While it is certainly arguable that Bahktin's essay "Discourse in the Novel" qualifies as pure post-structuralist criticism, many aspects of his theory can be regarded as such. In reading and disussing Bahktin in class this past week, I began to question the perception of "self" in Bahktin's essay. The constuction of self in poststructuralist criticism is one that of intense focus, and I would like to apply a poststructuralist lens to this text. In reading a text, such as a novel, the relation of the author to the text and his relation of the constructed self to the work is crucial. To gain adequate understanding of how a text can serve as a window into the social discourse that exists outside the text, the authors constuction of self serves as the primary means of examining social circumstances. As such, the self, as constructed by the author, exists within the novel and serves as a messenger to social discourse outside the boundaries of the text. For Bahktin, however, the existence of heteroglossia and hybrid construction adds a new deminsion to the poststructuralist view of the "self," one in which the author creates more than one voice. Does this mean that the author creates more than a single self within a text as well? Or are voice and self seperate within a text? These are questions that are worthy of contemplating during our current unit of Anti/signification.
In his essay "Discourse in the Novel" Bahkin does not explicitly detail the notion of self in a narrative. However, by analyzing some of the key points in his essay, we can try and come to a conclusion of how Bahktin might answer the questions I posed above. Heteroglossia is "anothers speech in anothers language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way" (324). This quote does not implicate the self, but it implies that in novels, the self can be constructed in a way that encompasses "another." This is obviously an important function in regards to social discourse, as the author utilzes the voice and language of another in the text to allow readers to examine socio-historical attitudes and condtions that the author wishes to portray. But it does not directly answer the questions above. More clarity might be found in Bahkins discussion of hybrid construction, which is an "utterance that belongs...to a single speaker, but that actually contains mixed within it two utterances, two speech manners, two styles and two 'languages'" (304). As such, Bahktin realizes that the construction of self may encompass many more than one "utterance" but still attributes this as belonging to a single speaker. While my questions may not have been answered in full regarding voice, self and Bahktin, his text pushes us to think of the potential dueality of the self within the novel.
Please comment on this post if you have anything to add, criqitue, etc! Interested to hear what others think!
I have been thinking a lot about Bakhtin's ideas of the self in his analysis of the novel as a genre, and I actually just posted about the relationship of self and language within the confines of the novel. Bakhtin seemed to focus on a very direct relationship between author and narrator (main character of the novel, we can assume). You brought up the question of whether the author creates more than a single self in a text; and it is a complicated question that I'm not sure if Bakhtin fully understood either.
ReplyDeleteThere was a section from the piece we read that helped me in thinking about this question. Bakhtin writes, "The internal bifurcation (double-voicing) of discourse, sufficient to a single and unitary language and to a consistently monologic style, can never be a fundamental form of discourse; it is merely a game, a tempest in a teapot"(325). This idea of a tempest in a teapot functions well as a metaphor for the novel in general, and I take it to mean that there is a partnership between author and narrator that works to create this "tempest" of language, functioning under the umbrella of a given and named society/culture. So my answer would be that there can only be two voices, more than that would murk up the tea.