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study and subjects worthy of cultivation. For what we may
conveniently call novel is the manifestation in literature of the
human capacity to perceive the artificiality of every system (social,
cultural, political, literary, religious), to subject it to the ridicule of
"laughter" when the system sacrifices the goal of human community to
the end of its own perpetuation, and to return discourse to an
awareness of its own adventitiousness .
For Bakhtin, the principle involved in this elevation-of prose
over poetry, of novelistic over dissertative discourse, and of the
dialogical over the monological novel-resides in the moral
distinction between truth and lie , not in the epistemic distinction
between truth and illusion or fact and fiction or reality and
appearance. When it comes to the representation of reality in
language , it is never, Bakhtin suggests, a matter of being absolutely
truthful. The
formal
coherency that language imposes on the clutter
of life is
always
illusory. And this because, as he puts it, " truth does
not seek words; she is afraid to entangle herself in the word, to soil
herself in verbal pathos." The
schematic
coherency that discourse
imposes on life is even more illusory, especially insofar as it tends
toward monological authoritativeness , advances claims to being the
one proper or adequate way of speaking the truth, and pretends to
know what "the truth" consists of; this is worse than an illusion-it
is a lie.
In Bakhtin' s view, if I read him correctly, all "official"
discourse is a lie, the deceptive intention of which is manifested in its
claim to authoritativeness. And he comes very close to suggesting
that all of the "high" genres of literature (the "noble" genres of
epic, lyric, and drama) are similarly prevaricative insofar as they lay
claim to a similar authoritativeness , a similar official status.
It
is the
claim to authority that Bakhtin radically
questions-any
claim to
authority, however pious in intention, however responsible in aim.
And it is the questioning of authority in the more licentious
traditions of folk speech and folklore that he would celebrate: the
foolishness of the Rogue, the Madman, and the Clown; the farcical
ridiculing of order and propriety; the parodistic derision of authority
and pretensions to nobility; the inversion of law and religious taboo
in the carnival; the assertion of the primacy of the" gross realities of
life" and of bodily needs over what society would put in their place
as "dignified" alternatives .
This licentiousness finds literary expression in the "low"
genres of comedy (of the Aristophanic and Lucianic kinds)-satire,
