Bakhtin
In this actively polyglot world,
completely new relationships are
established between language and its
object (that is, the real world) – and this
is fraught with enormous consequences
for all the already completed genres that
had been formed during eras of closed
and deaf monoglossia. In contrast to
other major genres, the novel emerged
and matured precisely when intense
activization of external and internal
polyglossia was at the peak of its
activity; this is its native element. The
novel could therefore assume leadership
in the process of developing and
renewing literature in its linguistic and
stylistic dimension.
From the Prehistory of Novelistic
Discourse
“Language in the novel not only
represents, but itself serves as the object
of representation. Novelistic discourse is
always criticizing itself.
In this consists the categorical
distinction between the novel and all
straightforward genres – the epic poem,
the lyric and the drama (strictly
conceived). All directly descriptive and
expressive means at the disposal of
these genres, as well as the genres
themselves, become upon entering the
novel an object of representation within
it. . . .
There never was a single strictly
straightforward genre, no single type of
direct discourse – artistic, rhetorical,
philosophical, religious, ordinary
everyday – that did not have its own
parodying and travestying double. . . .
Closely connected with the problem
of polyglossia [multiple languages used
in a society] 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 a decentralizing tendency (that is,
one that stratifies languages). The novel
senses itself on the border between the
completed, dominant literary language
and the extraliterary languages that
know heteroglossia. . . .”
“There is very little agreement as to
what the word "novel" means. Consider
three exemplary titles in which the word
will "novel" is preceded by the definite
article: Lukacs' Theory of the Novel (1920),
Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957)
and Lucien Goldmann's Towards a
Sociology of the Novel (1964). These are all
important books that have greatly
advanced our understanding of certain
kinds of novels, but each seeks to
elevate one kind of novel into a
definition of the novel as such. They
lack a field theory capable of
encompassing not only the texts
nominated by others as novels, but two
millennia of long prose fictions
preceding the 17th century -- the period
when, according to consensus, the novel
experienced its "birth." (The same view
holds that the novel "rose" in the 18th
century and "triumphed" in the 19th -its "death" in the 20th century is a
foregone conclusion by the same
historical logic.)
The absolute novelty of the novel has
not been adequately recognized.
Bakhtin's advantage over everyone else
working on novel theory is that he is
able to include more texts from the past
in his scheme than anyone else -- and
this because, paradoxically, he more
than others perceives the novel as new.
Not new when it is said to have "arisen,"
but new whenever that kind of text
made its appearance, as it has done
since at least the ancient Greeks, a text
that merely found its most
comprehensive reform in Cervantes and
those who have come after. In order to
see what kind of texts might have so
radical a novelty, we shall have to
rethink the basic categories of genre and
style.
Other genres are constituted by a
set of formal features for fixing
language that pre-exist any specific
utterance within the genre. Language, in
other words, is assimilated to form. The
novel by contrast seeks to shape its form
to languages; it has a completely
different relationship to languages from
other genres since it constantly
experiments with new shapes in order
to display the variety and immediacy of
speech diversity. It is thus best
conceived either as a supergenre, whose
power consists in its ability to engulf
and ingest all other genres (the different
and separate languages peculiar to
each), together with other stylized but
non-literary forms of language; or not a
genre in any strict, traditional sense at
all. In either case it is obvious that the
history of what might be called novels,
when they are defined by their
proclivity to display different languages
interpenetrating each other, will be
extremely complicated.
The only history of the novel
adequate to such complexity has been
proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin, whose
definition of the genre as a consciously
structured hybrid of languages I have
used in the preceding remarks. Bakhtin
has succeeded in forging a history
capable of comprehending the very
earliest classical texts and medieval
romances, as well as elements from the
oral tradition of folklore going back to
prehistoric times.
"Novel" is the name Bakhtin gives
to whatever force is at work within a
given literary system to reveal the
limits, the artificial constraints of that
system. Literary systems are comprised
of canons, and "novelization" is
fundamentally anticanonical. It will not
permit a generic monologue. Always it
will insist on the dialogue between what
a given system will admit as literature
and those texts that are otherwise
excluded from such a definition of
literature. What is more conventionally
thought of as the novel is simply the
most complex and distilled expression
of this impulse.
The history of the novel so
conceived is very long, but it exists
outside the bounds of what traditional
scholars would think of as strictly
literary history. Bakhtin's history would
be charted, among other ways, in
devaluation of a given culture's higher
literary form, such as the parodies of the
knightly romances (Cervantes) and of
sentimental fiction (Sterne and
Fielding). Bakhtin comes very close to
naming Socrates as the first novelist,
since the gadfly role he played, and
which he played out in the drama of
precisely the dialogue, is more or less
what the role of the novel always has
been. That role has been assumed by
unexpected forms. Even the drama
(Ibsen and other Naturalists) and the
long poem (Lord Byron) become masks
for the novel during the 19th century.
As formerly distinct literary genres are
subjected to the novel's intensifying
antigeneric power, their systematic
purity is infected and they become
"novelized." -- Michael Holquist.