Bakhtin and low poetic genres
Heteroglossia
I think B. is (purposefully?) mixing two ideas. One is the importance of individual language (parole, according to Saussure) and the other is the multiplicity of systems that are brought to bear on any linguistic production.
Perhaps those two dimension are inevitably blended in language production, but conceptually they are separate.
Parole
Parole is the enunciative counterpart of langue (a bit of heteroglossia on my part: a translation from the French énonciation). The crucial number in enunciation is three. The speaker represents him or herself in parole (features that mark my enunciations: spelling errors and Gallicisms!), as well as the listener (for example, baby talk would indicate that the speaker sees the listener as immature), and the world (the “it”, the assertive content of the words: is raining or not). I — YOU — IT. There is a dizzying spiral of feedback between these three enunciative actors, to the point that what is said becomes a blend of three voices into one voice. Here is a taste of the spiral:
I say “it’s raining”. You know it is raining, and that anyone with any brains would know that. You think I am being condescending, even provocative, because that statement comes after a discussion of how you don’t like for me to point out the obvious. That past world event (our conversation) changes my “it’s raining” just as surely as the actual weather; if there had been no rain for 40 days, “It’s raining” is cathartic, joyous, a completely different enunciation. Enunciation is a choral event: I, YOU, and IT speak at the same time and their voices resonate.
There are figures of enunciation that make that choral dimension conspicuous. “It’s a nice day” is ironic when in fact it is a lousy day full of rain…. but only if YOU put two and two together. YOU find the sign of irony in the contrast between my words and the world, even though words rarely reflect accurately the world. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say all language is ironic because the voices of I, YOU, and IT are never quite attuned. That is the point of a chorus: the voices must be different in order to resonate.
Why are jokes funny? Heteroglossia is part of the answer. Laughter is the effect of a chorus who’s voices are dissonant. The picture of the sheepdog is a voice that contradicts the caption. We are back to our spiral of enunciations. The photographer has a voice: background and cropping. The dog is at the center of the sheep. There is an abstraction effect: the animals contrast with the snow, both the fur (gray) and the muzzle (black). They are all fighting snow. So the dog is one among many.
I don’t think the photograph would be particularly comical without the caption. The caption does two things. First, it situates the communication in a serious genre; a spy story, for example. It contrasts now human/animal, the sophistication and cleverness of Bond with the friendly naivety of a dog unable to get out of the snow. Second, it underlines the natural resemblance between sheep and dog.
Why is it funny? It is a particular kind of heteroglossia that Freud calls naive comic (see Wit). Comical because the reader is able to take the unsophisticated position of the speaker (the dog) and then return to the sophisticated position of the observer. According to Freud, we enjoy that momentary visit to childhood, where dogs can quite seriously be secret agents. There is no joke without both enunciations: the readers representing to themselves all the complex effort at plausibility that are part of spy stories vs the simple scenarios of children, where a piece of wood can be a spaceship. It is this “saying together” of sophisticated and unsophisticated voices that makes us laugh in the case of naive comic.
Who you gonna to call?
The second dimension of heteroglossia is found in the intersection not of enunciative actors, but of different languages. Photography has its own language, as does painting and sculpture. The meaning of a given utterance come from many sources, each with their own systematicity. Counting is part of mathematical language, but there is no rupture between ordinary language and mathematics, even though we know that at some point mathematical language will become incomprehensible to the non mathematician.
Cultural references are of the same nature. Bakhtin talks at length about how society is stratified by jargons and above all by encyclopedic references that are enshrined in expressions. “Who you gonna call” brings with it a reference that a generation of anglophones will know but others will not.
Bakhtin: yes and no
Where Bakhtin leaves me “songeur” is his rejection of the abstract in favor of the “living language”. Saussure’s great contribution was to see language as a system. True, he recognized that this was a reduction, but it was the price to pay to understand language more thoroughly. He did postulate a science of the life of signs in society — the semiology that inspired Barthes–, but he would no doubt think that a science of parole is impossible. Aristotle says: there is no science of the individual. And, in any case, if there is a science of parole, it will have to be built on top of a science of langue.
