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parody, mimes, bucolic poetry, apologies, and so on-everything at
once " indecent" and tinged with laughter. Here not only social
authority, but language and literature itself (insofar as it is identified
with the "high" genres) are subjected to the one critical instrument
capable of demolishing "fear and piety before an object. " In the
laughter that arises from successful derision of authority, the
absurdity of the lie is exposed and " the truth is restored . . . ."
Considered as a genre in itself, the novel appears as the form that
thi-s derisory, parodistic, critical, and self-critical impulse in human
nature takes in literature. In the novel , the many discourses that
make up language and the many genres that comprise literature are
all taken as the subject matter of a discourse that effectively
"relativizes" them, exposes their limits as systems, and subjects
them to (more or less) benign criticism. In the novel, Bakhtin says,
one can lay bare " any sort of conventionality" and all that is
"falsely stereotyped in human relationships . " And indeed this
capacity of the novel to expose the limits , the artificiality, of any
system is the criterion he uses to rank specific novels or types of
novels , according to whether they approximate or fall away from the
paradigm of the genre , the carnivalesque discourse of Rabelais. It is
not surprising, therefore, that, unlike those historians of the novel
who view it as progressing from Cervantes to Flaubert and Tolstoy
and beyond, Bakhtin envisions a different scenario. From the
perspective of the 1930s, he saw the modern novel as a fall away
from the generic ideal . The sentimental novel, the
Bildungsroman,
the
novel of (family) generations, and what , he disdainfully calls "the
man of the people novel " all represent , in his view, a fateful lapse
into" seriousness ."
The carnivalesque novel, the novel of laughter and interest in
the " gross realities of life" is opposed to the art novel as laughter
is opposed to seriousness, as "life" is opposed to authority. Its
principles of articulation are to be found (and this is another
inversion of a pious commonplace of criticism) not in poetry but in
rhetoric, which, Bakhtin insists, is oriented toward the listener
rather than toward the speaker, presupposes diversity rather than
unity as the condition of discourse , is dialogical in its essence and
hybrid in its form . This means, among other things, that the
principles of articulation of the novel are not to be found in any logic
of the narrative-of the sort then being elaborated by the Russian
and Czech formalists and more recently proposed by French
"narratologists" (Barthes , Todorov , Genette , etc.) . The
