Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп. Сетевой архив.

Журнал научных разысканий о биографии, теоретическом наследии и эпохе М. М. Бахтина

ISSN 0136-0132

Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп. → 2000 → 1

Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1
38 39
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1

Clifford Hallam

Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism

Like the Russian Formalists, with whom he is often compared, Michael Bakhtin brought applied linguistics and literary history to bear in the analysis of prose fiction. His original insights, fully-informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy and the human sciences, reveal the unique features of the novel, namely its stylistic peculiarities, placing the genre in an autonomous relationship to the established classical forms. Bakhtin argues that «[t]he stylistic study of the novel began only very recently. Classicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not recognize the novel as an independent poetic genre and classified it with the mixed rhetorical genres».¹ Indeed, critics heretofore routinely bonded the primal epic with the modern novel, noting formal similarities including narrative structure, setting, conflict, and theme, which organically complement the culture hero, variously defined.

Georg Lucбcs, for example, regards the decline of the epic and the consequent rise of the novel as contingent with the dialectic of history². Thus, as the post-Renaissance bourgeoisie assumed a preeminent role in European society, the nascent leisure class required home entertainment, preferably in a medium suited to it own narcissistic interests. The novel, according to Lucбcs, emerges as a «fallen epic», no longer an extended narrative poem written in an elevated style and concerned with the fate of kings and princes, but rewritten as prose fiction in a vulgar style and featuring the vicissitudes of commoners—with whom the reader could readily identify.

Bakhtin, however, rejects diachronic formulas suggested by Lucбcs and other critics of various persuasions, regarding commonsense parallels between epic and novel as simplistic and superficial. He notes, for example, that the chronotope of the epic is the «absolute past»³, a sociology/history presented as fixed, permanent, closed. The novel, by contrast, is

. . . the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as genre takes place in the full light of the historical day. The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities⁴.

Closure for Bakhtin is false and dangerous. The doctrine of infinite possibility, a dominant theme throughout his work, informs notions of taxonomy, ethics, and the Other. Moreover, Bakhtin observes that the novel characteristically absorbs pre-existing forms, styles, and techniques while retaining its own identity. Thus, in describing the novel as genre, Bakhtin coincidently and prophetically charts the course of postmodernist fiction.

By 1975, the year of Bakhtin's death, the novel's plastic possibilities are a virtual fait accompli, particularly in the United States. A random selection of late mid-century postmodernist texts such as Naked Lunch, Lost in the Funhouse, Snow White, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Armies of the Night clearly demonstrates the openendedness of the form. The contemporary reader, trained in the study of conventional fiction, is no longer surprised to find, within the boundaries of a single novel, evidence of science fiction, gothic horror, hyper-realism, pornography, legal jargon, and cybernetic code. Presumably fixed conventions like formatting sentences from left to right and structuring paragraphs vertically may be overturned or ignored, as in novels by Raymond Federman, William Gass, and other experimental authors⁵.

An early postmodernist American novel by an author of Russian descent serves to illustrate Bakhtin's triad of global concepts, namely «prosaics»⁶, dialogue, and unfinalizability. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov appeared in 1962, following a spate of conventional postwar fiction by aging modernists like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, whose final productions are sometimes seen as unintended parodies of earlier work. These established authors (all Nobel laureates by 1962) were complemented by younger epigones like Bellow, Mailer, and Philip Roth, fresh vigorous writers who would later emerge as major figures of the fin de siecle period. Before Nabokov's Pale Fire, only a few master craftsmen like Sterne, Joyce, and Beckett have demonstrated Nabokov's skill and artistic daring; and no novelist, in fact, ever created a work quite like Pale Fire, which is composed of a foreword, lyrical poem in rhymed couplets, learned commentary, and annotated index. Published on the threshold of a radically new social order in the Western hemisphere, Pale Fire remains, nearly forty years later, a tour de force of the postmodern era and a paradigm of innovative form.

