Heterobiography: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Autobiographical Writing

ABSTRACT

The contribution offers a synthesis of a Bakhtinian philosophical approach to autobiography, conceived as both a text and a lifeproject, through the theoretical construct of ‘heterobiography.’ Drawing on Bakhtin’s philosophical rather than philological work, the discussion focuses for the most part on some of Bakhtin’s lesser-known, fragmented and often obscure writings: Toward a Philosophy of the Act, written ca 1919–1921; the long essay ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,’ written ca1922–1924; and several fragments from Bakhtin’s wartime notebooks, written in 1940–1946 and published in English translation only recently. Building on the author’s previous work on Bakhtin and ‘the question of the subject,’ the discussion highlights some of the ‘dotted lines’ that link these relatively obscure and fragmented texts, and suggests that they add up to a coherent, albeit complex, philosophical position on the dynamics of autobiography. The construct of ‘heterobiography’ is used in this context to account for the immanent ambivalence of the Bakhtinian position and to denote an element of alterity which operates both ‘centripetally’ and ‘centrifugally’ in the dynamics of narrative identity and its autobiographical inscription.

KEYWORDS:

• Subjectivity
• heterobiography
• centrifugal and centripetal vectors
• narrative identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan is professor of English at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her areas of research include literary modernism, literary and philosophical constructions of subjectivity, and the intersections of continental philosophy and literature. She is the author of Graham Greene’s Childless Fathers (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (Oxford University Press, 1991), The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford University Press, 2013) and numerous articles.

Notes

1. To take the most recent example, the special issue of Auto/Biography, titled ‘“Broken Dialogues”, or Finding Bakhtin in Auto|Biography,’ opens with an excellent introductory essay by Eva Karpinski on Bakhtin’s potential relevance to the study of autobiography, but this introductory essay concludes on an understandable (albeit understated) note of resignation at the relative paucity of the essays’ actual theoretical and philosophical engagement with Bakhtin’s work (Karpinski 2015).

2. The translation of Bakhtin’s terminology into English has been a source of vexed debates among Slavonic scholars. Being an ‘outsider’ (in this very limited linguistic and cultural sense, rather than in the privileged Bakhtinian sense, reserved for the author), I have provided the Russian terms for the benefit of Russian speaking readers, and a gloss whenever appropriate. In the case of the term vnenakhodimost’, the translators of Bakhtin’s wartime fragments have chosen the term ‘outsideness’ rather than than ‘exotopy,’ ‘extralocality,’ or ‘transgredience’ (see Denischenko and Spektor, 194–197). My own choice of the term ‘transgredience’ has been motivated by the desire to remain as close as possible to the translation of ‘Author and Hero,’ and to some extent, by the fact that this term is not commonly used in English and is therefore not likely to be transparent to the reader.

3. Both ‘author’ and ‘hero’ are referred to as masculine throughout Bakhtin’s essay, and the transition to the subject as I-for-myself or I-for-another carries the same gendered bias. For the sake of authenticity, though not without obvious misgivings, the contribution follows Bakhtin’s discursive practice whenever his work is directly cited or paraphrased, but the discussion itself follows a gender-neutral usage.

4. It is important to note that this impossibility is structural and grammatical and is not related to the attitude of the author or his/her attempt to produce and authentic and honest narration of themselves. Autobiography, on Bakhtin’s account, can never be more than a guiding ideal.

5. I believe that this is an encrypted religious reference, which Bakhtin could not spell out without incurring heavy penalties under the Stalinist regime.

6. In their Introduction to the published translations of the wartime fragments, Denischenko and Spektor note that ‘in cases where Bakhtin distances the other, he uses the word chuzhoi, which we rendered as “alien” whenever possible. In “A Person,” however, we chose to translate chuzhoi as “the other’s” because we found the combination “alien eyes” (chuzhie glaza) misleading … . Elsewhere Bakhtin always uses drugoi’ (2017, 191). This is compatible with Caryl Emerson’s earlier observation that ‘Russian distinguishes between drugoi (another, other person) and chuzhoi (alien, strange; also, the other)’ in her translation of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984b, Appendix II, n. 15, 302), and her later discussion of the problematic role of the other in the constitution of the self in the article ‘Problems with Baxtin’s Poetics’ (1988).

7. The affinity with the Lacanian ‘mirror stage’ is remarkable, not only in the choice of the mirror as a literal device for self-reflection and of mirroring as a metaphoric mediation process, but also in the essential fabrication or fraudulence of ostensibly reflexive process.

8. It is important to note once again that Bakhtin does not relate to ethics in terms of normativity – the ethical relation, as described in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, has to do with the position of the subject as inescapably accountable. This may well be debated, of course.

9. I am very grateful to the editors who have drawn my attention to the need for clarification on this point.

10. The precise dating of Bakhtin's texts is a complex issue, and I am very grateful to Sergeiy Sandler, who has drawn my attention to the editorial comments in the Russian edition of Bakhtin's collected works which suggest that these texts are chronologically much closer to each other and both may have been written in the early 1920s. This dating would, indeed, lend support to my reading of the texts as internally divided rather than opposed to each other.

11. Bakhtin uses the same Russian word, zaviershit both in the sense of ‘consummate,’ i.e. an operation of loving containment (as translated in ‘Author and Hero’), and in the sense of ‘finalize,’ a violent act of closure (as translated in Dostoevsky’s Poetics). See ‘Author and Hero,’ p. 233, translator’s note no. 6; and the ‘Glossary’ in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, eds. Hirschkop and Shepherd (1989, 193–194). The evaluative difference between these two terms is glaringly obvious, but it is very much in keeping with and symptomatic of the different positions of these texts: if in the earlier essay the authoring other is fundamentally benign, and being ‘authored’ is perceived as a gift of Grace, the conception of the other in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics entails violence, silencing and coercion. In this case, then, I would suggest that the choice of two different English renderings for the same Russian term is entirely justified.

12. The question of naming oneself comes up very powerfully in this passage, but Bakhtin does not answer it at this point.