#bakhtin

the carnivalesque and Ghost pt 1 of ???

The world of culture and literature is essentially as boundless as the universe. We are speaking not about its geographical breadth (this is limited), but about its semantic depths, which are as  bottomless as the depths of matter. The infinite diversity of interpretations, images, figurative semantic combinations, materials and their interpretations, and so forth. We have narrowed  it terribly by selecting and by modernizing what has been selected. We impoverish the past and do not enrich ourselves. We are suffocating in the captivity of narrow and homogeneous interpretations.

Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, 'The Master and Margarita', can be regarded as a highly original literary illustration of Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque novel. ... The appearance of Woland in Moscow and the subsequent immersion of the Soviet capital in 'mirthful time and space' evoke death, injury, madness and destruction on a scale unknown in Goethe, but these events are meant to be perceived comically, since the victims are the representatives of human banality and vulgarity. ... this terror of carnival surpasses and paralyzes the usual and 'monologic' terror of the NKVD...

Bakhtin often refers to the participants in a dialogic conception of truth as ‘voice-ideas’. By this phrase he has in mind a unity of idea and personality: the idea represents a person’s integral point of view on the world, which cannot be abstracted from the person voicing it. Conversely, the person who holds the idea becomes a full personality by virtue of that idea, the idea is not just something he happens to believe, but is an essential shaping force throughout his life. Such ideas are, as Dostoevsky observed, ‘felt’. When two such voice-ideas come to interact, they may produce a dialogue changing both of them and giving rise to new insights and new dialogues. The ‘unity’ of truth becomes the unified ‘feel’ of a conversation, not the unity of a single proposition, however complex, that may result from it. When monologic thinkers encounter such conversations, they try to extract just such a finalising proposition, but in doing so they are false to the dialogic process itself.