You’d think I would have learned long ago to associate Northwestern University Press with daring, off-the-beaten-path publications that are often right up my alley, considering that they put out translations of Veltman’s Selected Stories (translated by James J. Gebhard, 1988) and Andrei Bely’s Kotik Letaev (translated by Gerald J. Janecek, 1999; I wrote about the novel here). Not for them the umpteenth version of Anna Karenina or yet another Reader’s Companion to Dostoevsky! As I wrote last year, they are publishing Stephen Bruce’s translation of Veltman’s Странник, The Wanderer (scheduled for November), and to thank me for my assistance with the translation (not to mention having inspired it in the first place), they are sending me not only a copy of it but a number of other books from their imprint, several of which have already arrived (thanks, Charlotte!). I have just finished the first of these, Benjamin Paloff’s brand-new Bakhtin’s Adventure: An Essay on Life without Meaning, and I’m here to tell you about it.
I have long had an interest in Bakhtin, and back in 2018 I worked my way through Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson; I learned a lot from it, but it’s so fat and comprehensive that I wound up skimming a fair amount and forgetting much of what I learned. Paloff’s book is very short (93 pages of text and 27 pages of endnotes) and focused on a single aspect of Bakhtin’s thought, his concept of “adventure” as it applies to both life and literature. Paloff’s basic point is that Bakhtin is not primarily a literary critic or philologist, as we tend to think of him (because of his famous works on Dostoevsky and Rabelais) — he is obsessed with the question of how to lead an ethical life, which for him means treating other people as having the same freedom we feel ourselves to have, and his basic insight is that we can and do treat people much as we treat characters in novels, constructing a whole (inevitably incomplete and misunderstood) from whatever random selection of qualities have become apparent to us (or have been provided by the author). As Paloff puts it: “Following Bakhtin, I refer to stories that preserve the hero’s freedom not to mean anything as ‘adventure,’ and I regard this adventure not only as the essential intersection of Bakhtin’s early reflections on language and literature and his later writings on behavior, but more fundamentally as the precondition for imagining the lives of others ethically.” He goes into this from various angles and usefully brings in analogies from movies like The Matrix, Pulp Fiction, and The Big Lebowski (as a result of which I rewatched the first two for the first time since the ’90s and saw the last for the first time ever, so that I finally have a context for all the memes). There’s fascinating stuff on Bakhtin’s relationship with Lukács (he was so “electrified” by The Theory of the Novel that he wanted to translate it, but Lukács refused permission, telling him sternly that he no longer liked the book) and many other topics; if you have any interest in Bakhtin, I heartily recommend this book, which not only has plenty of helpful illustrations but, amazingly, no typos that I noticed, not even in the many quotes in the original. Well done, NUP!
Placed here just because of the musing about the personalities or priorities of university presses: I just chanced to learn that the fellow who taught the class on philosophy of language I took as an undergraduate (eligible for credit toward the linguistics major …) had died a few days ago because of a memorial notice posted on social media by … his publisher Harvard University Press, where you could click through to a memorial page on their site which conveniently allows you, if you scroll down, to click through and purchase copies of the decedent’s books and provide revenue to the publisher. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/jonathan-lear As his career progressed, he became more high-profile than a lot of philosophy-department academics and indeed wrote various books that reached a larger audience. But they didn’t have much to do with philosophy of language, I don’t think.
I’m pretty sure in hindsight that he taught that class that year because the department needed someone to cover it and no one who wasn’t on sabbatical was really an ideal fit and he got volunteered. He sort of felt like he was not as a general matter completely on board with the Usual Suspect Analytical Dudes who dominated the syllabus, but also had no well-developed alternative approach of his own to offer because it wasn’t really the focus of his own work. That said, he did a workmanlike job of teaching the rudiments of the USAD approach. Věčná památka, as they might have said in the Prague Circle, which was definitely unrepresented in that syllabus.
the book sounds fantastic!
i’ll be excited to read it and see what it does when bumped against le guin’s “carrier bag theory”, which is also so much about the freedom to not mean anything.
Please report back if/when you do read it!
You went on and achieved!
Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
Re-watching the Matrix is a high price to pay even for understanding an interesting book.
The Matrix is survivable. Not the sequels though.
Yeah, that was the one that suffered most from my rewatch. I never thought it was a great movie, but it was pretty mind-blowing back in the day, and now… well, it has some impressive action sequences, but basically all the air starts going out of it about halfway through. I have zero desire to watch any of the sequels.
all the air starts going out of it about halfway through
That was precisely my own feeling. Once it turns into a simple Action Movie it’s just meh. “Bullet time”? So what?
I did see the first sequel, in the captive environment of a sea voyage with a teenage son. So bad that I have never had the least desire to see the third movie.
The concept behind it is only enough to make half a movie out of.