The Spatial Form of the Character as an Aesthetic Event Chronotopically Defined

ABSTRACT

The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the place of space in the conceptual construction of Bakhtinian dialogism. It is understood that space and spatiality are categories that define the nature of the dialogical relations translated into act and aesthetic event. For this purpose, it is based on the concepts of chronotope and the spatial form of the character as constructed in the verbal creation of Dostoevsky, especially his understanding of the image of language as a spatial premise of articulation of points of view in confrontation and of autonomous and plenivalent consciences.

KEYWORDS:
Space; Chronotope; Aesthetic Event; Unfinalizability; Image of Language

RESUMO

O principal objetivo desse ensaio é analisar o lugar do espaço na construção conceitual do dialogismo bakhtiniano. Entende-se que espaço e espacialidades são categorias que definem a natureza das relações dialógicas traduzidas em ato e em acontecimento estético. Para isso, fundamenta-se nos conceitos de cronotopo e na forma espacial da personagem tal como construídos na criação verbal de Dostoiévski, sobretudo sua compreensão da imagem da linguagem como premissa espacial de articulação de pontos de vista em confronto e de consciências autônomas e plenivalentes.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Espaço; Cronotopo; Acontecimento estético; Inacabamento; Imagem da linguagem

Introduction: Image of Language as Space

Although the character, in a very elementary level of the work of verbal art, is presented as an approach to the discursive organization of the author, within the discursive construction created by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his novels and novellas, a character can only be developed as a propagator of his/her own language. In other words, instead of being an outcome of the author's view, the character is settled in by his/her own discourse, which guides his/her approach, particularly when he/she dialogues with himself/herself or with another person, including the author. Whether by the means of a clash, or by confrontation, the image of language produced this way is expressed according to discursive dimensions, which, at the same time, are positioned and displayed under different points of view and even unleashed by a creative reaction that distinguishes an aesthetic production from a breakthrough gesture.

The image of language subjected to the discursive relation presents it, consequently, as a place where discursive approaches are arranged, dispelled, but are not avoided. If we consider that in that place an image translates - consonant and dissonant - ideas, it is not difficult to understand how Dostoevsky has reached the recognition of the polyphonic novel as an artistic mode of the world. It is also not hard to comprehend why Mikhail Bakhtin, when he approaches the poetic singularities of the polyphonic novel, did not hesitate to acknowledge that "He [Dostoevsky] saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time" (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.28).¹ Therefore, it is not much of a problem to assume that the spatial prevalence of the dialogic relationships does not oppose time or eliminates history, but it only places the movement in the same time when the changes happened and in the transitory moment when there was a shift of conditions, when distinguished point of views coexisted and counterpoints were expressed in different development dimensions in the best tradition of the dialectical thought. After all, it is as space where different points of view in interaction and confrontation are able to produce dialogic dimensions in which the character clearly appears in an outer form of his/her ideas.

The image of language, as performed by Dostoevsky's characters, organizes founding experiences of the artistic mode of the world in a polyphonic novel. In these novels, different discursive formations mark the force field of actions and reactions, which lead to the ultimate consequences of the relation and the clash between author and character or between discourses. This is what Bakhtin attempts to analyze in a constellation of texts, which started to be produced in the 1920s and that, in the 1930s, ² led to the innovative thesis regarding the polyphony that matures the time movement in the spatial relationships. We could say that studies on the image of language constitute one of the points of the spatial form of the character and of the chronotope in a triagulation, whose theoretical and philosophical premisses definitely define a framework of poetics analysis and the fullness of aesthetics realization. From this triad framework, the spatial form of the character turns this aesthetic event constituted chronotopically into a new object of philosophic, poetic and aesthetic work that recquires a renewed methodology of analysis, which is a task that Bakhtin assigns to a dialogic theory.

If, on the one hand, Bakhtin has been guided by the artistic model of the world through language and aesthetic event, on the other hand, he has pursued the dialogic fundamentals, in which the use of language is only made possible as a form of knowledge and self-knowledge. Taking into consideration the unfinabilizability inherent to the nature of language manifestations, Bakhtin starts a reflection that moves along aesthetics and philosophy, which can be summarized by what has become the seed of the aesthetic event understood as the spatial form of character that is constituted chronotopically. This conception appears as a key pillar for the historical poetics studies and it aligns findings from different contexts of research.

Much of what Bakhtin observed in Dostoevsky's novels regarding the image of language is a hallmark or a turning point for the theoretical research from the 1920s and the theoretical systematization that started to gain shape after the publication of his book on Dostoevsky's poetics. The problem of the spatial form of the character falls within the studies on the aesthetic event, which spans studies on general aesthetics, Dostoevsky's poetics, and historical poetics. An aesthetic event - and not an aesthetic object - addresses the act of creation translated into language, i.e., into discursive points of view that are stated by the characters and the author. It is always expressed as an event, an act, an action and reaction in language, but not as something finalized and ended once and for all.

In the lenghty essay on the relation between author and character (BAKHTIN, 1990), Bakhtin translates the dialogic movement into the conception of spatial form of the character and the aesthetic act that it creates. It is in this translation that the compositional planes explore the struggle between points of view, which sets the focus on its ambivalence, i.e., on the clash of the author's and the character's positionings, thus enabling their actual role, in which there is no passivity of one in relation to the other, to be captured. Nevertheless, it is the essay on forms of time and of chronotope (BAKHTIN, 1981)³ that articulates and sheds light on the formulations, enabling us to analyze the dialogic connections between the polyphonic novel, the spatial form of the character and the time-space aspects. What had been potencially developed in Dostoevsky's novel gained a theoretical shape with a fine-tuned conceptual elaboration. Thus, we are able to understand the spatial form of the character that is chronotopically constituted not only in a dynamic relation between author and character, but also in the articulation between time and space in which the emphasis on the latter does not imply the deletion of the first.⁴ When Bakhtin layed the groundwork for his historical poetics, he introduces the concept of chronotope in order to designate the way that time can be regarded as a spatial dimension. Time, which is submitted to space and everything related to it, which includes characters and living things, can be dimensioned in its temporal magnitude, i.e., in its flows and becomings in which each form is architecturally unfinalized.

To scrutinize the development and the articulation of the pillars that support the dialogic conceptions has become the key justification for this study. The goal is to follow the path and the thoughts and rethoughts in which the conception of the spatial form of the character is aesthetically established. According to our fundamental hypothesis, the seed of such process has been developed in the aesthetical and philosophical reflections in which the spatial form is conceived as a patchwork of positionings. The living body matures in Bakhtin's findings on the poetic procedures of Dostoevsky's verbal creation, mainly on his comprehension of the image of language as a spatial premisse that articulates clashing points of view, autonomous and single authorial consciousness. Taking in consideration that the analysis of the spatial form of the character is not restricted to Dostoevsky's work, but has become the heuristic principle in researching historical poetics itself, we understand that the arguments regarding the spatial prevalence as a place where changes happen become more established when the spatial form of the character is chronotopically defined. This way, we seek to situate the Bakhtinian concepts in contexts other than the creative artistic experience and to show its heuristic principle in the aesthetical and philosophical analysis.

1 Dostoevsky's Principle of Simultaneity and Spatial Dramatization

We are aware that the verbal creation does not build the outer spatial form as it is done in painting, sculpting, drawing, even if one takes in consideration the spatiality of the word and the writting on a printed page (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.91). In comparison with spatial forms of art, which are based on two-dimensional or three-dimensional visuality, there is nothing visual about the verbal creation.

