From Discourse in the Novel- Bakhtin

Well, I think the whole “language barrier” thing is catching up to me. Is it just me or did everyone else have an extremely hard time understanding Bakhin’s essay? I think I must have read it at least three times all the way through and I’m still having trouble understanding parts of it. I feel like I had a much easier time understanding Barry and I feel like it took me hours to try to figure out Bakhin. I kept getting distracted and I feel like it did not keep my attention for more than minutes at a time. I had to keep going back and reading the same sentence a million times, along with looking up words in order to understand what they meant. It’s just very frustrating to not be able to understand something, especially something like this, which is vital to this posting. Anyway, I’m going to try to make some sense of it, so here goes!

On page 1190 Bakhtin states “The separation of style and language from the question of genre has been largely responsible for a situation in which only individual and period-bound overtones of a style are the privileged subjects of study, while it’s basic social tone is ignored”. When I first read this I was like “What? Is this even in English?”, but then I read a bit further and it did make a little more sense. He then says that “…..stylistics defines itself as a stylistics of “private craftsmanship” and ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities, and villages, of social groups, generations and epochs”. What I think Bakhtin means by all of this is that it is hard to pick out the style of writing or prose because it is not associated with any other style. So, stylistics are like a “private craftsmanship” and basically work alone. Also it “ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study” because it is misinterpreted and is not understood, hence why it stands alone.

Another quote that I had found interesting and a bit helpful in understanding this essay was on page 1192 when Bakhtin states the basic types of compositional-stylistic unities. He states them as: “Direct authorial literary-artistic narration (in all its diverse variants); stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration; stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc); various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth); and the stylistically individualized speech of characters. I think he stated these in order to make a point about the “novelistic whole”. I think what he was trying to say was that all of these unities work together to form a whole, which is the novel and no one unity is higher than the the work as a whole. This goes back to the “private craftsmanship”. A private craftsmanship, whatever it may be, works alone, but also needs other elements to help it along, but those elements are not higher than the craftsmanship. It’s confusing, but it does make sense if you look at it through an example. A Plumber could be considered a private craft-man, but the man or woman alone could not get the job done. He or she needs work tools and knowledge of the subject in order to do the job correctly. It is just like the unities. The novel or piece of work needs all of the unities to complete it, but it does not subordinate to it.

At the end of Bakhtin’s  essay he states that “the problem of stylistics for the novel inevitably leads to the necessity of engaging a serious of fundamental questions concerning the philosophy of discourse, questions connected with those aspects in the life of discourse that have had no light cast on them by linguistic and stylistic thought-that is, we must deal with life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multi-languaged world”. I think that this can be applied to his essay itself.  When I read this essay, I did not understand it until I read it a few more time through. I had to read it more times perhaps because of the linguistic and stylistic thought that had no light cast upon them, which did make me question the whole point of this essay. I think that he sums it up with the very last sentence which is true that “we must deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and muti-languaged world”. If you think about it, he is right. We really can’t do anything about it, but try to understand it through our questioning.