Novel and Film: Two Essays

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bahktin

“Discourse in the Novel”

Dialogical Discourse

• 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

• 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 Environmentin AMW

Social Situation 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 AMWExample: 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