However, in Dostoevsky's novels, Bakhtin finds visuality on verbal creation: A visuality that does not mean places, whether as the page's exteriority or a narrative situation, but that is more closely related to a compositional diagram of the movement of ideas translated into different points of view in order to make visible the frame of the visual field, where discourses from different constitution and action orientation interact. From this diagram, we are introduced to the spatiality that is developed by the images of the novelistic language as discursive clash. Therefore, the spatial form of a character stems from the translation of the alignments of the visual field, which are constituted by different points of view, and due to that an image of an arena as a struggle place is projected.

Dostoevsky's novellas were an experimental laboratory for this kind of composition, which would acquire acknowledgement to this author's great novels. Bakhtin, bearing in mind his philosophical premisses deeply formulated in the 1920s, showed interest in the struggles of ideas that the characters carry in order to develop their discursive autonomy in spite of the author and in conflict with him. It is time to introduce the experiments made in Dostoevsky's work in our analysis.

In the novel Notes From Underground⁵ (Записки иЗ подполья [Zapiski iz podpol'ya], 1864), a frame of ideas, which are constituted by this relation between them, develops a tense and argumentative discourse. It is in this context that the character discusses and challenges consensual points of view regarding the necessity of human beings to stand apart from inventions in order to have individual experiences, as it can be read in the following excerpt.

To start with, when in all these thousands of years has man ever acted solely to his own advantage? What about all the millions of facts that bear witness to people knowingly, that is to say fully understanding their real advantages, putting them into the background and flinging themselves onto another path, at risks, at chances, and not because anyone and anything has forced them to do so, but as if not wishing to follow the appointed path they stubbornly and wilfully thrust their way along another, difficult, absurd one, barely able to make it out in the darkness? Well, it means that man really finds this obstinacy and wilfulness more pleasant than any kind of advantage to himself.... Advantage! What is advantage? And would you take it upon yourselves to give a completely accurate definition of what it is that human advantage consists of? And what if it so happens that sometimes human advantage not only can, but even must, lie precisely in the fact that under certain circumstances man desires what is bad for himself and not what is advantageous? And if this is so, if this circumstance is even possible, then the whole rule is blown to the Wind. What do you think, can this event arise? You are laughing; laugh away, gentlemen, only tell me: are human advantages calculated altogether reliably? Are there not some that not only do not fit in, but cannot fit into any form of classification? After all, gentlemen, as far as I can see, you have taken your whole register of human adavantages from averages derived from statiscal data and scientific and economic formulae. And since your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace, etc., etc. (DOSTOEVSKY, 1999, pp.22-23).⁶

In this context or, even better, within this arena, language is developed as an image that is fulfilled with discursive clashes between different ideas by the use of analyses, ironic questions, confrontation, challenges to the other's idea, tergiversation. Those are some of the procedures that place the categories of interaction and coexistence as essential for Dostoevsky's artistic model (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.28).⁷ For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's principle of simultaneity is grounded in those categories. This is an artistic perception of the world, whose conceptual framework regards both the points of view that are projected and the moment when the living experiences occur and become experiences within the continuous movement in presentness; thus, there is no causality, no genesis and no explanations based on the past and on the influences of the environment. In such moments, the character lives his/her present in all its fullness, free from the author's predetermination (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.29).⁸ One can observe, for example, that in the novels Notes From Underground and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (Зимние Заметки о летних впечатлениях [Zimniye zametki o letnikh vpechatleniyakh], 1863]⁹ the events are projected in narrative modes of time transposition. In Notes From Underground, the current state of consciousness is due to a past; in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, the character turns his journey abroad into present. It is achieved not by the account on the places seen, but by the character's impressions on the events that took place in Paris, London and Berlin, which are developed in comparison to St. Petersburg, where the character lives and, thus, from the continuous present filled with meetings, displacements, and conflicts.

In its aesthetic composition, the work is unfolded, following the multidimensionality of life, in which the idea is that which is essential. However, the role of the hero is only suitable for human beings (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.31).¹⁰ The ideas are not portrayed as isolated consciousnesses, but in dramatic places of coexistence and contiguity between consciousnesses (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.32),¹¹ such as in the excerpts of The Double (двoйник [Dvoinik], 1846),¹² in which the thematic regards the dramatic unfolding of Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin. An example of such drama is possible to be noted when Golyadkin is in the middle of the street in a cold night, after having been expelled from a ball that he had been the entire day getting set up for, and, from the thin air of fog, someone similar to him emerges. In this very living moment, the time is broken, the body is duplicated and the mind is expanded in a patchwork of feelings.

At the moment he took in nothing surrounding him, understood nothing of what was going on about him, and looked as though the miseries of the stormy night, of the long tramp, the rain, the snow, the wind, all the cruelty of the weather, did not exist for him. The golosh slipping off the boot on Mr. Golyadkin's right foot was left behind in the snow and slush on the pavement of Fontanka, and Mr. Golyadkin did not think of turning back to get it, did not, in fact, notice that he lost it. He was so perplexed that, in spite of everything surrounding him, he stood several times stockstill in the middle of the pavement completely possessed by the thought of his recent horrible humiliation; at that instant he was dying, disappearing; then he suddenly set off again like mad and ran and ran without looking back, as though he were pursued, as though he were fleeing from some still more awful calamity.... The position was truly awful!... At last Mr. Golyadkin halted in exhaustion, leaned on the railing in the attitude of a man whose nose had suddenly begun to bleed, and began looking intently at the black troubled waters of the canal. There is no knowing what length of time he spent like this. All that is known is that at that instant Mr. Golyadkin reached such a pitch of despair, was so harassed, so tortured, so exhausted, and so weakened in what feeble faculties were left him that he forgot everything, forgot the Ismailovsky Bridge, forgot Shestilavotchny Street, forgot his present plight.... After all, what did it matter to him? The thing was done. The decision was affirmed and ratified; what could he do? All at once... all at once he started and involuntarily skipped a couple of paces aside. With unaccountable uneasiness he began gazing about him; but no one was there, nothing special had happened, and yet ... and yet he fancied that just now, that very minute, some one was standing near him, beside him, also leaning on the railing, and - marvellous to relate! - had even said something to him, said something quickly, abruptly, not quite intelligibly, but something quite private, something concerning himself. "Why, was it my fancy?" said Mr. Golyadkin, looking round once more. "But where am I standing?" (DOSTOEVSKY, 1997, pp.33-34).¹³

From this strangement of his body and of his place emerges a figure that is repuditaed by Mr. Golyadkin, who denies it, runs, runs away from it, feels followed by it; however, after a long struggle, when he was about to arrive at home, he gives up.

Mr. Golyadkin wanted to scream, but could not-to protest in some way, but his strength failed him. His hair stood on end, and he almost fell down with horror. And, indeed, there was good reason. He recognised his nocturnal visitor. The nocturnal visitor was no other than himself - Mr. Golyadkin himself, another Mr. Golyadkin, but absolutely the same as himself - in fact, what is called a double in every respect ... (DOSTOEVSKI, 1997, p.38).¹⁴

The unfolding movement of the other was phisically marked by the character's uneasiness, his detachment from his galosh, his bleeding nose. Such are the physical clues that something was coming out from his body, which was in a state of trance. From the moment when Golyadkin recognizes his double, the novella is developed in a multidimensionality of interaction and coexistence of a man disturbed by his own body. This goes on until the end, when his disturbance becomes clearly a mental disorder.

