Bakhtin

          I took a good deal from this weeks reading, though whether it was from understanding it in completer or finding aspects to be true to my own experience, I am not sure.  Bakhtin makes some good points but before I go into them I would like to stick up for T. S. Elliot for a moment (yes he was a bit of a crazed fascist) but that aside–as Bakhtin suggests–he can not be only discussed as wrong, which I feel we spent most of the time in class doing.  I do not agree with him at points, and I surely think that art comes from a connection with personality, but we also have to think of what he said that rings true for us.  We can not condemn a great thinker for one faulty thought.

          Anyway, back to Bakhtin.  I agree with his theory of the novel as being artistic prose, because plain and simply, it would be foolish not to think in such a way.  I also feel that style does seem to be looked at with much more depth than what causes the style, as he states “overtones of a style are the privileged subjects of study, while its basic social tone is ignored.  The great historical destinies of genres are overshadowed by the petty vicissitudes of stylistic modifications, which in their turn are linked with individual artists and artistic movements” (1190).  For instance, Jack Kerouac would not have created his style without the society in which he lived, and without that which he experienced in his life and thus wrote down.  The Beat Generation itself would not have existed if not for the time, a post war nation on the verge of social change and social uneasiness, and it was in this feeling of needing something other than what was offered that caused the Beats to happen and to be whom they were.

             Also Bakhtin makes the point of previous literary study and theory being of stylistics alone, and the idea of a “crafted” style by the artist.  There is surely a craft in writing at which you must work, and study; for to be good at what it is you are doing, any sort of trade or artisan-ship, you have to practice and learn.  Hemingway did not wake one morning and perfect the sentence out of a pure artistic birth right.  However, Bakhtin makes the point that this is not all that leads to a style.  That, “More often than not, stylistics defines itself as a stylistics of “private craftsmanship” and ignores the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities, and villages, of social groups, generations and epochs” (1190).  Once again, it is a time-period that helps shape a style and not just the study of style and “crafting” of a style, it has also to do with place and setting and lifestyle and personality (to go against Elliot myself).

             I have more to say but less time than ideas.  So I will finish off by saying that the novel is poetic discourse, and if we are too wrapped up in what to define things as or what label to put on them or what fits into what “club” of art, then we will lose track of what it is that makes art and what it is that it does for us; there are much more important things to think about than what to call something.