Novel, among the literary genres, is the most problematic one. When we are concerned with epic, with tragedy, or with lyric poetry, there are some definitions available that are more or less agreed upon by different scholars and critics. Thanks to the long tradition of arguments, debates and criticisms that have their roots deep in history down to the Greek world, there is now hardly any problem in finding the identity of these genres. The definitions of these classical genres are established. Now, reading an epic, we know that we are dealing with the old heroic days of a nation or a culture; or, reading a lyric poem we know that we are reading the emotions of a sensitive mind. We can study poetry per se ; it has no serious relation to epic, to comedy, or to tragedy. The type of poetry used in the other genres is a distinct one. Almost all the classical genres can be studied distinctively. Perhaps this is why Aristotle -- and his followers -- could draw clear lines between the genres.
Novel, on the other hand, is a hybrid genre. Discussing it, we have already begun a discussion of the other genres. At times, indeed, discussions of the other disciplines intrude: politics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, economics, etc. It may be possible to study the classical genres from a pure aesthetic point of view and with no regard to the other disciplines. Indeed, these genres tend to be specific. They limit themselves and any discussion of them comes to be limited and one-dimensional. Novel, however, involves itself with many different subjects, if not with everything concerning life.
Beside its involvement with many subjects, novel looks at each subject from many different points of view. It is impossible to write a novel with just one voice and with no social surrounding. As soon as the second voice is inserted into the novel, a different perspective is introduced. These different perspectives and ideas in the novel are in a constant process of give and take. The presentation of ideas is so complicated that it becomes impossible for the reader to identify the voice of the author from the plurality of voices present in the novel. Actually it becomes "a field of battle for others' voices" (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 89). Reading it, as the author neither affirms nor repudiates any idea but presents all the ideas with some sort of artistic distance, there always arises certain complications and ambiguities for the reader that which one of these ideas are intended to be glorified as textual representations and which ones are the author's own ideas, his personal code.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), a Russian literary scholar, through a life-long study on the novel came to the idea that novel is that exceptionally unique genre in which the author cannot give privilege to one specific idea. Studying Dostoevsky, Rabelais, Goethe, and indeed all the European and Russian novelists he could lay hands on, he came to the essential difference between epic and novel: epic is the genre in which there is one dominant, ruling ideology. The main distinctive feature of this genre is that no other ideology except that of the author (which is identical with the dominant ideology of the society, that of the hero, the narrator, and even of the reader) can find an expression. Novel, in contrast, is a genre in which there is a plurality of ideas and each idea finds expression only among and in relation with other ideas. As the writer has to present characters with different ideas to those of his or her own, imposing or propagating one specific idea is impossible in the novel.
The distinction between epic and novel by Bakhtin is based on the distinction between dialogic literature and monologic literature. Dialogic literature presents the ideas in a relative way. The ideas have to be alive and act with/among the other ideas. These ideas are embodied in different characters. In a fully dialogic work, the author does not take side with one or another character/idea. Ideas are presented with a sort of 'artistic distance.' They are neither affirmed nor repudiated directly by the author. Other ideas/characters may, and do challenge them, but, still, they are all there without being absolutely accepted or rejected. This challenge, however, is important as it enables different ideas to develop within their own unique worldviews. Much in the same way as a city is a place of contact between different personalities, novel, and most especially novel of ideas, is that place of contact between worldviews, ideologies, and voices.
In monologic literature the worldview of the author is the force working on the text. "The one who knows, understands and sees is in the first instance the author himself" (Dostoevsky's Poetics 82). The author is actively present there to either accept or reject one idea. The values in a monologic work are absolute values, and the author takes side with the 'good' party. The other characters are there as either friends and defenders of the dominant values, or 'foes' and evil. A binary system is working there: either -- or. There is no third party, no one to see the events from another point of view. "The appearance of a second account would inevitably be perceived as a crude contradiction within the author's worldview" (Dostoevsky's Poetics 82).
When a work is monologic, "the genuine interaction of consciousnesses is impossible, and thus genuine dialogue is impossible as well" (Dostoevsky's Poetics 81). There is only one consciousness that knows what the 'truth' is, and this version of truth is dictated to other consciousnesses. In this mode of presentation of ideas, the flow of ideas tends to move unilaterally, from top to bottom, from author to hero, from hero to other characters, from the writer to the reader. There is no give and take between the consciousnesses, only dictation of one powerful and dominant idea. Ideologically, even the hero is a passive character and ironically the most passive one as the ideas spring from a source above him/her: the author. The hero cannot question them, he or she cannot choose but to act according to the code of the author.
