Page 193 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 17: Mikhail Bakhtin and his “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”-Dialogics in Novels: Detailed Study

Five different stylistic approaches to novelistic discourse may be observed: Notes
1. the author's portions alone in the novel are analyzed, that is, only direct words of the author
more or less correctly isolated - an analysis constructed in terms of the usual, direct poetic
methods of representation and expression (metaphors, comparisons, lexical register, etc.);
2. instead of a stylistic analysis of the novel as an artistic whole, there is a neutral linguistic
description of the novelist's language;
3. in a given novelist's language, elements characteristic of his particular literary tendency are
isolated (be it Romanticism, Naturalism, Impressionism, etc.);
4. what is sought in the language of the novel is examined as an expression of the individual
personality, that is, language is analyzed as the individual style of the given novelist;
5. the novel is viewed as a rhetorical genre, and its devices are analyzed from the point of view
of their effectiveness as rhetoric.
All these types of stylistic analysis to a greater or lesser degree are remote from those peculiarities
that define the novel as a genre, and they are also remote from the specific conditions under which
the word lives in the novel. They all take a novelist's language and style not as the language and
style of a novel but merely as the expression of a specific individual artistic personality, or as the
style of a particular literary school or finally as a phenomenon common to poetic language in
general. The individual artistic personality of the author, the literary school, the general
characteristics of poetic language or of the literary language of a particular era all serve to conceal
from us the genre itself, with the specific demands it makes upon language and the specific
possibilities it opens up for it. As a result, in the majority of these works on the novel, relatively
minor stylistic variations - whether individual or characteristic of a particular school - have the
effect of completely covering up the major stylistic lines determined by the development of the
novel as a unique genre. And all the while discourse in the novel has been living a life that is
distinctly its own, a life that is impossible to understand from the point of view of stylistic categories
formed on the basis of poetic genres in the narrow sense of that term. The differences between the
novel (and certain forms close to it) and all other genres-poetic genres in the narrow sense—are so
fundamental, so categorical, that all attempts to impose on the novel the concepts and norms of
poetic imagery are doomed to fail. Although the novel does contain poetic imagery in the narrow
sense (primarily in the author's direct discourse), it is of secondary importance for the novel. What
is more, this direct imagery often acquires in the novel quite special functions that are not direct.
Here, for example, is how Pushkin characterizes Lensky's poetry.
He sang love, he was obedient to love, And his song was as clear As the thoughts of a simple
maid, As an infant's dream, as the moon[...]. (a development of the final comparison follows). The
poetic images (specifically the metaphoric comparisons) representing Lensky's' song' do not here
have any direct poetic significance at all. They cannot be understood as the direct poetic images of
Pushkin himself (although formally, of course, the characterization is that of the author). Here
Lensky's 'song' is characterizing itself, in its own language, in its own poetic manner. Pushkin's
direct characterization of Lensky's 'song' - which we find as well in the novel - sounds completely
different: Thus he wrote gloomily and languidly[...]. In the four lines cited by us above it is
Lensky's song itself, his voice, his poetic style that sounds, but it is permeated with the parodic
and ironic accents of the author; that is the reason why it need not be distinguished from authorial
speech by compositional or grammatical means. What we have before us is in fact an image of
Lensky's song, but not an image in the narrow sense; it is rather a novelistic image: the image of
another's language, in the given instance the image of another's poetic style (sentimental and
romantic). The poetic metaphors in these lines ('as an infant's dream', 'as the moon' and others) no
way function here as the primary means of representation (as they would function in a direct,
'serious' song written by Lensky himself); rather they themselves have here become the object of
representation, or more precisely of a representation that is parodied and stylized. This novelistic
image of another's style (with the direct metaphors that it incorporates) must be taken in intonational
quotation marks within the system of direct authorial speech (postulated by us here), that is, taken
as if the image were parodic and ironic. Were we to discard intonational question marks and take

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