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Novel and Film: Two Essays
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bahktin
“Discourse in the Novel”
Dialogical Discourse
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A living utterance
A particular historical moment
A socially specific environment
Dialogical “threads” woven about a social
object
• The utterance stems from the dialogue and
enters back into it—participatory rather than
theoretical
The Historical Moment of AMW
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Jansenism
Freethinkers-Port Royal
Still Life Painting
Court Life in France
Economic Development
Development of the Viol as Musical Instrument
Development of Orchestration and large Ensemble
Playing.
Jansenism
• Associated with Port Royal Cistercian Convent
and the Arnaud family
• Port Royal pupils included Racine, Arnuad family
and Pascal
• Emphasized original sin, human depravity, the
necessity of divine grace and predestination
• High level of moral rectitude and religious piety
• Influenced by Augustine’s philosophy
Blaise Pascal
• “We arrive at truth, not by reason only, but also by
the heart.”
• “[I feel] engulfed in the infinite immensity of
spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know
nothing of me, I am terrified The eternal silence of
these infinite spaces alarms me.”
• “However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is
capable of but one great passion.”
• “All man's troubles come from not knowing how
to sit still in one room.”
Society of Port Royal
“These were men whom the love of retirement had united to
cultivate literature, in the midst of solitude, of peace, and of
piety. They formed a society of learned men, of fine taste and
sound philosophy. Alike occupied on sacred, as well as on
profane writers, they edified, while they enlightened the world.
Their writings fixed the French language. The example of these
solitaries show how retirement is favourable to penetrate into
the sanctuary of the Muses; and that by meditating in silence on
the oracles of taste, in imitating we may equal them.”
Lubin Baugin 1610-1663
• Master of the still-life
• Two distinct periods of work—earlier, still life
(France); later, religious portraits (Italy)
• Lived outside of Paris
• He was openly involved in republishing the books
of the empirical doctor, David Laigneau, against
bloodletting. A Protestant, Laigneau had also
written a treatise on alchemy. Could an interest in
empiricism and alchemy exist in harmony with
orthodox piety in 1660? In any case, it was the
sign of a free spirit.
St. Jerome--Bible Translator
Socially Specific Environment
in AMW
Social Situation
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Discourse
Narration—Simple, Elegant Prose, Sparse and Clean
Hermit in Solitude—Silence, Music
Erotic, Dyadic Love—Silence, Music
Familial with Daughters—Actions, Clumsy Speech, Music
Fellow Animals and Plants--Actions
Muisican—Technique on the Instrument, Speech of the Instrument,
Nod of the Head, Raising of the Eyebrow
Mentor/Student—Explanations, Clumsy Speech, Music
Rural Helpmates—Actions
Co-religionists—Performance
Co-artist—Silence,Technique of the Brush Stroke, Listening
Royal Court—Argument
Dialogical Threads in AMW
Example: The Viol
• Narrative Description of Viol’s Music: “One of
his pupils, Come le Blanc the Elder, declared that
he contrived to imitate all the inflexions of the
human voice: from the sigh of a young lady to
the sob of an old man, from the war cry of Henri
de Navarre to the soft breathing of a child trying
to draw something, from the distracted groan
sometimes produced by sexual pleasure to the
almost voiceless gravity, deprived of nearly all
force and harmony, of a man lost in prayer.” (p. 4)
Film’s Use of Dialogical Thread?
Additional Dialogical Threads
around the Viol
• Technique: “He found a new way to hold the viola
de gamba between his knees without allowing it to
rest against his calf.”
• “He perfected the bowing technique by lightening
the weight of his hand and exerting pressure only
on the horsehair…astonishing virtuousity.”
• Insturment: “He added a bass string…deeper tones
and melancholy effect.”
• Place: “He had a hut constructed in the branches
of a great mulberry tree dating from the days of
Monsieur de Sully...In this retreat he could work
without disturbing the little girls…”
Heteroglossia
• To use language at all is to speak in many
languages.
• A social stratification of language(s)—
literary genres, professional usages,
religious discourses, regional idioms etc.
• Every speaker of language is inhabited by
these multiple forms of language in
juxtaposition to one another.
Internal Dialogization
• Rather than looking for a pure and coherent
image, form or metaphor, the novelist/poet
registers in his or her discourse the
heteroglossia of language
• To understand any utterance, one must hear
it against the background of language and
the multiplicity of concrete utterances
language allows
From The Unbearable Lightness
of Being
By Milan Kundera
Cemetery
Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are
covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones
are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the
cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the
dead are dancing at a children’s ball. Yes, a children’s ball,
because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how
brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery.
Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through
all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the
car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or
another of the country cemeteries she loved so well.
For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.
From Ceremony
By Leslie Marmon Silko
“Do something for me, the way you did for others who came back.
Because what if I didn’t know I killed one?”
