Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin

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Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin

The Dialogics of Madness: Language, Identity, and the Unravelling Self

Introduction:

The Newsletter Psychoanalytical Criticism - Mikhail Bakhtin aims to enlighten the profound and complex ideas of the Russian philosopher and literary theorist, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975), and to demonstrate their enduring relevance to contemporary literary and cultural studies. Our focus in this edition is a particularly resonant one: the complex relationship between literary discourse and the constructions of insanity.

Literature has long been a privileged space for exploring the fragile boundaries of the human mind. From Shakespeare’s tormented Prince of Denmark to the confined narrators of Charlotte Perkins Gilman or Sylvia Plath, the ‘mad’ character or voice challenges our stable notions of self, reason, and society. But how does language itself, the very stuff of literature, participate in constructing what we understand as madness? To examine this, we must turn to Bakhtin, whose revolutionary concepts provide not a diagnostic manual, but a linguistic and philosophical framework for understanding how identities—including those believed ‘insane’—are formed and contested in the dialogic clash of voices.

This newsletter will guide you through key Bakhtinian terms, explaining them in detail, before applying them to the complex interconnections between literature and the discourses of insanity. We will examine the relationship between writing and identity-formation, and investigate the interplay of social, medical, and historical forces that shape our understanding of the ‘mad’ self.

Key Concepts:

To fully grasp Bakhtin’s contribution to this topic, one must first become comfortable with his unique vocabulary. These are not merely jargon; they are precise tools for dissecting the nature of language and narrative.

• Dialogism (The Dialogic Principle)

Ø Explanation: This is the cornerstone of Bakhtin’s entire philosophy. He argued that language is inherently dialogic. This means that no word, utterance, or text exists in isolation. Every utterance is shaped by the words that have come before it and is anticipating a response. It is always addressed to someone and is part of an ongoing, unfinished conversation.

Ø  Example: When a novelist writes a sentence, they are in a dialogue with the entire history of the novel as a genre, with other writers, and with the anticipated responses of their readers. Similarly, an individual’s thought process is not a solitary monologue but an internal dialogue, filled with the voices of parents, teachers, cultural figures, and past selves.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: If a stable self is formed through a harmonious (if complex) dialogue with society, then madness, from a Bakhtinian perspective, might be seen as a breakdown in this dialogue—a situation where the internal voices become cacophonous, where the individual can no longer successfully answer or integrate the external social voices, or where their own voice is silenced or pathologised by powerful authoritative discourses (e.g., medical, patriarchal).

• Heteroglossia

Ø Explanation: Literally meaning “multiple-languagedness,” this term describes the central fact of social language. Any national language (e.g., English) is not a single, monolithic system but a living tapestry of many different ‘languages’ or social dialects. These are stratified according to profession (the language of lawyers, doctors, mechanics), generation (teenage slang), class, region, and ideology.

Ø  Example: A single novel can contain the heteroglot voices of a wealthy industrialist, a socialist revolutionary, a pious vicar, and a cynical journalist. The artistic genius of the novel, for Bakhtin, lies in its ability to orchestrate these diverse social languages without reducing them to a single, authorial viewpoint.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: The discourse of insanity itself is a powerful social language, often wielded by medical and institutional authorities. A Bakhtinian analysis would examine how this professional ‘language of psychiatry’ interacts with, labels, and attempts to overwrite the individual’s own social language and personal voice within a literary text.

• Authoritative vs. Internally Persuasive Discourse

Ø  Explanation: Bakhtin distinguishes between two ways in which we internalise external voices.

1. Authoritative Discourse: This is the language of authority, religion, parents, or political dogma that demands to be accepted and incorporated wholesale. It is static, finished, and hierarchical. We recite it; we do not genuinely dialogue with it. It operates as a monologic force—seeking to shut down dialogue.

2.  Internally Persuasive Discourse: This is language that we engage with, wrestle with, and make our own. It is open, dynamic, and enters into a dialogue with our other beliefs and experiences. It is the basis for authentic, organic identity formation.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: The process of diagnosis and institutionalisation can be seen as the imposition of an Authoritative Discourse (“You are hysterical,” “You suffer from neurasthenia”) upon a person’s Internally Persuasive Discourse. The literary depiction of madness often revolves around the conflict between these two forces, as the character’s own sense of self is threatened or dismantled by an authoritative medical or social label.

• Polyphony and the Carnivalesque

Ø  Explanation:

1.   Polyphony (“many-voicedness”): Bakhtin used this term specifically to describe Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels. He argued that Dostoevsky created a new type of novel where the author’s voice does not dominate those of the characters. Instead, the characters are fully realised, independent "consciousnesses" whose voices interact on a seemingly equal footing with the author's and with each other. The novel becomes a playground of competing ideologies and worldviews.

