"AMERICAN WAY OF SPEECH" AS A FICTIONAL MODEL,
M. BAKHTIN AS A TRANSATLANTIC TRAVELLER

When we talk we look into the apple of another’s eye
M. Bakhtin

    Anyone would recall a moment of naive surprise experienced once (or more than once) at hearing "natives" talk in a language different from one’s own. Even understanding what’s being said you are still at a loss through missing the how - the assumptions, implications and inferences, the interrelatedness of words, manners and values that to cultural insiders are an open secret (they would have learned it ‘by ear"), whereas to you, an outsider remain a riddle and a challenge.
    It was this fascination with cultural otherness - as coded in and connoted by speech - that made me years ago choose American literature as a university major. On the way through the usual stages of professionalization the sense of wonder faded somewhat. Having won the right to describe myself as an Americanist I had to admit with some sadness that America became my subject only in the sense of being an object of highly specialized knowledge organized by discipline one of which was mine.
    In Russia toward the end of the 1980s objectivist scholarship was welcomed by many as a healthy alternative to (and refuge from) ideological cant. Yet, in its selfconscious impersonalism, formalism and traditionalism, its careful avoidance of sensitive topics (e.g. identity and self-identity issues), it felt even then like a respectable impass. As it happened, the three months spent in New Haven in the fall of 1990 on an exchange program between Moscow University and Yale meant a lot for my own professional (re)orientation.
    There was the shock of wonder experienced again due to immersion into a strange language - not just American English (this time) but also the metalanguage of contemporary critique: playful, inquisitive, self-reflexive, making one question the perfectly "obvious" notions: what is reading? or writing? or identity? - "... what am I? and what are you?" (W.Whitman).
    It felt like an intellectual Land of Oz - running between a seminar where Geoffrey Hartman scrutinized the idea of culture in Europe between the two wars and one where Brian Wolf discussed American pragmatism peering into 19 century genre paintings or yet another one, where Shoshanna Felman probed into ways of testimony from Dostoyevski to current court practices. To meet a familiar stranger amid this stimulating confusion felt like a particular piece of luck. Michail Bakhtin, certainly, was familiar: an established Russian classic, of whose "carnival", "chronotope", "heteroglossy" etc. I thought I had known all I needed. However, what Professor Michael Holquist (to whom my greatest thanks go, little as he has to do with American Studies proper) was offering his graduate students seemed to be a different Bakhtin, if only for the simple reason of being discussed not in the splendid/ forced isolation issigned to him by many of his Russian disciples or opponents. Holquist’s Bakhtin indulged in the most informal, vigorous and generous exchange with the best minds of his time - and ours. Philosopher who in his lifetime only travelled in the far provinces of Russia (and that under the pressure of wars or political persecution) now turned into a world traveller. Recontextualization meant change: whether loss (of the "true" identity) or gain (in vital new relationships) - is something bakhtinians in Russia and elsewhere keep debating without end.
    To me personally, the lesson in dialogic openness - taught in two voices, one American one Russian - meant a lot in that it worked as an impetus to translate my field of professional competence, history American literature into a broader context of American studies as comparative cultural studies. In Professor Holquist’s office eight years ago there first came up the idea to assemble a group of American Russianinsts and Russian Americanists in order to discuss books together: not for the sake of books as art objects but with the view, rather, of opening up the cultural baggage that Americans bring to the reading and study of Russian literature and Russians ? to the reading and study of American literature. A literary seminar would thus become a laboratory for observing and discussing cultural parallels, differences and perceptions of both.
    The project wasn’t realized (so far) in any literal sense, though in a sense not so literal I have been actively engaged in it over the past few years. The gatherings of European Americanists (in Warsaw, Berlin, Lisbon or Amsterdam) in which I was privileged to participate, felt to me like a movable feast of comparative cultural thought giving energy and confidence to continue work along these lines at home.