In the narrated plot, feelings, thoughts, figures, space and time are combined, compounding a diagram that is, according to Bakhtin's understanding, due to a dramatic composition, in which the most diverse elements are expressed in a coherent and yet tense follow-up, as it is summed up in the following excerpt.

This stubborn urge to see everything as coexisting, to perceive and show all things side by side and simultaneous, as if they existed in space and not in time, leads Dostoevsky to dramatize, in space, even internal contradictions and internal stages of development of a single person - forcing a character to converse with his own double, with his alter ego, with his own caricature (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.28).¹⁵

This is a finding on the characters that are translated into multidimensional images in struggle, which are projected in visual fields, exceeding them and reaching their exteriority. The characters are discursively developed as images in the force field of their spatial forms. In this context, the character appears as a "particular point of view on the world and on oneself" (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.47, italics in the original)¹⁶ and, as such, he/she expresses himself/herself as a world view, i.e., as a consciousness and a self-consciousness in the visual field of his/her living experience. Following Bakhtin's perspective, "We see not who he is, but how he is conscious of himself" (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.49, italics in the original).¹⁷ Thus, the character self-consciousness is developed in the visual field of the others; this is the case of the underground man, who introduces himself as the "subject of consciousness and dream" (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.51)¹⁸ and of Mr. Golyadkin, who externally projects his interior disorder.

Meanwhile our underground hero recognizes all this perfectly well himself, and understands perfectly well the impossibility of escaping from that circle in which his attitude toward the other moves. Thanks to this attitude toward the other's consciousness, a peculiar perpetuum mobile is achieved, made up of his internal polemic with another and with himself, an endless dialogue where one reply begets another, which begets a third, and so on to infinity, and all of this without any forward motion (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.230, italics in the original).¹⁹

Perpetuum mobile does not only regard the moves in the space, but it also places the time dimension in it, which is enwrapped by the present as an ininterrupt becoming of everything that is alive in the thoughts and actions. The image of self-consciousness could not be better translated than as this image of perpetuum mobile.

The visual form is developed as a point of view or as a world conception produced in a self-consciousness process that leads Bakhtin to define Dostoevsky's character as an ideologist (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.78),²⁰ as a man of ideas, whose representation defines the artistic quality of the verbal work and its visuality. After all, it is in the plane of ideas that the refractions gain shape as a reactive creation.

The experience of simultaneities, mainly the ones of time in space, faced acclaimed positions, such as the notion of absolute time, questioned by relativity, and as the chronological time, which prevails in certain conceptions of the artistic representation. The conception of continuum appears as a fundamental aspect of the dialogic comprehension that, if it is observed in verbal work, acquires a wider range of relations, especially those involving the time and the beings of the time lived as a space of the spatial form.

2 Perpetuum Mobile: How the Time Progresses in Space and Constitutes the Present

Bakhtin's findings that balance character, space, discourse; point of view, idea, consciousness; living experiences, experiences and time compound the images of the relations in spatial forms and are the ground for Dostoevsky's poetics, which paved the way for maturing the historical poetics, by following a path that contemplates the deepest level of philosophical research on living experiences, experiences, aesthetics creation and that lays down the foundations of knowledge and history. In this new context, the image of language is approached as the spatial form of a flow of time from which it cannot be detached. If, in the first-person discourses, such as the memories from the underground man, or in the ones in which the confessional tone prevails, as in Mr. Golyadkin's discourse, it is the present force that develops the dramacity of scenes, we will be before a representation in which the time progresses and constitutes itself as space. The image of language focuses on the space where time flows, and due to this time determination, it presents itself as an aesthetic event translated into a spatial form that is chrontopically constituted. As such, it complies a movement that starts with the living experience, faces the cognitive experience and only achieves an artistic expression if it is placed in a sphere that enables it to be worked in order to acquire a finalizability that defines its value (BAKHTIN, 1990, pp.89-90). Even though living experience, aesthetic experience and cognitive experience are closely related, they do not blend or nullify each other. However, one implies the other and is dramatically tensed by the other.

Empirically drafted in the transformative movements of the space in Dostoevsky's work, the concept of time as a spatial dimension is theoretically materialized at the end of the 1930s, when Bakhtin formalized the concept of chronotope in a category of time-space in order to define the aesthetic event in all its extension, mainly within the spatial form of character, and the seed of such concept was developed in the beginning of the 1920s. Bakhtin, guided by the key question "how does time experience time?," started to dialogue with conceptual, philosophical and scientific issues from the beginning of the 1920s.

According to a previous study carried out by us (MACHADO, 2010), Bakhtin, coherent to his conceptual framework, defines the chronotope similarly to a metaphor²¹ (BAKHTIN, 1981, p.84), taking into consideration that the concept of time as a spatial dimension was firstly developed in the fields of Physics and Biology: in both cases, there is a (referential or biological) body that guides the perception of experiences and organizes them. Bakhtin finds in Physics, especially in the ideas developed in the relativity studies, elements that enabled him to develop his own perceptions of chronotope in the verbal work. However, it is not only a mere terminological borrowing. There is also an alignment between the theoretical ideas: Albert Einsten guides his observations through the perceptions and intuitions that are linguistically developed eventually, as one can see in the following excerpt:

By the aid of speech different individuals can, to a certain extent, compare their experiences. In this way it is shown that certain sense perceptions of different individuals correpond to each other, while for other sense perceptions no such correspondence can be established. We are accostumed to regard as real those sense perceptions which are common to different individuals, and which therefore are, in a measure, impersonal. The natural sciences, and in particular, the most fundamental of them, physics, deal with such sense perceptions. The conception of physical bodies, in particular rigid bodies, is a relatively constant complex of such sense of perceptions. [...] The only justification for our concepts and system of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy (EINSTEIN, 1923, p.2).²²

The role of language in the experience representation is, thus, submitted to an aesthetic work in both fields of knowledge, which were here specified as Physics and Literature. Experience organizes the event, and without it it would be impossible for the narratives and for Physics to constitute an object: an event is the environment of relations that turn time and space into contiguos physical entities - the perpetuum mobile. The event is conceived as the architectonic whole of unfinabilizability that is perceived in order to enable its organization as knowledge.

If it is a fact that Bakhtin has found theoretical parameters to think about the chronotope in Einstein's theory of relativity, it is as important the fact that Bakhtin has found the terminology for the concept of chronotope in a speech of A.A. Ukhtomsky, who was the diretor of an experimental laboratory in Leningrad, where he attended a conference in 1925. Ukhtomsky used such term in order to designate

[...] the function of the cortex is related to and make intelligible the signs from the perception organs. Ukhtomsky's concept was part of his theory on the nervous activity that is integrated to the body by the cortical "system of systems," which is definied as the dominant (TCHOUGOUNNIKOV, 2005b, pp.20-21, our translation).²³

The notion of "system of systems" enables a system of reaction in the cortex that draws Bakhtin's attention to its organinzing role of the simultaneities in the space of perception. We cannot forget that, for Bakhtin, time flows as a plurality of world views, whether in living experiences or in creation. Thus, it is expressed as a set of simultaneities that are not instants, but events in the complexity of their unfoldings. However, such plurality can only be perceived in the space of the event, or even better, in time.

