[dev] From the pre-history of novelistic discourse

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>From the pre-history of novelistic discourse (by Mikhail Bakhtin)

"As a result, under careful analysis almost the entire novel breaks down
into images of languages that are connected to one another and with the
author via their own characteristic dialogic relationships.

Laughter and Polyglossia

The novel contains multiple voices of a given culture

Moreover, in the process of literary creation, languages inter-animate
each other and objectify precisely that side of one’s own (and of the
other’s) language that pertains to its world view, its inner form, the
axiologically accentuated system inherent in it. For the creating literary
consciousness, existing in a field illuminated by another’s language, it
is not the phonetic system of its own language that stands out, nor it is
the distinctive features of its own morphology nor its own abstract
lexicon - what stands out is precisely that which makes language concrete
and which makes its world view ultimately untranslatable, that is,
precisely, the style of the language as a totality.

Everything new is born out of the death of something old.

It must not be forgotten that monoglossia is always in essence relative.
After all, one’s own language is never a single language: in it there are
always survivals of the past and a potential for other-languagedness, that
is more or less sharply perceived by the working literary and language
consciousness.

Closely connected with the problem of polyglossia and inseparable from it
is the problem of internal differentiation, the stratification
characteristic of any national language.

The speech diversity within language thus has primary importance

The relation to another’s world was equally complex and ambiguous in the
Middle Ages
 The boundary lines between someone else’s speech and one’s
own speech were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and
confused. 
 One of the best authorities on medieval parody, Paul Lehmann,
states outright that the history of medieval literature and its Latin
literature in particular “is the history of the appropriation, re-working
and imitation of some else’s property”.

Latin parody is an intentional bilingual hybrid. The problem of
intentional hybrid.

Thus it is that in parody two languages are crossed with each other, as
well as two styles, two linguistic points of view, and in the final
analysis two speaking subjects. It is true that only one of these
languages (the one that is parodied) is present in its own right; the
other is present invisibly, as an actualizing background for creating and
perceiving. Parody is an intentional hybrid, but usually it is an
intra-linguistic one, one that nourishes itself on the stratification of
the literary language into generic languages and languages of various
specific tendencies."

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