The dialogic imagination: four essays, by M. M. Bakhtin
Some quotes on language and the novel.
Quotes collecting from The dialogic imagination: four essays
EPIC AND NOVEL
They become more free and flexible, theirlanguage renews itself by incorporating extraliterary heteroglossia and the “novelistic” layers of literary language, they become dialogized, permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally—this is the most important thing—the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, a living contact with unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).
…it is intimately interwoven with those direct changes in reality itself that also determine the novel and that condition its dominance in a given era.
Only that which is itself developing can comprehend development as a process.
…there also exist novels that push to its literary limits the art of pure description)
I will attempt below to approach the novel precisely as a genre-
in-the-making, one in the vanguard of all modern literary development.
I am trying to grope my way toward the basic structural characteristics of this most fluid of genres, characteristics that might determine the direction of its peculiar capacity for change and of its influence and effect on the rest of literature.
I find three basic characteristics that fundamentally distinguish the novel in principle from other genres: (1) its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-languaged consciousness realized in the novel; (2) the radical change it effects in the temporal coordinates of the literary image; (3) the
new zone opened by the novel for structuring literary images,
namely, the zone of maximal contact with the present (with con-
temporary reality) in all its openendedness.
…there is no more peaceful co-existence between territorial dialects, social and professional dialects and jargons, literary language, generic languages within literary language,
In ancient literature it is memory, and not knowledge, that
serves as the source and power for the creative impulse. That is
how it was, it is impossible to change it: the tradition of the past is sacred.
This absolute fusion and the consequent unfreedom of the subject was first overcome only with the arrival on the scene of an active polyglossia and interillumination of languages (and then the epic became a semiconventional, semimoribund genre}
The dead are loved in a different way.
all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it.
Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically. As it draws an object to itself and makes it familiar, laughter delivers the object into the fearless hands of investigative experiment
But meanwhile our present has been moving into an inconclusive future. And in this inconclusive context all the semantic stability of the object is lost; its sense and significance are renewed and grow as the context continues to unfold.This leads to radical changes in the structuring of the artistic image.
A crucial tension develops between the external and the internal man, and as a result the subjectivity of the individual becomes an object of experimentation and representation—and first of all on the humorous familiarizing plane.
FROM THE PREHISTORY OF NOVELISTIC DISCOURSE
The language of the novel is a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other. It is impossible to describe and analyze it as a single unitary language.
It is impossible to lay out the lan-guages of the novel on asingle plane, to stretch them out along a single line. It is a system of intersecting planes.
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 the novelistic
whole; the transfers and switchings of languages and voices; their
dialogical interrelationships.
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
FORMS OF TIME AND OF THE CHRONOTOPE IN THE NOVEL
All the moments of this infinite adventure-time are controlled by one force—chance. As we have seen, this time is entirely composed of contingency—of chance meetings and failures to meet.
Moments of adventuristic time occur at those points when the
normal course of events, the normal, intended or purposeful se-
quence of life’s events is interrupted.
The mix of adventure-time with everyday time
general idea of metamorphosis has already become the private metamorphosis of individual, isolated beings and is already acquiring the characteristics of an external, miraculous transformation.
in its more important momentsof crisis: for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was.
does not, strictly speaking, unfold in biographical time. It
depicts only the exceptional, utterly unusual moments
Everyday life is that lowest sphere of existence from which the hero tries to liberate himself, and with which he will never internally fuse himself.
The prostitute and courtesan occupy a place in the novel analogous (in their functions) to that of the servant (cf. for example,
Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxanne). Their position is likewise
extremely convenient for spying and eavesdropping on private life
with its secrets and intimacies.
Everyday life is the nether world, the grave, where the sun does not shine, where there is no starry firmament. For this reason, everyday life is presented to us as the underside of real life. At its center is obscenity,
The concept of silent thought first appeared only with the mystics, and this concept had its roots in the Orient.
man’s image was distorted by his increasing participation in the mute and invisible spheres of existence. He was literally drenched in muteness and invisibility. And with them entered loneliness.
The rogue, the clown and the fool create around themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope.
The novelist stands in need of some essential formal and generic mask that could serve to define the position from which he views life, as well as the position from which he makes that life public. And it is precisely here, of course, that the masks of the clown and the fool (transformed in various ways} come to the aid of the novelist
DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL
The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice.
The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse,