The sovereignty of the writer in the notebooks

Between the notebooks and the novels there is more than the usual distance between the draft and the finished work, the plan and the novel. There is the breath of life which animates the clay bird, the free flight which liberates creature from creator. Bakhtin's polyphonic theory springs from his admiration for the freedom of Dostoyevsky's heroes and it is valuable because he plumbs the depths and discovers the foundations of this freedom. We share some of his conclusions and agree with his analysis of dialogue and speech in Dostoyevsky, but the premises are too absolute and his theory is only true as a tool. Bakhtin was like a member of the audience coming to a theatre just as the actors are improvising in a play by Pirandello. He believed in the illusion of the novel, which he transformed into a theory. But he had not seen the rehearsals, he had not read the technical diary of the author – a good part of his notebooks – questioning himself about composition and human architecture, doubting and hesitant: he had not taken part in the brutal experiments with final gestures: he deliberately ignored the dramatist writing the play with his characters, or slipping into the shadow of the chronicler to become a hagiographer. Bakhtin dealt with the fully grown novel and ignored its making. If he had studied the notebooks, which were not available in 1929, he would have seen that in fact Dostoyevsky was using all his skill to transfer his powers to the hero.