"Alien Word" and Centon: Aspects of the Theory of M.M. Bakhtin

Shukurov Dmitrii Leonidovich ORCID: 0000-0002-3463-7611 Doctor of Philology Head of the Department of History and Cultural Research at Ivanovo State University of Chemistry and Technology 153000, Russia, Ivanovo region, Ivanovo, Sheremetyevo Avenue, 7 shoudmitry@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The theoretical discourse of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975) is extremely saturated with numerous concepts and ideas of linguoculturological, literary, cultural and philosophical sense, and the modern bibliography of scientific works devoted to the study of certain aspects of the Bakhtin theory is extremely rich. The current scientific biography of the scientist is presented in the book A.V. Korovashko, recently published in the ZhZL series ^[1]. A professional research review of the scientific works published in recent decades on M.M. Bakhtin is contained in the work of O.E. Osovsky and S.A. Dubrovskaya ^[2]. A landmark linguistic study of M.M. Bakhtin's concept for modern humanities is the well-known monograph by M.V. Alpatov, published in 2005 ^[3]. No less significant, all-encompassing philosophical and linguistic research is the work of L.A. Gogotishvili ^[4], published in 2006. Relatively recently, the author of these lines published a work in which a comparative analysis of the discourse of M.M. Bakhtin and the theory of intertextuality was carried out ^[5]. The most relevant history of the Bakhtin issue should include the works of A.V. Korchinsky ^[6] and O.A. Bogdanova ^[7].

In this article, we consider the Bakhtin concept in the general literary methodology of analysis and present the characteristics of its individual theoretical aspects. The research goal is to consider such aspects of the topic as someone else's speech, someone else's consciousness in the context of the ideas of M.M. Bakhtin himself, as well as his student and colleague at the Nevelsko-Vitebsk seminar, Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895-1936).

The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it pays special attention to the comparison of the Bakhtin concept and the theory of the centon genre, which in the history of verbal culture has become a source of creative discoveries and innovative techniques for a variety of authors. The perspective of the study of Bakhtin's theory proposed by us is certainly relevant, since it involves hidden and previously unidentified contexts that allow researchers to evaluate the literary styles of modernism and postmodernism in a new way. As research approaches to this problem, we use comparative historical and comparative methods.

M.M. Bakhtin used the phrases "someone else's speech", "someone else's word" in many works, and they did not always retain the same amount of meaning. According to our observation, for the first time these expressions were used in the works of his student and colleague V.N. Voloshinov.

We do not touch on the controversial issue of the authorship of a number of books and articles published in the 1920s and attributed by some scientists to M.M. Bakhtin. However, the need to cite them makes us submit to the requirements of ethical and scientific correctness and consider the authorship of at least some of them established.

The position of Professor N.L. Vasiliev seems to us to be a well-founded, evidential and competent point of view on this issue: "With all due respect to the people who knew Bakhtin, with all gratitude for their desire to "record" conversations with the scientist, it seems to us that public opinion should not be too categorically inclined in favor of Bakhtin's authorship, since Bakhtin himself did not do this – neither in the distant 20s, nor in the 70s close to us. Delicacy is also needed in relation to people who left us “on the other side of the social”. <...> Bakhtin did not deny his “participation” in the “creation” of some works by Voloshinov and Medvedev, which was expressed in "creative contact", in the development of a "general concept" (probably coming primarily from Bakhtin), but did not extend to the form of implementation of "general" ideas, that is, the texts themselves" ^{[8, p. 19]}. On the problem of authorship of "disputed texts", see also in the work of V.M. Alpatov ^[3].

So, let's define the theoretical meaning that the terminological expression "someone else's word" has in the context of M.M. Bakhtin's theory.

