DOSTOYEVSKY IN CAPE TOWN
University of Manchester, UK
Abstract
Mikhail Bakhtin considered Dostoyevsky the creator of the polyphonic novel. The uniqueness of Dostoyevsky's literary style was in his ability to give voice to his characters, making it so they could almost be considered the authors themselves. Taking inspiration from Dostoyevsky's literary style and Bakhtin's analysis, we can imagine a kind of ethnographic observation of urban phenomena in which the city is compared to a literary text and its inhabitants can be compared to its characters-authors. In “Dostoyevsky in Cape Town” I sought to represent post-Apartheid Cape Town by comparing it to a novel build by interweaving its inhabitants' individual voices. Like in Dostoyevsky's novels, Cape Town was taken as a polyphonic entity made up of different independent voices that weave into a single narrative body.
Summary
Mikhail Bakhtin explained how when he became familiar with the voluminous literature about Dostoyevsky, he had the impression that it wasn't about a single author who had written novels and stories, but rather a series of philosophical statements made by several thinkers (Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, The Grand Inquisitor, and so on). Bakhtin noted that for some authors Dostoyevsky's voice merges with the voice of one or another of his characters. Other authors see it as the peculiar synthesis of these ideological voices; yet others considered his voice simply drowned out by them. (Bakthin). In Dostoyevsky's novels, the voice of the character (the hero) is ideologically authoritative and independent. He is perceived as the author of a fully weighted ideological conception of his own, and not as the object of Dostoevsky's finalizing artistic vision. I argue that by translating Dostoyevsky's literary style and taking inspiration from Mikhail Bakhtin's text analysis, we can envision a particular type of ethnographic observation in which the city is compared to a text and its characters to actual authors. In March 2011 I went to Cape Town in order to observe processes of signification in post-Apartheid Cape Town. My research's goal was to observe the process of signifying urban places through a multi-perspective method to be able to represent the city through its differences. Taking inspiration from Dostoyevsky's literary novels, I compared Cape Town to a polyphonic text made up of different independent voices that form the metropolis' narrative plot in their intersection.
From the polyphonic novel to the discovery of the city
Bakhtin noted that “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky's novels.” Bakhtin explains how the main characters in Dostoyevsky, by his creative design, are truly more than objects of the author's word; they are “subjects of their own directly significant word.” (Bakthin 1984:13). The word of the hero is never only explicated in the usual descriptive and pragmatic-narrative functions and “as a vehicle for the author's own ideological position (as with Byron, for instance).” (Bakthin 1984:14) The hero's consciousness is given like another consciousness, but, as Bakhtin notes, “at the same time it does not reify, it does not close itself, and it does not become a mere object of the author's consciousness.” (Bakthin 1984:15)
According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky is the creator of the polyphonic novel. His work does “not fit any of the preconceived frameworks or historico-literary schemes that we usually apply to various species of the European novel.” (Bakhtin 1984:15). Bakhtin explains that in Dostoyevsky's works heroes appear whose voice is constructed like one would construct “the author's voice in an ordinary kind of novel” (Bakhtin 1984:18). The word of the hero about himself and his world is fully autonomous “as the author's word usually is” (Bakhtin 1984:18). It cannot be subject to the hero's objectified image or “serve as a mouthpiece for the author's voice” (Bakhtin 1984:18). The character's voice has absolute independence within the work's structure and “sounds, as it were, alongside the author's word” (Bakhtin 1984:18) in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters. (Bakthin 1984:18)
According to Bakhtin, the fundamental characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s novels is that they contain voices and independent, unmerged consciousnesses. The novel is not the fixed object of the author’s explicit intention and fully artistic decisions, but a polyphony of fully independent voices. Dostoyevsky carefully avoids describing his characters’ biographies in an analytical way, but allows them to emerge in fragmented form as the novel is written. Something which could be simply considered a stylistic choice conceals a deeper intention on the part of the author: that of retaining the individual subjectivity of his characters. Dostoyevsky’s characters are themselves creators, in addition to being created by their writer. Each one has his own philosophy within the novel.
Taking inspiration from Bakhtin's analysis, I argue that we can transfer Dostoyevsky's literary style to the ethnographic observation of the city. We can adopt a particular mode of ethnographic representation in which the ethnographer/author's voice is set alongside that of the city's inhabitants. I also argue that we can compare the city to a polyphonic novel made up of different independent voices that intersect and overlap with each other to form the metropolis' narrative plot.
