Tag Archives: dialogue

“Discourse in the Novel” – Bakhtin

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Essay notes

  • “There is a highly characteristic and widespread point of view that sees novelistic discourse as an extra-artistic medium, a discourse that is not worked into any special or unique style. After failure to find in novelistic discourse a purely poetic formulation (‘poetic’ in the narrow sense) as was expected, prose discourse is denied any artistic value at all; it is the same as practical speech for everyday life, or speech for scientific purposes, an artistically neutral means of communication” (260). I sort of disagree. I think all speech is rhetorical and, therefore, art. But this opens up dialectics between speech and utterance, rhetorics and poetics.
    • Significance: “Thus stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge the novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories” (267). One solution is turning to rhetoric and coding novels as rhetorical texts rather than as poetic art. “The novel is an extra-artistic rhetorical genre” (268). Tbh, I think this is a Cartesian split. “… the very reliance on rhetorical forms has a great heuristic significance. Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and not the philosophy of language“ (268-69).
    • Double-bind: “ The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse, but one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists” (269).
  • “The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” and “These heterogeneous stylistic unities, upon entering the novel combine to form a structured artistic system, and are subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the unities subordinated to it” (261, 62). Indeed, “The stylistics uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the combination of these subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities (even at times comprised of different languages) into the higher unity of the work as a whole: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages’” (262).
  • “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262). And those compositional unities help heteroglossia enter the novel: “These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization–this is the basic distinguishing features of the stylistics of the novel” (263).
  • Raznorečie in Russian.
  • It’s symphonic, synergistic. Tower of Babel
  • “A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute and abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia” (271). But he’s not critiquing here a “common language” so much as a “language conceived as ideologically saturated” (271).
  • Significance: This is problematic because of essentialism and consensus… “The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of languages, their enslavement, the process of illuminating them with the True Word, the incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary language of culture and truth, the canonization of ideological systems,” and so on (272). And as long as language is enslaved, so too then by extension, are the people who voice it.
  • I’m hoping someone will be able to explain the centripetal and centrifugal force metaphors to me. Oh wait… so centripetal means a unifying language that sucks everything in ad co-opts it. Centrifugal is like heteroglossia, flinging several valid options out (?)
  • “The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance” (272).
  • Heteroglossia can be a site of resistance (273, 303).
  • What is the difference between discourse and rhetoric?
  • Active and passive responsive understanding as a prerequisite for rhetoric (280-82)
  • “Language [. . .] is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it” (288).
  • Genres stratify language (288).
  • Mutual exclusion v. intersection of plural languages: “… languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways (the Ukranian language, the language of the epic poem, of early Symbolism, of the student, of a particular generation of children, of the run-of-the-mill intellectual, of the Nietzschean and so on)” (291).
  • Stratification of literary language: “… in their intentional dimension one finds and common plane on which they can all be juxtaposed, and juxtaposed dialogically. The whole matter consists in the fact the there may be, between ‘languages,’ highly specific dialogic relations; no matter how these languages are conceived, they may all be taken as particular points of view on the world. However varied the social forces doing the work of stratification–a profession, a genre, a particular tendency, an individual personality–the work itself everywhere comes down to the (relatively) protracted and socially meaningful (collective) saturation of language with specific (and consequently limiting) intentions and accents. The longer this stratifying saturation goes on, the broader the social circle encompassed by it and consequently the more substantial the social force bringing about such a stratification of language, then the more sharply focused and stable will be those traces, the linguistic changes in the language markers (linguistic symbols), that are left behind in language as a result of this social force’s activity–from stable (and consequently social) semantic nuances to authentic dialectological markers (phonetic, morphological and others), which permit us to speak of particular social dialects. As a result of the work done by all these stratifying forces in language, there are no ‘neutral’ words and forms–words and forms that can belong to ‘no one’; language has been completely taken over, shot through with intentions and accents. For any individual consciousness living in it, language is  not an abstract system of normative forms but rather a concrete heteroglot conception of the world” (293). Each word has a “taste” of its influence (as the reading goes on to say). “The word in language is half someone else’s” (293). And it can only become “one’s own” when the speaker appropriates it by “populating it with his own intentions, his own accent” (293). And “Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language [. . .] but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (293-94).
  • This reminds me of ideographs: “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated–overpopulated–with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process” (294). (is it?)
  • Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a ‘language’” (295). This reminds me a lot of Discourse (Gee, Swales, etc.)!! Wait… THAT’S THE CODE I CRACKED IT YAS >>> languages are discourses. Heteroglossia is capital D Discourse.
  • “As soon as a critical interanimation of languages began to occur in the consciousness of our peasant, as soon as it became clear that these were not only various different languages but even internally variegated languages, that the ideological systems and approaches to the world that were indissolubly connected with these languages contradicted each other and in no way could live in peace and quiet with one another–then the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessity of actively choosing one’s orientation among them began” (296). And that, I argue is rhetorical.
  • While the poet tries to reduce language to its purest form by stripping it of its heteroglossia, the novelist tries to leverage heteroglossia and language stratification to hir advantage (298): “The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not violate those socio-ideological cultural horizons (big and little worlds) that open up behind heteroglot languages–rather, he welcomes them into his work” (299). Then, “Diversity of voices and heteroglossia enter the novel and organize themselves within it into a structured artistic system. This constitutes the distinguishing feature of the novel as a genre” (300). Indeed, “When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating language, all its words and all its forms, which provide language with its particular concrete conceptualizations, are organized in the novel into a structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch” (300).
  • Analysis of and application (of heteroglossia) to the comic novel and case study with Little Dorrit (Dickens)… Usually parodic.
    • “So it is throughout Dickens; whole novel. His entire text is, in fact, everywhere dotted with quotation marks that serve to separate out little islands of scattered direct speech and purely authorial speech, washed by heteroglot waves from all sides” (307).
    • But they’re not actual quotation marks because the other’s speech and author’s speech are “at none of these points clearly separated [. . .] the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing through a single syntactic whole” (308).
  • Leads to a sort of refracting of authorial voice/identity and intentions: “Heterogossia, once incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its incorporation), is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse. It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author” (324). And this is rhetorical (354).
  • I’m thinking too about how the author brings heteroglot voices to the novel in the language coded into it, but the reader also brings heteroglot interpretations to the novel as we decode it. Together we perform the text together, contributing to heteroglossia by interpreting it.
  • Then examples from Turgenev (// the “Dickens” section)
  • Heteroglossia includes not just the different kinds of speech, but also the character zones and incorporated genres, luxuries afforded the novel: “A comic playing with languages, a story ‘not from the author’ (but from a narrator, posited author or character), character speech, character zones and lastly various introductory or framing genres are the basic forms for incorporating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel. All these forms permit languages to be used in ways that are indirect, conditional, distanced. They all signify relativizing of linguistic consciousness in the perception of language borders–borders created by history and society, and even the most fundamental borders (i.e., those between languages as such)–and permit expression of a feeling for the materiality of language that defines such a relativized consciousness” (323-24).
  • “Prose consciousness feels cramped when it is confined to only one out of a multitude of heteroglot languages, for one linguistic timbre is inadequate to it” (324).
  • Then there’s a section about the speaking character of the novel that I was completely spent while reading. I heteroglossed over it.
  • Contact zone (Pratt): “In the history of literary language, there is a struggle constantly being waged to overcome the official line with its tendency to distance itself from the zone of contact, a struggle against various kinds and degrees of authority. In this process discourse gets drawn into the contact zone, which results in semantic and emotionally expressive (intonational) changes: there is a weakening and degradation of the capacity to generate metaphors, and discourse becomes more reified, more concrete, more filled with everyday elements and so forth” (345).
  • “Such mixing of two languages within the boundaries of a single utterance is, in the novel, an artistic device (or more accurately, a system of devices) that is deliberate. But unintentional, unconscious hybridization is one of the most important modes in the historical life and evolution of all languages. We may even say that language and languages change historically primarily by means of hybridization, by means of a mixing of various ‘languages’ co-existing within the boundaries of a single dialect, a single national language, a single branch, a single group of different branches or different groups of such branches, in the historical as well as paleontological past of languages–but the crucible for this mixing always remains the utterance” (358-59).
  • “The novelistic plot serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds. What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in someone else’s language, coming to know one’s own belief system in someone else’s system. There takes place within the novel an ideological translation of another’s language, and an overcoming of its otherness–an otherness that is only contingent, external, illusory. Characteristic for the historical novel is a positively weighted modernizing, an erasing of temporal boundaries, the recognition of an eternal present in the past. The primary stylistic project of the novel as a genre is to create images of languages” (365-66). Therefore, “Every novel, taken as the totality of all the languages and consciousnesses of language embodied in it, is a hybrid. But we emphasize once again: it is an intentional and conscious hybrid, one artistically organized, and not an opaque mechanistic mixture of languages (more precisely, a mixture of the brute elements of language)” (366).