V.N. Voloshinov's monograph "Marxism and the Philosophy of language" (1929) ^[9] (see also the abstract of this work – "The latest trends of linguistic thought in the West" (1928) ^[10]) in terms of cultural significance should be compared only with such studies on the philosophy of language of that time as "Aesthetic fragments"(1922-1923) by G.G. Shpet and "Philosophy of the Name" (1927) by A.F. Losev. (We note in parentheses that it is these works that are criticized – albeit indirectly – by V.N. Voloshinov.) The author's excellent erudition, a detailed description of modern Western European linguistic trends, a fully qualified criticism of these concepts, as well as a refined style and verified Marxist (?) methodology is the main qualitative characteristics of this book. (Two opposing tendencies of linguistic thought in V.N. Voloshinov's terminology are "individualistic subjectivism" (represented by such representatives as V. Humboldt, A. Potebnya, etc.) and "abstract objectivism" (F. de Saussure, S. Bally, etc.)). The linguistically reinterpreted concept of "alien consciousness" (gleaned by V.N. Voloshinov in fruitful communication with M.M. Bakhtin during friendly meetings and joint academic studies in Nevel and Vitebsk in the late 1910s and in Leningrad in the 1920s) appears here as a problematic of "foreign words", "foreign language": "If some people only knew their native language, if the word for them coincided with the native word of their life, if a mysterious foreign word, a word of a foreign language, did not enter their horizons, then such a people would never have created ... a philosopher. A striking feature: from the deepest antiquity to the present day, the philosophy of the word and linguistic thinking are based on a specific sense of a foreign, foreign–language word and on the tasks that a foreign word sets to consciousness - to unravel and teach the unraveled" ^{[9, p. 289]}.

It was in such a linguistic context as the specifics of the transmission of someone else's speech that the expression "someone else's word" was originally used. The poetics of the "foreign word", comprehended by M.M. Bakhtin on literary material (the works of F.M. Dostoevsky), took shape in a number of unpublished works at the time ^{[11, 12, 13, 14]} and published almost simultaneously with "Marxism and the philosophy of language" (in 1929) the book "Problems of Dostoevsky's Creativity" ^[15]. The innovation of these studies, in our opinion, is that the "literary word" is considered here not as a stable category, but as a categorical mobility – the interference of the discourses of the author and the character in the space of the cultural context. V.N. Voloshinov wrote about the same in a somewhat sociologized version of literary analysis in one of the early works devoted to the criticism of the formal method ("The Word in Life and the Word in Poetry" (1926) ^[16]).

We support Yu's point of view. Kristeva, who believed that "... Bakhtin's "dialogism" reveals in writing not only subjective, but also communicative, or better to say, intertextual beginning; in the light of this dialogism, such a concept as "personality – the subject of writing" begins to fade in order to give way to another phenomenon – the ambivalence of writing" ^{[17, p. 8]}. By the expression "ambivalence of writing" Y. Kristeva understood the thesis defended by M.M. Bakhtin about the inclusion of history and culture in the text and the text in cultural history. Any literary text, according to M.M. Bakhtin, absorbs another text and is a "replica" in his direction.

In the history of literature, there is a genre whose semantics and poetics correspond to the Bakhtin understanding of the "foreign word" included in the ambivalent space of a literary work. This is the centon genre.

The name of the genre comes from the Latin word cento, which literally means "patchwork fabric", "quilt sewn from different pieces", "bedspread", "cloak", "mattress", etc. In literary theory, the centon form means a poetic text composed of poems or parts thereof belonging to previously created works by one or different authors. The heyday of the genre falls on the times of late antiquity and is associated with the name of the Roman poet Ausonius (IV century AD), who was engaged in the compilation of "Virgilian" centons. He also owns the first surviving theoretical description of the centon. Ausonius wrote, dedicating the centon to his friend Axius (368 AD): "... accept this essay, made from the incoherent to the coherent, from the heterogeneous to the one, from the important to the amusing, from the alien to ours... If you want me, an ignoramus, to teach you what a centon is, then I'll tell you this. The structure of a certain song is formed from different places with different meanings... <...> Let the verses of different meanings get a single one, let the borrowed pieces seem primordial, let nothing extraneous shine through, let the collected does not reveal tension, does not stray too closely, does not gape too wide" ^{[18, p. 198]}.

In early Byzantine and Baroque literature, the centon form was widely used, as it combined the artist's desire for an impersonal canon, individual submission to the absolute – with creative agonality in the field of historical, literary and literary co-creation. Describing this literary quality, S.S. Averintsev in the "Poetics of Ancient Greek Literature" noted: "... literature continues to be traditionalist in its essence, combining the trait of reflection with the trait of traditionalism for more than two millennia. According to the logic of this synthesis, the author is given his individuality in order to participate in the “competition” forever with their predecessors within the genre canon" ^{[19, p. 5]}. In the "Poetics of Early Byzantine Literature", the scientist pointed out that in the cents, quotations "... were taken out of their context and collected in such a way as to form a new context for each other, with a new theme and a new content" ^{[20, p. 8]}.

