Bakhtin

jbor jbor at bigpond.com
Sat Sep 7 16:53:59 CDT 2002


Applying a "positive" or "negative" valency does seem to run counter to
Bakhtin's notion of carnival. The subversive potency of the carnival resides
in its ambivalence. It's a shame that Bakhtin's idea has been done to death
and thoroughly bowdlerised because it is a useful way of investigating the
rise of the novel as a sort of literary anti-literary genre.

More relevant for Pynchon's fiction is Bakhtin's work on Dostoevsky and the
dialogic novel I think, though these do follow on from the Rabelais,
carnival stuff too. Pynchon's narratives are deliberately polyphonic, are
consciously aware of the heteroglossia (intertextuality, shifting
signification, pluralism) which is imbedded in discourse. And, applying that
idea of the chronotope (representation of space and time) to Pynchon's
narratives is another useful way of disclosing their difference from prior
modes such as Modernism or naturalism.

best
 

Heikki wrote:

> 
> 
> I learned in the fall '93 that Michael Holquist was coming in
> the spring to a weeklong Nordic Comp Lit seminar taking place
> in a nunnery in Djursland, Denmark... To get there, I started
> writing that (post-)Bakhtinesque piece. (Mike H loves Pynchon
> by the way.) The piece was also a critique of the late Allon
> White's essay, "Bakhtin, Sociolinguistics and Deconstruction."
> (In Gloversmith, Frank (ed.): The Theory of Reading. Brighton:
> Harvester Press Ltd. 123-146.) In White's view, Pynchon holds
> a frozen middle position between the positive carnivalism of
> James Joyce and negative carnivalism of Malcolm Lowry. I tried
> to show that the issue is much more complicated than that, esp.
> when it comes to Joyce.
> 
> Of course Brian McHale, too, draws on Bakhtin in chapters like
> "Heteroglossia" and "Carnival" in _Postmodernist Fiction_.
> 
> 
> Heikki
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 




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