Among the several chronotopes analyzed by Bakhtin, which starts with the Greek novel, the one that deals with discussions of the spatial form of the character as an experience of the time progressing in space, in its flow and becoming, can be stemmed from the chronotope of experience in Bakhtin's analysis of Goethe's work. In the main aspects targeted by Bakhtin's reflection is the characterization of the historical time and its expression in the present as human culture creations. According to his understanding, in these creations, the artist reads the "signs that show time in its course" in which the most complex ideas of people, generations, epochs, nations, and social and class groups are. Those ideas become "visible vestiges of man's creativity, traces of his hands and his mind" (BAKHTIN, 2013, p.25, italics in the original).²⁴ Goethe as a visual artist underlined culture based on visible experience, because

[...] the seeing eye seeks and finds time - development, emergence, and history. Behind the ready-made it perceives what is emerging and being prepared. And he sees all this with exceptional clarity (BAKHTIN, 2013, p.29).²⁵

Taking into consideration the conception of the chronotope of experience, which relies on the "work of the eye" and on the "vision of emergence" worked by Goethe in order to translate the time pulsation of things in their space, it is possible to analyze a Dostoevsky's novel, in which the character uses his travelling abroad experience to read the historical time, not from its events, but from the social and political shifts developed in his account, which is told in a different time and space. In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, the character asserts, in an account, the confession of his impressions on his trip abroad, i.e., on the European cities. "Impressions" are here introduced as a key point for the chronotpic experience that even defines the spatial form of the character. If at a first sight they suggest an interior perception, the character's first words express another dimension, which blends the living experience with the cognitive experience. The first are marked by desire and the latter by hypothesis and antecipating inferences.

Heavens, how much I expected from my tour! "It doesn't matter if I don't look at things in great detail" I thought. "I shall, at least have seen everything and been everywhere, and all I have seen will have fused itself into one whole and made up a kind of general panorama. I shall, at one fell swoop, have had a bird's-eye view of the entire 'land of holy miracles', like the Promised Land from the mountain - in perspective. In fact, I shall experience a new, wonderful and mighty impression" (DOSTOEVSKY, 2008, p.4).²⁶

In fact, the "impressions" developed panoramas, whose perspective is given by the "bird's-eye view": a panoramic view that works with gaps and generalizations. This way, the wide movement of syntheses and particular clashes is translated, such as the one experienced in Berlin: "[it] made a very sour impression on me" (DOSTOEVSKY, 2008, p.5),²⁷ or in the debate of ideas that took place inside the train, when the character was going to Paris, which was one of the most expected places to visit for him.

"Good heavens," I kept thinking as I sat in the railway carriage, "how can we be called Russians? Are we really Russians in fact? Why does Europe make such a powerful and magic impression on all of us whoever we are? Why does it appeal to us so much?" I don't mean to those Russians who stay at home, those ordinary Russians whose name is Fifty Million, on whom we, all the one hundred thousand of us, look with disdain and whom our profound satirical journals make fun of, because they do not shave their beards. No, I mean our priviledged and patented little group. After all, everything, literally almost everything we can show which may be called progess, science, art, citizenship, humanity, everything, everything stems from there, from that land of holy miracles (DOSTOEVSKY, 2008, p.13). ²⁸

In the syntheses, the points of view show how the continuous and infinite space experiences time in its current history, in which the character, who had expected to make this trip since childhood, is found. The spatial form of the character is translated by the shifts that reach different spatialities: from the cities narrated in relation to the Russian cities, especially St. Petersburg; from the Slavic way of living and the foreign one; from the Russian culture and the European civilization in its definition of the idea of progress. Thus, the impressions developed are defined by the chronotope of the foreign experience, which is a synthesis of all the European Europe and against which the experience of Slavophilism of the Russian Europe debates, according to the character's own distinction (DOSTOEVSKY, 2008, p.14).²⁹ The trip's impressions point out how the space experiences historical time and how the latter becomes current in the character's discursive enunciation.

In different moments of the character's confessions, he questions himself about the clash between the Russian and the European: "Is there really a chemical bond between the human spirit and a man's native land which makes impossible to break away from one's country and, even if one does break away from it, makes one come back to it in the end?" (DOSTOEVSKY, 2008, p.14).³⁰ Behind this question is the need to reflect on the chronotopic condition of the space where the historical shifts are in their most diverse directions. At another moment, it is questioned not the movement of the one who leaves a place and comes back to it, but the European domination that suporposes upon the own country:

The theme of my reflections was in fact the following: what kind of imprint did Europe leave on us at different times? Why did it constantly try to gatecrash upon us with its civilization? How civilized have we become and precisely how many of us have so far become civilized? I can now see that all this is somehow unnecessary (DOSTOEVSKY, 2008, p.20).³¹

That is, in order to live the historical time and its shift, Europe has extended its spaces not by a territorial extension, but by its interferences in the "spirit of time," which is slyly embodied by culture. The same happened to the city of St. Petersburg, which was submitted not to the Russian model of city, but to the European model, a foreign one. One can here observe that the space itself is constituted by an alignment that goes beyond it: the Russian Europe that stems from the European Europe.

From the moment that the cities' physical spaces are replaced by a foreign dimension, the notion of space fuses with time in order to translate the country's dialogy into border spaces between it and other languages and cultures. When the civilization itself starts to be the object of chronotopic reflections, the aesthetic production gives space for the embodiment of the ethical act and system of values. In the character's discourse, the civilization space inherited from Europe is valued as a progress that modifies the foreign value.

It may be that reality around us looks none too lovely even yet; but then we are so wonderful ourselves, so civilized, so European that the common people feel sick at the very sight of us. We have now reached the point where the common people regard us as complete foreigners, and do not understand a single word of ours --- and this certainly is progress, whatever you say. We have now reached a point where our contempt for the common people and the basic principles of their being is so profound that even our attitude to them is stamped with a new, unprecedented and kind of supercilious disdain...and this is progress, whatever you say. (...) And then how self-confident we now are in our civilizing mission, with what an air of superiority we solve all problems, and what problems! There is no soil, we say, and no people, nationality is nothing but a certain system of taxation, the soul is a tabula rasa, a small piece of wax out of which you can readily mould a real man or a homunculus - all that must be done is to apply the fruits of European civilization and read two or three books (DOSTOEVSKY, 2008, p.29).

However, the adoption of a civilizatory model does not drastically change a city, for it is the result of a juxtaposition of models. Therefore, the notion of an unfinalized and ongoing experience prevails. Time leaves tracks that do not make definitive interferences in space, which results thus in an ongoing construction.

The chronotope of experience used in Dostoevsky's novel develops a controversial discussion on the relations between time and space as well as on the currency of the historical time in spaces and on its unfinalized up-dates. The spatial form of the character is also chronotopically constituted in the foreign condition that spans time and space limits in order to live the present of its historical time.

