Month: October 2013

Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel has been an interesting read, and has highlighted some aspects of the discourse we use in everyday life that I had not previously considered. I suppose I have already ‘unconsciously’ illustrated Žižek’s philosophy in accepting everything so unquestioningly!

Bakhtin’s notion of the hybrid nature of language; its intertextuality and the relation between each word really demonstrates the power and influence language can have. It can be used to educate or bring down entire systems, purely “through the medium of their specific concrete instancing” (675). The ‘stratification’ of language I think is very important when we think of relations and hierarchies within a society; each social group tends towards their own language, and thus each interpretation, utterance and meaning of an individual word will always be different.

Bakhtin has personified language for me; he speaks of it as having the ability “to infect with its own intention” (675) different semantic meanings. Also that “these languages live a real life” (676); “it exists in people’s mouths” (677) and it tastes of the context in which it has lived. These suggestions seem to point to language as some form of disease – which I don’t enjoy associating it with for one moment, but I suppose we could refer to it as such. It is resilient, and always evolving into new strands of other ‘language’ so as to ensure its survival. Each word we say has previously been someone else’s and we take it and ‘mutate’ it into our own; giving it our own meaning. Language is also “overpopulated” (677) with the intentions of others, therefore it is imperative that we make it our own so as to ensure our utterances bear some significance. Language also faces a constant struggle as it is fighting past social groups and stratification which continually evolve and form new dialogues surrounding their own specific belief systems. Furthermore the novelist must contend with this barrage of numerous systems and stratifications of language, and in turn create his own language, often resorting to “heteroglossia” (679) (which in itself sounds like something you wouldn’t want to catch!); incorporating “another’s speech in another’s language”, as Bakhtin explains. So the novel brings into the conscious mind the diversity and abundance of different social speech types. Also within this cacophony of other voices scrambling for the reader’s attention, the reader must contend with his own voice, which will again take on a whole different utterance and meaning, and so affecting his own interpretation of the novel and the language which lives within it.

I just have one issue with Bakhtin; he talks about “authoritative discourse”, which always remains a “dead quotation” (684) as it is a thing in its own right – I interpreted this to allude to ‘innate’ truths, such as (some may argue) the existence of God, as “its authority was already acknowledged in the past” (683). Bakhtin then goes on to talk about “internally persuasive discourse” (685) which I took to mean something that has been taken, developed, worked on, churned up and spat out in some sense, by our own and other’s interaction with discourse, but surely at one point all discourse has been internally persuasive? So I would like to know when authoritative discourse stopped being internally persuasive and got its promotion in the linguistic realm?

Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel has been an interesting read, and has highlighted some aspects of the discourse we use in everyday life that I had not previously considered. I suppose I have already ‘unconsciously’ illustrated Žižek’s philosophy in accepting everything so unquestioningly!

Bakhtin’s notion of the hybrid nature of language; its intertextuality and the relation between each word really demonstrates the power and influence language can have. It can be used to educate or bring down entire systems, purely “through the medium of their specific concrete instancing” (675). The ‘stratification’ of language I think is very important when we think of relations and hierarchies within a society; each social group tends towards their own language, and thus each interpretation, utterance and meaning of an individual word will always be different.

Bakhtin has personified language for me; he speaks of it as having the ability “to infect with its own intention” (675) different semantic meanings. Also that “these languages live a real life” (676); “it exists in people’s mouths” (677) and it tastes of the context in which it has lived. These suggestions seem to point to language as some form of disease – which I don’t enjoy associating it with for one moment, but I suppose we could refer to it as such. It is resilient, and always evolving into new strands of other ‘language’ so as to ensure its survival. Each word we say has previously been someone else’s and we take it and ‘mutate’ it into our own; giving it our own meaning. Language is also “overpopulated” (677) with the intentions of others, therefore it is imperative that we make it our own so as to ensure our utterances bear some significance. Language also faces a constant struggle as it is fighting past social groups and stratification which continually evolve and form new dialogues surrounding their own specific belief systems. Furthermore the novelist must contend with this barrage of numerous systems and stratifications of language, and in turn create his own language, often resorting to “heteroglossia” (679) (which in itself sounds like something you wouldn’t want to catch!); incorporating “another’s speech in another’s language”, as Bakhtin explains. So the novel brings into the conscious mind the diversity and abundance of different social speech types. Also within this cacophony of other voices scrambling for the reader’s attention, the reader must contend with his own voice, which will again take on a whole different utterance and meaning, and so affecting his own interpretation of the novel and the language which lives within it.

