Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Bakhtin discovers in Dostoevsky the principles of the polyphonic novel, in which the primacy of explicating the modern world is banished, in favor of the text’s orientation toward the world of the other, toward the word rival to the novel under scrutiny. “In Dostoevsky,” Bakhtin explains, “there is almost no word that does not direct a tense glance at another word.” The critic opposes this form to what he calls the monological or univocal novel dominated by the “voice” of an author or a protagonist. In the polyphonic novel, words are a crack, a window, an opening to a possible alternate meaning, which accompanies each word like a shadow.

Literally, each word should be final. But this is only its (Erasmian) appearance. In fact, there is never a final word; the polyphonic novel exists thanks to a plurality of truths. The novel (again, in the Erasmian manner) is always relative. Its home is the individual conscience, which by definition is partial. Bakhtin states: “It is possible to conceive that truth, in order to be unique, requires a multitude of consciences; that, in principle, truth cannot be contained within the limits of only one conscience; that truth is naturally social and is born at the point where several consciences meet.”

Bakhtin distinguishes between epic and novel. Epic, he says in his Epic Narrative and Novel (1941), is based on “a unique and unified vision of the world, obligatory and undoubtedly true for its heroes, as well as for its authors and its audience.” Epic deals in categories and implications proper to a completed world, past, understood (or, at least, understandable) once and for all. The novel, in contrast, reflects better than any other discourse the tendencies of a new world in the process of making itself. Whereas the epic is a world whose hierarchical unity has not yet been pulverized by history, the novel is a world where every discourse lives on the frontier between its own context and another, alien context.

From this plurality of contexts proper to the novel, or neighboring it, or even rivaling it, the narrative text extracts and orchestrates a series of dialogical confrontations between languages which permit the novelist to use words that others have used before him, in order to generate new and, above all, problematic meanings. The novel is an instrument of dialogue in this deeper sense: of a dialogue not only between characters but between languages, between genres, between social forces, between contiguous or distant historical times.

The novel, says Bakhtin, is the expression of a Galilean perception of language. Far from being one more genre among others, the novel uses other genres and places authors and readers within an era of competitive languages.

This is the conclusion: the dynamic notion of the novel is equal to its incomplete nature. “As long as man is alive,” Bakhtin concludes without concluding, reinitiating his own critical discourse, “he lives by virtue of being incomplete, of not having said his final word.”

Rabelais, Cervantes, Dostoevsky: in them it is specially true that the novel is, in Bakhtin’s words, a “radical revolution in the destinies of human discourse,” a “liberation of semantic-cultural and emotional intentions,” and a liberation, as well, “from the hegemony of a unique and unitarian language”: a “simultaneous loss of the sense of language as myth, that is, as an absolute form of thought.”

Gogol is not Rabelais, Cervantes, or Dostoevsky, the great constructors of the polyphonic universe of the novel. Gogol is closer to the hero and the victim of the novel, rather than its architect. He knows everything about the worlds of fiction, like Rabelais, Cervantes, and Dostoevsky in their respective times. But he also forgets everything about them — he is Gogol, a character in Gogol, finally disguised, deferred, displaced: a gigantic dwarf, a very small giant: David and Goliath in one single slingshot; Perseus first, then Medusa. Gogol murders Gogol.

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He writes in Dead Souls: “Fear my gaze when it is penetrating; you yourselves fear to gaze penetratingly at anything; you like to slide down things with eyes that think not.” In these few words is contained the literary drama of Gogol: the drama of his postponed perception, his identity and his conscience postponed so that the novel, as indicated by Bakhtin, may maintain its vitality: that being an unfinished discourse.

Gogol is a Perseus who cuts off the heads of the Medusas of certainty. Everything in him is deformed, refracted, postponed. We must not end: the gaze of certainty will transform us into stone. But to be seen authentically (writes Fanger) is to be known. It is to acquire a certain rank in a world of values. For the majority of Gogol’s characters, this is a negative rank: to look is to judge; the gaze petrifies or annihilates. The recognition of the gaze that identifies us is the recognition of the gaze that places us, radicalizes us (as in radix, root), terrifies us (as in terra, land): paralyzes us.

This is the terrible gaze of the other— le regard d’autrui —to which Sartre dedicates some of his most brilliant pages. Donald Fanger recapitulates Sartre’s arguments with special intensity in The Creation of Nikolai Gogol: To know that we are seen is to know ourselves seen in the world and from the point of view of the world. I am my possibilities: I am what I am not and I am not what I am, but always in the measure in which I am seen by the world. The eyes of the world transform me into someone. The other who perceives me represents “the death hidden in my possibilities.” For the other, I am not a project but a fact; I shall not be, I am. I am finished. The gaze of the other has exhausted my fictional possibilities, my perpetually unfinished being is over.

Fanger says of Gogol that pride and faith were his possibilities, and fear both his premature identification and his premature judgment. The mysterious dwarf from the Nezhin Lyceum exclaims: Do not judge me yet! You do not know who I am yet, I myself do not know it, not yet, please!

He insists: To be a writer is a riddle whose solution is to be found in a perpetually unreachable future. The work joins this work of postponement; it is intrinsic to it because the work is a verbal counterreality that can be rooted only in the feeling that “each man, at least once in his lifetime, has an encounter that induces in him sentiments that were until then unknown” (Dead Souis).

Gogol can express this same idea with comic verve. “There are faces that nature has not wished to finish,” he says while observing the landlord Sobakevich. But the comic phrase is the perfect indication of Gogol’s artistic adherence to the novel as the art of novelty, of the unfinished, of the free. The order of these factors does not alter the product.

But the product is sumptuous: it is a novel pregnant with itself, giving birth to true narrative constellations, unexpected and autonomous. For example, all those imaginary biographies of the dead serfs that Chichikov must invent. They are a marvelous foretaste of Marcel Schwob, Max Beerbohm, and Jorge Luis Borges. The art of these imaginary lives is that they are born of the paucity of hearsay, not of academic solemnity. They are part of an art of the unfinished and the potential, and its seeds are malicious tongues, old wives’ tales, opinion, rumor: maybe Chichikov is Napoleon, his profile resembles Napoleon’s. Chichikov is Napoleon scooting about Russia under the name Chichikov. Chichikov invents fictions, orchestrates them, and inspires others to join in his creation. We read in Dead Soub :

Penetrating into the most far-flung byways, this novel was subjected to numerous versions … Since ordinary people are most interested in the gossip of the upper classes, this adventure was discussed, commented upon and beautified in homes where the existence of Chichikov, up till then, had been unknown …