"you need a yanking," yes.
...These parodic-travestying forms prepared the ground for the novel in one very important, in fact decisive, respect. They liberated the object from the power of language in which it had become entangled as if in a net; they destroyed the homogenizing power of myth over language; they freed consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed the thick walls that had imprisoned consciousness within its own discourse, within its own language. A distance arose between language and reality that was to prove an indispensible condition for authentically realistic forms of discourse.
Linguistic consciousness--parodying the direct word, direct style, exploring its limits, its absurd sides, the face specific to an era--constituted itself outside this direct word and outside all its graphic and expressive means of representation. A new mode developed for working creatively with language: the creating artist began to look at language from the outside, with another's eyes, from the point of view of a potentially different language and style. It is, after all, precisely in the light of another potential language or style that a given straightforward style is parodied, travestied, ridiculed. The creating consciousness stands, as it were, on the boundary line between languages and styles. This is, for the creating consciousness, a highly peculiar position to find itself in with regard to language. The aedile or rhapsode experienced himself in his own language, in his own discourse, in an utterly different way from the creator of "War between the Mice and the Frogs," or the creators of Margites.
One who creates a direct word--whether epic, tragic or lyric--deals only with the subject whose praises he sings, or represents, or expresses, and he does so in his own language that is perceived as the sole and fully adequate tool for realizing the word's direct, objectivized meaning. This meaning and the objects and themes that compose it are inseparable from the straightforward language of the person who creates it: the objects and themes are born and grown to maturity in this language, and in the national myth and national tradition that permeate this language. The position and tendency of the parodic-travestying consciousness is, however, completely different: it, too, is oriented toward the object--but toward another's word as well, a parodied word about the object that in the process becomes itself an image. Thus is created that distance between language and reality we mentioned earlier. Language is transformed from the absolute dogma it had been within the narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality.
But such a full and complete transformation can occur only under certain conditions, namely, under the condition of thoroughgoing polyglossia. Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language. Parodic-travestying forms flourish under these conditions, and only in this milieu are they capable of being elevated to completely new ideological heights.
Roman literary consciousness was bilingual. The purely national Latin genres, conceived under monoglotic conditions, fell into decay and did not achieve the level of literary expression. From start to finish, the creative literary consciousness of the Romans functioned against the background of the Greek language and Greek forms. From its very first steps, the Latin literary word viewed itself in the light of the Greek word, through the eyes of the Greek word; it was from the very beginning a word "with a sideways glance," a stylized word enclosing itself, as it were, in its own piously stylized quotation marks.
...
But we have to do here not only with the cultural bilingualism of literary Rome. Roman literature at the outset was characterized by trilingualism. "Three souls" lived in the breast of Ennius...
For all the barbarian peoples who came in contact with it, Hellenism provided a powerful and illuminating model of other-languagedness...On Hellenistic and Helleno-Roman soil there became possible a maximal distance between the speaker (the creating artist) and his language, as well as a maximal distance between language itself and the world of themes and objects. Only under such conditions could Roman laughter have developed so powerfully.
...
The Orient was itself bearer of an ancient and complex polyglossia.
...
from Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin
/
books due back tomorrow (04/12/02) that i've especially enjoyed:
.the higher learning in america by thorstein veblen
.gender and the politics of history by joan scott
.dialogic imagination by mikhail bakhtin
.on religion: speeches to its cultured despisers by friedrich schleiermacher
/
bit on the above--
talk about tentative and very, very controversial--i mean, provocative really. i already have some possible, very specific objections/"counter-thoughts"...i wonder how it's been addressed publically, now. the next step to find for me. this morning i seriously considered, for a moment, joining the bakhtin/dialogism mailing list...it's apparently a bunch of published scholars, though? i could lurk maybe though. maybe. meep.
Linguistic consciousness--parodying the direct word, direct style, exploring its limits, its absurd sides, the face specific to an era--constituted itself outside this direct word and outside all its graphic and expressive means of representation. A new mode developed for working creatively with language: the creating artist began to look at language from the outside, with another's eyes, from the point of view of a potentially different language and style. It is, after all, precisely in the light of another potential language or style that a given straightforward style is parodied, travestied, ridiculed. The creating consciousness stands, as it were, on the boundary line between languages and styles. This is, for the creating consciousness, a highly peculiar position to find itself in with regard to language. The aedile or rhapsode experienced himself in his own language, in his own discourse, in an utterly different way from the creator of "War between the Mice and the Frogs," or the creators of Margites.
One who creates a direct word--whether epic, tragic or lyric--deals only with the subject whose praises he sings, or represents, or expresses, and he does so in his own language that is perceived as the sole and fully adequate tool for realizing the word's direct, objectivized meaning. This meaning and the objects and themes that compose it are inseparable from the straightforward language of the person who creates it: the objects and themes are born and grown to maturity in this language, and in the national myth and national tradition that permeate this language. The position and tendency of the parodic-travestying consciousness is, however, completely different: it, too, is oriented toward the object--but toward another's word as well, a parodied word about the object that in the process becomes itself an image. Thus is created that distance between language and reality we mentioned earlier. Language is transformed from the absolute dogma it had been within the narrow framework of a sealed-off and impermeable monoglossia into a working hypothesis for comprehending and expressing reality.
But such a full and complete transformation can occur only under certain conditions, namely, under the condition of thoroughgoing polyglossia. Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language. Parodic-travestying forms flourish under these conditions, and only in this milieu are they capable of being elevated to completely new ideological heights.
Roman literary consciousness was bilingual. The purely national Latin genres, conceived under monoglotic conditions, fell into decay and did not achieve the level of literary expression. From start to finish, the creative literary consciousness of the Romans functioned against the background of the Greek language and Greek forms. From its very first steps, the Latin literary word viewed itself in the light of the Greek word, through the eyes of the Greek word; it was from the very beginning a word "with a sideways glance," a stylized word enclosing itself, as it were, in its own piously stylized quotation marks.
...
But we have to do here not only with the cultural bilingualism of literary Rome. Roman literature at the outset was characterized by trilingualism. "Three souls" lived in the breast of Ennius...
For all the barbarian peoples who came in contact with it, Hellenism provided a powerful and illuminating model of other-languagedness...On Hellenistic and Helleno-Roman soil there became possible a maximal distance between the speaker (the creating artist) and his language, as well as a maximal distance between language itself and the world of themes and objects. Only under such conditions could Roman laughter have developed so powerfully.
...
The Orient was itself bearer of an ancient and complex polyglossia.
...
from Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin
/
books due back tomorrow (04/12/02) that i've especially enjoyed:
.the higher learning in america by thorstein veblen
.gender and the politics of history by joan scott
.dialogic imagination by mikhail bakhtin
.on religion: speeches to its cultured despisers by friedrich schleiermacher
/
bit on the above--
talk about tentative and very, very controversial--i mean, provocative really. i already have some possible, very specific objections/"counter-thoughts"...i wonder how it's been addressed publically, now. the next step to find for me. this morning i seriously considered, for a moment, joining the bakhtin/dialogism mailing list...it's apparently a bunch of published scholars, though? i could lurk maybe though. maybe. meep.