I just have one issue with Bakhtin; he talks about “authoritative discourse”, which always remains a “dead quotation” (684) as it is a thing in its own right – I interpreted this to allude to ‘innate’ truths, such as (some may argue) the existence of God, as “its authority was already acknowledged in the past” (683). Bakhtin then goes on to talk about “internally persuasive discourse” (685) which I took to mean something that has been taken, developed, worked on, churned up and spat out in some sense, by our own and other’s interaction with discourse, but surely at one point all discourse has been internally persuasive? So I would like to know when authoritative discourse stopped being internally persuasive and got its promotion in the linguistic realm?

In “discourse in the novel”, Bakhtin attempts to redefine the meaning and purpose of the novel by discussing the non-unitary aspect of language (language is divided, stratified, categorized and constructed by historical, cultural and social context). In that sense, Bakhtin seems to say that the formalist or structuralist focuses too much on style (form) and misses the social interaction of discourses in literature. Since a language exists within a context that is homogenous, we cannot avoid stratification (in terms of lingusitic dialects, socio-ideological languages or the language of certain groups). Hence the notion of heteroglossia, which is defined as “the coexistence of district varieties with in a single language”, that is, having multiple varieties or dialects within a single language. According to Bakhtin, “each generation at each social level has its own language; moreover every age group has a matter of fact its own language, its own vocabulary, its own particular accentual system”. In fact, different social groups have different varieties of language and within the same social class different professions will also have their own varieties of language. Heteroglossia can also happen at the individual level. In fact, a person speaking a given language may adopt different varieties of his language to adapt to the context in which his discourse is made without being conscious of the difference between them. This shows us that any language is an interaction of different language uses which is unintentional in everyday communications.

Bakhtin later incorporates this heteroglossia into writing a novel and he talks about the “double voice” which means that when a dialogue takes part in a novel, there is a double intention of the author and that of the character speaking in the novel (the direct voice). In that sense, an author plays with the individual and social voices and brings them into a novel intentionally. If we look at the novel in this way, we will see how the author’s historical and social context speaks in his/her writing.

In short all of these voices 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 speech.”

As someone who has always found the link between literature and politics fascinating, I really enjoyed the variety in this week’s readings and after completing them I find myself thinking the most about the arguments Žižek puts forward in his discussion of “Fantasy as a Support of Reality”. This short section is not only very relevant to how we confront and approach texts as human beings that function in a larger world with many active political pressures, but also how we approach political discourse – which in my opinion, largely affects our world. I liked that Žižek opened the discussion with a clarification of the fact that when Lacan states that the last support of what we identify as “reality” is a fantasy, we should not understand this in the sense of life being “just a dream” or of the opinion that “what we call reality is just an illusion” (722) – he rather carefully identifies that it is only in the dream that we “come close to the real awakening – that is, to the Real of our desire” (722). Žižek then draws a parallel between this type of dream if it can be termed that, and how it is that only in the dream do we approach the fantasy framework which determines our activity, and the ideological dream.

I think the crux of his thesis is best expressed in his explanation of “the determination of ideology as a dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such”. What I find to be his biggest contribution to this discussion is, however, when he takes a rather different stance than the “free your mind” one that I think invades so many discourses in the present-day; it is easy enough to utter these saying convincingly, but concrete measures for that purpose seem to be much harder to articulate by their proponents. This is where I find Žižek’s explanation (and his use of manifestations of anti-Semitism in the late 1930s in Germany) most useful, productive, and a very significant contribution to this type of discussion. He explains that:

“In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by ‘opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is,’ by throwing away the ideological spectacles as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout ‘the consciousness of our ideological dream”

(722)

I think it is precisely this point that often gets forgotten or neglected in this type of discourse, and that might have something to do with the fact that it is by no means an easy issue to tackle – just how can we go about truly “breaking out” then? I am hoping that maybe talking this over with some other members of the class later on today when we meet might make for some interesting discussion on this very complex and germane topic!

