SOURCE: Wall, Anthony. “A Broken Thinker.” South Atlantic Quarterly 97, nos. 3-4 (summer-fall, 1998): 669-98.

In the following essay, Wall argues that Bakhtin is a fundamentally fragmentary thinker and that those who attempt to reconstruct his lost thought from his fragments both misread Bakhtin and misunderstand the process of cultural memory.

Or again, what harm would it have done us to have remained uncreated?

—Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe

Bakhtin is a broken thinker and the pieces of his thought are strewn in virtually every direction. It is ironic that as the early writings are becoming more widely known—texts that are, without exception, fragments of varying scope and length—interpretations are being proposed that purport to give the entire picture of Bakhtin or to read these fragments through the prism of his later works. Although his oeuvre begins in fragments rather than wholes, readers are often tempted...