Dialogism: Introducing Bakhtin...Poetry is nothing. The novel is everything. Ancient forms have no meaning. All is relative and subject to vague criticism. I do not have to use specific evidence to back up my claims unless I feel like it.
Did I get it right?
No. I confess. I just picked out the parts where I scribbled insulted question marks in the text.
I mentioned in the last class that I was glad Vice uses examples of Dostoevsky's works. I was actually happy to read the section 'Dostoevsky could hear dialogic relationships everywhere.' These words especially spoke to me as a reader: "Not a single element in [the novel's] atmosphere can be neutral: everything must touch the character to the quick, provoke him, interrogate him, even polemicize with him and taunt him; everything must be directed toward the hero himself, turned toward him" (56). Dostoevsky's character Raskolnikov so perfectly illustrates this perspective, because he is vain. The text is vain. This aspect of fiction is what draws me to the art of writing, and also to reading.
This kind of character spotlight makes the Burroughs narrative so utterly compelling. We, as readers, want to experience the accute slant the author, or narrative voice, has given to select inhabitants of the world. We are drawn in--and subjected. So, would it be fair to say that all authors are Confidence Men?
Overall, I think Stephen Burroughs, as a character, has displayed more corruption while confined than he ever did while walking the world as a "free" man. Obviously. But more specifically, "flaws" in the narrative begin to show as he tries to break out of jail more often. He has it down to an art. Well, not really--considering I'm 1/3 through the narrative and he so far is unsuccessful. Look on page 140. He breaks through the wall, conviently just under a "covered way." And this he measures by way of a "geometrical operation." With a penknife. And then he tells all the other prisoners exactly how he did it! Really? Up until this point, I "liked" the character.I am beginning to sense a kind of madness in the character of Burroughs not felt in the first third of the narrative. Although the narrator is presenting the story post-adventure, change is taking place. He describes his own appearance near the scene in the jail when he is deprived of food for 32 days (which, by the way, seems unlikely. wouldn't a person perish after that long?). His hair is sticking all over the place. Who knows when he last bathed or even cleaned himself. And his clothes were probably less than rags. Quite possibly he didn't have all of his teeth and he is probably covered in sores. That image really jumped out at me more than any other. This interaction with the reader is especially evident when Burroughs encounters a group of Pelhamites (133). Perhaps as further evidence for his affected state of mind, Burroughs is elated to find that "they pitied me! They offered me, as a token of their benovolent feelings, as much punch as I would drink" (133). And here is where I think I can interject some Bakhtinian concepts: The reader is "listening" to the voice of a present narrator speaking about the character Stephen Burroughs in the past. The thoughts and words of each are seperate concepts. Burroughs is "looking" at Burroughs who is being looked at by Pelhamites and all are being looked at by readers. Am I getting closer?
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Hi Courtney, I think you are right on target. thanks for the good response. Your readings of both Vice and Burroughs are insightful, though your first paragraph might be a bit reductive. But certainly Bakhtin does favor the novel over other genres, especially lyric and epic. I really liked your thought that writing is a kind of con game and that authors are confidence men. This is interesting and valid. I also agree that Burroughs does seem a bit too desperate and unbelievable in the prison sections, but perhaps he is restaging the Revolutionary struggle for liberty and seeking to imbue himself with shades of the greater political struggle. Good thoughts, dw
ReplyDeleteHmm, that is really interesting about all authors being confidence-men. We have to put a certain amount of confidence in them to trust them as a narrator. And we talk about "unreliable narrators." Are those narrators just not playing the confidence game? I think maybe not. Or maybe they are playing it better than the rest because they are able to dupe us for a while and then reveal their true intentions. I am thinking especially of Villette, in which the protagonist presents a character as Dr. John and refers to him as such for a hundred pages or so, and then reveals that he is a character that we already know from their very beginning of the novel! There is certainly a confidence game being played out there. We trust the narrator they he or she would tell us something so substantial, and thus the author has gone off with our gold watch.
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