As someone who has always found the link between literature and politics fascinating, I really enjoyed the variety in this week’s readings and after completing them I find myself thinking the most about the arguments Žižek puts forward in his discussion of “Fantasy as a Support of Reality”. This short section is not only very relevant to how we confront and approach texts as human beings that function in a larger world with many active political pressures, but also how we approach political discourse – which in my opinion, largely affects our world. I liked that Žižek opened the discussion with a clarification of the fact that when Lacan states that the last support of what we identify as “reality” is a fantasy, we should not understand this in the sense of life being “just a dream” or of the opinion that “what we call reality is just an illusion” (722) – he rather carefully identifies that it is only in the dream that we “come close to the real awakening – that is, to the Real of our desire” (722). Žižek then draws a parallel between this type of dream if it can be termed that, and how it is that only in the dream do we approach the fantasy framework which determines our activity, and the ideological dream.

I think the crux of his thesis is best expressed in his explanation of “the determination of ideology as a dreamlike construction hindering us from seeing the real state of things, reality as such”. What I find to be his biggest contribution to this discussion is, however, when he takes a rather different stance than the “free your mind” one that I think invades so many discourses in the present-day; it is easy enough to utter these saying convincingly, but concrete measures for that purpose seem to be much harder to articulate by their proponents. This is where I find Žižek’s explanation (and his use of manifestations of anti-Semitism in the late 1930s in Germany) most useful, productive, and a very significant contribution to this type of discussion. He explains that:

“In vain do we try to break out of the ideological dream by ‘opening our eyes and trying to see reality as it is,’ by throwing away the ideological spectacles as the subjects of such a post-ideological, objective, sober look, free of so-called ideological prejudices, as the subjects of a look which views the facts as they are, we remain throughout ‘the consciousness of our ideological dream”

(722)

I think it is precisely this point that often gets forgotten or neglected in this type of discourse, and that might have something to do with the fact that it is by no means an easy issue to tackle – just how can we go about truly “breaking out” then? I am hoping that maybe talking this over with some other members of the class later on today when we meet might make for some interesting discussion on this very complex and germane topic!

Reading Marx’s theory this week, is actually a re-reading for me. In China, every single middle school and high school student is obligated to take a course that can be called “Political Science” where we learn Marxism and we have to memorize a lot of the concepts and the theory for the exams. And if you have any idea how much Chinese students and parents and teachers and everyone else care about exams (which is somewhat understandable since a good grade is the only thing that can get you into a good university and hence a guarantee of future life), you can imagine how hard we had to work to stuff into our heads ideas like “dialectics”, ” universality and concrete”, “division of labor power”, and “consciousness determined by material life”, etc.
So reading all this again in English, in his original words (our textbooks didn’t quote much), was somewhat a strange experience. A lot of the concepts are so familiar that I was able to read very fast, but I also find myself stopping at a lot of points thinking or rethinking about it. As a teenager, even though I had it memorized like the back of my hands, I don’t think I was taking any interest in what this bearded old man was saying: it made sense but was still a hollow statement that I didn’t concern myself with, probably because I was mostly reading novels.
However, reading it again made me realize the actual impact of his theory. His categorization of the various forms of societies in European history based on the different stages of development in the division of labor and forms of ownership, provided a fresh perspective to examine the history. As literature students, we are accustomed to considering history in terms of literary (ideological) movements, Renaissance, the age of classicism and Les Lumières, etc., and we tend to generally characterize a historic period by its ideological features. But according to Marx, there is another force, a more essential force at play: “Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. […] Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process” (p.656). So men’s ideas and consciousness are dependant of their material life-process, you can’t ignore the latter and talk about the former independently. And to think that Marx’s work was published in the middle of nineteenth century when Europe had just been taken by the storm of Romanticism, his theory was a strong antidote and suggested that the real and material life of men (and also his social relations) should always be taken into account when considering his ideas and consciousness. He also pointed out that the dominant ideas of a society or an epoch are usually determined by the ruling classes since they have the resources, “while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality […] have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves” (p.657). This immediately reminds me of the “proletariat literature” that was once very popular in China (especially for my father’s generation) and was designed exclusively to represent the lives, the ideas and the interests of the working class, which also made literature a vehicle of ideology and a device at the service of a certain political agenda. This brings me back to the Formalists’ critique…