On the theoretical level, Saul Bellow, the contemporary American novelist, views the novel in a similar way. In an essay entitled "Where We Go From Here: The Future of Fiction" he makes the distinction between "a didactive novelist like D. H. Lawrence and one like Dostoyevsky [sic]" (146). Bellow maintains that whereas the first group of novelists, like the monologic authors of Bakhtin, have nothing to offer but their own "didactive" purposes, the other group, like dialogic artists, while being didactive, are "the bravest" because they "have taken the risk of teaching religion, science, philosophy and politics. Only they have been prepared to admit the strongest possible arguments against their own positions " (146; emphasis added). Then Bellow gives an example that, incidentally, is a favorite passage of Bakhtin's:
When he was writing The Brothers Karamazov and had just ended the famous conversation between Ivan and Alyosha, in which Ivan, despairing of justice, offers to return his ticket to God, Dostoyevsky [sic] wrote to one of his correspondents that he must now attempt, through Father Zossima, to answer Ivan's arguments. But he has in advance all but devastated his own position. (146)
Very much like Bakhtin, Bellow in theory believes that a novel "becomes art when views most opposite to the author's own are allowed to exist in full strength. Without this a novel of ideas is mere self-indulgence, and didacticism is simply axe-grinding." We are not sure how much Bellow was familiar with the ideas of Bakhtin when he was writing his essay, but there are articulations that one could find in Bakhtin as well: Bellow believes, "[t]he opposites must be free to range themselves against each other, and they must be passionately expressed on both sides" (146).
To have a theoretical framework similar to the dialogical methodology of Bakhtin does not necessarily mean that all the artistic productions of Saul Bellow are dialogic as well. Bellow is too much present in his early works. His first two novels, Dangling Man (1944) and The Victim (1947) are interesting. Bellow in his early novels is more under the influence of Dostoevsky the journalist and ideologist rather than Dostoevsky the novelist and methodologist. He certainly had assimilated the ideological ideas of Dostoevsky but had not fully acquired his methodology in treatment of the other ideas. Behind both novels Dostoevsky is present in a different version than that fascinated Bakhtin. In these two novels Dostoevsky the journalist, the idealist and in short the philosophical ideas of Dostoevsky himself are present. It is the Dostoevsky as defined by the ontological existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre, not by the epistemological dialogism of Bakhtin. In both the two early novels of Bellow man is defined as a dangling creature in a victimizing world. It is a world in which man cannot choose to act. Asa Leventhal, the protagonist of The Victim undergoes some sort of identity crisis. Seeing that the other people are different from himself, instead of accepting the difference as natural, he feels guilty of not being that way. In order to begin a genuine dialogue with the others, Asa lacks a sufficient definition of himself, and what is more important, he has no clear knowledge of this fact.
Bellow actively created a distinct style for himself with the writing of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), where his genius for comedy with distinct Yiddish overtones had a zestful impact. In his two earlier novels he had already established his primary strategic mode of centering the fiction's structure in the consciousness of the male protagonist -- a hero with strong antiheroic impulses and a victim-loser in the game of life. The Adventures of Augie March is the most popular novel of Saul Bellow. In spite of its huge popularity and also originality, the comic persona of Augie March is narrow, idealistic, and too self-centered to carry the burden that Bellow increasingly imposes on his male protagonists. Augie thinks that every man or at least he himself is an island, that a man's character is his fate. The protagonist of the two earlier novels, on the other hand, viewed people as indivisible continents, there is no chart and border between them. All these novels and also Seize the Day (1956) and Henderson the Rain King (1959) can be studied with a Bakhtinian approach but perhaps the most dialogic novel both in subject and approach is Herzog .
Herzog (1964), Saul Bellow's famous novel is a text in which there is a host of heterogeneous people and ideas. In this novel all the past and present ideas of the post-war American society are present. In the text of Herzog one can find references to many, if not all, the philosophical, religious, political and even scientific ideas that have made the post-war America. Many ideas of this period, and also of those of the past that have some sort of relationship with present find expression in the novel. The principal character, Moses E. Herzog, speculates on all these ideas, evaluates them for himself, and in the best manner available to him, communicates with them, that is, makes them a subject for dialogue. He writes letters to "everyone under the sun" (Herzog 7), dead or alive: to philosophers, politicians, his friends, his family members; he even writes a letter to God and a letter to himself. The intriguing point about the presence of the different ideas in this novel is that all of them are actively present. All the ideas in the novel are in dialogue with some outer reality (or with other works of fiction), which makes the novel an intertexual text.
Herzog is in dialogue with the world around himself; he both gives and takes. He expresses his own attitude toward the other ideas. These attitudes are often negative but at the same time there is usually a tone of attention, involvement, and even respect behind the negations. The other ideas are more negotiated with than negated. Sometimes we may call this satirical. For example, Thomas Marshall (Woodrow Wilson's vice-president) once has said that "what this country needs is a good five-cent cigar" (Harper 16). Herzog in one of his casual jottings writes: "What this country needs is a good five-cent synthesis " (Herzog 215). The text of Herzog is full of this kind of allusions, dialogues, answers . At times the dialogues become internal and the book questions itself. What a dialogic study is concerned with is not the content of each idea or an ideological evaluation of them, but the relationship of the ideas to each other, the way they contact with each other. The study of the content of the ideas and 'evaluation' of them is the subject of an ideological study such as the orthodox Marxist approach to literature that is eventually at the service of the power system of the totalitarian governments such as the Stalinists and Fascists.
Thus, Herzog can be read as an intellectual history of post-war America as it has affected a man who "all the while one corner of his mind remained open to the external world," and who becomes "excited with mental letters" (Herzog 7). The major difference between this novel and a possibly written book on the history of ideas is that in contrast to the cool, dead presentation of ideas in a book of history, here, the ideas are more alive; they show themselves in action and interaction.
As it is indicated in the title, using the theories of Bakhtin on novel, that is, the intertextuality, interaction of ideas, carnivalization, and the dialogic nature of novel, there would be an examination of Saul Bellow's Herzog . The presence of different, at times dissenting voices and ideas in Herzog, makes it possible to explore this novel using a Bakhtinian theoretical basic. There are certainly similarities between Bakhtin and Bellow's outlook on the novel, as referred to; we would read, however, for possible differences as well.
Using the theories of Bakhtin, this study attempts to show, first, the plurality of the ideas present in the novel; second, that these ideas are independent of the writer's; and if the ideology of the author is present in the novel it is not the dominant one; it is just one among the many; and finally there would be an attempt to reveal the dialogue of ideas in the novel. These ideas include: those of the writer, of the narrator, of the characters, and of the social and literary setting of the story.
In the world of everyday facts it is (or at least has been) actually impossible to make a genuine dialogue between different ideologies. The main aim of this study is to show how novel is the most civil genre and is a genuine place for Dialogue. The word "City" of the title shows this concern and interest in novel as an ideal city for ideas. Very much the same way as the people of a city in a civil environment act and interact, the ideas and ideologies in a novel communicate and interact with each other. This treatment of the novel of ideas is something relatively new and would find its articulation and development side by side with the main discussion.
In a Bakhtinian approach, it is impossible to read a work per se . In this approach a text finds meaning only in relation with the other texts. Therefore, there would be some references to, and comparisons and contrasts with some other related texts and theories. The texts may include Saul Bellow's other novels and those contemporary with him, such as Ralph Ellison and/or Dreiser. Among the theories we may include those of such Marxist scholars as George Lukacs. This would be done to show Bakhtin's difference (or, rather, dialogue) with Marxists. We may also compare Bakhtin with one or two postmodern theorists (such as J. Derrida). These texts and theories, however, would be mentioned to provide a point for comparing and contrasting so that we could identify our subject better. The main text, therefore, would be Herzog and the main theoretical framework such Bakhtinian concepts as heteroglossia, double-voiced-discourse, chronotope, carnival and most especially polyphony and dialogue.
This study will show the difference of Bakhtin with the other traditionalist, modern, and postmodern approaches. Because he has written books with a Marxist stance, and because his concept of dialogic is similar to the Marxian concept of dialectic, Bakhtin sometimes has been read as a Marxist. This study, in contrast, without overlooking his interactions and dialogues with Marxism, would show how Bakhtin is different with this school.
Also, Bakhtin's difference, and, therefore, dialogues with the other schools and theories would be explicated. Bakhtin is a key figure in the contemporary intellectual scene because he can show the adequacies and inadequacies of different theories. Indeed, since his theories have common bases with both sides, he can make a dialogue between modern and postmodern theories.
