Morson goes on to focus on the Rabelais book, which is of less interest to me (perhaps unfairly — its ideas about carnival were the first thing of Bakhtin’s Westerners got hold of, and they were talked about so relentlessly that I got sick of them before ever reading him myself), but if you’re interested, by all means click through. (We discussed the “bodily lower stratum” back in 2007: John Emerson’s question, my response. As John says, the English is horrible.)
When you have applied all possible categories to a person—social class, nationality, historical period, ethnicity, even personality type as shaped by years of experience and patterns of behavior—there is still something left over. It is this “surplus,” as Bakhtin calls it, that makes a person human.
The greatest novelists of all can mimic this. There is (for example) an extraordinary scene in Proust where we eavesdrop on the godawful Verdurins plotting – to do a deed of pure altruism, in secret, to benefit the butt of their constant bullying, Saniette.
Yes!
Students of Adam Smith who wonder at the apparent discrepancy between his two masterpieces, The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), often consider the “Adam Smith problem”
I suspect that this reflects the fact that The Wealth of Nations tends to be much more often alluded to (often in support of a wholly amoral determinist view of ideal capitalism, held by the alluders, but not by Smith) than actually read.
Why, the man was practically a communist (in US terms):
Amusing bits on the WP page about how contemporaries contrasted The Wealth of Nations (scholarly, needs sustained intellectual effort to appreciate) with The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (popularising beach reading.)
I am afraid a lot of detective fiction, even very good one, is written with the excess of “surplus”. After all the participants are shown to be suspects and no definite proof is found, the denoument is usually entirely unconvincing and overwrought.
“surprisingness” […] the reader unavoidably knows that they must do what will create a structurally satisfying work […] characters are subject to a form of backward causation, as the predesigned end dictates what they will do to reach it; their actions are, so to speak, not only pushed but also pulled. […] an “essential surplus” of meaning
i really do have to reread the bakhtin i’ve read, and read what i haven’t!
this passage from the review reminded me of delany’s description of what it takes to make a “good character” (which i take to mean: legible as meaningfully a person). i seem to have misremembered it as given b’shem theodore sturgeon, but delany says in On Solids and Surds that he’d worked it out by 1961 (a few years before bakhtin got scholarly attention, per wikipedia), and i found it described (in 1975, when bakhtin died) as a joint notion of chip’s and marilyn hacker’s here:
A good character of either sex must be shown performing purposeful actions (that further the plot), habitual actions (that particularly define her or him), and gratuitous actions (actions that imply a life beyond the limit of
the fiction).
rozele’s last block quote is useful and insightful, but certainly not so oddly counterintuitive that it couldn’t have been written w/o first reading Bakhtin …
o certainly! i quoted it because i like the resonance between the unconnected formulations!
the fact that The Wealth of Nations tends to be much more often alluded to (…) than actually read.
I’m pretty sure ‘The Adam Smith Institute’ believes Smith wrote only one book. (But, yes, even so they’d rather you didn’t read it.)
Reminds me (by knight’s move thinking) of a bit in Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch where the heroine asks an economist whether he is a Keynesian. (No prizes for who the economist turns out to be.)
certainly not so oddly counterintuitive that it couldn’t have been written w/o first reading Bakhtin …
Likewise the idea of the “essential surplus” doesn’t strike me as so oddly counterintuitive that anyone needed to name it. I don’t know the history, though. Surely somewhere there’s a novel about twins who are different people because they’re just different. Maybe I’ve even read it.
The need to specify “of either sex” is slightly counterintuitive. Was it motivated by 1, 2 or 3?
Probably mostly by the fact that male SF writers have often not been great at writing plausible female characters.*
Plenty of honourable exceptions (especially nowadays), but true for all that. Several famous names were really bad at it. Invidious to name names (and frankly, superfluous …)
To be fair, even great authors can struggle with writing characters whose gender or orientation differ from their own. Dickens was really bad at it: his friend Wilkie Collins was much better in this particular respect, though certainly a lesser artist overall.
Even Jane Austen’s male characters always strike me as a bit flat, certainly compared with her female characters.
* Some of them, of course, have not been great at writing male characters either. It doesn’t necessarily make their books bad … it rather depends on what you’re looking to get out of SF. You don’t read Asimov for his piercing insights into human psychology.