In The importance of living (1937) Lin Yutang (1895-1976) tried to approach Chinese culture and traditions to North American readers, at those times when internet did not answer every single cultural question that humanity has. Yutang, who lived in Europe and in USA, always maintained a strong bond with his origins, for that reason Confucianism and Taoist traditions are intrinsic parts of his ideas and discourse. In the book, there are many points that I disagree with, of course, we are talking about a book that represented particular values that maybe today should be argued, but I think at least that Yutang’s intentions were valid since is natural that a immigrant want to explain his roots and his point of view.

There is a part f the book that is called “The art of writing”. In this part, Yutang call to young writers to fell more than to think, and go deep in their selves and try to find something profound to say, to write, not be concern about grammar, but try to find deep inside a personal and natural reason to write. He also recommend to find a favorite author and read it very well, so you can fallow him or her as a Master. During the whole reading, he also offers some advise  so they can start to think as a writers. One of his observation is:

“Hay dos minas del idioma, una nueva y una vieja. La vieja mina está en los libros y la nueva en el idioma de la gente común. Los artistas de segunda categoría excavan las viejas minas, pero sólo los artistas de primera calidad pueden obtener algo de la mina nueva”  

I find interesting that we usually can discover this two mines in great novels. For instance, in Don Quijote de la Mancha, trough the voice of Sancho and through the voice of Quijote; or we can also hear them in Falstaff and Henry, in  Henry IV by Shakespeare.

Moreover, I can easily relate Yutang’s ideas with Bajtín’s. In this fragments of his readings (“Discourse in The Novel” and “Rabelais and His Word”) the Russian critic develop at least two concepts related with the second mine.

The first concept is dialogism.  The dialogism allows us to hear many voices on the novels, allow us to read and hear different cultural backgrounds and let us see the humanity that relies in the novel.  In that order of ideas, Bajtín is aware that novel, as an hybrid genre, should contain those different voices that represents different social class, and it could be a mirror of how society is built, and how the different sound registers implies that local or common languages establish, also, different types of communications. Bajtín, perhaps, is not saying that there are only two mines but many whence the novelist should nurture his writing. Later, the Russian critic explains how this dialogism is related to society:

“[…] language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence os socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “languages” of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying “languages” (676).

I also think that is really important what Bajtín notes about the carnival. Described, by Bajtín, the work of Rabelais becomes an important presence that let us remember in which conditions the society could be travesty through the laughter. The second concept to remember, therefore,  in these readings is the grotesque, like a possibility for different social classes to criticize, analyze the social conditions and laugh at itself. Laughing and the possibility of parody our reality, let us realize that the system is not fair and it should be questioned. So, is like a ironic laugh. But also laugh unifies, has Bajtín says, and in that way shows a society that, in way, could be seen more equal.

I know Bajtín’s objective differs a lot from Yutang’s, but when I was reading Bajtín’s ideas I thought that maybe some writers should read his analysis, and how the dialogism and the grotesque could illuminate a work of art. I know is not an easy task but is good to think about it.

Coda:

After reading Marx I was absolutely depressed. He noticed in the Nineteenth Century (!) that the reality of industrial era was unfair, unequal and how the worker class or proletariat was submitted to the capital and the market. Today, more than one hundred fifty years after his analysis, there are still slaves, unequal salaries, worker classes it the worst conditions, global iniquity… Are we really evolving or not? Is there a way for making a social change that in the future will represent something for this unfair society? I doubt it.

  http://www.busateo.es/busateo/Libros-inmortales2/LIN%20YUTANG%20-%20La%20importancia%20de%20vivir/get_file.pdf 

 (There are two mines in the language, a new one and old one. The old is in the books and the new is in common people’s language. The artists from the second category dig in old mines, but only the artists of quality can obtain something of the new mine. (My translation. I offer apologies for not translating to the French language… sorry).

