The wind (MDDM)

[jbor]

on 11/10/01 10:24 PM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> McHale 
> mentions Mikhail Bakhtin

Came across this the other day in Bakhtin's 'Discourse in the Novel' (1935)
and thought it was relevant to _M&D_ :

    ... [T]he narrator's story or the story of the posited author is
    structured against the background of normal literary language, the
    expected literary horizon. Every moment of the story has a conscious
    relationship with this normal language and its belief system, is in
    fact set against them, and set against them *dialogically*: one point of
    view opposed to another, one evaluation opposed to another, one accent
    opposed to another (i.e., they are not contrasted as two abstractly
    linguistic phenomena). This interaction, this dialogic tension between
    two languages and two belief systems, permits authorial intentions to
    be realized in such a way that we can acutely sense their presence at
    every point in the work. The author is not to be found in the language
    of the narrator, not in the normal literary language to which the
    story opposes itself (although a given story may be closer to a given
    language)--but rather, the author utilizes now one language, now
    another, in order to avoid giving himself [sic] up wholly to either of
    them, he makes use of this verbal give-and-take, this dialogue of
    languages at every point in his work, in order that he himself might
    remain as it were neutral with regard to language, a third party in a
    quarrel between two people (although he might be a *biased* third
    party). _The Dialogic Imagination_ (trans. by Holquist and Emerson, Uni
    of Texas, 1981, p. 314)

So, not a Hegelian dialectic, or even one in Engels' terms; closer to Kant
or Adorno perhaps?

best