Ending on polyphony
In the few chapters of this thesis, I have tried to show what polyphony could look like outside the realm of the novel. Bakhtin’s concepts have been tremendously popular in academic fields like literary studies and film studies but have scarcely been used in the field of cultural memory, which is truly a loss. With the new interest in the dialogic features of memory, polyphony can shine new light on the way memory objects have multiple
‘voices’, thus rejecting the idea of an essentialist approach to heritage, in which an object can only have one meaning. Polyphony, compared with other dialogic concepts, has special attention for the open-endedness of the conversation, best suited to match the never-ending memory wars.
Unlike the concept of heteroglossia it also places the author on an equal
footing with the characters, which conveys to memory studies a way of
sharing authority. Curating polyphony requires attention for a plurality of
independent voices, making polyphonic memory especially valuable for
the remembering of sensitive topics. In a Europe in which the memory of
the Nazi occupation and the Soviet occupation differ widely between many
memory cultures, a pluralistic concept like polyphonic memory is
necessary because it underlines both the interaction between the types of
memory, and the conflict between them. Ultimately, the purpose of
polyphonic memory should be to facilitate this open-ended conversation
about the shared past, without imposing any outcome onto it. To answer
the question, how Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony can contribute
to cultural memory studies, I have introduced three case studies
concerning the memory of totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.
Guernica (1937)
As became clear in the first chapter, Picasso’s painting forms a unique insight in one of the earliest efforts to capture the rise of totalitarianism in Europe. Caught between fascism and communism, the Spanish town Guernica became the scene of the first arial raids on innocent lives. Picasso’s painting is therefore a testimony of this trauma, visualized through fragments of geometrical shapes. His cubist style and his ‘swirl of signs’, create space on the canvas for a polyphonic dialogue in which the onlooker cannot remain a passive bystander, but becomes implicated in this process. The figures of Guernica (1937) all point to each other, creating a dynamic interplay between these symbols, that actually mimics the act of remembering itself.
This is the reason Picasso created, what Benjamin would have called a dialectical image, showing both movement and the arrest of movement. Cubist proves to be the ultimate style to capture this contradiction, that can facilitate multiple consciousnesses on one two-dimensional plane. The result
Bronze Soldier (1947)
The Bronze Soldier became the space in Estonian memory politics, onto which the clashing memories of the totalitarian memories were performed. While many academics stop their analysis of the conflict with the relocation to Filtri Tee, polyphonic memory actually reveals a continuation of dialogue surrounding the monument. By redrawing the paths at Tõnismägi, the Bronze Soldier was restructured into another conversation, without its message being muted. The relocation also did not cut-off the history of the Bronze Soldier on Tõnismägi, as its new location reveals many similarities with the original location. Using the logic of polyphony, we could locate the conflict within the monument itself, unveiling a conflict between the statue and its new text. This intrinsic dialogic power of the Bronze Soldier is as relevant today, as it was in 2007, visible in the official statements of the Minister of Defence.
European House of History (2017)
The museum’s mission to show interpretations in all their diversity, contrasts and contradictions, seemed especially fit to facilitate a polyphonic memory. However, as I have argued, the museum seems to narrate an understanding of the totalitarian past that leans heavily on the technical comparisons of the two regimes. This makes the room ‘Totalitarianism versus Democracy’, a room that speaks as ‘Democracy’, about ‘Totalitarianism’, without creating the space for competing memories to speak back. However, by looking at the exhibition through the concept of polyphony, a slight hessitation in the narration is visible, as somehing which Bakhtin woud have called a ‘micro-dialogue’. It shows that the narration within a museum can adress multiple discourses.
Beyond polyphonic memory: Digital voices
In 2019 the group ‘Network’ launched an app with which the Bronze Soldier would return to Tõnismägi through augmented reality. The app called CyberHistory has been launched in other post-Soviet states like Poland and Ukraine, to digitally restore the monuments to the heroes of
‘the Great Patriotic War’, destroyed by nationalists (Regnum 11/09/2019). According to the founder of the app, Gleb Krainik, this new virtual world can contest the physical reality. ‘It turns out that it is a digital, not a granite monument that becomes an eternal symbol and reminder of the events of the past’, says Krainik (Regnum 11/09/2019). An Estonian anti-propaganda website Propastop, responded to the launching of the app, claiming that the group
‘Network’ is funded by the Kremlin. ‘It is not a history project but an imperialistic Russian propaganda campaign aimed at expanding the Kremlin’s influence and provoking conflict’, writes the website. This digital layer to Tõnismägi and the online discourse launches us to another dimension of memory, that has not been mentioned in this thesis so far: digital memory.
In this thesis we have seen a painting dating from 1937, a monument from 1947 and a museum that opened in 2017. However, if we were to look at the future of polyphonic memory, digital memory must be taken into consideration. The development of the digital world has an incredible effect on how we, as humanity, will remember our past. In his introduction to the book Digital Memory Studies (2019), Andrew Hoskins wrote that the ‘connective turn’ will have serious implications for our understanding of the past and the present. It both redistributes the past much faster with the new media and adds a bit of ‘present’ to each moment because we have become increasingly aware of our digital footprint (2). ‘Thus the networked self and society foster a view that collapses past and present into an orgy of hyperconnectivity’, writes Hoskins (2). What follows in his text are reasons for academics in memory studies to disentangle this hyperconnectivity because the post-scarcity of memory will slowly cloud our understanding of remembering and forgetting (Hoskins 6). However, this should not have to mean that ‘older’ conceptualizations of memory have become outdated. I would argue quite the opposite: polyphonic memory can especially be useful to disentangle the multiple layers of remembering in the twenty-first century. Bakhtin’s conception of polyphony already featured an idea of multi-layered reality, that works well for the example of the digital monument.
Dostoevsky’s multi-layered composition within the polyphonic novel makes it, according to Bakhtin, a distinctly different than any other genre. Drama as a genre needs the
‘single-tiered’ background, on which the dialogue between characters is projected (Bakhtin 17).
In the mystery genre, the plot indeed works with different levels, but has only one possible outcome, making the plot closed-off from the beginning (Bakhtin 18). In the polyphonic novel, reality is layered, and the outcome of events is not predetermined due to the many independent
characters, who are all independent. Bakhtin thus speaks of an ‘ultimate dialogicality’, in which the different characters form different consciousnesses that form a unity on another level, another plane.
The essence of polyphony lies precisely in the fact that the voices remain independent and, as such, are combined in a unity of a higher order than in homophony. If one is to talk about individual will, then it is precisely in polyphony that a combination of several individual wills takes place, that the boundaries of the individual will can be in principle exceeded.
These ‘several individual wills’, fits the example of the digital Tõnismägi. In the case of the relocation of the Bronze Soldier, the Estonian government performed its individual will because there was no possibility of facilitating more than one will. Digital memory can oppose these top-down decisions with techniques like augmented reality. By using the concept of polyphonic memory, it becomes clear how the past is redistributed in an ultimate dialogue, inviting memory actors who would normally not receive this agency.
Bakhtin praised Dostoevsky’s ability to see everything in their simultaneity. Now, in the twenty-first century, we too have come more and more aware of our interconnectedness.
Using this interaction, dialogue and difference to our advantage, might help us in the future of European memory.
> Figure 21
Digital reconstruction of the Bronze Soldier, as part of the CyberHistory-app.