3 Architectonic Construction of the Aesthetic Event according to the Principle of Exotopy

In the same way that Bakhtin was interested in the word chronotope, because it enabled a system that organized spatial pluralities and time simultaneities, the word architectonics becomes part of his conceptual vocabulary for unveiling the constructive process of the dialogic and responsive relations in the constitution of viewpoints, as developed in the essay Art and Answerability (BAKHTIN, 1990), written in 1919. If, before chronotope, he asked himself, "how does space experience time?" before architectonics, he questions, "After all, what constitutes an answer or a finalizability in a point of view?" This questioning is not done by chance if we consider that architectonics is related to the world constructions that do not construct an ended building, but that is up to the flow of unfinalized things and the relations in progress. It changes the answer's aspect: instead of providing one-way answers, the answers give space to new questions in a flow of unfinalized formulations. Instead of a building placed in the space and ready to be used, the architectonics expresses the quality of the relations that are not straightly perceived at the very sight of it, but that are expressed as a projection.³² The architectonics seeks the flows and its points of view that are projected under the form of different interactions.

The field of architectonic interactions presents itself as a space under construction, in a movement in which everything is mutually implied and in which the action elements interfere in one another. This is the world of language, people, ethical behavior, aesthetic events that are interrelated and where it is not possible to break away from one another. The world of architectonic relations is the world where people speak, question themselves and their surroundings and, by doing so, they establish connections between interactive relations that enable them to give answers from which knowledge can be built.

Architectonics is conceived as a field of analysis of expressions that are always answers, i.e., that are the result of actions and reactions determined by particular, not mechanical, points of view. It encompasses a set of premises regarding the aesthetic event in its dialogic becoming. What we mean is: no matter how much one seeks to develop an unfinalized model, the aesthetic view will always be the result of unfinalized perspectives.

When Bakhtin formulates the concept of architectonics, he does not bind it with the aesthetic event or with the spatial form of the character. However, the notion of movement of unfinalized forms becomes a strong hypothesis for analyzing the dialogic relations of the character that is being developed at the author's sight: Author and character, whose points of view project consciousnesses that do not coincide, which contrast living experience and experience, aesthetic experience and cognitive experience, horizon and environment. A space whose visual fields are in opposition is established. While the character lives the living experience, the author works on the ethical, aesthetics, cognitive experiences "from the creation's outside."

To work from the outside implies developing a view angle that is situated in the counterpoint of the visual fields of others, highlighting the contrast between one's horizon and the horizon of other projections and other points in the space. Thanks to the coexistence of different horizons, the dynamics of the space architectonically developed can be understood as a dialogic space of borders. From this standpoint, the notion of horizon is situated in the spatial form of the aesthetics creation from other angles which are not restricted to the author's. On the one hand, the notion of horizon suggests restriction and, therefore, limits; on the other hand, it gives space for what is outside a given limit. This way, it regards both what is interior and exterior, making visible the excess of a given visual field: the lines that are projected in the interior of the character compose his/her horizon and his/her living experience while the lines that surround him/her constitute the experience environment (TEZZA, 2001, p.294, our translation).³³ Although they coexist and interact in the same place, the visual field of one and the other does not coincide; each one constitutes a relation towards the other, an excess that suggests unfinalizability. Each angle only reaches part of the event and of the relation.

For Bakhtin, what one sees in one's visual field is inaccessible to the other who is before him/her and, therefore, his/her look is directed towards another horizon, (cf. Bakhtin, 1990, pp.22-23). The horizon that is unfolded in each visual field presupposes a limit; the very notion of horizon pressuposes an excess of seeing from both the author and the character. Here, we have outlined an aesthetic principle of composition, which is defined by the angulation between the visual fields of the author regarding the character: the principle of exotopy lies on the perception of the excess of seeing and in the extraposition of the points projected diagrammatically in the visual space.

As the character can only access what is inside his/her visual field, many things are left out, such as his/her outer image. When developing forms to somehow provide such image, the author ends up producing certain finalizability from a living experience in its course, however partial it may be. Here we clearly see the distinction between an unfinalized living experience and the aesthetic event geared to its finalizability or as we can read in the following statement:

If I am consummated and my life is consummated, I am no longer capable of living and acting. For in order to live and act, I need to be unconsummated, I need to be open for myself - at least in all the essential moments constituting my life; I have to be, for myself, someone who is axiologically yet-to-be, someone who does not coincide with his already existing makeup (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.13).

Taking into consideration that creation results from the interaction between two consciousnesses, it is clear that their domain does not coincide with each other. Therefore, there are different spatialities in the visual field configuration of the one and the other, which are established by the singularity of the points of view in interaction. The place occupied in space is unique, but the visual field itself is inside the architectonics of the space of relations that is fulfilled with several intertwinings. Consequently, what can be seen by one cannot be seen by the other and vice-versa. However, the inaccessible is not nonexistent, as Bakhtin understands:

The excess of my seeing in relation to another human being provides the foundation for a certain sphere of my own exclusive self-activity, i.e., all those inner and outer actions which only I can perform in relation to the other, and which are completely inaccessible to the other himself from his own place outside me; all those actions, that is, which render the other complete precisely in those respects in which he cannot complete himself by himself (1990, p.24).

By becoming a fundamental synthesis of the architectonic conception, the excess of seeing brings different tensions to the foreground of the debates: the transformation of unfinalizability, the boundary between consciousnesses, the clashes between points of view, the ethic act and aesthetic activity. In it, the unfinalized life is embraced by an aesthetic construction of a finalized architectonic structure. However, the finalizability becomes only visible with the seeing of the other, when it achieves an aesthetic visibility.

Living experience and experience constitute different horizons in the architectonics of the dialogical thought. To distinguish them was Bakhtin's task, which would guide his way through the domains of human culture - life, art, science - without mistaking one for another. This way he took into consideration their individual horizons in the clash of excesses of seeing. The aesthetic view is not restricted to the living experience or to the cognitive experience, but it emerges from the contemplation act, in which the interaction between them places the diversity of the visual field in confrontation, consequently, producing the emergence of the excess of seeing that is, this way, defined by the productive action (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.26).

Bakhtin has no doubt that human life is driven by each one's orientation according to the experimental horizon that does not coincide or mix up with the others that are in interaction with it. What assures that such singularity of the the living experience is not only the single position that each one has in space, but, especially, the excess of seeing that comes from it and is unknown by it. Such extraposition of the world of experience is due to its movement and continuity. The same cannot be said of the world of cognition, which is completely driven outside the excess of seeing. According to Bakhtin, for the cognition, the world constitutes a whole unity and is independent from the individual views and from the clashes of points of view. Even though it projects cohesion, what is offered to perception is not completeness, because it can be conceived, but it cannot be perceived. Whereupon Bakhtin concludes: the world of living experience does not coincide with the world of cognition. This calls into question the very notion of horizon as a unique space of living experience and cognitive experience (BAKHTIN, 1990, pp.23-24).

Relying on this distinction, we can reach an understanding of the aesthetics activity, whose horizon exotopically projects the living experience and the cognitive experience.

The starting point for such understanding is the one that defines the aesthetic object by its action, i.e, by a supplemental action that is expressed in between the excesses of seeing. The aesthetic view appears in the emergence of a projected horizon in order to complete what the other lacks without placing their distiction at stake (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.27). The example which is used by Bakhtin for approaching such formulation could not be more eloquent: the pain of the human suffering in the context of interactions from where it emerges.