But the old man shook his head slowly and made a low humming sound
in his throat. In the old way of warfare, you couldn’t kill another human
being in battle without knowing it, without seeing the result, because
even a wounded deer that got up and ran again left great clots of lung
blood or spilled guts on the ground. That way the hunter knew it would
die. Human beings were no different. But the old man would not have
believed white warfare—killing across great distances without knowing
who or how many had died. It was all too alien to comprehend, the
mortars and the big guns; and even if he could have taken the old man to
see the target areas, even if he could have led him through the fallen
jungle trees and muddy craters of torn earth to show him the dead, the
old man would not have believed anything so monstrous. Ku’oosh
would have looked at the dismembered corpses and the atamic heat-flash
outlines, where human bodies had evaporated and the old man would
have said something close and terrible had killed these people. Not even
oldtime witches killed like that.
The way
I heard it
Was
In the old days
Long time ago
They had this
Scalp Society
For warriors
Who killed
Or touched
Dead enemies.
They had things
They must do
Otherwise
K’oo’ko would haunt their dreams
With her great fangs and
Everything would be endangered.
Maybe the rain wouldn’t come
Or the deer would go away.
That’s why
They had things
They must do
Woman with Girdle
By Anne Sexton
Your midriff sags toward your knees;
Your breasts lie down in air,
Their nipples as uninvolved
As warm starfish.
You stand in your elastic case,
Still not giving up the new-born
And the old-born cycle.
Moving, you roll down the garment,
Down that pink snapper and hoarder,
As your belly, soft as pudding
Slops into the empty space;
Down, over the surgeon’s careful mark,
Down over hips, those head cushions and mouth cushions,
Slow motion like a rolling pin,
Over crisp hairs, that amazing field
That hides your genius from your patron
Over thighs, thick as young pigs,
Over knees like saucers,
Over calves, polished as leather,
Down toward the feet.
You pause for a moment,
Tying your ankles into knots.
Now you rise,
A city from the sea,
Born long before Alexandria was,
Straightway from God you have come
Into your redeeming skin.
Seymour Chatman
“What Novels can do that Films can’t
(and vice versa)”
Narratives vs. Images
• Narratives take time to read, while images
are taken in in a glance
• Narrative, more than an image, invokes a
virtual, as well as actual, time: “story time”
vs. “discourse time.”
• The time of a narrative can be ordered
internally in a manner an image cannot.
Description in Narrative
• Interrupts and freezes the time structure of
the narrative and invokes a tableau vivant (a
living picture).
• Only a limited amount of details can be
invoked in the tableau
• The details are invoked in a particular order.
• An implied narrator easily asserts details as
existing: e.g. the “tiny” cart.
The painter was busy painting a still-life on a
table: a half-filled glass of red wine, a lute
on its side, an open music score, a black
velvet purse, some playing cards with the
knave of clubs uppermost, a chessboard on
which were arranged a vase holding three
carnations and an octagonal mirror leaning
against the studio wall. (p. 45-46)
‘All that death shall take away is in its night,’
Sainte-Colombe whispered in his pupil’s
ear, ‘They are all the pleasures of this world
that are taking their leave, bidding us
adieu.’ (p. 46)
Setting a Scene in Cinema
• Everything is present simultaneously as the
action unfolds
• Numerous details must be added
• The details can be structured visually but
are more synchronic than diachronic
• Assertions of an implied narrator cannot be
easily included in the setting up of a scene.
• Action still occurs even when the director
has a scene stand still.
“Whereas in novels, movements and
hence events are at best constructions
imaged by the reader out of words,
that is, abstract symbols which are
different from them in kind, the
movements on the screen are so
iconic, so like the real life movements
they imitate, that the illusion of time
passage simply cannot be divorced
from them.”
• Further in film there is a movement from scene to
scene that gives the film a tempo beyond that of
the actions of particular actors within a scene:
intra-scene tempo vs. inter-scene tempo
• Spatial element in written works that is lacking in
film. For instance, AMW has very short chapters.
Further the sentences are of simple construction
and do not dawdle. The reader is not encouraged
to take pleasure in the act of relating the different
sentence parts into a coherent whole. Rather a
sentence emerges and then quickly fades, as the
next sentence emerges. Further AMW has short
paragraphs. Each indentation acts much like a
musical rest, a pause before one takes up the next
thread of narrative.
The Musical Note
• Music is played in the cinema and the
narrative descriptions of music from the
novel are left out.
• Colombe’s compositions and style
emphasized the dynamics of single notes, as
well as the silences out of which notes
emerge and then fade back into.
• The importance of rests/pauses in music.
The Voice Over vs. Narrator
How to Translate Narration into Cinema
1) Use a voice-over
2) Action, editing and cutting
3) Incorporate key elements of narration into
dialogue
4) Add words at scene transitions
5) Compose the film as flashback