In a provocative essay entitled «Discourse in the Novel», Bakhtin proposes that encompassing theoretical approaches (i.e., a poetics)

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
Clifford Hallam
Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism

Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1
40 41
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1

to prose fiction cannot account for the heterogeneous nature of the genre. Further, in prose fiction, «. . . the basic types of stylistic-compositional unities»⁷ include (among other important elements) conventional written forms (e.g., the diary, the letter, the report, and so on), skaz, dialect/idiolect, and register. Thus»,[t]he novel can be defined as a diversity of speech types (sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized»⁸.

Pale Fire, in fact, bypasses standard organizational strategies (which, given the formal structure, are in any case unavailable) by foregrounding setting, characterization, plot, etc. as stylistic devices per se. Polyphony in the novel combines aesthetically with an integrated diversity of «speech types» to produce, unexpectedly and paradoxically, a prose fiction gestalt out of radical stylistic fragmentation. That is, in Pale Fire, the normative reader empirically apprehends a poem and scholarly apparatus from which—phenomenologically—a novel appears.

The various registers of American English including slang, academic jargon, poetic diction, and 1950s middle class American idiom are sometimes playfully juxtaposed to foreign words and phrases: e.g., «je nourris/Les pauvres ciqales»⁹ is translated as «he [sic] fed the poor seagulls!» and «shootka» presumably means «little chute» (PF: 221). Hence, the polyglossia adds a cosmopolitan dimension, not fully accomplished by the alien narrator as such, to the nominally provincial American chronotope. Consequently, Pale Fire not only transcends a poetics of the novel, but it also escapes any known taxonomy, save the plastic possibilities of the genre itself.

Bakhtin's global concept of dialogue, which is central to his critical hermeneutics, embodies the metaphysic of freedom and, in practice, foregrounds complexity, fictionality, and popular culture. Thus/contemporary writers, in reaction to the political conservatism and implicit elitism that characterizes high modernist fiction, may treat say, cartoon figures, franchised business chains, and best-selling genre novels in a «serious» artistic manner¹⁰. Pale Fire, like Crime & Punishment, treats characters with a measure of autonomy and unpredictability that transcends determinate factors associated with realism/naturalism to the extent that they are literally «out of control.» This «surplus of vision»¹¹, offers a view of the Other not, like in Hegel and Sartre as threat, but rather as a positive occasion for dialogue and an opportunity for enhanced self-knowledge and awareness.

Voice in Pale Fire problematizes the entire text. In an early passage Charles Kinbote, the scholar-narrator, includes a personal response to an annoyance, thus breaking the frame by jarring the academic tone of his foreword. This loss of control, along with various other unprofessional asides in the prefatory essay, foreshadows the narrator's increasingly eccentric behavior which later proves to be paranoiac. The protagonist, in facts, maintains no reliable fixed identity—a violation of reader expectations virtually unprecedented in American fiction. Even Faulkner's Benjy, the idiot, whose stream of consciousness point-of-view radically distorts «literary time» in the initial chapter of The Sound and the Fury, remains a stable and identifiable literary character throughout. Charles Kinbote, like the Whitman persona, contradicts himself and contains multitudes. A selective survey of possible narrators in Pale Fire includes Professor Botkin, Russian emigre; Dr. Charles Kinbote, prince in exile; John Shade, American poet (presumed dead); and anonymous literary persona as ventriloquist.

Lacking a central narrative perspective, the novel combines both centripetal and centrifugal forces—in Bakhtin's terminology, heteroglossia.¹² Specifically, this term signifies multiple, incompatible points-of-view, as opposed to different dialects per se. In Pale Fire the centripetal voice (i.e., the lyrical persona) clashes with the centrifugal voice(s) of the commentator, whose identity remains unconfirmed. This exchange of perspectives (a continuous shift of signifiers and signifieds) accounts for the manifold interpretive possibilities of the work—not as learned commentary on a long meditative poem, but as fiction. Thus, owing to the editor's obsession with Zembla, the poem «Pale Fire» is utterly transformed, just as the poem itself creatively deforms reality: as Yeats inquires, «How can we know the dancer from the dance?»

