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

he lives in a kitchen; his "sideward glance" and his recoiling as he thinks about her negative Notes
reaction to this embarrassing news are easy to imagine: his discourse is penetrated by the words
of another and therefore it becomes distorted.
If in Problems... Bakhtin claimed that Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel, later on
he slightly altered his views, stating that dialogism is more or less present in all novels, especially
in those imbued with a carnivalesque mood. Thus in "Discourse...", he defined the novel as "a
diversity of social speech types, sometimes even diversity of languages and a diversity of individual
voices, artistically organized". There is polyphony even in some non-fictional prose, such as the
early Platonic dialogues where Socrates appears not so much as the teacher, the owner of truth,
but rather as a kind of grotesque midwife, one who incites to dialogue in order to search for truth.
Or in satires such as the Menippean ones, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and so forth.
In its general sense, then, polyphony is not only a technical characteristic of the novel (related, yet
not restricted to, the notion of dramaticism), but also a principle of the creative process and of
moral philosophy, owing to its implications of unfinalizability.
The Bakhtinian concept has made a significant career in the last decades. Contemporary critics
have used the term mainly to refer to the modernist and postmodern fiction (Julia Kristeva, for
instance), but others (such as David Lodge) have rightfully argued that polyphonic elements can
also be found in realistic prose. Some feminists have appropriated it in reference to l'écriture
féminine, and connections between the notion of dialogic speech and psychoanalytical or
deconstructive approaches have also been established. Some even claim to discern a particular
critical approach of late, Dialogical Criticism, inspired by such concerns of Bakhtin's as the
polyphonic heterogeneity of the discourse, and the function of subversive, carnivalesque elements
in prose narratives. Tzvetan Todorov, for instance, has made use of these concepts in La conquête
de l'Amérique (1982), a study of the dialogue between the European, colonizing voices and the
Indians' colonized ones.
Self-Assessment
1. Choose the correct options:
(i) The final part of the essay references the ............... .
(a) ancient ages (b) middle ages
(c) modern ages (d) none of these
(ii) Parody is a composition of ............... .
(a) irony (b) metaphor
(c) satire (d) none of these
(iii) “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse” Bakthin discusses the idea of ............... .
(a) satire (b) metaphor
(c) parody (d) none of these
(iv) The Greeks were not at all embarrassed to attribute the authorship of the parodic work
war between the ............... .
(a) mice and the frogs (b) mice and the dogs
(c) cats and the rats (d) none of these.
17.2 Summary

• Bakhtin's essay "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" is composed of three parts,
each offering a different component to his study of novelistic discourse. The first part is an
introduction to novelistic discourse; Bakhtin introduces the five stylistic approaches to
novelistic discourse and differentiates the novel from other forms of writing.

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