    In the perspective that Mikhail Bakhtin had developed first in the 1920s, sociology, aesthetics, semiotics and value analysis were meant to work together - exploring the intimate interrelatedness of culture, communication and speech. The fundamental category related to all three, according to Bakhtin, is a speech genre. It can be anything from a casual street talk down (or up) to a sophisticated work of literature - defined in either case by a particular mode of interaction between an addressor and addressee. Comparing national cultures in terms of speech genres is a possibility mentioned by Bakhtin in passing but never seriously developed. He wasn’t, however, the only scholar to entertain such ideas. Following G. Tarde’s suggestion that a new discipline might be established - "conversation compare", on a par with comparative religion or comparative literature, there have developed thriving fields of interdisciplinary research like discourse analysis, conversation analysis, ethnography of speech. A literary historian can learn and profit from all of these, the more so since literature itself has been re-viewed in the functionalist, ‘reader-response" perspective: we are now fully aware of the fact that fiction not only mimics acts of communication, but also enacts them (in the relationship of writer-narrator-character-reader) as well as reflects upon them. This complex activity would necessarily be framed by a specific cultural context, which makes it possible to describe a literary tradition as a continuing "conversation", a standing communication pact between writers and readers in the same language (including, necessarily, the cultural metalanguage).
    Whether we can afford to describe a modern nation’s culture in terms of speech genres - still remains an open question. A generalization as broad as a "national way of speech" seems hopelessly presumptious - reaching toward it feels like peeling an onion. In a complex organism of a nation there are as many ways of speech as communities or social occasions. After we "bracket" conventions peculiar to a province, time period, particular environment or situation - would there be left enough to define a mode of speech exchange as nationally specific? Aren’t we likely to end up with an empty figment of imagination - artificial and arbitrary?
    To the extent that we live by imagination, it might still be usable. As a teacher of American literature in Russia I find that the most complex and challenging part of my work lies in introducing students to a new and different way of reading, i.e. relating to or conversing with text. Trying to imagine oneself into an interpretive community different from one’s own is hard, it can even be painful since in the same move you have to bring familiar conventions, assumptions and value priorities under critical reflection. The resultant double insight might be highly rewarding: growth in cultural awareness, certainly, means more than mere increase in knowledge of things American.
    Suppose we start with a premise that certain speech genres tend to be imagined as particularly expressive of a national identity (which also means that they contribute to the construction of a national identity, in a circular fashion). Wishing to identify and explore such genres - where do we go for data? My first idea as a literary historian was to approach writers - any nation’s "natural" communication experts. What is "conversation in American" - we might ask Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville or Howells - screening their texts for implicit and explicit meta-communicational commentary. We are sure to get some answer, but the question would also bound back on us. How about you the interviewer, an interviewed text would "ask". What is it you work from as a for-you-implicit norm? How does your own cultural positioning influence the way you frame what you observe?
    A conversation thus becomes not only the focus but also the important means of analysis. The inbuilt element of subjectivity does not make the work of cultural comparison worthless, but rather - endless. I finally found myself working with two sets of texts, American and Russian, organized in pairs. Each two had something in common, chronologically, structurally or thematically - something, that is, to get the dialogue started. For instance, we can take two short stories written in the first decades of the 19 century, that both relate of somebody who slept too long having drunk too much and, due to excess of imagination, found himself in a social fix (W. Irving’s Rip Van Winlkle and Chertokutzki - protagonist in "The Carriage" by N. Gogol). Or, we can take two romances written at midcentury, both discussing free love, socialist experimentation and the predicament of an artist vis-a-vis popular audience ("The Blithedale Romance" by N. Hawthorne and "What is to be done?" by N. Chernishevski). Or, two semi-fictional I-narratives describing, both, an excursion into Otherness that provides an invitation to self-renewal(Thoreau’ s "Walden" and Dostoyevski’s "Notes from the Dead House"). Or, two realistic novels about a "typical" individual who tests his communicative resources in trying to live up to the challenge of radical change (W.D. Howells’ Silas Lapham and I. Goncharov’s Oblomov)...