Bakhtin: It’s all about dialogue
Language is constructed through form and content however, according to Bakhtin it is a mistake to study the two of them separately because it leaves behind the social, political an philosophical baggage that language invariably carries. Furthermore, language cannot be understood only as a centralized set of rules that serve as norm for everybody, the creation of a unitary language works as to ensure a maximum of mutual understanding, but since it exists within a context that is anything but homogenous (heteroglossia) and where centrifugal forces are constantly pushing for decentralization, stratification is an inevitable risk. That stratification can be in terms of lingusitic dialects, socio-ideological languages or the language of certain groups. In the end, every word (utterance) that is ever written or spoken is affected by these opposite forces that saturate them of meaning.
The existence of different meanings within a single word gives cause to dialogue that relates it directly to the object it “describes”. Throughout Bakhtin’s text, dialogue appears as an essential aspect of language, dialogue between sociopolitical eras, historical contexts; dialogue as the main substance of discourse that enables languages not only to coexist but to intersect/juxtapose.
This brings us to the literary face of languages. According to Bakhtin languages exist in the creative consciousness of people who write novels, writers use certain and many languages intentionally and create what he denominates as “double voices”. It is interesting that the proper use of double voicedness is for Bakhtin the only way to create artistic images in the literary world. When Bakhtin talks about poetry he says that it only utilizes cannonized language (that is also affected by heteroglossia but every time it changes it is “officialized” as poetical language) which as a consequence renders superficial the use of the double voice. Double voice is only real when it plays consciously with the baggage (for lack of a better word) of the languages and creates a dialogue between them, not only rhetorically or as a figure of speech.
With this in mind, there are a few questions that automatically arise: Is poetry not an artistic form for Bakhtin? Should poetry be analyzed by stylistics and lingusitics like a rhetorical text? Moreover, if the artistic value of a novel lies in the skillful use of various languages, what is the literary worth of those narrative texts that master the unitary language?
In the end I think the idea of stylistics studying language in a way that takes into consideration the changing nature of it and the obvious power that context has over it is of utter importance. However, I don’t completely understand how this condition of the language is applied to the artistic aspect of literature and if it is as determining as Bakhtin ponders it to be.
Art as Technique–one essential argument of Formalism
Shklovsky, one of the founders of the Formalist study group, believes the nature of literature is their form, which comprises all literary devices and techniques, artistic materials and defamilization of forms are the essential characteristics of literature. Influenced by new opinions of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics, Shklovsky analysed this technique from the linguistic viewpoint.
To introduce and spread the concept of defamilization, which turns something that has become over-familiar into something reactivated, Shklovsky gave several examples to illustrate perception has become unconsciously automatic, he took it as a retreat of our habits. And he thought over-automatization of an object, the greatest economy of perceptive effect could impede our entire comprehension of objects.
In this essay, I noticed a sentence “…if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” I once saw a similar sentence “It never happens when something real had been forgotten”, people try hard to recollect scenes of the past when they look back, they are apt to forget routine matters which happen around them every day because of unconsciousness. To reverse this trend of modern living, Shklovsky proposed a technique of art which makes objects “unfamiliar”. Art is extracted from life, but superior to life in many respects. Art, as an essential method of writing, makes real objects look different through images and modes of expressions, then unexpected results are fed back to readers.
Shklovsky cited several Tolstoy’s passages to explain his theory. The first method is using different words to replace familiar names. Author has to use more words to explain an act or a phenomenon, this seems a little bit tedious and complicated, readers will notice other parts then the greatest possible effect will be produced. Such like that harsh example of flogging, it’s a typical Tolstoy’s way of pricking the curiosity and conscience of readers.
Personally, I prefer the second method of estrangement, authors make a story from different point of view. First of all, a story made from special angle of view intrigues people into reading it. Secondly, it’s easier for us to accept a totally different opinion. Specifically, people won’t have an attitude of exclusion towards “different arguments” of a horse, but they tend to refute the same argument from a person. This horse thought it was incorrect that people think animals should be naturally possessed by human being. People are guided by words, not by deeds in life, their instinct is narrow. I totally agree to what this horse has said, correct ideas are not innate in the mind, people seldom dare to face squarely their problems and they are unwilling to acknowledge their shortcomings and responsibilities.
