“I respect people, I listen to their voices. Yours too. This is not Bakhtin’s carnival.”

Mikhail Bakhtin my beloved Dostoyevsky fanboy I knew I felt your presence✨

Okay but actually this is serious and, in many ways, an answer to the questioning that has been dominating so much of this forum to the point that it’s hard to find much else: “What’s the point? What’s going on?” Not in a "this is the message Zaher wants you to get" sense, but in a "this is how one can understand the form this story is taking" sense.

First, some quick background. Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher who is most famous for his literary theory (at least, outside of Russia). Poor bastard didn't really get to be known for his work during his lifetime (cold war and Soviet shenanigans). The main theoretical concepts/frameworks he posited that are at play in the Coin are dialogism, polyphony (and polyphonic novel) and the carnivalesque. I can't cite my own notes from undergrad, but I swear I have them (Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics and The Dialogic Imagination✨✨).

Dialogism and Polyphony

Note: I do spoil Sartre's Huis Clos/No Exit in this section.

Dialogism is, essentially, that meaning/language is only formed through interactions between different voices. I say different voices because they can be two voices in one.

For Bakhtin, existence itself is discursive, including the self and its identity. The 'person' isn't just a closed loop with a firm boundary between themselves and the world around them; instead they exist (through identity, consciousness, language etc) in a state of "outsidedness" where they are on the boundary between themselves and the world, looking in and looking out.

The best way I can describe Bakhtinian outsidedness is by referencing the a scene in the middle of Sartre's Huis Clos/No Exit. In the play, Inès and Estelle are trapped in a room (✨✨✨). The occupants can't leave, can't kill each other (as they later find out), and there's nothing else in the room that can let them perceive themselves. This crisis of perception forms the "hell is other people" stinger at the end. However, midway through, there is a point where Estelle is desperate for a mirror because she becomes anxious about her physical appearance. Inès suggests that she can be Estelle's mirror: "I can see you. Entirely. Ask me questions. No mirror will be more believable."✨✨✨✨ As they talk, Estelle spirals unable to be reassured that Inès is accurately reflecting what she sees; fearing most of all that she is unable to judge for herself. Inès responds once again in comparing herself to a mirror "Am I not more valuable than a mirror?"✨✨✨✨✨

For Bakhtin, Inès is right. The only way to understand a person is to be able to see the context in which they exist - something that isn't possible from within. You can't see yourself without seeing yourself through the eyes of the other.

Further, people, like language, are contextual. When you speak, when you say a word, it has a context behind it; intention, historical associations, memory, etc. It exists in that dialogic space, that travels from border to border. The words you speak are appropriated by you to become "yours," they aren't coming from some neutral authority or database in your head - they come from the people you've heard speak it. It's a metalinguistic (or extralinguistic) process rather than a linguistic one. Meaning cannot be separated from discourse, the use of language. In prose literature, to quote Bakhtin directly, "[the author] can make use of language without wholly giving himself up to it, he may treat it as semi-alien or completely alien to himself, while compelling language ultimately to serve all his own intentions. The author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances himself to a greater or lesser degree), but he speaks, as it were, through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates. [...] The prose writer makes use of words that are already populated with the social intentions of others and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to serve a second master."

The Coin also features a full range of double-voiced discourse, which Bakhtin asserts is the foundation of metalinguistics. In double-voiced discourse we are multi-track drifting (in two "directions"): one, the "object" (whatever is being spoken about); two, the "other" (someone else's speech). The most obvious is Zaher's use of active double-voiced discourse every time the narrator addresses "you." The narrator perpetually addresses, and anticipates, what "you" are thinking/saying and she responds to it. "I listen to their voices. Yours too."

There's one element of dialogism that is - for Bakhtin - baked-into prose works that "succeed" as art (✨✨✨✨✨✨). The prose author, particularly the novelist "welcomes the heteroglossia and language diversity of the literary and extraliterary language into his own work not only not weakening them but even intensifying them (for he interacts with their particular self-consciousness). [A] prose writer can distance himself from the language of his own work, while at the same time distancing himself, in varying degrees, from the different layers and aspects of the work. "

What's heteroglossia? Hetero for difference, glossia for tongues. Bakhtin argues that languages, and (often) works produced in them, possess heteroglossia. Ever read a book where the dialogue is full of slang while the narration is more formal? That's heteroglossia. Multiple POVs written in different styles and forms? Also, heteroglossia. Do you code-switch? Guess what! This quality is what makes having distinct voices more recognizable in a given work of prose; when someone complains that every character in a story reads the same, they're complaining about the lack of heteroglossia. This also means that the author's solitary 'tongue' is not the only one that they are reduced to in order to construct meaning.

This is where polyphony comes to play. Polyphony is the coexistence of multiple, independent, melodic lines; in literature, in a Bakhtinian sense, this is when the voices in a text are equals. It is how the prose author fully leverages the heteroglossia of language.