Minor characters – Alex Woloch

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Character space

Character system

 

By interpreting the character system as a distributed field of attention we make the tension between structure and reference generative of , and integral to, narrative signification.

The tension between representing and allegorizing is one of the focus on one life vs the many

Realist novel – Depth psychology and social expansiveness

The realist novel is destabilized not by too many details but by too many people

Flat minor characters become allegorical

How can human beings enter into a narrative world and not disrupt the distribution of attention?

Minor characters are the proletariat of the novel

Balance between protagonist a minor characters mirrors asymmetric norms of democracy

What we remember about a minor character is how the text forgets them, like a great actor in a bad production

Narratives allow and solicit us to create a story – a distributed pattern of attention- that is at odds with or divergent from the former latter. Of attention in the discourse

19th century realist novel – pull between democratic equality and consequences of social stratification

On Voice – John Brenkman

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This creation of an imaginary space of narration is a complex stylization, a kind of rhetorical zone in which the narrator “recounts” events-actions, emotions, thoughts-as though he or she has “observed” them, though no such space of witness exists within or outside the story told. That we accept this rhetoric of recounting and observing, this imaginary space from which someone who is no one addresses us, is at the very least a significant achievement in our modern capacity for alienation.

 

 

 

 

 

Two originators of novel theory, the early Lukhcs and Bakhtin, do not presup- pose an imaginary space of narration. They look at narration from the standpoint of writing. Rather than treating the novel as a type of narrative among others (myth, folktale, film, and so on) as narrative theory and narratology do, the novel theorists consider the novel a specific, though diverse and polyglot, cultural form and social practice.

 

 

The essential reference point of novel theory for Bakhtin is the process of composition; he conceives of the novel as discourse, an act of communication ventured in, and venturing to alter, concrete public spheres. The composition or construction of a novel takes as its raw material a variety of discourses active in society at large and re-voices them. In the terms he developed in the essay “The Problem of Speech Genres,” these pre-existing social discourses are “primary genresw-for example, “the rejoinder in dialogue, everyday stories, letters, dia- ries, minutes, and so forth”-which “secondary, complex genres,” like novels, “play out” (Speech 98). The novel engages the sociality of communication on, as it were, two fronts: on the one hand, it incorporates into its very construction discourses originating in several social contexts, public and private; and, on the other hand, it addresses itself to, intervenes in, an actual public realm.

 

 

Poe’s achievement is immense, and if my hypothesis is correct that it established the conventions of the imaginary space of narration and the structured distinc- tion of narrator and (implied) author, it has had a profound effect on reading habits and criticism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bakhtin thus sees in the flexibility and relativity of “double-voiced” narrations the writer’s leeway to experiment with his or her commitment to the norms and meanings of a particular discourse. Keying on the resources that such “a refract- ing of authorial intentions” affords the comic novel in particular, he stresses the “variety of different distances between distinct aspects of the narrator’s language and the author’s language” (315).Poe’s innovative stylization turns the relativity of double voice to a more regulated, unified purpose. He renders it “monologi- cal” in Bakhtin’s terms or “parsimoniously plural” to borrow Roland Barthes’s term in S/Z.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bakhtin is truer to the history of the novel in seeing it as a continual appropriation of other social discourses, including the whole array of storytelling modes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What makes the novel, however, is its voice. Among Flaubert’s indelible con- tributions to the novel form is free indirect style, with its unlimited flexibility in evoking the subjectivity, the interiority and inner speech, of a character within the objectifying trajectory of third-person narration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Writing” is on the face of it a literal rather than metaphorical term. And indeed I hold the view, which I associate with the work of Bakhtin and Raymond Williams, that “literature,” broadly defined, is the social practice of writing and therefore inseparable from the social history of literacy. Nevertheless, poststruc- turalism threw a wrench into every purely empirical sense of “writing,” begin- ning with Jacques Derrida’s huge claim in Of Grammatology that Western philosophy conceptualizes speech and writing as opposites and then freights the concept of writing with whatever features of language are deemed errant and recalcitrant to the reigning metaphysical idea of the nature of language. De Man’s Allegories of Reading and Derrida’s own work as a literary critic, especially in the essays on Plato, MallarmC, and Philippe Sollers in La disstmination, revolu- tionized literary studies by showing that mefaphors of writing are so integral to every practice of writing that it is impossible to say what writing is-as artistic activity, social practice, or vocation-without entering the metaphorical or figurative labyrinth of the written text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Voice” is overtly metaphorical and has acquired connotations ranging from onto-theological presence to the lingusitic technicalities of grammatical mood. Yet, it has distinctive advantages over other widely used terms in novel criticism. Unlike “presiding consciousness,” it does not presuppose what shape the subjec- tivity of writing and reading actually takes, or ought to take, in novels. Unlike “point of view” or “perspective,” it does not import a visual metaphor into the account of a phenomenon of language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moreover, because novel theory starts from the worldly intersubjectivity of writing and reading, it eliminates the need for dubious categories like “vision” or “focalization” to fit intersubjectivity into novelistic prose, whether the shadowy intersubjectivity of free-indirect third-person narration or the relatively delimited intersubjectivity of unreliable first-person narrations. For Bakhtin, language is in essence intersubjective, lying “on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he approriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (293). The novelist’s stylistic achievement of “double voicing,” however master- ful, derives from the existential condition of every speaking being: no one ever truly originates or masters speech.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fictional Dialogue – Bronwen Thomas

