Page 194 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes the use of metaphors here as the direct means by which the author represents himself, we would
in so doing destroy the novelistic image [obraz] of another's style, that is, destroy precisely that
image that Pushkin, as novelist, constructs here. Lensky's represented poetic speech is very distant
from the direct word of the author himself as we have postulated it: Lensky's language functions
merely as an object of representation (almost as a material thing); the author himself is almost
completely outside Lensky's language (it is only his parodic and ironic accents that penetrate this
'language of another').[...] The image of another's language and outlook on the world, simultaneously
represented and representing, is extremely typical of the novel; the greatest novelistic images (for
example, the figure of Don Quixote) belong precisely to this type. These descriptive and expressive
means that are direct and poetic (in the narrow sense) retain their direct significance when they
are incorporated into such a figure, but at the same time they are 'qualified' and 'externalized',
shown as something historically. These lines and the following citations from Eugene Onegin are
taken from Walter Arndt's translation (New York: Dutton, 1963), slightly modified in places to
correspond withBakhtin's remarks about particular words used. (Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, first
published in Russia in 1831, is 'a novel in verse'. The fact that it is written in verse does not,
however, make it a poem rather than a novel in Bakhtin's terms.) relative, delimited and incomplete
- in the novel they, so to speak, criticize themselves.[...] The author represents this language,
carries on a conversation with it, and the conversation penetrates into the interior of this language-
image and dialogizes it from within. And all essential novelistic images share this quality: they are
internally dialogized images - of the languages, styles, world views of another (all of which are in
separable from their concrete linguistic and stylistic embodiment). The reigning theories of poetic
imagery are completely powerless to analyze these complex internally dialogized images of whole
languages. [...] The stylistic structure of Evgenij Onegin is typical of all authentic novels. To a
greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dialogized system made up of the images of 'languages',
styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and inseparable from language. Language in the
novel not only represents, but itself serves as the object of representation. Novelistic discourse is
always criticizing itself. In this consists the categorical distinction between the novel and all
straight-forward genres - the epic poem, the lyric and the drama (strictly conceived). All directly
descriptive and expressive means at the disposal of these genres, as well as the genres themselves,
become upon entering the novel an object of representation within it. Under conditions of the
novel every direct word - epic, lyric, strictly dramatic - is to a greater or lesser degree made into
an object, the word itself becomes a bounded [ogranicennij] image, one that quite often appears
ridiculous in this framed condition. The basic tasks for a stylistics in the novel are, therefore: the
study of specific images of languages and styles; the organization of these images; their typology
(for they are extremely diverse); the combination of images of languages within then ovelistic
whole; the transfers and switchings of languages and voices; their dialogical interrelationships.
The stylistics of direct genres, of the direct poetic word, offer us almost no help inresolving these
problems. We speak of a special novelistic discourse because it is only in the novel that discourse
can reveal all its specific potential and achieve its true depth. But the novelis comparatively recent
genre. Indirect discourse, however, the representation of another's word, another's language in
intonational quotation marks, was known in the most ancient times; we encounter it in the earliest
stages of verbal culture. What is more, long before the appearance of the novel we find a rich
world of diverse forms that transmit, mimic and represent from various vantage points another's
word, another's speech and language, including also the languages of the direct genres. These
diverse forms prepared the ground for the novel long before its actual appearance. Novelistic
discourse has a lengthy prehistory, going back centuries, even thousands of years. It was formed
and matured in the genres of familiar speech found in conversational folk language (genres that
are as yet little studied) and also in certain folkloric and low literary genres. During its germination
and early development, the novelistic word reflected a primordial struggle between tribes, peoples,
cultures and languages - it is still full of echoes of this ancient struggle. In essence this discourse
always developed on the boundary line between cultures and languages. The prehistory of novelistic
discourse is of great interest and not without its own special drama. In the prehistory of novelistic
discourse one may observe many extremely heterogeneous facts at work. From our point of view,
however, two of these factors prove to be of decisive importance: on of these is laughter, the other

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