According to the observation of M.L. Gasparov and E.G. Ruzina, in the genre of the centon, in contrast to the reminiscing book literature, the original context is more radically rethought, thus forming the two-dimensional semantic and contextual changes in the field of aesthetic tension of which the reader of the centon is ^[18]. In the history of modern literature, centons are known as comic poems, a kind of poetic charades and represent a small or marginal genre used exclusively for poetic entertainment. The researchers note that the reason for this attitude to the centons is connected with the pan-European trend towards the individualization of style: "The poetics of modern times... I saw in poetry the "confession of the soul" of the poet, the outpouring of his individual (or considered individual) feelings; individual feelings required individual means, "his own word", and the centon was something exactly the opposite – a set of other people's words" ^{[18, p. 197]}.

E.M. Meletinsky defined the centon form as "metapoesis" ^[21]. Of course, in the theory of literature, the centons received their genre interpretation as mainly poetic works – this is reflected in their typological limitations in relation to the Bakhtin concept of "someone else's word" and, for example, the modern concept of intertext. However, in the literature and literary studies of the XX century, an expansive understanding of centons as "quoted quotations" is asserted, from which many modern works of modernism and postmodernism are composed.

Perhaps the revival of the tradition of the centonic organization of the text is connected with the general crisis of authorship, which began at the end of the XIX century and was expressed in the situation of the artist losing the position of an out-of-the-way creator in relation to his own work. The author loses "power" over the work. The postmodern situation of the "death of the author" (R. Barth), which has become the subject of reflections of the greatest intellectuals of our time (Cf. some definitions of the author's subject in this situation: "fainting of the talking subject" (M. Foucault on J. Bataille), "anonymous and nomadic singularity" (J. Deleuze), "split subject" (Z. Freud, J. Lacan, Y. Kristeva), subjects as "empty names" (U. Eco), is implemented in literary texts of the XX century as the "principle of citation" ^[22], or cultural mediation.

As for the semiotic and semantic function of a quotation in the texts of modern literature organized according to the centonic principle, it must be said that, firstly, it loses the function of informativeness (references to another text), becoming "the key to the self-growth of the meaning of the text" ^{[23, p. 113]}, and, secondly, it loses of any source, of its author, endlessly repeating itself in mirror reflections of its own copies and simulacra: "Every text is an inter-text in relation to some other text," R. Barth wrote in the essay "From Work to Text" (1971), "but this intertextuality should not be understood in such a way that the text has some kind of origin; all searches for "sources" and "influences" correspond to the myth of the filiation of works, while the text is formed from anonymous, elusive and at the same time already read quotes - from quotes without quotes" ^{[24, p. 418]}.

Many modern postmodern literary works are structured according to the centonic principle; moreover, often the compositional structures themselves become "borrowed". Thus, the "foreign word" in a work of fiction becomes an opaque hint at the former, once became, becoming - for the future repetition of "one's own" as "alien" and "alien" as "one's own". M. Foucault in the preface to one of his first books (quite structuralist) as follows He expressed his attitude to his own authorship: "I would like this little thing-an event, barely noticeable among a great many other books, to be rewritten again and again, so that it breaks up into fragments, repeats, reflects, doubles and eventually disappears – and so that the one who happened to create it never he was able to achieve for himself the right to be her master or compulsively inspire others with what exactly he wanted to say in her and what exactly she should be" ^{[25, p. 22]}.

The aspects of M.M. Bakhtin's theory considered by us allow us to draw an important conclusion about the distinctive features of the organization of a literary text in modernist and postmodern literature.  

The organization of a literary text in modern postmodern literature takes place in accordance with the principles of citation and citation, i.e. cultural mediation of most artistic artifacts. The main difference between postmodernist works from the majority of reminiscing works of modernism is that allusions and reminiscences cease to perform the function of references to generally significant concepts in them, but work in the mode of a centonic (radically rethinking the original context – up to its leveling, "dissolution", "dispersion") organization of the literary text.