In his research in Sao Paulo Massimo Canevacci compares the city to a polyphonic text with different autonomous voices. The title of his book “La Città Polifonica” [Polyphonic City] (1986) is meant to signify that “the city in general and urban communication can be compared to a choir singing a multiplicity of autonomous voices that are crossing, relate to each other, overlap, isolate each other and contrast with each other.” (Canevacci 1986:17)
The analogy is clear here with Dostoyevsky's textual construction and Bakhtin's ideas which Canevacci cites only sporadically. Nonetheless, the parallels between the city's textual construction and the narrative construction of the novel emerge powerfully. Like Dostoyevsky's heroes/characters, Canevacci identifies individual voices in the city's places that the author/researcher never drowns out through a single-voiced, levelling interpretation, leaving them free to express themselves through the writing. Canevacci takes the operation of writing the city as a montage work in which the voices of the author and those of the object of study (seen in its subjectivity) intersect and unfold side by side. Like Dostoyevsky's characters, the city's places (considered as an ethnographic object of study) do not appear as silent slaves of the author's interpretation, emerging in their total autonomy and freedom. The places of Sao Paulo, its squares, streets, shopping centres and museums, are seen as subjects that have their autonomy voice that the researcher can narrate without drowning them out under an authorial viewpoint.
Unfortunately, though Canevacci recognized the metropolis' polyphony, he stopped at narrating the city through his voice alone. This gives rise to the paradox of the polyphonic city narrated only though the voice of one person (who sets himself up as the translator of different voices). In his writing, the voices of the city's inhabitants in their singularity are almost absent. Canevacci emphasized how the city is imbued with the memories of its inhabitants' temporalities (their memories, hopes and imaginations). Yet he limits his text to the places of the city seen as keepers of temporality. He does not extend his observation to the point of examining how these places were experienced, imagined and remembered by them.
Dostoyevsky's literary style can be associated with another work about post-Apartheid Cape Town. Imagining the City (2007) in which Sean Field, Renate Meyer and Felicity Swanson represent the city through a plurivocal viewpoint made up of the intertwining of the different viewpoints and voices of its inhabitants. The book is organised in eleven chapters in which the authors describe Cape Town taking different vantage points on it. Field explains how through this project the authors sought to give voice to the city's regular people whose perspective has been neglected amidst the broad generalisations of those looking at the post-Apartheid period. Cape Town is recounted through the eyes of township inhabitants, former residents of District Six, survivors of the terrorist attacks in 1998 and 2000, and through the eyes of immigrants, musicians, hip hop music lyricists and rugby players. In some passages, the voices of the city's residents join those of the authors who intervene in the text with their interpretations. In other cases the authors leave the stories and images ‘to speak for themselves’. Cape Town is represented in this work as a complex organism, made up of a discontinuous collection of viewpoints and voices overlapping and interweaving into a single narrative structure.
In the introduction Sean Field explains that they chose this particular methodological approach with the goal of suggesting an alternative to all of the uniformising generalisations of many works about post-Apartheid South African cities. Citing Nuttal and Michael, he notes how theorizing South Africa has been characterized by “the overriding analytical weight given to politics, resistance struggle and race as determinant of identity.” (Nuttal and Michael in Field 2007:7). Field explains that, despite “stories about political resistance struggles” are issues discussed in the work, they are not its central focus. He wrote: “We explore rather the neglected significance of popular imagination in shaping memories, identities and agency. We assert the centrality of attempts of people to construct, contest and maintain a material and emotionally secure sense of place and identity in Cape Town.” (Field 2007:7). The insistence of the centrality of the imagination and memory of individuals and their ability to create their own rapport with the city's urban spaces is set in open antithesis with the instrumentalist and developmentary tendencies of many studies about the post-Apartheid period that took the city as “a problem to be solved.” Mbembe and Nuttal noted how post-Apartheid cities were often observed through the lens of a single development paradigm (Murray 2007:8) and are more concerned “with whether the city is changing along vectors of institutional governance, deracialisation of service provision and local politics than with citiness as such” (Mbembe and Nuttal 2004 in Murray 2007:9). Field rejects the monological, uniformising perspective of a top-down approach and contrasts it with a decentralized and polyphonic viewpoint in which the post-Apartheid city is seen through the many pathways of its inhabitants' memory and imagination. “It is through the ways people imaginatively frame and place of memory that the disparate narrative threads of this book are linked and speak to multiple senses of the city.” (Field 2007:7)Starting from these bases, I sought to adopt a particular method to observe the city from a multiple perspective. My primary objective was to observe the process of signifying Cape Town, seeking to explore how it was perceived by individuals in their individuality and their idiosyncrasy. In this way I strove to observe, understand and represent this process of signifying urban places, seeing them not only as a shared public expression of the city, but primarily as intimate, private experiences.
Taking inspiration from this and other works, I decided that I could represent post-Apartheid Cape Town from a polyphonic viewpoint too, in which the city could be told through the memories and imaginations of its inhabitants. Comparing the city's ethnographic description to a polyphonic novel, I could consider the city's inhabitants as authors who interpreted and “created” their social worlds in different ways. There is no human (and social) world with its own truth; it possesses no independent character. The human world is subject to a plurivocality of interpretations; “the world can be interpreted equally well in innumerable, vastly different and deeply incompatible ways” (Rapport 1997:47). Based on these assumptions, the social world can be understood as the contradictory, unstable sum of these interpretations. As in the novel understood by Bakhtin as a pluridiscursive reality in which the different voices (of the author and narrating voices) are taken as parts of a whole but do not coincide, in the world as “artwork”, human beings are simultaneously an essential part of the whole and autonomous voices that cannot be reduced to it. Though they are part of the whole, they scrutinise it, interpret it, and create it: “Human beings may themselves be part of the world, may be viewing in from situated, interested and partisan perspectives, but nonetheless, it is they who created the world, create themselves, and their perspectives in their interpretations” (Rapport 2000:86). Taking inspiration from Bakhtin's literary analysis we can compare ethnographic, textual construction to that of a novel and to the city as an artwork. This means that each social actor can be conceived as a creator and a co-author who writes, interprets, and creates a particular meaning.
