SOURCE: Holquist, Michael. “Why Is God's Name a Pun?: Bakhtin's Theory of the Novel in the Light of Theophilology.” In The Novelness of Bakhtin: Perspectives and Possibilities, edited by Jørgen Bruhn and Jan Lundquist, pp. 53-69. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Holquist explores the relationship between the sacred and the profane in Bakhtin's theory of the novel.

“The life which that has no knowledge of the air it breathes is a naive life.”

M. M. Bakhtin

For all his opposition to monologue and the autarchic word, Bakhtin himself was not above making categorical statements from time to time. This apodictic tendency—what might be called Bakhtin's Sherlock Holmes tone of voice—is most pronounced in those writings of his that deal with the novel. We are told that a correct understanding of Rabelais “requires an essential reconstruction of our entire artistic and ideological perception...