Novel Language

While reading Bakhtin, I realized how his use of the popular genre of novels helps increase my understanding of idealizing accuracy of verbal language into a literary form. Form is correlative to content because the content must fit the appropriate form. Society decides to categorize and label literature, not a single person. So the creation of the novel genre proves the diversity and difficulty of language is recognized by society, however subconsciously it may be. Verbal language has many different groups, and subgroups. In each language there is common, formal, slang and foreign subgroups. If language had to fit into a “genre” novel would be the best literary representative because of similar characteristics of verbal language (diversity of compilation). A novel is built upon abstractions, yet openly accepted and used with constant consciousness that it relies on interpretation of an individualistic nature, exactly like verbal language. This “abstraction of viewpoint” is the advantageous success of language.

As the diversity of language was discussed by Locke, Bakhtin states that “Individual and tendentious overtones of style….cannot therefore be studied in organic unity with a work’s semantic components” (Bahktin 259). As I noted in my roadmap, the input of artistic styles (individual response and belief) complicated the validity and interpretation of the text. As with language, it was not the sounds that failed, the intended meaning was misinterpreted.

I end my post with curiosity in the fact that every form of communication depends so heavily on interpretation, and it is recognized. I suppose it surprises me since the problem is obvious, then why must language fail at all if it is known that the only mistake was lack of clarification, and not incapacity to be comprehensive of sound/text/sign.