V.V. (1) Picaresque novel

[Dave Monroe]

... from Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse and the Novel," The Dialogic 
Imagination: Four Essays (Ed. Michael Holquist.  Trans. Caryl Emerson and 
Michael Holquist.  Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), pp. 259-452:

At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing under 
the influence of the unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of 
verbal-ideological life, the novel--and those artistic-prose genres that 
gravitate toward it--was being historically shaped by the current of 
decentralizing, centrifugal forces. At the time when poetry was 
accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralization of 
the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological 
levels, on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon 
spactacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all 
'languages' and dialects; there developed the literature of the fabliaux and 
Schwaenke of street songs, folksayings, anecdotes, where there was no 
language-center at all, where there was to be found a lively play with the 
'languages of         poets, scholars, monks, knights and others, where all 
'languages'         were masks and where no language could claim to be an 
authentic, incontestable face.

Heteroglossia, as organized in these low genres, was not merely
heteroglossia vis-a´-vis the accepted literary language (in all its        
various generic expressions), that is, vis-a-vis the linguistic center of 
the verbal-ideological life of the nations and the epoch, but was a 
heteroglossia consciously opposed to this literary language. It was parodic, 
and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its 
given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized. (272-3

... the one useful citation I could find online (hey, it's difficult enough 
hauling around V. et al. all the time), but a particularly pertinent one, I 
think, here.  MB, as I recall, agrees, The Satyricon, The Golden Ass, as 
early Roman novels (...), the picaresque, La Celestina, Don Quixote, 
Gargantua and Pantagruel, et al., but, what I recall as of particular 
interest is Bakhtin's treatment of the novel as such, in the English sense, 
vs. the "roman" of the Romance (...) languages (or, for that matter, of 
German as well), as "novel," as new, "novelization" as (a, in, ongoing) 
process, begging, perhaps (perhaps even deconstructively, after a fashion, 
fashionable or otherwise), that question of the origin(s) of "the" novel ... 
at any rate, Pynchon's novels, Pynchon's discourse, are, certainly, 
"novelistic" in teh Bakhtinian sense here ...

In the meantime, anyone here familiar with The Baffler?  Just picked up an 
issue I'd somehow missed, Number Nine, "Interns Built the Pyramids," 1997, 
see Robert Nedelkoff, "Remainder Table," on "The Invisible Novelist," i.e. 
Thomas Pynchon, wherein Nedelkoff imagines Pynchon's (sadly [?] 
unmaterialized) TV promo tour for Mason & Dixon (Leno, Letterman, O'Brien, 
Maher) ... any reason why each "soundbite" leads off with TP discussing how 
he kept sand out of the air filter of his 1963 Buick Skylark?  Curious ...

And note that no date has been announced yet for announcing the Noble Prize 
in Lit'rachure, 2000, despite the fact that the prizes for medicine, 
chemistry and physics have already been awarded.  Why the hold up?  Had been 
speculating that it'd be Bei Dao this year (got a book autographed, just in 
case), could, however, finally be Pynchon's year, which, one imagines, might 
well be a subject of some debate, but wondering if just maybe the committee 
is debating instead the possible ramifgications of giving it to Rushdie 
instead?  In any case, I'd imagin this year might well prove an occasion for 
a Statement of some kind, esp. given the apparent Fo debacle ...
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