Taking inspiration from the research method used by Andrew Irving in his study on HIV-positive individuals in London, New York, and Kampala, I decided to adopt a multiple viewpoint of the city. I asked my interviewees to identify places in Cape Town that had a particular meaning because connected to certain events in their lives. Moving through Cape Town's different places, photographing the city's spaces and recording the interviews, I observed how they reconstructed the events of their lives putting them in relationship to the city's urban spaces. Each stop in the city can be considered a mnemonic and emotional area in which the interviewees reconstruct part of their narrative.
Conclusions
In The Conquest of America (1982) , Tzvetan Torodov chose a particular narrative style to represent the 17th-century conquest of America, overlapping the different life stories and perspectives of the protagonist, including Columbus, Cortes, Montezuma, Las Casas, Cabeza de Vaca, Duran, and Sahagun. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan explained how in this way the author sought a particular way to relate with otherness and found it by telling their stories. Vulcan wrote: The “exemplary” nature of the narrative, in Todorov's sense, lies not in its claim to universality, but precisely in its specificity and singularity. Todorov is not concerned with History in the upper case, but precisely with the lower case mode: with particular and diverse histories of the relation to the other. Vulcan explains how this particular mode of representing the story can be compared to what Bakhtin called a character zone:
These zones [which] are formed from the characters' semi-discourses, from various forms of hidden transmission for the discourse of the other, by the words and expressions scattered in this discourse, and from the irruption of alien expressive elements into authorial discourse (ellipsis, questions, exclamation). Such a zone is the range of action of the character's voice, intermingling in one way or another with the author's voice. (Bakhtin in Vulcan 2007:155)
Vulcan notes how in this way Torodov achieves surprising results, upsetting the “monolithic picture” through which historic periods were often represented, “such as the “worldview of the Victorians” or the “Elizabethan world picture” (Vulcan 2007:155). Adopting the “voices” of the different protagonists, Torodov can observe the phenomenon he is studying through a multi-perspective viewpoint. “The significance of the work as a whole may be perceived in the various permutations and intermediate nuances of all these options, in the interstices of these relations with the other.” (Vulcan 2007:156) Vulcan explains that in order to understand the book we must relate it to Dostoyevsky’s literary style and particularly its analysis by Bakhtin.
The best exotopy is precisely the one Dostoevsky practices, insofar as it does not confine the character in the consciousness of the author and puts into question the very notion of the privileging of one consciousness above another. A character in Dostoevsky is an unaccomplished, incomplete, heterogeneous being, but that is the reason of its superiority, because we are all, as we have seen, subjects only in unaccomplishment. [...] Dostoevsky's characters are like us; that is, incomplete, they are like so many authors, rather than the [finalized] characters of ancient authors. (Bakthin in Vulcan 2007:156)
Vulcan notes how the narrative mode that Torodov adopt and his decision to follow the cue of Dostoyevsky should be seen both as a stylistic choice and as an ethical choice, to which I would add an epistemological choice. “At the core of this project there is a yet implicit but powerful connection between the way we get to know or understand the other and the ethical choices we make. What leads to this realization is a direct reference to Bakhtin's “exotopy”: “an affirmation of the other's exteriority which goes hand in hand with the recognition of the other as subject” (Torodov in Vulcan 2007:156)
Like Torodov, in this article I sought to borrow Dostoyevsky’s literary style and take a cue from Bakhtin's ideas in order to observe post-Apartheid Cape Town. I thereby sought to observe the city through its residents' intimate, private experiences. We noted how many scholars of the post-Apartheid phenomenon have underscored the need to adopt new approaches based a multiple perspective observation of the city. Having abandoned the top-down, elite view in which the only viewpoint on a city coincides with that of its planners these new approaches consider the possibility of observing the city from different vantage points. Field wrote:
Views, whether they are of urban landscapes, politics or conceptual paradigms, can be misleading. What do you see from where you are positioned? How does this shape your outlook on life? How does this shape your memories of spaces and places of this city? The crucial significance of vantage points is that they are shaped by who you are, where you are, and when you are experiencing and constructing this view (Field 2007:7).
Taking inspiration from Dostoyevsky's novel, we can imagine a type of observation of a city in which each voice of the city can be understood as the creation of a different author. From this perspective, the role of the ethnographer is to avoid levelling the voices of the different authors, freeing them and letting them express themselves each in their own way.
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