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Thomas, Bronwen. Fictional Dialogue: Speech and Conversation in the Modern and Postmodern Novel. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2012.

 

Gennette “scene” – dialogue practically takes place in real time

Direct discourse fallacy – it’s not mimesis

We don’t have a direct copy but question how it’s been reported to us (Sternberg ‘s quotation theory”

But even this critique relies on an ideological of the real

Realism in dialogue has shifted from not portraying curt speech to it being a requirement

 

The fascination over fictional dialogue has never been about measuring its accuracy or authenticity, but rather about trying to understand why the experience it offers me as a reader is so exhilarating”

 

“Dialogue affords the reader, particularly in offering the sensation of being in the midst of an event, a performance, where boundaries of all kinds are eroded and outcomes uncertain.” (pg. 1-2)

 

Quasi-direct discourse “between the reported speech and the reporting context, dynamic relations of high complexity and tension are in force.”

 

Challenged and exposed the “direct discourse fallacy” – direct speech has a kind of authenticity and immutability denied to other forms of representation.

 

Alan Palmer – Speech and thought have continuing consciousness, novels are full of references to joint or group thinking.

 

Dialogue has a metacommunicative function, reflecting not just on how groups of characters choose to behave toward and interact with one another but also to suggest how those forms of talk are socially situated and become socially sanctioned.

 

dialogue plays a crucial role in helping to create and populate credible fictional worlds and in contributing drama and vitality to the actions and situations located within those worlds.

fictional dialogue is often highly stylized and that what passes for an accurate reflection of “real speech” may be simply the product of a “linguistic hallucination” (Fludernik 1993, 453) in which the reader readily participates.

Meir Sternberg (1981, 237) playfully contends that “the trouble is that, unlike the proverbial old dog, mimesis has been taught so many new tricks and has such an aptitude for learning new ones, that its performance can hardly be reduced to a single univocal bark.”

 

Sternberg argues, any analysis of fictional dialogue must be alert to the fact that “the most potent effects of direct speech . . . turn on various strategies of interference and montage”(1982a, 69)

 

What Monika calls we-narratives, in which (1) action (groups that do things on the plot level); (2) thought or attitude (groups that have a common viewpoint and express a common attitude); and (3) narration (groups that engage in collective storytelling as co-authors and co-narrators)

 

Turning next to the delineation of collective consciousness, one has to observe at the outset that—even in factual narratives—this is a fiction. Collective mindsets are speculative attributions of attitudes and opinions but also of dispositions. They occur pervasively in historiography, everyday conversational narrative, and fiction. In con- trast to the thought process of individual protagonists, a collective consciousness very rarely comes in the form of interior monologue; the standard mode of representation is that of psychonarration, but there are also some examples of free indirect thought (see Houghton 139).

 

Lots of the fallacies over seeing speech as either transcript or as a transparent reflection of consciousness, that which makes dialogue the “handmaid of bourgeois humanistic ideology”  can be avoided by thinking about Gramsci’s theories of language as being socially and politically embedded.

What Is Unnatural about Unnatural Narratology? A Response to Monika Fludernik

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Response to ongoing debate 2012-2010

Fludernik defines the term “unnatural narrative” as denoting “the fabulous, the

magical, and the supernatural besides the logically or cognitively impossible” (362).

Furthermore, from her perspective, unnatural narratology combines two different

discourses: “the discourse of fable, romance, before-the-novel narrative; and the

discourse of postmodernist anti-illusionism, transgression and metafiction” (36

Richardson argues elsewhere, “we will be most

effective as narrative theorists if we reject models that, based on models derived from

linguistics or natural narrative, insist on firm distinctions, binary oppositions, fixed

hierarchies, or impermeable categories” (Unnatural Voices 139).

unnatural is ultimately a function of our bodily existence in the world (Alber s position) or whether the unnatural lies beyond the scope of our embodiment (the position of Iversen and Nielsen);