How are we to do inquiry into the rhetoric of modernity if we cannot experience the social life of discourse? Can an individual speak or is she in constant dialogue? Bakhtin says,"It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of a language" (272). Because the utterance lives and takes shape in an environment of social and historical heteroglossia, "it cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological conciousness...it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue" (276). How, then, do we make sense of today's utterances if we do not know the environment of the historical utterances that shaped today's discourse? I agree that rhetorical analysis of historical documents can shade the empty space, but journalistic or political genres can forget or ignore the heteroglossia that surrounds it, which is why I think that the English curriculum needs to include novels as we revise our curriculum for the twenty-first century. The discourse of the novel has what Bakhtin says is "an orientation that is contested, contestable, and contesting" from which "follows the decisive and distinctive importance of the novel as a genre: the human being in the novel is first, foremost and always a speaking human being; the novel requires speaking persons bringing with them their own unique ideological discourse, their own language" (332).
The novel is artistic prose in the family of rhetoric, for while there is an element of authorial intention to move the reader, the author is not merely reproducing or transmitting a person's discourse but artistically representing it. If we think about literature of atrocities, we can imagine all the survivors, perpetrators, and victims (and the spectrum connecting this naming) who have not spoken publicly about their experiences and those who do not have the skills to write their stories. Laub and Felman in Testimony explore the effect of bearing witness to the the testimony of survivors; Shoah captured the utterances of perpetrators as well as survivors, and Clendinnen in Reading the Holocaust presented a variety of genres that transmitted or reproduced speech -- none novels. Indeed an individual's speech is already and always in constant dialogue, but singularly, these texts do not place the speech and acts of the human being in an ideological world as does the novel through representing discourse.
...a really adequate discourse for portraying a world's unique ideology can only be that world's own discourse, although not that discourse in itself, but only in conjunction with the discourse of an author [who is aware of that which he intends to represent]. A novelist may even choose not to give his character a direct discourse of his own, he may confine himself to the representation of the character's actions alone; in such an authorial representation, however, if it is thorough and adequate, the alien discourse (i.e., the discourse of the character himself) always sounds together with authorial speech. (334)The novel, as stated above, does not want to reproduce or transmit; it does not want to parody voices situated in social and historical contexts. There is a problematic of reproducing or transmitting texts, especially ones that need a degree of mediation to establish social and historical context for readers, modern readers in particular.
A central problem of the novel is the artistic representation of another's speech. If an novelist bears witness to the story of a women who survived the Guatemalan genocide, how is he to represent not just her words, but her speech, her discourse? The problem is that her story is a rendering of history told in a discourse unique to her that then interacts with the discourse of her listener, the novelist. The question is who precisely is speaking and under what concrete circumstances? If we stop at the utterance and consider only the words transmitted, we do not consider the images lying behind the isolated utterances of social language. The image the novelist creates reveals the truth and limits of a given language because it is a social discourse, and in any social discourse, there are spaces of nonunderstanding even if we are using the same semantic or syntactic rules of language.
The novel has what Bakhtin calls a "double-voicedness" that pushes to the "limit the mutual nonunderstanding represented by people who speak different languages" (356). What Bahktin says he means by social language is not semantic and lexical choices but a "concrete socio-linguistic belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of language that is unitary only in the abstract" (356). What exactly does this mean, I am not sure yet, but in trying to make sense of it, I think he is saying that the novelist could either use the discourse of the novel to mark off different historical and cultural social worlds -- with jargon, dialect, lexical markers, etc -- if he seeks to make a direct commentary on language use. But the novelist can do more (and better is what I think Bakhtin is saying). The novelist can create a perspective for another's speech by creating a specific novelistic image of language; this notion of "image of language" is central to Bakhtin's chapter, "Discourse of the Novel," but I am not sure if I am grasping this. It is much easier, of course, to note direct dialogue of characters and to hear the dialects as such, but the novelist is creating the image of language not is such an overt manner, I think. The novelist is one part of the double-voicedness, one part of the discourse -- the part artistically representing the discourse of the social and historical context. Bakhtin writes:
Thanks to the ability of a language to represent another language while still retaining the capacity to sound simultaneously both outside it and within it, to talk about it and at the same time to talk in it and with it -- and thanks to the ability of the language being represented simultaneously to serve as an object of representation while continuing to be able to speak to itself -- thanks to all this, the creation of specific novelistic images of languages becomes possible. Therefore, the framing authorial context can least of all treat the language it is representing as a thing, a mute and unresponsive speech object, something that remains outside the authorial context as might any other object of speech. (358).In creating the image of language, the novelist can create new living contexts that expose new truths and limits, which then might answer questions otherwise unavailable in the unrepresented discourse. Two linguistic conciousnessnes are present -- creating a new zone of contact to explore -- the one being represented and the one representing, each belonging to a different system of language. Bakhtin says that if there is no second representing conciousness that what results is not an image of language but a sample of some other person's language. He writes, "An image of language may be structured only from the point of view of another language, which is taken as the norm. The novelist, then, is the norm who structures utterances in that language and who therefore introduce into the potentialities of language itself their own actualizing intention (360) -- a collision of two different points of view on the world. Does this mean that the novelist must have an actual language in mind, an actual human being he or she is representing? The definition of the novelistic hybrid is this: an artisitcally organized system for bringing languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving out of a living image of another language (361).
