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

element played a background role, in the novel it has a direct, molding impact upon the characters: Notes
they and the society influence and change each other as it happens in actual history, and this
accounts for Bakhtin's interest in the dialogic consciousness of the novel.
Another direction of investigation which he pursued in the 1930s belongs to the sociology of
culture: in Rabelais and His World, a book which could be published only in 1965, Bakhtin celebrated
the "joyously ambivalent carnivalesque" mood in Rabelais's writings, indirectly referring to the
life conditions and the constraints in an authoritarian state: this form of social manifestation,
having its own norms and rituals, subverts the official ideology, overturns the established
hierarchies, mixes up the opposites and provides an escape valve for discontent. Upon literary
genres, such as the novel, the carnivalesque mood, with its insistence on body and bodily functions,
has a molding effect, resulting in a parodic or grotesque style. Owing to his emphasis on the
socially liberating role of laughter and the carnivalesque forms of manifestation, typical of low
culture, Bakhtin is claimed today by the advocates of "cultural studies" as one of their predecessors.
In the last two decades of his life, the Russian scholar revised and added some earlier studies, and
returned to the broader philosophical themes of his early writings, extending his concerns to the
humanities and the interpretation theory in general.
Critics have identified three overall concepts which subsume Bakhtin's theoretical findings. The
first one is Prosaics, as opposed to poetics: the term, coined by his commentators, describes his
mistrust of "theoretism" (i.e. the belief that everything can be explained through wide-ranging
systems, such as Saussureanism, Freudianism, Marxism, formalism), the importance he attaches
to small, "prosaic" facts of life instead of the dramatic, catastrophic events, and as concerns the
novelistic genre, the emphasis he lays on its complexities: the novel cannot be analyzed with
reference to tropes, like poetry, but insisting on its dialogic nature. Dialogue, the second global
term, refers to the fact that authentic consciousness can be revealed only by presenting the interaction
of at least two voices: truth resides in conversation rather than in a set of sentences. The third basic
concept in Bakhtin's thought is Unfinalizability. In dialogic prose the world appropriately appears
as an unfinalizable, open, creative space; in his Dostoevsky study Bakhtin states that /n/othing
conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world
has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will
always be in the future.
With Bakhtin, not only is the literary work open (Umberto Eco's opera aperta), or writerly, but the
world it creates is never to be finished.
The most seminal finding of Bakhtin's research as concerns the novel is its polyphonic (or dialogic)
nature. In order to understand the meaning in which the Russian scholar used these terms, it is yet
necessary to dwell first on the related concept of Heteroglossia (Reznorechie). The term
"heteroglossia" belongs to linguistic theory, just as "polyphony" does to fictional studies. It is
meant to reveal the way in which meaning is produced by discourse through the use of a "social
diversity of speech types", as Bakhtin observes in his renowned 1935 essay "Discourse in the
Novel". There are numberless discursive strata in every language, such as social dialects,
characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations
and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, .... languages that serve the
specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even of the hour, for, says Bakhtin, each day has its
own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphasis.
It is even possible to speak of a family jargon, with its special vocabulary and its unique accentual
system, as in the case of the Irtnevs, in Tolstoy. At any moment in history, language is heteroglot
from top to bottom. Bakhtin's dynamic perspective on language can be described as in vivo, a
Romanian scholar has observed, in contradistinction to the in vitro view of the formalists.
In "Discourse..." Bakhtin claims that some of the best instances of heteroglossia at work can be
found in the English comic novel, where there is a "re-processing of almost all the levels of literary

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