    In away, it is like making poetry or striking a new acquaintance: you discover a rhyme (or a potential dialogic relationship - in the bakhtinian sense) and then develop its unsuspected riches. May I now offer a brief sketch of the model of the "American way of speech" as born out by this contrastive analysis.

    A common place might do for a starting point. An American tends to be imagined (and imagine himself?) as an independent self-relying individual who would "shift for himself ... under immense and lonely skies" (T. Wolfe). This human monad is also engaged in "self-making" and for this reason ever unequal to self: in Emerson’s metaphor - a "generator of circles". Experienced from within, each new "circle" is an act of the extra-vagance - the going out, expansion beyond one’s former scope. Observed from without, it is an outer rim, a newly formed image addressed to (to be perceived by) others. A personality constitutes itself through production of signifying gestures: becoming involves seeming, seeming implies becoming. A perfect example of their interrelatedness is offered by young Benjamin Franklin as person and character in his autobiography. As he pushes his wheelbarrow loaded with paper down Philadelphia streets he clearly means himself as a "letter to the world" - or at least to his townspeople. The lad with the barrow is a walking allegory of industry - the virtue that he is not fully in possession of, but strives to generate. The image functions as a sign of which the referent is "unreal" - yet to be produced.
    If we turn from the addressor to the addressee we shall discover that to be on an equal footing he, quite inevitably, wuld have to stand "one foot on confidence and the other on suspicion"¹: trust enough to make practical engagement with the other possible and distrust enough not to be "taken in", not to lose sight of the hiatus between the other’s being and self-making, fact and act. The gap between the two (i.e. the element of fictionality in the other’s self-presentation) may be interpreted unfavorably - as deception, or favorably - as evidence of continuous creative effort. The art of seeing double is most difficult but also most rewarding.
    Conversation, according to Emerson, is "the game of circles"."We pluck up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost. Tomorrow they will have receded from this high-water mark"² . In conversation - as follows from this famous metaphor - parties are represented by their enlarged, inflated selves - exaggerated, virtual rather than substantial. The "game" can only go on if its principal rule is observed which seems to be this: an act of expansion, self-promotion on behalf of one player is to be complemented by an act of conditional belief, a "suppose-this-supposition" attitude on behalf of the other/ others. So far as parties share in this tacit pact and "play up" to each other, they make the most out of the ongoing exchange. To quote Emerson again: "The wise man comes to this game to play upon others and be played upon. He is as curious to know what can be drawn from him, as what he can draw from them".³
    A "real" conversation is thus defined as a play ground between Self and Other where energy-generating traffic (or commerse) is taking place. A picture of a version of such exchange is provided by Henry Thoreau in one of his letters where he draws line

A and line B with asterisks (dots? stars?) between.
    The comment under the picture is in the form of a question: "How will this do for a symbol of sympathy?" ⁴
   The space between the communicants, A and B is never to be closed, ⁵- it is important in its own right and is only bridgeable by a tentative speculation, a guess, a metaphor. In the context of American literary culture soulful empathy does not figure as a privileged virtue: more often than not ( in the experience of Hawthorne, Melville, Poe or Twain) it is treated with sispicion. Too close an identification with another might mean surrender to alien will or an illusion. ⁶
    Difference is posited as a condition that initiates and stimulates exchange ("commerce"). "I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was on each other’s minds - says Silas Lapham in the novel about himself. - It would take a man out of his own hands. As long as he’s in his own hands, there’s some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out - even if he hasn’t been found out to be so very bad - it’s pretty much all up with him".⁷ Acting under this assumption each communicant trusts himself and another to be "nontransparent" as well as "in his own hands" (looking after his/ her own interests). Consequently the exchange takes the form of "bargaining" - the working out of the desired balance of interests through asking questions such as: how much am I prepaired to pay for what I seem to be offered? how far should I trust or distrust another to keep the exchange-game going and NOT put myself at a disadvantage? how do I tell between fact and fiction and miss neither on the usefulness of fact nor on the creative energy of fiction?