The novelistic plot, then, serves to represent speaking persons and their ideological worlds, according to Bakhtin. 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 and thus ideological world. Bakhtin suggest that in this space, there is an overcoming of otherness -- an otherness that is only contingent, external, and illusory. In this sense by perceiving the otherness, one recognizes the erasing of temporal and spatial boundaries. Could we say that the novel minimizes the distancing present in other genres? Can the images of language represent atrocities? If it is intentionally organizes as such, does it mean that it is successful? Is the fact that the novel is not attempting to achieve exact and complete reproduction of those alien languages he incorporates into the new text make its efforts to achieve artistic consistency among the images of these languages sufficient for rendering history?
Thus, if there is no novelist, there is no double-voicedness or no second representing conciousness in the discourse. In memoirs, autobiographies, essays, speeches, conventions, and contracts, readers miss the second discourse that creates the reality of different points of view on the world. In between those different points of view, questions and potentialities are revealed; we witness the limits. A single-voiced discourse or a collection of single voiced discourses offers readers samples; the reader must do the representing, but are all reader as capable of representing as a novelist, able to illuminate one language by means of another? I think there is something here -- this difference between double and single voicedness.Bakhtin compares the novel to poetry, drama and epic, but I am trying to get a sense of how the novel is doing something that a document, say the Genocide Convention, or the guidelines for the Gacaca hearings in Rwanda, or even Primo Levi's If This is a Man don't do. Are those single-voiced? Do we need single-voiced and double-voiced texts in the English classroom?
Am I even asking the "right" questions here?
Todd's help:
The short answer to the question "Why Bakhtin?" is that he gives you a
language to describe how, of all genres, the novel includes many voices,
how it destabilizes attempts at an abstract or stable account of life and
language, and how it invites readers to understand any utterance as
unfinished. In reading Bakhin (B’) I think it’s especially important to
think of his observations on the novel as descriptive not just of the
novel, but of language as it actually functions in real life, and, by
extension, life itself. If we keep this in mind, we can apply a lot of
what B’ says about the novel in general to novels about genocide.
By way of contrast, when B' talks of the Epic as a fixed form that is
disconnected from present reality, that cannot admit change, that forces
real language to be “poured into” it in order to qualify as an Epic, are
there parallels in other forms of writing about genocide (like official
reports) that tend to ossify language, to remove it from the realm of
actual experience? But regarding the novel, B’ writes about its inherent
instability, its constantly “becoming,” its “free and flexible”
“openendedness,” its capacity to bring into one text a huge range of
voices and modes of expression. In that way, the novel--of all genres--is
the one that most approximates the language of real life and people's
attempts to understand and represent it.
We might also consider what B’ says about how the novel (i.e. the way
people really use language) has the potential to critique and destabilize
hierarchies, how nothing is sacred to its critique, and how it brings
whatever we’re considering into a “zone of contact” with experience.
In essence, B’ explores this notion of the novel as a genre that resists
stability and domestication. One might say it’s delightfully “messy.”
This is so, according to B’, because “verbal discourse is a social
phenomenon”: it cannot be cut off from the world in which it comes to mean
something. Because the world we live in is so “messy” (esp. when things
like genocide happens) the novel itself (again, read: language) can’t be
pinned down with any kind of precise definition or description. It
includes “a diversity of social speech types,” an evolving collection of
different ways with words that move in and out of each other, that may
complement or work against each other in more ways than we can ever
anticipate or describe with any finalization. This what “heteroglossia”
is—this character of internal tension within anything that is ever said or
written between forces that are trying to fix its meaning and those that
compromise its stability. Put another way, B’ is interested in what might
be called the “flux” of language, its internal stratification and
movement, the ways in which all of the different languages within an
utterance are dialogically interacting and influencing each other. Or, to
try yet another definition, heteroglossia is the way in which languages
“talk to” each other within a single text.
Ever read HUCK FINN? Remember that scene where Huck is on the raft and
decides to write a letter to the Widow Douglass telling her where he is
and and turning Jim in? Huck says that he feels terribly sinful for not
doing it before, that he knows it's the right thing to do, etc. But then
he remembers what a good friend Jim has been, tears up the letter, and
resolves that he'll go to hell rather than betray his companion. In that
one scene you see tons of different languages: Huck the narrator, Twain
winking and acknowledging that he believes that it would actually be wrong
to turn Jim in (double-voicedness). But in that utterance situated in the
novel, you also see previous utterances of slave owners, abolitionists,
etc. That one scene is populated by different languages and ideologies
all over the place.
To be sure, we have no choice but to treat language as a more-or-less
fixed system (we couldn’t talk or write to each other if we didn’t), but
B’ helps us see how any attempt to do that is subject to its own internal
tension. These tensions, it seems to me, open up spaces to recognize in
the novel a multiplicity of ideologically-laden voices, and the reader is
drawn into participating in that conversation.
I'm not sure if this is all that helpful, but I find B' to be delightfully
challenging in that he explains how the novelist arranges artistically not
a fixed form, not a static view of life or language, but countless
languages in dialogue with each other. Let's keep talking about this when
we meet with Dave.