The dialogic power expressed in Pale Fire by voice, heteroglossia, and structure guarantees a «surplus of humanness»¹³, and the crucial element of surprise. Thus, the normative reader cannot assume the mode of passive consumer of meaning, as the undecidable and indeterminate nature of text requires one to assume the posture of active producer of meaning¹⁴. Attempts to reduce the narrator to his position in society (professor/king), psychological role (madman/imposter), or basic social identity (Botkin/Kinbote) only generate additional interactional levels of complexity, rather than following an ordinary critical procedure. As Bakhtin states, «An individual cannot be

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
Clifford Hallam
Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism

Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1
42 43
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1

incarnated into the flesh of existing sociohistoric categories; there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found»¹⁵.

Uncannily, a new, different and entirely unexpected voice emerges in the final section of the Commentary. The metacommentary functions as a self-reflexive device, now commonplace in postmodernism, and more specifically it promises the narrator a future—a guarantee of freedom, unfinalizability.

Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here.

. . .

I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile…sans anything but his art (PF: 300_01).

But this usurper voice, never named, never known, does not depart before undercutting the above remarks by a final turn of the screw. In the terminal sentence of the Commentary, the narrator implicitly yokes the transcendent and immortal power of the writer's art with the existential certainty of the author's deaths which he personifies as Jacob Gradus, John Shade's killer/Charles the Beloved's failed assassin:

But whatever happens, whatever scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out — somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plan, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring my door—a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus (PL: 301).

¹Michael Bakhtin, «From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse» // The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin TX: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), 41.

² See Georg Lucбcs, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1971), passim.

³ See Bakhtin, «Epic and Novel,» The Dialogic Imagination, 15 ff. for his discussion of this term.

⁴ «Epic & Novel», 3.

⁵ See Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing and William Gass, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife.

⁶The term «prosaics» was coined by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in their entry on Bakhtin in The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden & Martin Krelswirth (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), 64_5: «As a view of the world, prosaics is suspicious of explanatory systems (of theoreticism); it also suggests that the most important events in life are not the grand, dramatic, of catastrophic but the apparently small and prosaic ones of everyday life.» Bakhtin discusses these ideas in «Discourse in the Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, passim.

⁸ «Discourse in the Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 262.

⁹Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (NYC : Vintage, 1989), 41. Further citations to this edition will be noted parenthetically.

¹⁰See, for example, Gary Wolfe, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, Max Apple, The 0ranging of America, Don DeLillo, End Zone.

¹¹By this term Bakhtin means that one can see, literally and figuratively, beyond the Other. See his Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, passim.

¹²See «heteroglossia and the Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 301 ff.

¹³The notion of surplus in this context is discussed in «Epic and Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 37.

¹⁴Refers to Roland Barthes' well-known distinction between lisible (readerly) and scriptible (writerly) texts, respectively.

¹⁵«Epic and Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 37.

В своей ранней статье «Эпос и роман» М.Бахтин определил прозу как открытую по своей сути форму, потенциал которой ещё не был реализован. В этой и других работах того периода он ввёл такие термины, как «диалогичность», «многоголо сие», «полифонизм» и «избыток видения», чтобы подчеркнуть свойства романа, которые выходили за рамки, что называется, миметических пассажей, описаний и характеристик. Можно удивляться тому, сколь пророческими оказались бахтинские наблюдения, когда возникла постмодернистская литература, отличающаяся свойством нарушать все принципы литературной красивости и впечатляюще раскрывать всю трансцендентную и непредсказуемую сложность человеческого бытия. Как доказатель

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
Clifford Hallam
Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism

Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1
44
Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1

ство этого, «Бледный огонь» («Pale Fire») В.Набокова, в сущности, нарушает все условности традиционного (да и эксперимен тального) романа, включая и структуру, и манеру изложения, и интонацию, и стиль.

Этот роман действительно игнорирует типовую стратегию организации произведения (которая, с точки зрения формальной структуры, и так едва ли действенна), выдвигая на первый план язык, искусство создания образов, построения сюжета и т.д., как стилистические приёмы per se. В самом деле, шедевр Набокова со всей полнотой демонстрирует глубину и размах жанра — именно так, как возможности романа представлял себе Бахтин.

ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ
Clifford Hallam
Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism

		Журнал научных разысканий о биографии, теоретическом наследии и эпохе М. М. Бахтина ISSN 0136-0132



		Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп. → 2000 → 1 Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1 38 39 Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1 Clifford Hallam Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism Like the Russian Formalists, with whom he is often compared, Michael Bakhtin brought applied linguistics and literary history to bear in the analysis of prose fiction. His original insights, fully-informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of philosophy and the human sciences, reveal the unique features of the novel, namely its stylistic peculiarities, placing the genre in an autonomous relationship to the established classical forms. Bakhtin argues that «[t]he stylistic study of the novel began only very recently. Classicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not recognize the novel as an independent poetic genre and classified it with the mixed rhetorical genres».¹ Indeed, critics heretofore routinely bonded the primal epic with the modern novel, noting formal similarities including narrative structure, setting, conflict, and theme, which organically complement the culture hero, variously defined. Georg Lucбcs, for example, regards the decline of the epic and the consequent rise of the novel as contingent with the dialectic of history². Thus, as the post-Renaissance bourgeoisie assumed a preeminent role in European society, the nascent leisure class required home entertainment, preferably in a medium suited to it own narcissistic interests. The novel, according to Lucбcs, emerges as a «fallen epic», no longer an extended narrative poem written in an elevated style and concerned with the fate of kings and princes, but rewritten as prose fiction in a vulgar style and featuring the vicissitudes of commoners—with whom the reader could readily identify. Bakhtin, however, rejects diachronic formulas suggested by Lucбcs and other critics of various persuasions, regarding commonsense parallels between epic and novel as simplistic and superficial. He notes, for example, that the chronotope of the epic is the «absolute past»³, a sociology/history presented as fixed, permanent, closed. The novel, by contrast, is . . . the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as genre takes place in the full light of the historical day. The generic skeleton of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities⁴. Closure for Bakhtin is false and dangerous. The doctrine of infinite possibility, a dominant theme throughout his work, informs notions of taxonomy, ethics, and the Other. Moreover, Bakhtin observes that the novel characteristically absorbs pre-existing forms, styles, and techniques while retaining its own identity. Thus, in describing the novel as genre, Bakhtin coincidently and prophetically charts the course of postmodernist fiction. By 1975, the year of Bakhtin's death, the novel's plastic possibilities are a virtual fait accompli, particularly in the United States. A random selection of late mid-century postmodernist texts such as Naked Lunch, Lost in the Funhouse, Snow White, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Armies of the Night clearly demonstrates the openendedness of the form. The contemporary reader, trained in the study of conventional fiction, is no longer surprised to find, within the boundaries of a single novel, evidence of science fiction, gothic horror, hyper-realism, pornography, legal jargon, and cybernetic code. Presumably fixed conventions like formatting sentences from left to right and structuring paragraphs vertically may be overturned or ignored, as in novels by Raymond Federman, William Gass, and other experimental authors⁵. An early postmodernist American novel by an author of Russian descent serves to illustrate Bakhtin's triad of global concepts, namely «prosaics»⁶, dialogue, and unfinalizability. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov appeared in 1962, following a spate of conventional postwar fiction by aging modernists like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, whose final productions are sometimes seen as unintended parodies of earlier work. These established authors (all Nobel laureates by 1962) were complemented by younger epigones like Bellow, Mailer, and Philip Roth, fresh vigorous writers who would later emerge as major figures of the fin de siecle period. Before Nabokov's Pale Fire, only a few master craftsmen like Sterne, Joyce, and Beckett have demonstrated Nabokov's skill and artistic daring; and no novelist, in fact, ever created a work quite like Pale Fire, which is composed of a foreword, lyrical poem in rhymed couplets, learned commentary, and annotated index. Published on the threshold of a radically new social order in the Western hemisphere, Pale Fire remains, nearly forty years later, a tour de force of the postmodern era and a paradigm of innovative form. In a provocative essay entitled «Discourse in the Novel», Bakhtin proposes that encompassing theoretical approaches (i.e., a poetics) ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Clifford Hallam Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1 40 41 Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1 to prose fiction cannot account for the heterogeneous nature of the genre. Further, in prose fiction, «. . . the basic types of stylistic-compositional unities»⁷ include (among other important elements) conventional written forms (e.g., the diary, the letter, the report, and so on), skaz, dialect/idiolect, and register. Thus»,[t]he novel can be defined as a diversity of speech types (sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized»⁸. Pale Fire, in fact, bypasses standard organizational strategies (which, given the formal structure, are in any case unavailable) by foregrounding setting, characterization, plot, etc. as stylistic devices per se. Polyphony in the novel combines aesthetically with an integrated diversity of «speech types» to produce, unexpectedly and paradoxically, a prose fiction gestalt out of radical stylistic fragmentation. That is, in Pale Fire, the normative reader empirically apprehends a poem and scholarly apparatus from which—phenomenologically—a novel appears. The various registers of American English including slang, academic jargon, poetic diction, and 1950s middle class American idiom are sometimes playfully juxtaposed to foreign words and phrases: e.g., «je nourris/Les pauvres ciqales»⁹ is translated as «he [sic] fed the poor seagulls!» and «shootka» presumably means «little chute» (PF: 221). Hence, the polyglossia adds a cosmopolitan dimension, not fully accomplished by the alien narrator as such, to the nominally provincial American chronotope. Consequently, Pale Fire not only transcends a poetics of the novel, but it also escapes any known taxonomy, save the plastic possibilities of the genre itself. Bakhtin's global concept of dialogue, which is central to his critical hermeneutics, embodies the metaphysic of freedom and, in practice, foregrounds complexity, fictionality, and popular culture. Thus/contemporary writers, in reaction to the political conservatism and implicit elitism that characterizes high modernist fiction, may treat say, cartoon figures, franchised business chains, and best-selling genre novels in a «serious» artistic manner¹⁰. Pale Fire, like Crime & Punishment, treats characters with a measure of autonomy and unpredictability that transcends determinate factors associated with realism/naturalism to the extent that they are literally «out of control.» This «surplus of vision»¹¹, offers a view of the Other not, like in Hegel and Sartre as threat, but rather as a positive occasion for dialogue and an opportunity for enhanced self-knowledge and awareness. Voice in Pale Fire problematizes the entire text. In an early passage Charles Kinbote, the scholar-narrator, includes a personal response to an annoyance, thus breaking the frame by jarring the academic tone of his foreword. This loss of control, along with various other unprofessional asides in the prefatory essay, foreshadows the narrator's increasingly eccentric behavior which later proves to be paranoiac. The protagonist, in facts, maintains no reliable fixed identity—a violation of reader expectations virtually unprecedented in American fiction. Even Faulkner's Benjy, the idiot, whose stream of consciousness point-of-view radically distorts «literary time» in the initial chapter of The Sound and the Fury, remains a stable and identifiable literary character throughout. Charles Kinbote, like the Whitman persona, contradicts himself and contains multitudes. A selective survey of possible narrators in Pale Fire includes Professor Botkin, Russian emigre; Dr. Charles Kinbote, prince in exile; John Shade, American poet (presumed dead); and anonymous literary persona as ventriloquist. Lacking a central narrative perspective, the novel combines both centripetal and centrifugal forces—in Bakhtin's terminology, heteroglossia.¹² Specifically, this term signifies multiple, incompatible points-of-view, as opposed to different dialects per se. In Pale Fire the centripetal voice (i.e., the lyrical persona) clashes with the centrifugal voice(s) of the commentator, whose identity remains unconfirmed. This exchange of perspectives (a continuous shift of signifiers and signifieds) accounts for the manifold interpretive possibilities of the work—not as learned commentary on a long meditative poem, but as fiction. Thus, owing to the editor's obsession with Zembla, the poem «Pale Fire» is utterly transformed, just as the poem itself creatively deforms reality: as Yeats inquires, «How can we know the dancer from the dance?» The dialogic power expressed in Pale Fire by voice, heteroglossia, and structure guarantees a «surplus of humanness»¹³, and the crucial element of surprise. Thus, the normative reader cannot assume the mode of passive consumer of meaning, as the undecidable and indeterminate nature of text requires one to assume the posture of active producer of meaning¹⁴. Attempts to reduce the narrator to his position in society (professor/king), psychological role (madman/imposter), or basic social identity (Botkin/Kinbote) only generate additional interactional levels of complexity, rather than following an ordinary critical procedure. As Bakhtin states, «An individual cannot be ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Clifford Hallam Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1 42 43 Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1 incarnated into the flesh of existing sociohistoric categories; there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found»¹⁵. Uncannily, a new, different and entirely unexpected voice emerges in the final section of the Commentary. The metacommentary functions as a self-reflexive device, now commonplace in postmodernism, and more specifically it promises the narrator a future—a guarantee of freedom, unfinalizability. Well, folks, I guess many in this fine hall are as hungry and thirsty as me, and I'd better stop, folks, right here. . . . I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist. I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile…sans anything but his art (PF: 300_01). But this usurper voice, never named, never known, does not depart before undercutting the above remarks by a final turn of the screw. In the terminal sentence of the Commentary, the narrator implicitly yokes the transcendent and immortal power of the writer's art with the existential certainty of the author's deaths which he personifies as Jacob Gradus, John Shade's killer/Charles the Beloved's failed assassin: But whatever happens, whatever scene is laid, somebody, somewhere, will quietly set out — somebody has already set out, somebody still rather far away is buying a ticket, is boarding a bus, a ship, a plan, has landed, is walking toward a million photographers, and presently he will ring my door—a bigger, more respectable, more competent Gradus (PL: 301). ¹Michael Bakhtin, «From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse» // The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin TX: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), 41. ² See Georg Lucбcs, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1971), passim. ³ See Bakhtin, «Epic and Novel,» The Dialogic Imagination, 15 ff. for his discussion of this term. ⁴ «Epic & Novel», 3. ⁵ See Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing and William Gass, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife. ⁶The term «prosaics» was coined by Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson in their entry on Bakhtin in The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden & Martin Krelswirth (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), 64_5: «As a view of the world, prosaics is suspicious of explanatory systems (of theoreticism); it also suggests that the most important events in life are not the grand, dramatic, of catastrophic but the apparently small and prosaic ones of everyday life.» Bakhtin discusses these ideas in «Discourse in the Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, passim. ⁸ «Discourse in the Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 262. ⁹Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (NYC : Vintage, 1989), 41. Further citations to this edition will be noted parenthetically. ¹⁰See, for example, Gary Wolfe, Who Censored Roger Rabbit?, Max Apple, The 0ranging of America, Don DeLillo, End Zone. ¹¹By this term Bakhtin means that one can see, literally and figuratively, beyond the Other. See his Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, passim. ¹²See «heteroglossia and the Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 301 ff. ¹³The notion of surplus in this context is discussed in «Epic and Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 37. ¹⁴Refers to Roland Barthes' well-known distinction between lisible (readerly) and scriptible (writerly) texts, respectively. ¹⁵«Epic and Novel», The Dialogic Imagination, 37. В своей ранней статье «Эпос и роман» М.Бахтин определил прозу как открытую по своей сути форму, потенциал которой ещё не был реализован. В этой и других работах того периода он ввёл такие термины, как «диалогичность», «многоголо сие», «полифонизм» и «избыток видения», чтобы подчеркнуть свойства романа, которые выходили за рамки, что называется, миметических пассажей, описаний и характеристик. Можно удивляться тому, сколь пророческими оказались бахтинские наблюдения, когда возникла постмодернистская литература, отличающаяся свойством нарушать все принципы литературной красивости и впечатляюще раскрывать всю трансцендентную и непредсказуемую сложность человеческого бытия. Как доказатель ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Clifford Hallam Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism Диалог. Карнавал. Хронотоп, 2000, № 1 44 Dialogue. Carnival. Chronotope, 2000, № 1 ство этого, «Бледный огонь» («Pale Fire») В.Набокова, в сущности, нарушает все условности традиционного (да и эксперимен тального) романа, включая и структуру, и манеру изложения, и интонацию, и стиль. Этот роман действительно игнорирует типовую стратегию организации произведения (которая, с точки зрения формальной структуры, и так едва ли действенна), выдвигая на первый план язык, искусство создания образов, построения сюжета и т.д., как стилистические приёмы per se. В самом деле, шедевр Набокова со всей полнотой демонстрирует глубину и размах жанра — именно так, как возможности романа представлял себе Бахтин. ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ Clifford Hallam Notes on Bakhtin and Postmodernism