Trashing aka unizhen, oskorblen, obizhen--no zria!

[Helena Goscilo]

Colleagues (both engineers of refuse/trashers and others),

Responses to reviews of one's own books, in my view, should adopt the
genre of silence.  But it's difficult to be silent regarding Dima Khanin's
"review" of Caryl's recent book.  In preparation for my own review of it
for CHOICE, I read it twice: the first time to acquaint myself with the
contents; the second time for the sheer INTELLECTUAL pleasure of it.  I
enjoyed disagreeing with chunks of it--but, then, the promise of regular
and stimulating disagreement that urges one to reassess one's own stance
regarding issues constitutes one of the chief reasons, surely, for
choosing academia as one's profession?  I found it one of the most
thought-provoking, thoroughly researched and argued books I've read in
recent years.  Paul de Man maintained that all readings are misreadings,
and my perusal of Dima's review brought home to me just how inseparable
misreading is from our perception of texts.  Quite simply, I don't
recognize the book I read in the book Dima has, in his regrettable
wording, "trashed."
Leaving aside the dispiriting questions of taste, decency, and civility, I
would like to address several points of ACCURACY, or absence thereof, in
the review and the Email message that followed.  Like Amy Mandelker, I
found the statement about Caryl's "turning against" MB once he was no
longer modish simply uninformed, for it was precisely Caryl's (and Michael
Holquist's) DIALOGIC IMAGINATION, pub. in 1981, PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY'S
POETICS, pub. in 1984, her Bakhtin-inspired BORIS GODUNOV: TRANSPOSITIONS
OF A RUSSIAN THEME, pub. in 1986, RETHINKING BAKHTIN, co-edited with Saul
Morson in 1989, and a series of articles that introduced Bakhtin to the
West and ignited an enthusiasm for some of his concepts.  But Caryl
certainly did not join the "mode" for Bakhtin and could hardly be held
responsible for the fact that some of the Western "use" of Bakthin was,
indeed, Versace-style.  In fact, several of her publications (observing
taste, decency, and civility) express regret at that development.

The review casts Caryl as an opportunistic worshipper, whereas she
rigorously wrote as an explicator, a translator in the multiple senses of
the word.  What the review presents as "apostasy" (p. 221) struck me, when
I read the book, as part of any thinking critic's evolution in thought and
appraisal regarding an author s/he has unflaggingly worked with for almost
two decades.  Is it really possible to maintain unchanged notions about
and attitudes toward a given writer for decades?  In what sense was
Bakhtin Caryl's "mentor" (221) ??? How is her book a "surprise attack" (p.
221), as opposed to a sober REassessment of her own evaluation of MB and
that of others?  (Parenthetically, I might note that the oxymoronic
[ne to slovo!]  concept of a "polyphonically executed hatchet-job" [p.
221] requires a radical redifinition of polyphony!)

Specifically: Caryl's remark that Russia "is not going 'to endorse values
that make sense to us rapidly and easily--if at all'" (p. 221) is not a
"pessimistic prognostication about Russia's future," but pertains to one
of the book's central, and most intriguing, points: Russia and the
non-Slavicist West have read Bakhtin very, very differently, and what
interests Caryl is what those differences are and what they reveal about
BOTH cultures.  The pique at a perceived offense intended to Russia in the
review results, I think, from inattentive reading (apologies, Dima, but
the study attempts to UNDERSTAND Russians' perceptions of MB, and to
contrast them with Western ones, not to denigrate them.  Here, as in her
translations, Caryl tries to move between two languages/cultures and
inform each about the other).

The review claims that the "principal merit" of the "judicious
'neutrals'" among Russian Bakhtinists "who have no ideological axes to
grind" for Caryl is "a ready display of a courteous attitude toward
renowned Western Bakhtinists" (p. 221).  In fact, this section of the book
implicitly urges dialogue between Western critics and Russian ones, and
not unreasonably regrets that Bakhtin specialists seem resistant to
dialogue.

Regarding Caryl's "borrowing" of Natasha Reed's ideas about Dostoevsky's
dialogism. I assume the review refers to Reed's 1994 dissertation, which
Caryl's article on "The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin" (RETHINKING
BAKHTIN) preceded by five years.  In that piece Caryl explicitly
challenges Bakhtin's "far too facile categorization of Dostoevsky as a
'polyphonic' thinker and of Tolstoy as a 'monologic' one" (p. 168).  To
read Caryl's comments about Dostoevsky in her most recent volume as
"following in others' critical footsteps" (p. 222) is to betray, perhaps,
an ignorance of some of her earlier scholarship.

There are several other points of misinformation in the review, but I
don't wish to tax the list-readers' patience by elaborating on them.
Ultimately, the review may have served a useful function by encouraging
people to read the book in question.  It is, I think, a splendid book,
wide-ranging, eloquent, highly informative, and (in my Manian misreading)
completely free of the impulse to trash Russia or any other phenomenon.
Trashing, after all, is the business of garbage-men, not academics.

Helena Goscilo