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Unit 18: Mikhail Bakhtin and his ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse (Textual Analysis with Chronotopes...

maner. It could also be used to explain newer genres, such as Magic Realism, which seems to Notes
demonstrate a blending of the novel with the fairy tale. Accordingly, while we might object to
Bakhtin’s theories by pointing out poets such as Walt Whitman (1819–1921) who are very clearly
using heteroglossia, Bakhtin would answer that Songs of Myself is simply a novelized poem, or
even a novel in verse form.

18.1 Bakhtin’s Concept of Chronotopes
Mikhail Bakhtin's chronotope concept offers for the study of the intrinsically hybrid genre of the
historical novel. By applying the concept to the analysis of the early 19th century Flemish historical
novel, I illustrate how the chronotope of the adventure novel of ordeal, which structures a
significant number of the historical novels published in Belgium between 1830 and 1850, and
which can be traced back to the ancient Greek romance, can undergo drastic revisions under the
influence of the particular poetics of the Belgian historical novel. During the first two decades of
Belgian independence the poetics of the genre was strongly determined by the nationalist and
didactic function the historical novel was called upon to perform. I will illustrate how the first
Flemish novelists harked back to traditional chronotopes (and their corresponding plots and
motives) with which the largely uneducated Flemish public was familiar from a mostly oral folk
tradition, and tried to remould these to accord with their own purposes and with the demands
and regulations of the genre. In what is generally referred to as Bakhtin's third period (the period
of his forced exile in Kazakhstan in the 1930s), Mikhail Bakhtin became interested in the question
of genre, which he regarded as 'a key organ of memory and an important vehicle of historicity'.
More specifically, it was the genre of the novel that awakened this interest.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Bakhtin wrote six essays that deal with the theory
of the novel: 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel', 'The Bildungsroman
and Its Significance in the History of Realism', 'From the Prehistory of Novelistic
Discourse', 'Epic and Novel', 'Discourse in the Novel' and The Novel of Education and
Its Significance in the History of Realism.

In their own way, these essays all trace and describe 'the establishment and growth of a generic
skeleton of literature'.
The chronotope essays 'Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. Notes toward a
Historical Poetics' (henceforth referred to as FTC) and 'The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in
the History of Realism (Toward a Historic Typology of the Novel)' (henceforth referred to as
BSHR) constitute the basis for the theoretical framework that is developed in my dissertation on
19th century Belgian historical novels. One of the case-studies from this dissertation is presented
here, albeit in a considerably abridged form.
The main reason for choosing Bakhtin's chronotope theory for the textual analysis of Belgian
historical novels written in the 1830s and 1840s is the hopeful prospect that Bakhtin's concept
might help to shed some light on the essential hybridity of the genre. The chronotope essays
chiefly trace the literary descent of what Bakhtin considers to be the various 'genres of the novel'
(the adventure novel of ordeal, the adventure novel of everyday life, the chivalric romance, the
(auto-)biographical novel, the idyllic romance, the folkloric romance, the Bildungsroman, etc.).
Many of these 'sub genres' can be recognized in the multifarious set of novels that are lumped
together in the first half of the 19th century under the common denominator 'historical novel'.
This tracing of the literary descent leads Bakhtin to consider the literary works of the ancient
Greeks and Romans as the 'authentic predecessors of the novel […] containing in embryo and
sometimes in developed form the basic elements characteristic of the most important later
prototypes of the European novel'.

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