Shklovsky cited Tolstoy’s other passages to show how common the method of narrative is used, seeing things out of their normal context makes writings more impressive. Many people considered it blasphemy to present as monstrous what they accepted as sacred, in my opinion, they merely declined to approve those habitual things in an unfamiliar way.
The third method used mainly in poetic speech is using artistic trademark as a way of lingering to impede perception; making the language appear strange, intricate and roughened. Sometimes, foreign languages, archaism and popular language, even dialects are new devices to create a properly poetic language. Speaking of the rhythm of poetry, which is totally different from the rhythm of prose— an essential automatizing element, the adjustment of poetry rhythm orders are necessary as well, even if it would not have too much effect for the roughening of language, the unpredictable disordering of rhythm should become a convention, anyway.
In brief, Shklovsky developed the critical theories and techniques of Russian Formalism. The concept of “defamilization” creates a special perception of objects, it’s an innovative writing technique which produces a great influence on theories of literature and the study of modern Russian poetic language.
texts
Those course texts that are not in the Ryan and Rivkin anthology will be available at this link.
Impressions on Toine by Guy de Maupassant
The short story Toine by Guy de Maupassant presents the narrative of a man whose sudden medical condition turns into an opportunity to become a father. I will first discuss themes of the story then the writing style .
Toine is a bon vivant greatly appreciated by the people of his county. Right at the beginning, the reader can grasp his character by the way Maupassant introduces several positive monikers to name Toine (le gros Toine, Toi-ma-fine, Brûlot). The name Toine – the story title – itself is a nickname. Toine is an important person of his county ; the whole hamlet seems to be his property.
He seems however to be the antithesis of his wife, who’s described as beeing ‘‘born ill-tempered, and (going) through life in a mood of perpetual discontent.’’ They constantly fight – Toine in an humoristic way, his wife with real anger. Her anger towards her husband surely comes from the fact thet he doesn’t contribute much to the production while she constantly works to be more efficient. The wife’s expression, ‘‘Wait a bit! Wait a bit! You’ll see what’ll happen. He’ll burst like a sack of grain!”, mentionned at the end of every argument, foreshadows Toine’s sad destiny. (It is important to note that Maupassant’s use of past tenses to describe Toine’s life also hints at Toine’s life change – his attack and new condition).
After the attack, Toine is confined to his bed. His friends start to visit him in his room and Toine enjoys life almost as before, which upsets his wife. At this point the balance of power changes and Toine must now follow his wife’s orders. The jovial Toine becomes anxious and docile in front of his wife who’s quite decided to make her husband productive. She makes him brood eggs under his big arms as if they are wings (what he had mentioned – but surely not thought true – earlier in the story).
At the end, Toine becomes proud when finding a paternity that he never had : the chicks that he brooded became, in some way, his children. And when he calls his friend son-in-law, that time it is almost true.
Style
The writing has interesting, constrasting aspects in both its form and register. The text has a fluidity almost as though it is told in oral tradition. Many sentences or paragraphs start with a coordinating conjunction (and, but) as if the story was coming out of a mouth without pausing. While it possesses this characteristic, the writing style is highly literary. In the narration, the simple past – a literary tense – is constantly used.
Another important contrast is the gap between the register used in the narration and that of the dialogue. The use of the simple past, sentence constructions and vocabulary used in the narration contribute to the literary register. On the other hand, dialogue is written such that we can almost imagine French peasants speaking in the 19th century countryside. From the simple syntax and colloquial words used as well as ellipsis (like in these lines: ‘‘J’verrons c’qu’arrivera’’, ‘‘Qué que tu veux ?’’, ‘‘Pourquoi que tu ne bé point la mé, pé Toine ?’’), the register used for dialogues is popular.
Finally, the story has the feel of a legend. Toine’s and his wife’s personalities seem exaggerated, but it really is the description of the brooding and the chicks’ birth that make the story special : there was a great ‘‘commotion’’, ‘‘newcomers filled the bar’’ asking how many chicks there were, it was a ‘‘triumph’’ ! This singular paternity surely contributes to making Toine a legendary character.
