“Language…shot through with intentions and accents.”

Bakhtin asserts context is the key to language, for every word is inseparable from the context it was first used in, the context of its first reading and every reading after that ad infinitum. For Bakhtin it is dialogized heteroglossia that characterizes the novel as art form.

Heteroglossia indicates the inclusion of multiple socio-cultural perspectives. In any given reading of a text, the stratified voices of past and present signifiers and the signified coexist to give it meaning which is constantly being reconstructed as new voices are added to the mix.

This ever-morphing text then can never have a fixed meaning because of the diversity of perceptions it both expresses and engenders. In fact, for a text to function as art, heteroglossia is inevitable as dialogue is not possible when there is one unified voice. The novel “denies the absolutism of a single and unitary language.”

With plurality there is dialogue and the possibility for new realities and conceptions of identity. Dialogue recognizes the existence of other consciousnesses beginning with the “two language intentions, two voices and two accents participating in an intentional and conscious artistic hybrid.”

In Toine, we read the language of the narrator and his literary language as well as the voices of the characters and their vernacular. In addition, it is impossible not to hear the voice of the author and the authority he criticizes. (We could also add the voice of the translator in translated texts. For example, cognac in the French original becomes pepino in the Spanish text.) The juxtaposition of voices in Toine “expresses the author’s intention in a refracted way” to undermine dominant or authoritative discourse.

Bakhtin points to the “multi-languagedness” of prose that “undermines the authority of custom …[and the]…system of national myth that is organically fused with language.”

In Maupassant’s text, the religious mythology of the Catholic Church and feudal culture is subverted with his use of a multiplicity of languages. The inversion of Christian images and values presents a warped view of the ‘known’ world and its inhabitants. The perplexed reader recognizes something of himself or herself in the ‘other’, adds his or her voice to the conversation, and the dialogue intensifies. (see notes on Shklovsky)

You could say that the reader is an author of the text.

The author is also a reader as when Maupassant writes, he is ‘reading’ the many voices of the past and present.

This does not mean that there is no author, or that Maupassant has no language of his own. His language is made up of many languages and has its own particular style that he uses to “refract” his intention.

The Problem

My difficulty with Bakhtin, if I understand him correctly, is his describing poetry as a static art form that unifies language. Is this because the poetry of his time was more restrictive?

Doesn’t poetry offer the author a form that allows for polyphony? Dialogism and heteroglossia are not foreign to poetry, or am I missing something? Many poets have used the language of others in their work to challenge authority. Poetry can also personalize the every day with language that reaches beyond the boundaries of space and time.

Thoughts on Shklovsky

Shklovsky argues that art must create “a shock effect that disrupts habitual ways of seeing and thinking” because if we perceive things automatically, it is as if they do not exist in any manifestation of their form.

“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life…The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”

In Toine peasant life as it is ‘known’, that is fixed in time by a supposed universal perception of it, is deconstructed by Maupassant’s use of the unfamiliar. Once the innkeeper becomes paralyzed, there is a shift in a previously construed understanding of the world. In this way, the reader is forced to question what he or she knows about society and in doing so is actively engaged in creating another view of present reality.

“The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar”, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an esthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important.”

When art makes objects or familiar situations unfamiliar, art and the observer necessarily engage as the observer attempts to reconcile what he or she perceives with his knowledge of the world. This interaction is what makes an object art, and it is therefore a continual process that is never fixed in time as the observer’s perception changes with the various experiences of life. Thus, when we read Toine next year, or ten years from now, we will perceive the text differently with past and present perceptions transforming the reader’s conception of what is perceived. When language is no longer habitual, each iteration is an experience of life.

“Defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found.” And an image “creates a vision of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it.”

So if we cannot know an object when we perceive it unconsciously, and we cannot know it through an image of its likeness, can we know it at all as having a fixed meaning? And does this not imply that nothing exists without an observer?

In other words it seems that we can’t perceive an object as existing without our conscious perception of it. (Why am I thinking of String Theory and Schrödinger’s cat?)

We give things meaning, and because we are always changing, meaning is always in flux.

(This view coincides with Bakhtin’s idea that language does not exist without a speaker.)