BAKHTIN AND LUKÁCS: SUBJECTIVITY, SIGNIFYING FORM AND TEMPORALITY IN THE NOVEL

Liisa Steinby

Introduction: Bakhtin and Lukács

New research on the German and Russian background of Bakhtin's thinking, and the new perspectives and understanding thus opened up, invite an interest in contributing to this understanding by clarifying some new connection or aspect. Since Bakhtin apparently combined quite freely ideas from a great number of different authors – and notoriously even borrowed directly from their works without indicating the source (e.g. Poole 1998) – it is obvious that a great deal of work remains to be done in this area. My purpose in this chapter is to elucidate one of those connections, namely Bakhtin's debt to the young Georg Lukács, the Hungarian aesthetician and literary scholar. Lukács, who wrote in German, began as a Neo-Kantian and Hegelian, but in the 1930s became immensely influential as a Marxist literary theorist.

The basic study of Bakhtin's relation to Lukács, and of the common intellectual background they shared, is Galin Tihanov's The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (2000). Until the publication of Tihanov's work, the connection between Lukács and Bakhtin passed unnoticed in the Bakhtin boom that has been ongoing since the 1970s. There is a natural reason for this: in none of his published writings does Bakhtin ever mention Lukács. Tihanov, however, noticed a reference to Lukács in Bakhtin's unpublished doctoral dissertation (Tihanov 2000, 295). The fact that Bakhtin intended to translate Lukács' The Theory of the Novel (Die Theorie des Romans, 1920) into Russia, before he found out that the Marxist Lukács himself disapproved of this early work (Clark and Holquist 1984, 99), makes Lukács' apparent non-presence in Bakhtin's writings even more conspicuous. Tihanov ambitiously investigates these two theoreticians of literature and culture, comparing them not only with each other but also with their common background in German cultural philosophy, aesthetics and literary theory in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Tihanov suggests that Bakhtin, in his most original contribution to the theory of the novel, actually takes a stand in the 1930s discussion of the novel and of literary realism, in which the Marxist Lukács played a major role (cf. Tihanov 2000, 140). I argue, however, that there exists an important earlier connection between Bakhtin and the young Lukács that is in need of further clarification, especially with regard to the latter's seminal The Theory of the Novel. That Bakhtin never refers to The Theory of the Novel in his published writings might be because this idealist (Neo-Kantian – Hegelian) work of the young Lukács would have been an undesirable source for a writer in the Stalinist period. This, however, does not mean that the work ceased to influence Bakhtin's thinking – just as the Marxist Lukács never stopped employing German idealist aesthetics as the basis of his own theory of art. Moreover, we will see that through the young Lukács – though obviously not only through him – Bakhtin's roots reach further back, to Hegelian and Early Romantic thinking about the novel.

Subject and Signifying Form: The Early Bakhtin and the Early Lukács

In 'Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity', Bakhtin shows how the 'consummating' and 'meaning-governed' form (Bakhtin 1990b, 25, 138) is given to the hero in an act of contemplation and aesthetic creativity by the author. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, he defines this unity-creating aesthetic activity as follows:

The unity of the world in aesthetic seeing is not a unity of meaning or sense – not a systematic unity, but a unity that is concretely architectonic: the world is arranged around a concrete value-center, which is seen and loved and thought. What constitutes this center is the human being: everything in this world acquires significance, meaning, and value only in correlation with man – as that which is human. (Bakhtin 1993, 61)

The hero and his life deliver the content for the work of art, to which the author gives a form; this form is not a synthesis of meaning or a systematic account of the content, but an 'architectonic' form, organizing the content and thus bearing significance but preserving the genuine concreteness of the individual's experiences (Bakhtin 1993, 61). 'Architectonic form' is thus equivalent for Bakhtin to the consummating, 'meaning-governed' or signifying aesthetic form. He contrasts this with the 'compositional form', referring to the mere technical arrangement of the material (cf. Bakhtin 1990a, 303–4).

The idea of signifying form, one which arises from the content and is not mechanically imposed on it, played a major role in aesthetic thinking in the German tradition since Romanticism. It is obviously an essential element of the young Bakhtin's aesthetics as well, and I would argue that in different, even radical modifications it continues to play an important role in his thinking down to his last writings, such as the essay on speech genres. I therefore suggest that this concept be taken as one of the focal points in analysing Bakhtin's relation to his German background and especially to Lukács. This can be understood as a continuation and narrowing down of what Tihanov perceives as the most important themes which Lukács and Bakhtin share with their German predecessors: the concepts of culture, form and genre (Tihanov 2000, 21 – 61). All three concepts are both very common and very broad; what is needed is a more specific scrutiny as to how they were used in the German context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, before they can be applied in elucidating Lukács' and Bakhtin's thinking. This requirement is not easily accomplished, as the concepts of culture, form and genre are seldom clearly defined and are used in a number of different ways. The concepts of subject, which we consider here primarily in the context of the novel, and of signifying form, may initially not appear much clearer; but I believe that we can...