Carnivalesque

To understand the carnivalesque we first have to begin with the disambiguation of carnival. He characterized it in four categories that have some overlap and, specifically, in reference to the medieval sense of carnival (for reasons that will also be in my explanation here).

In the Carnival, hierarchy is dissolved and everyone is together in one event (including heaven and hell, rich and poor). Despite being linked to Lent (and therefore Christianity), the Carnival has no respect for religious authority just as it lacks any for secular authority. What would be otherwise unacceptable or inappropriate is not just permissible but encouraged. Significantly, while the Carnival is one event that brings all together, the all remain their own voices (their worlds combined, but not folded into each other or merged into some kind of chimera).

Thus, the carnivalization of literature is where this becomes a part of the fabric of literary language. Bakhtin traces this evolution, considering Dostoyevsky the height when he cultivates the polyphonic novel. In the literary carnival, no voice is privileged over the others. The author too cedes ground to the voices they create in their work, dissolving the hierarchical relationship of "author" and "character." In The Coin (though not uniquely in this book!) we have no dialogue markers (beyond capitalization). Every voice is given the same 'place' in the narrative hierarchy whether it's a student or the narrator.

Further, we have a narrator who does some things - and has some fantasies - that are distinctly inappropriate/profane. Bakhtin puts the literary foundations of the carnival in the "serio-comical" genres where contemporary elements are drawn into the narrative (rather than segregated from it, as seen in other more "serious" genres). The everyday, as "crudely familiar" as it is, takes centre stage. We have the full range of expression, elements of both 'high' and 'low' forms of literature/speech (dialects, parodies, letters, misquotes, jargon etc etc). The carnivalesque is heterogenous, it's a mixture and grab-bag. In The Coin we have everything from fucked-up fantasy to critique to parody to memoir-esque.

However, the narrator of The Coin claims this ISN'T a Bakhtnian carnival.

Why? Doesn't this book have all the hallmarks?

We could read this as her unreliability. The narrator simply doesn't recognize what she's in because she is one of the voices therein (and, who knows, there's 30% ~ left of this book for that to be the case, the coin in the corner of the page is still spinning).

But.

Is this a true Bakhtinian carnival thus far? Is it even possible to have one?

The narrator (and the author before her) is, ultimately, who chooses who we listen to and what we know about. We didn't know her mother's name until she told us, we still don't know her father's name. We don't know her brother's name or even what he's like beyond his control over her finances. She has twenty students at Franklin, do we know twenty names? Have we heard twenty voices? Have we even heard enough from Jay or Leonard to know who they are outside of what their teacher knows? How does Sasha feel about being unloved? How does Curls feel about being used recreationally? Trenchcoat's name certainly isn't Trenchcoat! We get glimpses into the ensemble's lives, their aspirations, their insecurities, but we do not get the same slippage and range as we do the narrator's.

While there are many ways that Bakhtin's work can help us understand The Coin, the most elucidating is that this isn't a Bakhtinian carnival. This is something near to it, but not entirely, because there is no way to truly reflect that complete mingling of everyone in one event in one book. To be able to put each voice equally would be to make it nigh incomprehensible. The selective deluge of experience we get from the narrator alone can be difficult to parse.

Besides, she's the one who gets to take the 'I' at the end of the day. It is she that appropriates the words of others for her as their second master. There is no greater power than that. Anyone who experiences a carnival is going to experience it as an "I" in that polyphony, just like we all navigate the world - and its many voices.

✨I have had Notes from Underground vibes for so long and this is the point that took my brain from repeatedly being tempted to joke some variation of “she thinks her ____ is diseased, perhaps” since the beginning of the book. ✨✨Both are the Emerson translations, the latter being his collection (which I mainly used for the "Discourse in the Novel" essay). I haven't read his analysis of Rabelais because I only read his work directly for Dostoyevsky in undergrad (and when I used it again in grad school, I didn't need the carnivalesque so... I just didn't read the Rabelais book). In other words, if I mention something that's in the Rabelais because my prof mentioned it then I have no clue what translation was used (sorry). ✨✨✨there's also a guy with them but I don't care about his role here (to quote Inès "Ne nous occupons pas de lui.") ✨✨✨✨"Je te vois, moi. Tout entière. Pose-moi des questions. Aucun miroir ne sera plus fidèle." (I translated fidèle to believable, but the sense of the word is more like "loyal" and "accurate" all at once) ✨✨✨✨✨"Est-ce que je ne vaux pas mieux qu'un miroir?" (more literal translation would be "better worth") ✨✨✨✨✨✨ while I don't think it's necessarily impossible in successful poetic work as he stipulates... I do agree you should have this in prose works to have something interesting/engaging to read.