BOOKS
307
THE AUTHORITATIVE LIE
THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION: FOUR ESSAYS. By M. M. Bakhtln.
Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist. University of Texas Press. $25.00.
These essays were written by Bakhtin during the 1930s,
the period between publication of his work on Dostoevsky's poetics
and the completion of his great study of Rabelais. They represent his
reflections on such topics as the relationship between the epic and
the novel, the " prehistory" of what he called "novelistic discourse,"
the "forms of time" in the novel, and the nature of discourse in the
novel. They are rich in linguistic, historical , and philological
learning and packed with insights into the even more general topics
of language , prose as opposed to poetic discourse, genres, ideology,
rhetoric, style, the history of literary forms , and so on . They also
offer some startling revisions of what were canonical critical
opinions at the time of their composition .
For example, on the question of the relationship between the
epic and the novel, Bakhtin stresses their differences rather than
their similarities . Indeed , in his view, the novel is the very antitype
of the epic . Whereas the epic is noble , serious, "high," and
nostalgic for a lost past, the novel is common, parodistic, "low,"
and oriented toward the future contained immanently in every
present. As for the "prehistory" of "novelistic discourse," he does
not locate it in ancient Greek romances, medieval chivalric epics, or
such "narrative" poems as Dante's
Commedia,
but rather in the
philosophical dialogue, the apologia, familiar letters, and satires, on
the one side, and the folk traditions of farce , carnival, scurrilous
tales, and parodistic jokes, on the other. So, too , the "forms of time"
that he finds represented in the novel turn out to be complex
"pre-narrative" structures, which he calls "chronotopes," models
of a spatialized time frame already endowed with the capacity to
determine the kinds of events that can happen within their confines.
Examples of chronotopes are the castle, the road, the salon, the
parlor, the city, and so on . These are not religious, mythical, or
psychological archetypes so much as pregeneric matrices that
authorize a wedding of a specific content with a specific literary
form, thereby providing one basis for classifying kinds of narratives.