    Isn’t this model of relationship underlying such genres as tall tale ("bragging", "swelling" an d "talking big"), or newspaper puff, or popular romance or even highbrow point of view novel - all (arguably) quintessentially American genres. In each case we seem to be invited into an interpretive negotiation, - a fine epitome of this might be the way we are engaged by (and react to) an advertisement: it tries "to compel belief by any means short of outright deception", whereas we try "to maintain disbelief short of losing whatever information is there to be gotten".⁸
    Conversation in American" - i.e. communicational model that the American mainstream tradition seems to favor - could be best described as a pragmatistic (dynamic, contestual, playful etc.) give-and-take among "strangers" in the absence of any pre-given, binding context (all context there is is produced ad hoc). Truth, though far from value-less, is not an absolute value, more comparable to a "fair price" that conversing parties might or might not agree upon. It is this, in my observation, that a Russian reader experiences as most "un-Russian" in the American discourse (literature being one of its versions) - therefore, hardest to relate to.⁹ An "ideal conversation" a la Russe I would describe as one that posits common identity (not difference) as the necessary precondition, puts premium on "being together" (not negotiation or contestive play) and takes ethical insight (not exchange) for an implicit goal.
    One might conclude, of course, that what I have just outlined boils down to a predictable contrast between the "Modern", market-oriented and the Traditionalist types of culture. The conclusion would be as obvious (theoretically) as unhelpful (practically). The question it leaves open is: how are we to teach American studies in Russia (with its largely traditionalist, communitarian mentality) or in the wide world generally, today, when modernistic logic is dominant yet increasingly inapplicable, where political and economic differences become less prominent but cultural divides yawn as dramatically as ever?
    Easy equations - American as modern, non-American as pre- or unmodern - are catchy but flawed in that they fail to provide basis for a sustained and satisfying multilateral discussion. The necessary work of cultural mediation would be done best if we (those of us who teach about America in the non-American, non-Western world) do not universalize American experience but rather particularize it. The happiest development in the Russian American studies in recent years has been the rediscovery of the 1U.S. as a cultural subject, "answerable" (in the bakhtinian sense) i.e. engageable in dialogue, challenging and informal. When we look in the apple of another’s eye - as we talk face to face, we see ourselves mirrored; we also gain privileged access to what another culture holds dearest, most unique, hopefully - most shareable.

1. H. Melville The Confidence Man, His Masquerade. N.Y. 1964 p.251
2. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. N.Y 1961 p.219
3. Literary Comment in the American Renaissance Newspapers. Ed. K.W.Cameron Hartford 1977 p.97
4. H.Golemba Thoreau’s Wild Rhetoric p.124
5. So far as individuals enter communication as "souvereign states", they have to school themselves to a good measure of distance. Self and another person are defined by Thoreau as "kindred from a distant land": if he/ she"has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me".
6. See E. Weinauer’s observations of the "proprietory self" as skeptical and suspicious of the "marriage of minds" ("Plagiarism and the Proprietory Self: Policing Boundaries of  Authorship in H.Melville’s "Hawthorne and His Mosses"" - "American Literature", December 1997)
7. W.D.Howells The Rise of Silas Lapham. N.Y. 1963 p.75
8. B.H. Smith On the Margins of Discourse. The Relation of Literature to Language. Chicago and London 1978 p.57
   Donald Carbaugh, having explored native genres of speaking through closereading of various exchanges on the Donahue show, describes American discourse in a somewhat similar way - as a paradox of sympathy without empathy. On one hand, he writes, Self in its internal uniqueness is posited as "an unquestionable" and supremely important, on the other hand, it never becomes the focus of interest and attention in its own right: "New information is valued and the locus of interactional concern, more than is the person speaking it" (D.Carbaugh Talking American: Cultural Discourses on "Donahue". Norwood N.J. 1988 p.140).
9. One would presume that the model of "conversation in American" would look different if framed from a Dutch or French or other perspective.