According to his thought, when one gets in touch with the person who suffers, the immediate movement that emerges to anyone is to try to see the world as if the one were inside of the other person's living experience of suffering, even though it is impossible to feel the other person's pain. Following this movement, one gets back to where one was, i.e., to the outer place of the other person's pain. In this return, there are at least two dimensions in which the outer place of the one who suffers is projected: the contemplator's (who is not suffering) excess of seeing of the feeling, and, the excess of seeing of the one who suffers but who does not know the image that his/her pain projects to the other. Although one cannot live the living experience of the other's inward pain, the contemplator can experience the projections of this pain. To experience a pain cognitively is not to live it; therefore, the dimension of this experience exotopically constitutes the living experience of it.

Before this context of the excesses of seeing bifurcation, Bakhtin states that to take for oneself the other person's pain in a movement of compenetration is only and solely an elementar step of aesthetic activity. The aesthetic act itself takes place externally, in the extraposed experience, and it focuses on the external expressedness of the pain of the person who suffers, but this inward suffering is inacessible. The one who suffers "does not see the agonizing tension of his own muscles, does not see the entire, plastically finalized posture of his own body, or the expression of suffering on his face" (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.25). What the one who suffers does not see, which is extraposed to him/her, constitues the issue that enables the expression of the aesthetic act. According to Bakhtin, "When I project myself into another's suffering, I experience it precisely as his suffering - in the category of the other, and my reaction to it is not a cry of pain, but a word of consolation or an act of assistance" (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.26, italics in the original). Consequently, the aesthetics activity is only developed in an extraposed place of experimentation and living experimentation and, considering the confrontation of this horizon, it "takes on a purely plastic value" (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.27). Only on its plasticity can the living experience become an aesthetic act.

In this sense, the consummating moments are transgredient not only to the hero's actual consciousness but also to his potential consciousness - his consciousness extended in a dotted line, as it were: the author knows and sees more not only in the direction in which the hero is looking and seeing, but also in a different direction, in a direction which is in principle inaccessible to the hero himself; it is precisely this position that an author must assume in relation to a hero (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.13).

In short: compenetration embraces the other's living experience, taking on "the concrete life-horizon of this human being as he experiences himself" (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.25), i.e., with all the precariousness and limitations of his/her view. This is the time to live the other's feelings in the category of the other, without mistaking the living experiences. As to the finalizability, it sets the return to the author's consciousness domain, when we "start to form and consummate the material we derived from projecting ourselves into the other and experiencing him from within himself," in which the sensory states "no longer have the function of informing, but have a new function, the function of consummating" (BAKHTIN, 1990, pp.26-27, italics in the original). This is the time for the architectonic development of the aesthetic itself.

As one can observe, compenetration is a movement directed "inwardly"; the finalizability can only be accomplished "from the outside." Those two movements combined are indispensable for the character creation, which is, especially, constitued by the aesthetic excess of seeing. In this case, it is the process of architectonic development that is chronotopically constituted thanks to the spatial and time nature of the relations.

In the architectonic development of the aesthetic event, inner and outer acts compound a flow of movement that is not only situated in tension of what happens in the borders, but that also causes a refraction of points of view, as we could observe, in the process of exotopy and of excess of seeing. However, there are issues related to the exotopy of our own contact with our living experience, which Bakhtin translates into questions: How do we experience our own exterior? How do we experience outward appearance in the other? To what extent does the outward appearance lie?

The same exotopy pointed out by the excess of seeing between a character and another can be applied in the relation we have with our own body. All that is outside one's body is not part of one's current horizon of view. Bakhtin states that before carrying on his thought:

My own exterior [that is, all of the expressive features of my body, without exception] is experienced by me from within myself. It is only in the form of scattered fragments, scraps, dangling on the string of my inner sensation of myself, that my own exterior enters in the field of my outer senses, and, first of all, the sense of vision. But the data provided by these outer senses do not represent an ultimate authority even for deciding the question of whether this body is or is not mine. That question is decided only by my inner self-sensation (BAKHTIN, 1990, pp.27-28).

Although Bakhtin kept his focus on the scope of the aesthetic event of the verbal creation, his own formulations are situated in a place that is extraposed in relation to the aesthetic work. The spatial form of the character heads more and more towards a reflection on the ethics of human relations, or even better, towards living experiences, without which no aesthetics experience can blossom. He steps into a universe of search in which the philosophical view emerges as an excess of seeing of aesthetics, from which Bakhtin searches the foundations of his view of dialogic aesthetics, specifically the ethical dimension that emerges in one's interaction with the other. It is observed that not even the living experience can be considered as an act of solipsism, as he states in following excerpt.

In order to vivify my own outward image and make it part of a concretely viewable whole, the entire architectonic of the world of my imagining must be radically restructured by introducing a totally new factor into it. This new factor that restructures the architectonic consists in my outward image being affirmed and founded in emotional and volitional terms out of the other and for the other human being (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.30, italics in the original).

From the moment that no language, no saying and no interaction can be accomplished by itself, in isolation from communication, the double-voicedness of language is already evidence that the development of the outerness can only be expressed by the other's elaboration.

The point at issue here is precisely how to accomplish the task of translating myself from inner language into the language of outward expressedness and of weaving all of myself totally into the unitary plastic and pictorial fabric of life as a human being among other human beings, as a hero among other heroes (BAKTIN, 1990, p.31).

As translation, one must equally consider the double-voicedness of values as well as every point of view, considering its exotopy.

The experience of the body from within oneself - the hero's inner body - is enclosed by his outer body for the other, for the author, and is aesthetically consolidated or "bodied" by the latter's axiological reaction. Every aspect of this outer body (the body enclosing the inner body) performs, as an aesthetic phenomenon, a double function: an "expressive" function and an "impressive" function. And to these corresponds a twofold active position or attitude assumed by the auhtor and by the contemplator (BAKHTIN, 1990, p.60).

If it is in the displacement of the generative process that the fields in confrotation are consolidated, the spatial environment stems from the relations that take place in, at least, three distinct and interconnected spheres: the sphere of cognitive relations, the sphere of ethical relations and the sphere of aesthetical relation. Not only does the alignment of the relations draw a map of the actions and behaviors, but it is also in the spatial evironment that the author's creative process is developed. Bakhtin conceptualizes the field of forces that is constituted, this way, by a diagrammatic model, in which the different points of view are in dynamics.

It is worthy stating that the ethical act does not suit a priori purposes, but stems from displacements that Bakhtin conceives in the extraposition movement: that bidirectional action, in which one moves towards the other in order to experience the world from a place that is not one's own so that, from there, one expresses oneself ethically. What is clear is that the ethical experience cannot be accomplished without displacement. Nevertheless, counting only on such movement, no aesthetical experience can be complete, because it requires one's return to one's own place. In a two-way path, the singular and unique place of existence is constituted. In this place, the extraposition view translates experience into livingness and unveils the unexpected act that never existed. It is no wonder that the sharpness of such formulation has reached very distinct experiences in the fields of moral, philosophy and other different activities from culture, such as art, literature, and religion.

Final Remarks

From the conceptualization perspective, the notion of spatial form of character emerges in research studies in the 1920s. The reason for inverting the pyramid, i.e, for starting our text from Dostoevsky's poetics, then addressing the historical poetics and ending it by approaching the theoretical and philosophical formulations, is to show how the notion of aesthetic form was structured, mainly in the West. From the poetic standpoint, Bakhtin's formulations reflect the power of the experiments that lead to the consolidation of dialogism. From the searching point of view, the philosophical remarks show the actual reach of its consolidation as heuristic principles, whose hypotheses outgrow the experimental field, which presents the possibility for proposing conceptions that are sufficiently robust, in order to support a consequent framework. There is no doubt that, in dialogism, Bakhtin has found the ground for historical poetics and for the aesthetic event that is chronotopically constituted.