The study is not confined to Bakhtin alone; reading the selected text (Saul Bellow's Herzog ) a dialogue would be maintained between theoretical foundation of the text and theories of Bakhtin. The major difference of this study with the other application of theories to the texts is that, whereas usually theories are imposed upon the text, this study would try not to impose the theory on the text. This is not just a matter of try, since Bakhtinian theories are not that sort of totalizing theories that insist on their applicablity on every text.
Reading Herzog , this study would also try to find the relationship between plurality and dialogue. Bakhtin had showed attention to this subject but only as a marginal subject. Herzog is an ideal text in showing the fact without plurality that no free dialogue is possible and the most significant aspect of this study is to show this relation.
Bakhtin has a complex and fully developed set of concepts. The most important and indeed central to all these concepts is the concept of 'dialogue'. Indeed dialogue is so central to Bakhtinian thought that he is called the philosopher of 'dialogism'(see, for example, Holquist's Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World and Pearce's Reading Dialogics ). Bakhtin presents the theory that in a novel all the ideas are in a constant process of give and take, so that no idea can find a domination over the others. Dialogue has the relativity of values as its starting point. There are no absolute values working in the novel. In contrast to the epic, neither good nor evil is clearly defined. All the values are in relation to each other and, hence, relative. Indeed, Bakhtin goes on to claim that there is no meta-historical, objective reading devices above, beyond, and removed from the working texts. All reading devices and strategies are within the texts or, more clearly, in the relation between the texts.
Beginning a dialogical study of a novel, we should bear in mind that dialogue/monologue, epic/novel and the other Bakhtinian categories and concepts are not new binary systems. When we are talking about a work as being dialogic, we are only referring to its degree of dialogicality. To some degree, as the author himself or herself is not present everywhere with the text to read it according to his or her own code and the text is exposed to the interpretation of an actual reader, the most monologic work is dialogic.
The basic thing a dialogical methodology wants us is to make a dialogue between the theory and practice: neither theory is a meta-temporal, abstract and a removed-from-the-text system, nor the text is something cut off from the theory. Both are in dialogue with each other; neither of them can separately act. Indeed every action is an inter-action. Bakhtin argues that if there is any rule outside the text it is affected and determined by the text itself.
The best known methods compatible with this approach are phenomenological, and socio-historical approaches. Approaches such as Freudian psychoanalysis and textual analysis of the New Critics, as they try to extract the character and the text from its unique position in time and space would not be applicable here. There would be, however, some abstract references to these theories and approaches for maintaining a point for comparison and dialogue .
So the major approach would be 'dialogical approach' as it refers to the other approaches, and shows the hidden dialogue between the text and theory. As the Bakhtinian terms are extremely important chapter two is devoted to an introduction into the Bakhtinian thought and methodology.
As the title shows, this thesis is very much indebted to the title of Tony Tanner's City of Words . Tanner, however, does not view Bellow's approach in the presentation of ideas as dialogic. He believes that "Bellow's difficulty is moving beyond monologue" (296). This Bakhtinian reading, in contrast, would reveal that Herzog is a long dialogue. Despite this radical difference, there may be some references to Tanner's ideas on Bellow as he is a great scholar working on Saul Bellow and the contemporary American fiction.
Perhaps the most exhaustive, yet somehow inconclusive Bakhtinian reading of Saul Bellow's works that has been done is a doctorate dissertation done by Sigrid Renaux, University de Sao Paulo, 1978. Entitled "Bellow's Carnivalistic Vision of the World in Henderson the Rain King, " it is a structuralist reading of this novel through Bakhtin's theories about the carnivalization of the literature. This study would be different in both subject and approach. It would be Bellow's dialogic vision of the world in Herzog . Yet, there would be some cross references to Bakhtin's ideas on carnivalization of literature, as it is the most important prerequisite of a free and uncontrolled dialogue of the ideas. So, the carnivalistic aspects of Saul Bellow's work would also be studied, but not at the expense of the fact that carnivalization is a strategy, not the end. While, as I conceive it, Renaux insists on carnivalization as the aim of the novel, in this study we would see how carnivalization acts as a means for making dialogue possible, then we would examine whether dialogue itself is a means or an end.
Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (first Russian edition, 1929; fully revised by Bakhtin at 1961; translated into English by Caryl Emerson, 1984) is the most dialogic study of any work of art. What is interesting about this work is that while the subject of study is Dostoevsky's polyphonic and dialogic world, the approach to the subject is also polyphonic and dialogic. There is a fascinating harmony between the epistemology and methodology. While Bakhtin admires Dostoevsky's polyphonic and dialogic treatment of his subjects, he himself does the same with his subject. The work grows far beyond a monologue to a heterolog and dialogue. There are so many references to other works done by different scholars on Dostoevsky that some parts of the work resemble book review articles, but actually it is a textual invitation of the other scholars into a discussion panel on Dostoevsky.