@drasvi: o! that’s because the context is a fanzine-printed symposium on gender in science fiction. delany goes on to talk about the common varieties of not-a-full-person character that result when writers only depict women using 2 of the 3 types of action.
the whole issue of Khatru is pretty fascinating – very much of its precise moment, and i think quite important as documentation of that moment. i mean, look at this list of contributors:
WOMEN IN SCIENCE FICTION: a symposium
Susy McKee Charnas : Samuel R. Delany : Virginia Kidd : Ursula K. Le Guin : Vonda N. McIntyre : Raylyn Moore : Joanna Russ : James Tiptree, Jr. : Luise White : Kate Wilhelm : Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
and it’s 1975, so still two years before tiptree was identified as alice sheldon, so he’s there with delany* as a pro-feminist man worth taking seriously!
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* and presumably jeffrey smith, the editor
rozele, thanks!
So for me it is 3 (hints on the larger context I was unaware of) and for others who’re aware of the context it is 1. (treating him as a character:-))
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Kinder, Küche, Aliens.
A hypothetical novel where contacts with extraterrestrials belong to women’s world, men take little interest in them.
It is a bit amusing to see how in philosophy Russian is treated in much the same way as Russians treat (in any context) English in 2020s. Is “unrepeatable” (quotemarks Morson’s) a translation of неповторимый (a common epithet which translates English “unique” but literally means “unrepeatable, unmatched”)?
Also reminds me “inimitable” in Quraanic contexts.
“beach reading” – *imagining a fashionably undressed young lady, topless, on a beach with the 6 volumes of it and nail polish* (But I didn’t read it, and confuse it with Italy and Her Invaders, 8 volumes)
A hypothetical novel where contacts with extraterrestrials belong to women’s world, men take little interest in them.
I want to read that.
As the roulette player cannot predict the outcome of his bets, so Dostoevsky, as he himself emphasized, did not know (even unconsciously) where the work was going.
I don’t know if he wrote about this anywhere, but Omry Ronen objected to Bakhtin’s view of Dostoevskian polyphony insofar as, even if Dostoevsky didn’t know exactly where the novels were going on the event-structural level, he would still use those events to enforce a particular and rigid moral structure on his characters, e.g. using them to punish the bad ones. In other words, whether or not the characters “surprised” him in the moment, the author was always there to impose his “monophony” on them anyway. (Then again, Ronen was very much in the Nabokov tradition of “don’t take Dostoevsky seriously as an artist”.)
I like Dostoevsky more than them, but to be fair I think this is mostly right. And The Possessed/Demons really is the best case for Bakhtin’s approach: that one ends up a bit messier than the other novels (and that’s why it’s his best!)
“rigid moral structure”
Morson’s analogy (God and humans) still works.
“Humans and humans” would work as well: each is a surprised spectator and agent too (with a moral structure etc.) – much in line with the idea of “polyphony” (which I only know from this review: I didn’t read Bakhtin)
Ronen was very much in the Nabokov tradition of “don’t take Dostoevsky seriously as an artist”.
I’m sorry to hear that, and Ronen doesn’t have Nabokov’s excuse (novelists are allowed and maybe required to hate great rivals).
A hypothetical novel where contacts with extraterrestrials belong to women’s world, men take little interest in them.
ruthanna emrys’ A Half-Built Garden approaches that in certain ways! the first contact situation it depicts involves an encounter with people who place child-bearers at the center of communication & negotiations, and emrys explores the implications of that within the very different social structures of several human polities and at least one non-human one (some mapping better than others onto the current dominant human culture’s system of gender). which is a lot of why, according to its acknowledgements, it has been (accurately, i’d say) accused of being a “diaperpunk” story. i like emrys’ writing a lot; this one was interestingly unsatisfying in particular ways*, but i found it good to think with (especially about the flaws in most Fully-Automated Luxury Communism writing).
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* maybe most significantly, a central piece of plot that doesn’t seem like it could work if the central characters had read octavia butler’s Xenogenesis books, which could be perfectly plausible in a medium-near-future post-collapse setting – if a character didn’t quote butler’s Earthseed liturgy at a key moment.
Reminds me of Star Wars: when it came out, no sequels were yet intended. That’s part of why the great reveal in the first sequel works so well.