CCR 631/CCR 690

“From the Prehistory of Novelisitc Discourse”
The Dialogic Imaingation: Four Essays by MM Bakhtin
Ed. Michael Holquist
Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist

For the first set of notes please click here.

The second part to “From the Prehistory of Novelisitc Discourse” continues the development of the idea that the novel is different, flexible, and important to the play and development of a language and a people within a given society; and like the last section it follows the slow build idea where examples are piled one on top of another until his penultimate claim can be made towards the end (if not at the end) of the section. The major claim of this section is:

Of course all these processes of shift and renewal of the national language that are reflected by the novel do not bear an abstract linguistic character inthe novel: they are inseparable from social and ideological struggle, from processes of evolution and of the renewal of society and folk. (68, emphasis original)

For Bakhtin, this is done through the ability of the novel to parody the different literary genres, and its ability to demonstrate “the problem of polyglossia and inseparable from it the problem of heteroglossia within a language” (67). It seems Bakhtin is attacking, in a roundabout why through demonstrating the primacy of his methodology using this text, the other styles of criticism concerning the novel in his milieu (why else would he find it necessary to write “From the Prehistory of Novelisitc Discourse” unless he was going to shape it to meet his own needs,ie, as the basis for his claims? OK, well that and I’ve done some outside reading. Please read 1206-1209 of The Rhetorical Tradition to see the basis for my claims.). For Bakhtin, the major goal of any criticism concerning the novel is:

understandingthestyle and historical destinies of the modern European novel, that is, the novel since the seventeenth century. This latecomer reflects the, in its stylistic structure, the struggle between two tendencies in the language of European peoples: one centralizing (unifying) tendency, the other a decentralizing tendency (that is, one that stratifies languages). The novel senses itself on the border between the completed, dominant, literary language and the extraliterary languages that know heteroglossia, the novel either serves to further the centralizingtendencies of a new literary language in the process of takingshape(with its grammatical, stylistic, and ideological norms) or–on the contrary–the novel fights for the renovation of an antiquated literary language, in the interests of those strata of the national language that have remained (to a greater or lesser degree) outside the centralizing and unifying influence of thw artistic and ideological norm established by the dominant literary language. (67)

I thnk this begs the question: so is the writer an individual genius evoking this chain of events to occur through the creation of an individual work of art, or is this the writer articulating the discourses of her milieu, and therefore, working without the benefit of the author subject position? To make this a simpler question, can I place Bakhtin in the modern or postmodern? Answering these questions will help me understand how Bakhtin envisions his ideas of the novel and what the novel represents in literate circles.

Section Three
Hearkening back to the title (“From the Prehistory…”), Bakhtin explains parody in the Middle Ages. Parody, according to Bahktin, was rampanant during this time period and allowed brief, but large scale, moments of revelry (see his expanation of feast days and holidays from 72-76).

These parodies occurred within the confines of an official language (church and state), Latin, and the parodies often took advantage of the differences between the national language and Latin. These parodies often took the form of verses or retellings of hero epic or sermons in ribald or reseque fashion, and to get the double meaning, or entendre, these version often participated in a macaronicuse of language. This, according to Bakhtin, forced a

highlight[ing of] certain elements while leaving others in the shade: parody is always based in some direction, and this bias is dictated by the distinctive features of the parodying language, its accentual system, its structure…This means that the languages that are crossed in it are relative to each other as do rejoinders in a dialogue; there is an argument between languages, an argument between styles of language. But it is not a dialogue in the narrative sense, nor in the abstract sense; rather it is a dialogue between points of view, each with its own concrete language that can not be translated into the other. (76)

This language is more than idle chatter. The space of this discourse, which is eventually subsumed by the novel, is the only way talk goes back and forth concerningthe dominant hegemony and the struggle for a cultural and its people to develop beyond the confines of the entrenched ruling class. This is a “dialogized hybrid” where “languages and styles actively and mutually illuminate one another” and amount to a “folkloric dialogue: the dispute between a dismal sacred word and a cheerful folk word, a dispute between a dismal sacred word and a cheerful folk word, a dispute” that amounts to Pratt’s contact zones, where meaning is created through the grappling of ideas enteringinto forced association with one another.  This grappling is made egalitarian if it is approached with the idea of multiple audiences and multiple interpretations.  There is no one audience, and each audience takes up the speaker’s ideas differently than the author’s intention, or even a previous audience’s reception of the work. If the writer is at the center of the work but language as placed in “a system of intersecting planes…Therefore, there is no unitary language or style in a novel” (48), then this means one of those planes is the language of the audience reading a text at a specific time after the author’s original writing has its own plane it is forcing into contact with the writer’s text.  Ideas concerning what is probable and possible within the material reality of a particular culture is suddenly different for a reader taking up an auteur’s oeuvre now than it has been in the past.  For instance, how Bakhtin is applied in the age of the Internet and Web pages, television and self-referential fictional stage productions is much different than how Bakhtin would have been applied in Stalinist Russia.  One is not more valid than the other insomuch as one is appropriate for that specific moment in time given the material conditions of the society and the means available for the creation of text which aim to move an audience.