By placing the aesthetic event at the heart of all his research, Bakhtin presents a methodological choice that is not restricted to poetics. In his essay Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,³⁴ Bakhtin broadens the scope of his inquiry and reaches the field of Human Sciences. According to his undersanding, the dynamics of the architectonic relations, conceived in the horizon of the excess of seeing, defines its own distinction between the Human Sciences and the Natural Sciences. Although this is not all, not to regard the exotopy of the points of view hinders the very constitution of the world of ethics as an aesthetical experience and vice-versa. From this stems the solid inference that states that the finalizability of nonspeaking things is opposed to the unfinalized person, whose speaking nature demands one to study this person dialogically. This way, the world becomes an event with meaning potential (BAKHTIN, 2013, p.159 and the following pages).³⁵

The editor of the Russian printing of Estética da criação verbal [The Aesthetics of Verbal Creation] (1979)³⁶ acknowledges that the studies on the "author" and the "character" articulate not only aesthetic categories, but also philosophical positionings of everything that is conceived as a dialogical event. In this sense, the namesake essay gathers the key concepts of aesthetics, such as "distance and excess of seeing and knowledge (that is bound to this second concept), hero's horizon and environment" (BAKHTIN, 2003, p.425, italics in the original, our translation).³⁷

In this sense, Bakhtin submits his inquiry on the spatial form of the character to his premisses regarding the general and philosophical aesthetics, which relies on the triad of ethics, aesthetics and cognition. In it, he finds the key pillar of "three great fields of the human culture: science, life and art" (FARACO, 2009, p.99, our translation),³⁸ as we stated in different moments of our refection. The spatial form refers to life's expression and not to its representation, because it is an organizing principle of experience in its semiotic expression, mainly of the one that organizes the Russian visual culture.

According to A. Efimova and L. Manovich, the theoretical writings on the Russian visual culture understand space as both the environment that surrounds the objects and the metacategory of cultural analysis (EFIMOVA; MANOVICH, 1993, p.xxvi). Far from the notion of the geometric space drawn in relation to the bodies, the space-environment is a space-medium in which the objects are results of the space, and the objects cannot be broken away from the space, as conceived by Pavel Florensky (EFIMOVA; MANOVICH, 1993, p.xxvi). When Bakhtin analyzes the space from the point of view of the chronotpe, which allows him to follow up the development of the cultural temporalities, his approach is driven by the notion of metacategory of historical and cultural organization. However, by focusing on the relation between author and character, it is the notion of space-medium that works as a connecting thread, especially in the development of the environment of interaction between the author's and the character's points of view without, however, becoming separate dimensions. According to Efimova and Manovich (1993, p.xxvii), "for Bakhtin, the space-medium plays two crucial roles: it represents what lies in the character's field of vision, on the one hand, and what the author chooses to evoke about the character, on the other hand." It is a dialogical methodology in which the net of multiple non-coincident points of view introduces us to a space, which is radically different from the linear perspective for the apprehension of optical phenomena, which was bequeathed to us by the Renaissance artists.

More important than the aesthetical procedures found to create representations is the appreciation of the creation act in the clash of different living, aesthetic, cognitive attitudes. In it, the aesthetic event is apprehended in its couse, in the perpetuum mobile of its development.

In our work, Dostoevsky's artistic world renewed in the image of language and of his characters is the force for this perpetuum mobile, which is the only one that is able to project itself for the future. Bakhtin, in his article on the reworking of the book on Dostoevsky, acknowledges the aesthetic and philosophical potential created by the artist of the word and states:

After my book (but independently of it) the ideas of polyphony, dialogue, unfinalizability, etc., were very widely developed. This is explained by the growing influence of Dostoevsky, but above all, by those changes in reality itself which Dostoevsky (in this sense prophetically) succeeded revealing earlier than others (BAKHTIN, 2011, p.285).

This is a well understood prophecy grounded on the deep communicative communion, which is able to actively position itself in the space of relation, in which discourses track the limits that exist in the borders. By spatially developing an image of language in a way that the aesthetic event in its becoming is apprehended, Dostoevsky creates an artistic model of the world that Bakhtin apprehends as his new reflection object.