The Uncanny in Guy de Maupassant’s Toine
Karen O’Regan
The Uncanny in Guy de Maupassant’s Toine
In Toine, Guy de Maupassant’s realistic style evokes the familiar images of peasant life only to subvert reality with the uncanny predicament of a paralyzed innkeeper forced to hatch eggs. Initially, the humorous description of rural life entertains the reader as impartial observer. Soon, however, the author’s use of the absurd forces his audience to participate in the creation of the text and reflect on the unresolved denouement.
While the linear narrative begins in a deceptively traditional manner, interpreting the text becomes increasingly problematic as the tale unfolds. An omniscient narrator introduces the characters and the environment that governs their behaviour. As with the rest of the natural world, the peasants’ physical needs are the focus of their lives. Thus, Toine resembles a pig, his wife a bird of prey, and later their friends are compared with a fox and a tree. The dehumanizing descriptions are humorous at first while the reader retains the position of spectator. However, the distance between the observer and the observed soon diminishes.
The reader begins to identify with the characters when they display certain human qualities. The innkeeper is first likeable because of his social nature and his affinity for physical pleasure, and his wife less so for her puritan work ethic. However, when the second and central action of the text reveals the unsettling strangeness of Toine’s situation, his weaknesses appear less comical and more disturbing. The unfortunate innkeeper has become a rather pathetic figure, inspiring both sympathy and revulsion. This ambivalence undermines a binary world of good and evil, and reflects the ambiguity of social mores. In this way, the text presents a mirror (the same yet different) image of the world that challenges the reader’s perception of reality. As a result, the reader participates actively in the narrative in an effort to interpret the text.
The rupture with reality is complete when Toine is asked to hatch the eggs. A plausible situation becomes fantastical, and the resulting confusion of the reader reflects that of the villagers. This blurring of the line between the possible and the impossible creates a liminal space in which the reader can create a new ‘truth’ or understanding of the world.
The concluding scene invites the reader to contemplate a reality outside of common experience. The protagonist has come to terms with his fate, yet the reader remains unsure of the outcome. Accustomed to the short story format, which traditionally propels the narrative towards closure, the reader is left perplexed and forced to examine why it is difficult to appreciate the character’s happiness. Ultimately, the innkeeper is imprisoned in a hell of his and his puritanical wife’s making. Moreover, all those around him are both products of and fodder for his insatiable pursuit of pleasure and her determination to control this weakness. Even Prosper Horsville falls victim to Toine, the progenitor of all his gendres, for his cleverness has turned him into yet another of Toine’s chicks. The characters in Maupassant’s looking glass are both victims and perpetrators of the violence done to them, and as their doubles his readers must re-evaluate their conception of reality.
New Blog
hello my name is Esmeralda Robles and I am testing out my new blog 
New Blog
hello my name is Esmeralda Robles and I am testing out my new blog 
Toine: Staying on Top
FHIS 501
Toine: Staying on Top
Sometimes it is difficult to determine what is good and/or what is bad. The difficulty lies, perhaps, in the subjective experience or learned values of he or she who gazes at a situation to be contemplated. Determining then whether something is good or bad may be irrelevant because of the varying opinions the situation or object in question may generate. There is however something that remains from anyone who gazes. It is precisely the gaze that remains. Then, if the gaze was not altered with the subjective values or the use of polarizing language to describe or explain, the gaze is an objective text that can be read and effectively argued. Guy de Maupassant offers an “objective” gaze of a place and of a people in the short story Toine.
Toine is the man that gives his name to the story and therefore much attention, focus, is vested onto his character. In this story he is the character that would be impossible to say that he is anything but a good man. That however does not seem to be the stories objective to show that he is good or to show that he is bad. In this objective gaze, let’s remember that that is realisms objective, we easily see what ‘seems to be’, Toine is a Jolly good fellow who gets fat, has a nagging wife, and then has health problems, but it is also easy to miss, perhaps because of this happy, pleasant fellow, the connections that can be made with the material which makes up this gaze, the words, the language. In his town, in his land, Toine is a man of power, and as such must maintain that power, stay on top, by any means, even in the sneakiest of ways, sneaky because he doesn’t resort to violence but rather other undetected methods that allow things to go on as they should, as he wants them to be.
