Bakhtin's Confessional Self-accounting and Psalms of Lament
AbstractIn his early essay entitled "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," Mikhail Bakhtin laid the groundwork for his later discussion of dialogism by exploring the concepts of "outsideness," "authoring," and "aestheticizing." While his essay concerns the relationship of an author to a created hero (literary character), it also—in typical Bakhtinian style—grows to encompass far more than literature, contemplating as well the construction of self, others, and even God. One portion of this most explicitly theological of his essays explores the genre he calls "confessional self-accounting" and the path by which remorse becomes the opportunity for faith both for the one repenting and for the one reading the confession of another.My essay uses Bakhtin's discussion to help explore a neighboring genre, the biblical Psalms of lament. These psalms display moods and movements analogous to those of confessional self-accounting—isolation, inner chaos, and the turn toward God as loving other for reconstructing a beloved self. The psalms have also functioned similarly to confessional self-accounting in the religious experience of generations of subsequent readers, who respond by reading their own griefs, fears, and hopes in the "I" and "we" of the ancient Psalms.