2.  Carnivalesque: Drawing on the medieval tradition of carnival, Bakhtin identified a literary mode that subverts and liberates. Carnival involves the temporary suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. It is a world of grotesque realism—focusing on the body, its lower strata (defecation, copulation), and its materiality—which debunks high-minded ideals and official culture through humour, chaos, and parody.

Ø  Relevance to Madness: The carnivalesque can be a powerful literary strategy for representing madness. The ‘mad’ character often behaves in a carnivalesque manner: they break social taboos, speak the unspeakable, and invert logical hierarchies (the fool becomes the wise one). Their discourse can carnivalise the sober, rational, ‘sane’ world, exposing its hypocrisies. A polyphonic novel allows the ‘mad’ voice to exist with its own integrity and challenge the reader’s assumptions, rather than being neatly contained and explained away by a dominant authorial or narrative voice.

The Dialogic Self: Writing and Identity-Formation in the Shadow of Madness

Bakhtin’s view of the self is not as a fixed, essential core, but as a project that is perpetually under construction through dialogue. The self is a meeting point of myriad social voices. We are who we are through our constantly evolving relationship with the words of others.

This has profound implications for understanding the nexus of writing, identity, and madness.

Ø  Writing as Self-Authorship: The act of writing, particularly in first-person narratives like diaries, confessions, or autobiographies, is a potent tool for identity-formation. It is an attempt to organise the internal dialogue, to take the chaotic multitude of influencing voices and craft them into a coherent narrative of the self. It is a process of making the Internally Persuasive.

Ø  The Fractured Text of the ‘Mad’ Self: When the social dialogue breaks down—when the authoritative discourses of medicine or family become overwhelmingly oppressive and monologic—the project of self-construction can falter. The literary representation of this is often a fractured text: a stream-of-consciousness that jumps between voices, a diary that reveals paranoia and disintegration, or a narrative where the protagonist’s voice is constantly interrupted and re-defined by the diagnostic language of doctors (as seen in The Yellow Wallpaper). The writing does not create a coherent self but documents its unravelling, showcasing a failed dialogue.

The Inter-relationship of Social, Medical, and Historical Constructions

A Bakhtinian approach insists that ‘madness’ is not a transhistorical, biological given. It is a discursive construction—its meaning is created and fought over within language and culture, across different historical periods.

Ø  Social & Historical Constructions: The ‘village idiot’ of the 17th century, the ‘nervous hysteric’ of the Victorian era, and the ‘schizophrenic’ of the 20th century are all products of their specific time and place. Each era has its own heteroglot array of voices (religious, judicial, medical, familial) that compete to define what constitutes unreasonable behaviour. Literature is a key archive of these competing discourses.

Ø  Medical Discourse as Authority: The rise of psychiatry and psychoanalysis saw the medical profession’s language become a supremely authoritative discourse in defining insanity. Literary texts often stage a clash between this clinical, objectifying language and the subjective, experiential language of the sufferer. The question becomes: Whose voice gets to define the reality of the experience? The patient’s internally persuasive, but chaotic, account? Or the doctor’s authoritative, diagnostic label?

Ø  Gender and the Female Malady: This power dynamic is intensely gendered. Historically, medical and social discourses have often pathologised female rebellion, sexuality, and intellectual ambition as forms of madness (‘hysteria’ derives from the Greek for ‘womb’). A Bakhtinian reading of a text like Jane Eyre would not just analyse Bertha Mason as a ‘madwoman in the attic’; it would analyse the authoritative discourses (Mr. Rochester’s patriarchal voice, the medical voice of restraint) that label and confine her, silencing her own voice and rendering her a monstrous, grotesque figure. Her muffled roars and violent acts can be read as a desperate, non-linguistic, carnivalesque attempt to break back into the dialogue from which she has been excluded.

Conclusion:

For Bakhtin, the human being is always unfinalisable. There is no final word that can be said about a person; the dialogue of identity is always open to new responses and reinterpretations. This is a profoundly humane vision.

Applying this to the discourse of insanity in literature allows us to move beyond simplistic readings of ‘madness’ as a plot device or a tragic flaw. Instead, we can see it as:

1. A dialogic breakdown between the individual and the world.
2. A site of struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses.
3. A carnivalesque force that can challenge and expose the limitations of ‘sane’ society.
4. A construct shaped by the heteroglossia of its specific historical and social moment.

Literature, in its highest polyphonic form, does not give us answers about madness. Instead, it preserves the complexity of the dialogue, allowing the myriad voices—the sufferer, the doctor, the family, society—to sound together in all their conflict and confusion. It refuses to let the authoritative discourse have the final word, keeping the conversation, and thus our understanding, provocatively and productively open.

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