"But there is nevertheless an inexorable movement from, say, Homer to Rabelais
and beyond. And that is the movement towards dialogical language in literature ('heteroglossia'), which is part of a much broader process of social differentiation and differentiation within consciousness. "
Well, if I can guess what "dialogic" language means, I certainly wouldn't dispute this, and in fact it seems self-evident. I dont think it sheds any light on Shakespeare's achievement, though, any more than it does on Chaucer. Both spoke mixed high and low language; the charm (and weirdness) of both is in the mixture. Milton, on the other hand, consciously does use a classical, conservative style of speech, and this limits his modern audience, but in no way lessens the power of his poetry.
Obviously I have to read Backtin. From your comments, though, he doesnt appear to link the different forms of modern consciousness with modern class positions, but simply locates them on some straight-ahead path of development, like the forward movement of capitalism itself..
BobW
I had to go to the archives again to retrieve this message, because most of it was clipped from my digest again. Anyway ... Bob, the book you need to read is The Dialogic Imagination, especially the two chapters called 'Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel' and 'Discourse in the novel'. Don't worry, Bakhtin pays off, big time. You should know obviously that complex writers are difficult to summarise in email form, and I'm sorry if I've failed to whet your appetite.
As for the comparison of Chaucer and Shakespeare, while I do concede that the dialogical tendency is present in Shakespeare, I think that Chaucer is the greater figure in the development of the English language. But maybe I'm biased. I once spent two weeks in solitary confinement because the Grahamstown police thought that I could assist them with some information regarding drugs (this was a very long time ago of course). Anyway, because I was a student they allowed me to take in some books. I had two novels and the Collected Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (untranslated). I finished the two novels in about the first two days. After that it was only me and Jeff Chaucer in that cell. Two weeks later when I was released I was almost thinking in middle English! I never would have believed that Chaucer could have absorbed me in that way. I loved him for it. Now there was a writer who could descend from the heights of philosophical abstraction into the the most earthy of popular speech within one couplet.
In fact I'm not sure what Shakespeare's achievement really is; for many of us it only lies in some memorable poetic lines, like Hamlet's 'to be' speech, or 'the quality of mercy' in the Merchant of Venice, or Othello's final emotive speech, etc.
As for Milton, I doubt whether anyone besides students and specialists reads him. I once read Paradise Lost as an undergraduate in 12 straight hours because I had an essay on it due the following day. I used diet tablets (the poor student's speed) and I passed the essay.
As for Bakhtin and class, well there's an issue full of murkiness and mystery. I thought for years that he was a marxist, partly because of his expressed ideas and partly because he was reputed to be the true author of Voloshinov's Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Only when I began to read some biographical material about him did I find out that he was actually a neo-kantian with very strong political leanings towards Russian populism. I read recently that later he was trying to make the leap from Kant to Hegel in his own work, as someone explained it. Be that as it may (and whatever it might mean), much of his work seems to assume a notion of class struggle that is both radical and highly original. He was a philosopher who worked out almost all of his philosophy through a vast study of literature. But he was an elusive thinker, no doubt partly because of dealing with official censorship throughout his working life.
Tahir
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