It would be difficult to make a full analysis in a short blog post but the argument, an observation in the text, has been made. A few examples can be given in support of this, although without deep explanation. First there is the opening of the text. It is the start of the gaze into Toine’s life but also into the dynamic of the town area where the story takes place. It describes Toine and his importance in the land. He is talked about and recognized as a focal point, perhaps he is even liked. Then the story presents him personally. He is a man that ‘gives back to the people’, even if just a drink or one meal, a man that uses language, humor, to maintain those important around him. The use of this language can be said to create subjects for Toine; people whom he has persuaded. After this, there is an underlying fact that is also symbolically connected to his growing body, this is his growing wealth. He takes and he grows without giving anything substantial back. The contrast to him is his wife, nagging wife who hates him, and has been described as a “peasant woman”. This is the only person whom he has a problem with, and the only person who hates him for his bodily and wealth growth while she herself must do peasant work.
At the end we have a particular situation. Toine seems to be emotionally changed by the birth of the chicks, which “he has birthed”. But in a matter of moments he turns to having no care for life in order to give a gift, perhaps a gift of persuasion, perhaps a gift of pleasure. At work in the text are politics such as politics of life, social division, and wealth distribution shown in conjunction with, or underneath, the image of a pleasant man and the land of which he is lord.
hen
Toine, the eponymous innkeeper, is the very model of productive consumption. He is the biggest fan of his own product: the cognac that he calls "extra-special," which he declares to be "the best in France." His zealous praise of his own produce gives him his nickname, "Toine-My-Extra-Special," and his loquacity and cheeriness draw customers from miles around, "for fat Toine would make a tombstone laugh."
But what makes him special (and presumably what makes him cheery) is also his prodigious appetite, which is itself a marvel for visitors to this out-of-the-way hamlet, sheltered in a ravine from the ocean winds: "merely to see him drink was a curiosity. He drank everything that was offered him."
This consumption, however, is not simply wasteful or a drain on his resources. It is in fact what makes his business profitable. Consumption and acquisition are happily mixed in Toine's gregarious nature: "His was a double pleasure: first, that of drinking; and second, that of piling up the cash."
Toine is a poster boy for profitable sybaritism. He is a living rejoinder to miserliness on the one hand, and the Protestant work ethic on the other.
And this is surely what irks his wife. She is angered by the fact that her husband "earned his money without working." The story's narrative, then, is devoted to her efforts to turn him into something more like a laborer: to reap profit not from his consumption but from a more stringent (and more morally acceptable) program of regimentation and discipline.
So she makes Toine into a broody hen.
Laid up after an apoplectic fit (the fruit of his excessive enjoyment, though it hardly slows him down: he sets up a regular domino game by his bedside and he would still "have made the devil himself laugh"), Toine is forced to keep his wife's chickens' eggs warm. For the long, anxious gestation season, his movements are even more radically restricted: he can no longer turn to left or right, for fear of "plunging him[self] into the midst of an omelette."
As time goes by, Toine, whom his wife has long regarded as more beast than man ("You'd be better in the sty with along with the pigs!") comes more and more to identify with the animal kingdom. There's something almost Kafkaesque about his gradual metamorphosis, if not into a pestilent cockroach but into a mother hen. His arms become like wings, under which his precious charges shelter.
And becoming animal is also (here at least) a becoming feminine: he manifests "the anguish of a woman who is about to become a mother." No wonder that his is an "unusual sort of paternity" as he is transformed into "a remarkable specimen of humanity."
But the story is not so much about Toine's gradual animalization, and more about simply his increasing recognition of his animal status. For Maupassant treats all his characters as, frankly, beasts: Toine's wife "walked with long steps like a stork, and had a head resembling that of a screech-owl"; his friend Prosper, whose idea the entire stratagem is, has "a ferret nose" and is "cunning as a fox." Another friend is if anything less human still: he is "somewhat gnarled, like the trunk of an apple-tree."
So perhaps Maupassant's final word is that, whichever economic regime they favour, and whether they choose the moral virtue of restraint or the sybaritic pleasures of unlicensed consumption, in the end all of his characters are animals. Either way, what you have are simply various modalities of affective labor. It's just that some are more in tune with this realization than others.