Bakhtin talks of hidden polemics in Dostoevsky's works (and world). Hidden polemic is a word with a sideward glance; it is a word that is apparently neutral and isolated but is actually in conflict and quarrel with some other words. Associated with hidden polemic is the hidden dialogue where traces of the addressee is evident but the speaker does not mention him (Dostoevsky's Poetics 197). The works of Bakhtin, specifically the Dostoevsky work, can also be read as an obvious open polemic/dialogue and a hidden one. The composition of the Dostoevsky book belongs to totalitarian period of Stalin, when Marxism was the only reigning ideology. The work is not a pure 'literary criticism' and hidden behind it there is a strong criticism of the reigning politics and its philosophical background (Hegel and Marx). When Bakhtin was speaking about dialogue, variety of ideas (polyphony), double-voiced-discourse and heteroglossia, at the same time he was attacking the totalitarian politics of Stalin.
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics is the first book in which Bakhtin developed his methodology. The germs of all the other works done by Bakhtin are laid here. The book consists of five chapters. In the first chapter Dostoevsky is introduced as the creator of polyphonic novel (7), then there is a long elaboration on Dostoevsky's philosophical polyphonism. This is done through a review of the place of Dostoevsky in the critical literature. Chapter two examines the relationship between the author and hero in Dostoevsky's novels. Characters in Dostoevsky, to Bakhtin, "are someone else;" they are more subjects than objects:
Thus the new artistic position of the author with regard to the hero in Dostoevsky's polyphonic novel is a fully realized and thoroughly consistent dialogic position , one that affirms the independence, internal freedom, unfinalizability, and indeterminacy of the hero. For the author the hero is not a "he" and "I" but a fully valid "thou," that is, another and other autonomous "I" ("Thou art").< yes"> (63)
The author does not look on his characters as instruments and objects in the process of the construction of the plot. Rather, he talks with them and out of this talk there emerges life with all its complexity and variety. Chapter three examines the way Dostoevsky treats different ideas in his novels. He shows how the meaning of one idea depends on the existence of other ideas, and how any idea finds meaning only in its relation with the other ideas. No idea can exist independent from other ideas. He illustrates the fact that Dostoevsky could present many different ideas in his novels without imposing his own worldview on them. In his fourth chapter, Bakhtin gives an account of literary historical genres, from Greek time to present, that have helped in the emergence of the novel. He refers to the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire as the ancestors of the modern polyphonic novel of Dostoevsky. Chapter five is a quasi-linguistic study of discourse in Dostoevsky.
The Dialogic Imagination is a collection of four long essays. The first one is an attempt in defining the novel among the other genres, especially epic. The second essay is an account of the historical story of the novel. Chapter five of Dostoevsky's Poetics is extensively developed in this essay. The next essay that has the length of a book in itself (more than 170 pages) is a historical survey of time and 'chronotope' in the novel. Chronotope, a term borrowed from the general physics of Albert Einstein, literally means time-space and signifies the inseparability of the two categories of time and space in a study. The place of this concept in the Bakhtinian thought is something like the place of archetype in the psychology C. G. Jung. "Discourse in Novel" is the final essay in which Bakhtin introduces heteroglossia as the distinctive feature of novel as a genre. We would explain and examine these parts in chapter two in detail.
This study will consist of five chapters: after the introductory chapter, we would present the methodology and ideas of Bakhtin on novel in chapter two. In this chapter we would study not only the ideas of Bakhtin himself but also his relation and dialogue with the other traditional as well as the modern and postmodern theories. Chapter three would mostly deal with the plurality of ideas that are present in Herzog . This part will concentrate on the novel in relation with what Bakhtin calls a 'polyphonic' text. In addition, the strategies that Bellow takes in order to decanonize and pluralize Herzog will be shown. Chapter four would be an examination of the relationship between the multiple discourses, ideologies, and voices in the novel. Dialogic discourses as well as the monologic discourses in the novel will be explored. Also, the dialogues of the text with itself, with other texts, and with what Tony Bennett calls the world "outside literature" would be read and discussed. The final chapter (five) would be a summing up of the discussions of the previous chapters. Also, the marginal discussion of 'city of ideas' of the previous chapters would find its full articulation and conclusion.