Polyphonic humanity

Bakhtin ( Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Theory & History of Literature) ) famously characterized Dostoevsky’s fiction as “polyphonic.”  His novels were characterized by multiple voices that were never merged into the author’s single voice.  As Bakhtin wrote, “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.  What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event.

One of the more dramatic ways this appears is in Dostoevsky’s use of characters.  Bakhtin comments repeatedly on the “independence” of the characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, and notes that the characters are often self-contradictory, “internally” polyphonic, as it were.  But in depicting the complexities of his characters, Dostoevsky was not dissolving his characters to nothing but revealing their basic humanity, which is to say, their freedom.

For Dostoevsky, the hero is not “some manifestation of reality that possesses fixity and specific socially typical or individually characteristic traits, nor as a specific profile assembled out of unambiguous and objective features which, taken together, answer the question Who is he?”  rather, the hero is “a particular point of view on the world and on oneself.”  For Dostoevsky, the hero is mainly a viewpoint on the world; he is interested in how the hero views himself.

Bakhtin contrasts Dostoevsky to Gogol in this regard.  In Gogol, the hero is a specific type of character, a “poor government clerk” with a lonely life, dead-end job, pathetic excuse for life.  Even when he was writing in imitation of Gogol, Dostoevsky isn’t interested so much in the government clerk as such, or as an individual instance of a particular class.  Rather, he is interested in the self-consciousness of the character.

One way to state this is that Dostoevsky brings “the author and the narrator, with all their accumulated points of view and with the descriptions, characterizations, and definitions of the hero provided by them, into the field of vision of the hero himself, thus transforming the finalized and integral reality of the hero into the material of the hero’s own self-consciousness.”  Bakhtin describes this as a “small-scale Copernican revolution” in which the authorial definition of the hero is relativized, made just one more viewpoint on the hero.

One effect of this is to create characters that are less than fully themselves.  As Bakhtin says, “A man never coincides with himself.  One cannot apply to him the formula of identity, A = A.  In Dostoevsky’s artistic thinking, the genuine life of the personality takes place at the point of non-coincidence between a man 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 his own will, ‘at second hand.’  The genuine life of the personality is made available only through a dialogic penetration of that personality, during which it freely and reciprocally reveals itself.”

For Dostoevsky, this is not a destruction of the self, but rather a penetration into the deepest reality of the consciousness of his heroes.  They are most themselves not by the definitions that others can give to them, not by the objective realities of class, occupation, marital status, physical appearance.  They are most themselves in their freedom to be something beyond all these definitions and external qualities.  The “man in man” is that which “does not submit to an externalizing secondhand definition,” it is an “internally unfinalizable something.”