• 1
  BAKHTIN, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, with introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
• 2
  The constellation of texts we mentioned comprehends the following works: BAKHTIN, M. M. Art and Answerability. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. In: HOLQUIST, M.; LIAPUNOV, V. (Eds.). Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp.1-3 [1919]; BAKHTIN, M. M.. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. In: HOLQUIST, M.; LIAPUNOV, V. (Eds.). Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp.4-256 [1920-23]; BAKHTIN, M. M. Supplement: The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. In: HOLQUIST, M.; LIAPUNOV, V. (Eds.). Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp.310-379 [1924]; BAKHTIN, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, with introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. [1929]; BAKHTIN, M. M. Forms of Time and of Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics. In: HOLQUIST, M. (Ed.). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp.84-258 [1937-38]; BAKHTIN, M. M. Discourse in the Novel. In: HOLQUIST, M. (Ed.). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp.259-422 [1934-1935]; BAKHTIN, M. M. From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse. In: HOLQUIST, M. (Ed.). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp.41-83 [1940]; BAKHTIN, M. M. Epic and Novel. In: HOLQUIST, M. (Ed.). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp.3-40 [1941]; BAKHTIN, M. M. The Art of the Word and Culture of Folk Humour (Rabelais and Gogol). In: BARAN, H. (Ed.). Structuralism and Semiotics: Readings from the Soviet Union. Translated by Henryk Baran. New York: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976, pp.284-296 [1940]; VOLOŠINOV, V. N. Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art (Concerning Sociological Poetics). Translated by I. R. Titunik. In: VOLOŠINOV, V. N. Freudianism: A Marxist Critique. Edited by I. R. Titunik and N. H. Bruss. New York/London: Academic Press, 1976, pp.93-116 [1926] (It bears Voloshinov's name).
• 3
  BAKHTIN, M. M. Forms of Time and of Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics. In: HOLQUIST, M. (Ed.). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp.84-258 [1937-38]
• 4
  Boris Schnaiderman adresses the statement that Dostoevsky values space above time with many remarks and he highlights that: "I do not believe that he nullifies time. What he nullifies is the linear succession of events" (SCHNAIDERMAN, 1982, p.86, our translation). Text in original: Não acredito que ele anule o tempo. O que ele anula é a sucessão linear dos acontecimentos.
• 5
  For a more detailed study on this novel, mainly regarding the role played by tergiversation in the confessional discourse from a first-person narrative, see Brait & Machado (2011, p.24-43).
• 6
  DOSTOEVSKY, F. Notes from the Underground and The Gambler. Translated by Jane Kentish and with an introduction by Malcom Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• 7
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 8
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 9
  DOSTOEVSKY, F. Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Translated by Kyril FitzLyon. London: Oneworld Classics, 2008
• 10
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 17
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 12
  DOSTOEVSKY, F. The Double. Translated by Constance Garnett. NewYork: Dover Thrift Editions, 1997.
• 13
  For the full reference: see footnote 12.
• 14
  For the full reference: see footnote 12.
• 15
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 16
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 17
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 18
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 19
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 20
  For the full reference: see footnote 1.
• 21
  The use of concepts from different fields of knowledge reflects the engagement between the scientists and the traditions of Russian naturalists from the 19th century (TCHOUGOUNNIKOV, 2005a, p.11). Similar to the chronotope, which is a conceptual methaphor that is originally from Biology, the metaphor of refraction was developed by taking into consideration the concept of Optics.
• 22
  EINSTEIN, A. The Meaning of Relativity: Four Lectures Delivered at Princeton University, May, 1921. Translated by Edwin Plimpton Adams. Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1923.
• 23
  Excerpt in Portuguese: "...a função do córtex que relaciona e torna inteligíveis os sinais provenientes dos órgãos de percepção. O conceito de Ukhtómski fazia parte de sua teoria sobre a atividade nervosa integrada ao corpo por intermédio do 'sistema de sistemas' cortical, definido como dominante."
• 24
  BAKHTIN, M. M. The Bildungroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel). In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Ed.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp.10-59
• 25
  For full reference, see previous footnote.
• 26
  For the full reference: see footnote 9.
• 27
  For the full reference: see footnote 9.
• 28
  For the full reference: see footnote 9.
• 29
  For the full reference: see footnote 9.
• 30
  For the full reference: see footnote 9.
• 31
  For the full reference: see footnote 9.
• 32
  The word "projection" must be here understood in its philosophical meaning regarding the merging movement between the world phenomenon or also, as it was defined by Boris Schnaiderman, as the relations dynamics "in which everything is projected against everything without precise limits between them, it is the world of the deliquescent and the never finalized, of the flow and the endless" (apud MACHADO, 2001, p.174). The original in Portuguese: "em que tudo se projeta contra tudo, onde não há limites precisos entre coisa alguma, o reino do deliquescente e do jamais acabado, da fluidez e do infindável" (apud MACHADO, 2001, p.174).
• 33
  Excerpt in Portuguese: "as linhas que são projetadas do interior da personagem constituem seu horizonte e sua vivência; já as linhas que cercam o seu entorno constituem seu ambiente de experiências" (TEZZA, 2001, p.294).
• 34
  BAKHTIN, M. M. Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences. Translated by Vern W. McGee. In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Eds.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp.159-172.
• 35
  For full reference, see previous footnote.
• 36
  Estetika sloviésnova tvórtchestva (Moscow, 1979) was translated into several Western languages as Estética da criação verbal. The essays from this anthology was differently organized in the American printings, according to our previous analysis (MACHADO, 1995).
  TN.: Estética da criação verbal comprises the following texts: BAKHTIN, M. M. Art and Answerability. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. In: HOLQUIST, M.; LIAPUNOV, V. (Eds.). Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp.1-3; BAKHTIN, M. M.. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. In: HOLQUIST, M.; LIAPUNOV, V. (Eds.). Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, pp.4-256; BAKHTIN, M. Appendix I. Three Fragments from the 1929 Edition. In: BAKHTIN, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, with introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp.275-283; BAKHTIN, M. M. The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism. In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Eds.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Tradução Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp.10-59; BAKHTIN, M. M. The Problem of Speech Genres. In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Eds.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Tradução Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp.60-102; BAKHTIN, M. The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis. In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Eds.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Tradução Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp.103-131; BAKHTIN, M. M. Appendix II. Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book. In: BAKHTIN, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson, with introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp.283-304; BAKHTIN. M. Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial Staff. In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Eds.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Tradução Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, p.1-9; BAKHTIN, M. From the Notes Made in 1970-1971. In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Eds.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Tradução Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp.132-158; BAKHTIN, M. M. Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences. Translated by Vern W. McGee. In: EMERSON, C.; HOLQUIST, M. (Eds.). Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp.159-172; and, some conferences on the history of Russian literature and other editor's remarks.
• 37
  Excerpt in Portuguese: "o de distância e o de excedente de visão e de conhecimento a ele vinculado, o de horizonte do herói e o de seu ambiente" (BAKHTIN, 2003, p.425).
• 38
  Excerpt in Portuguese: "três grandes domínios da cultura humana: a ciência, a vida e a arte" (FARACO, 2009, p.99)

REFERÊNCIAS

• BAKHTIN, M. M. Art and Answerability. Trad. Vadim Liapunov. In: Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. [Arte e responsabilidade. In: Estética da criação verbal Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.]
• _______. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity [1920-1923]. Trad. Vadim Liapunov. In: Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin (Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. [Autor e personagem na atividade estetica. In: Estética da criação verbal Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.]
• _______. Formas de tempo e de cronotopo no romance. Ensaio de poética histórica [1937-1938]. In: Questões de literatura e de estética. A teoria do romance Trad. Aurora F. Bernardini e outros. São Paulo: UNESP, 1988.
• _______. O tempo e o espaço nas obras de Goethe. In: Estética da criação verbal [1979]. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.
• _______. Problemas da poética de Dostoievski [1972]. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. Rio de Janeiro: Forense-Universitária.
• BRAIT, B.; MACHADO, I. O encontro privilegiado de Bakhtin e Dostoiévski num subsolo. Bakhtiniana. Revista de Estudos do Discurso São Paulo: PUC-SP, n.6, 2011.
• DOSTOIÉVSKI, F. Notas de inverno sobre impressões de verão. In: Memórias do subsolo e outros escritos Trad. Boris Schnaiderman. São Paulo: Paulicéia, 1992.
• _______. O duplo. Poema petersburguense. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2011.
• EINSTEIN, A. O significado da relatividade Trad. Mário Silva. Coimbra: Armênio Amado, 1984.
• EFIMOVA, E.; MANOVICH, L. Tekstura. Russian Essays on Visual Culture Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.
• FARACO, C. A. Autor e autoria. In: Bakhtin: Conceitos-chave (Beth Brait, org.). São Paulo: Contexto, 2005.
• MACHADO, I. A questão espaço-temporal em Bakhtin: cronotopia e exotopia. In: Círculo de Bakhtin: teoria inclassificável (Luciane de Paula; Grenissa Stafuzza). São Paulo: Mercado de Letras, 2010.
• _______. Projections: Semiotics of culture in Brazil. Sign Systems Studies Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2001.
• _______. O romance e a voz. A prosaica dialógica de Mikhail Bakhtin São Paulo: Fapesp; Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 1995.
• SCHNAIDERMAN, B. Dostoiévski prosa e poesia São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1982.
• TCHOUGOUNNIKOV, S. O dialogismo e a paleontologia da linguagem: o Círculo de Bakhtin na episteme soviética. Conexão Letras Revista do PPG-Letras da UFRS, n.1, 2005a.
• _______. Por uma arqueologia dos conceitos do círculo de Bakhtin: ideologema, signo ideológico, dialogismo. In: Mikhail Bakhtin: contribuições para a filosofia da linguagem e estudos discursivos (Ana Zandwais, org.). Porto Alegre: Sagra Luzzatto, 2005b.
• TEZZA, C. Sobre O autor e o herói: um roteiro de leitura. In: Diálogos com Bakhtin (C.A. Faraco; C. Tezza; G. Castro, orgs.). Curitiba: Editora UFPR, 2001.
• VOLOSINOV, V. N. Discourse in life and discourse in art. In: Freudianism, a Marxist Critique Trad. I.R. Titunik. New York: Academic Press, 1976.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  May-Aug 2017

History

• Received
  08 Feb 2017
• Accepted
  06 Apr 2017