Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [180]
The war with Germany created a need for foreign-language speakers and meant that he was allowed to teach German (in which he was virtually bilingual) to high school students. But even after the war ended he was still regarded as “unreliable.” In part this was because he refused to denounce his Orthodox roots and upbringing. With his “cosmopolitan” interests and connections he was lucky to survive a third purge of intellectuals in the 1950s. It was only in the 1960s that Bakhtin was rescued from obscurity, by a group of scholars who had read his work and were amazed to find him still alive. By then he had lost a leg through osteomyelitis, and walked on crutches or unsteadily with a stick. Cheap cigarettes, smoked incessantly, gave him a permanent cough and the emphysema that eventually killed him. (In the depths of World War II, lacking paper, he had torn up the only copy of one of his manuscripts to roll his own cigarettes.)
All the work that he wrote, unobtrusively, in exile or in self-imposed isolation, was shot through with a theme of impermanence. Insecurity and change were the constants of his life and mutability was the essence of his scholarly message. It was present in his studies of Dostoyevsky, in his essays published in English as The Dialogic Imagination, and in his greatest work, on Rabelais. He saw almost every word in a language as being in a state of flux, as it interacted or was colored by the use of other words. This “intertextuality” was natural. For Bakhtin the normal, healthy state of life involved interaction with others. Whatever they did or said affected you and influenced your response. Yet this mutual relationship could never be congruent. Bakhtin told a story of two people looking at each other. Consider them as an observer looking at another observer. You are one, someone else is the other.
You can see things behind my back that I cannot see and I can see things behind your back that are denied to your vision. We are both doing essentially the same thing, but from different places: although we are in the same event, that event is different for each of us. Our places are different not only because our bodies occupy different positions in exterior, physical space, but also because we regard each other from different centres.5
Bakhtin’s work has helped me to understand the opposing poles—“Christian infidel” and “Muslim infidel”—as being conjoined, as “enemies in the mirror.”6 But over many centuries, while each might have been aware of the other, even observed the other, neither could, as Bakhtin suggests, see what the other sees. The relationship between “one” and “another” would also be constrained by their relative social, political, or military power. Ultimately they were incommensurable.7 Words of hate and images inviting disgust were a direct product of differences in position. Bakhtin described what happens when such words are uttered: “The utterance is related not only to preceding but to subsequent links in the chain … From the very beginning the speaker expects a response from them, an active responsive understanding. The entire utterance is constructed, as it were, in anticipation of encountering this response.”8 In this dialogue language is both a “weapon” and a “shield.”9 The deliberate intensity of insults, spoken or written, makes their effect unpredictable. Maledicta are the most volatile and dangerous elements in any language.
Following Bakhtin’s idea of dialogue, there are two parties to every malediction. It might seem logical that the person affected most directly is the one insulted. But I believe the reverse may be true. If you are the object of an insult, you may not know that it has happened, or understand exactly what has been said, like Ivo Andrić’s character Consul Danville. Today the most foul and gratuitous insults lurk on the Internet, but are never