Page 197 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

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

freed consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed the thick walls that had Notes
imprisoned consciousness within its own discourse, within its own language. A distance arose
between language and reality that was to prove and indispensable condition for authentically
realistic forms of discourse. Linguistic consciousness - parodying the direct word, direct style,
exploring its limits, its absurd sides, the face specific to an era - constituted itself outside this
direct word and outside all its graphic and expressive means of representation. A new mode
developed for working creatively with language: the creating artist began to look at language
from the outside, with another's eyes, from the point of view of apotentially different language
and style. It is, after all, precisely in the light of another potential language or style that a given
straight forward style is parodied, travestied, ridiculed. The creating consciousness stands, as it
were, on the boundary line between languages and styles. This is, for the creating consciousness,
a highly peculiar position to find itself in with regard to language. The aedile or rhapsode
experienced himself in his own language, in his own discourse, in an utterly different way from
the creator of 'War between the Mice and the Frogs', or the creators of Margites.
One who creates a direct word - whether epic, tragic or lyric - deals only with the subject whose
praises he sings, or represents, or expresses, and he does so in his own language that is perceived
as the sole and fully adequate tool for realizing the word's direct, objectivized meaning. [...] In his
book on Plato, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff writes: 'Only knowledge of a language that possesses
another mode of conceiving the world can lead to the appropriate knowledge of one's own
language[...].'
I do not continue the quotation, for it primarily concerns the problem of understanding one's own
language in purely cognitive linguistic terms, an understanding that is realized only in the light of
a ifferent language, one not one's own; but this situation is no less pervasive where the literary
imagination is conceiving language in actual artistic practice. Moreover, in the process of literary
creation, languages interanimate each other and objectify precisely that side of one's own (and of
the other' s) language that pertains to its world view, its inner form, the axiologically accentuated
system inherent in it. For the creating literary consciousness, existing in a field illuminated by
another's language, it is not the phonetic system of its own language that stands out, nor is it the
distinctive features of its own morphology nor its own abstract lexicon - what stands out is
precisely that which makes language concrete and which makes its world view ultimately
untranslatable, that is, precisely the style of the languages as a totality. [...] Closely connected with
the problem of polyglossia and inseparable from it is the problem of heteroglossia within a language,
that is, the problem of internal differentiation, the stratification characteristic of any national
language. This problem is of primary importance for understanding the style and historical destinies
of the modern European novel, that is, the novel since the seventeenth century. This latecomer
reflects, in its stylistic structure, the struggle between two tendencies in the languages of European
peoples: one a centralizing (unifying) tendency, the other adecentralizing tendency (that is, one
that stratifies languages). The novel senses itself on the border between the completed, dominant
literary language and the extra literary languages that know heteroglossia; the novel either serves
to further the centralizing tendencies of a new literary language in the process of taking shape
(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 the artistic and ideological norm established by the dominant literary language. The
literary-artistic consciousness of the modern novel, sensing itself on the border between two
languages, one literary, the other extra literary, each of which now knows heteroglossia, also
senses itself on the border of time: it is extraordinarily sensitive to time in language, it senses
time's shifts, the aging and renewing of language, the past and the future - and all in language.
[...In the later period of the mainstream Russian formalists' activity, another school of criticism,
led by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), shared some of their concerns, at the same time attempting to
reconcile formalism with a socio-historical approach. Bakhtin's writings aroused less interest in
his active years than they were to receive later on when the time of formalism was long overdue.
His stature has risen highest in critical milieus especially in the last 3-4 decades, that is since his

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