In The importance of living (1937) Lin Yutang (1895-1976) tried to approach Chinese culture and traditions to North American readers, at those times when internet did not answer every single cultural question that humanity has. Yutang, who lived in Europe and in USA, always maintained a strong bond with his origins, for that reason Confucianism and Taoist traditions are intrinsic parts of his ideas and discourse. In the book, there are many points that I disagree with, of course, we are talking about a book that represented particular values that maybe today should be argued, but I think at least that Yutang’s intentions were valid since is natural that a immigrant want to explain his roots and his point of view.

There is a part f the book that is called “The art of writing”. In this part, Yutang call to young writers to fell more than to think, and go deep in their selves and try to find something profound to say, to write, not be concern about grammar, but try to find deep inside a personal and natural reason to write. He also recommend to find a favorite author and read it very well, so you can fallow him or her as a Master. During the whole reading, he also offers some advise  so they can start to think as a writers. One of his observation is:

“Hay dos minas del idioma, una nueva y una vieja. La vieja mina está en los libros y la nueva en el idioma de la gente común. Los artistas de segunda categoría excavan las viejas minas, pero sólo los artistas de primera calidad pueden obtener algo de la mina nueva”  

I find interesting that we usually can discover this two mines in great novels. For instance, in Don Quijote de la Mancha, trough the voice of Sancho and through the voice of Quijote; or we can also hear them in Falstaff and Henry, in  Henry IV by Shakespeare.

Moreover, I can easily relate Yutang’s ideas with Bajtín’s. In this fragments of his readings (“Discourse in The Novel” and “Rabelais and His Word”) the Russian critic develop at least two concepts related with the second mine.

The first concept is dialogism.  The dialogism allows us to hear many voices on the novels, allow us to read and hear different cultural backgrounds and let us see the humanity that relies in the novel.  In that order of ideas, Bajtín is aware that novel, as an hybrid genre, should contain those different voices that represents different social class, and it could be a mirror of how society is built, and how the different sound registers implies that local or common languages establish, also, different types of communications. Bajtín, perhaps, is not saying that there are only two mines but many whence the novelist should nurture his writing. Later, the Russian critic explains how this dialogism is related to society:

“[…] language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the coexistence os socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “languages” of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying “languages” (676).

I also think that is really important what Bajtín notes about the carnival. Described, by Bajtín, the work of Rabelais becomes an important presence that let us remember in which conditions the society could be travesty through the laughter. The second concept to remember, therefore,  in these readings is the grotesque, like a possibility for different social classes to criticize, analyze the social conditions and laugh at itself. Laughing and the possibility of parody our reality, let us realize that the system is not fair and it should be questioned. So, is like a ironic laugh. But also laugh unifies, has Bajtín says, and in that way shows a society that, in way, could be seen more equal.

I know Bajtín’s objective differs a lot from Yutang’s, but when I was reading Bajtín’s ideas I thought that maybe some writers should read his analysis, and how the dialogism and the grotesque could illuminate a work of art. I know is not an easy task but is good to think about it.

Coda:

After reading Marx I was absolutely depressed. He noticed in the Nineteenth Century (!) that the reality of industrial era was unfair, unequal and how the worker class or proletariat was submitted to the capital and the market. Today, more than one hundred fifty years after his analysis, there are still slaves, unequal salaries, worker classes it the worst conditions, global iniquity… Are we really evolving or not? Is there a way for making a social change that in the future will represent something for this unfair society? I doubt it.

  http://www.busateo.es/busateo/Libros-inmortales2/LIN%20YUTANG%20-%20La%20importancia%20de%20vivir/get_file.pdf 

 (There are two mines in the language, a new one and old one. The old is in the books and the new is in common people’s language. The artists from the second category dig in old mines, but only the artists of quality can obtain something of the new mine. (My translation. I offer apologies for not translating to the French language… sorry).