Julia Kristeva Word Dialogue And Novel Pdf 21
Latrisha Adan
What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his conception of the "literary word" as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.
These three dimensions or coordinates of dialogue are writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts. The word's status is thus defined horizontally (the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee) as well as vertically (the word in the text is oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus.
Kristeva's spatialization of the word has potential applications for narrative. I will alter her model of a text's vertical and horizontal axes at the same time as I maintain her insistence on historical and intertextual resonances. As an interpretive strategy (not as a narrative typology), I propose two kinds of narrative axes whose intersections are reconstructed by the reader in the interactive process of reading. Bakhtin's notion of the novel's double chronotope is useful:
A "full" reading of narrative axes is not possible in a bounded text because, like the dream in Freud's psychoanalysis, the text's dialogism is unbounded, as is the story of the intersections between the horizontal and vertical coordinates. But a reading strategy based in the identification of horizontal and vertical narratives axes fosters relational readings, discourages "definitive" and bounded interpretations, and encourages a notion of the text as a multiplicitous and dynamic site of repression and return. Such spatialized readings also allow us as readers to construct a "story" of the fluidly interactive relationship between the surface and palimpsestic depths of a given text--taking into account all the historical, literary, and psychic resonances that are embedded within the horizontal narrative and waiting to become narrated in the reading process. ldeally such a story is made up of a sequence of relational readings that at every point in the horizontal narrative examines its vertical component. The richest insights produced by a spatialized reading strategy may well reside in the way it potentially produces interpretations of the textual and political unconscious of a given text or series of texts. But in general, spatializing narrative gives us a systematic way of approaching the various forms of narrative dialogism and of (re)connecting the text with its writer and world. In Kristeva's words, spatialization suggests an interpretive strategy that regards a text as "a dynamic..intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee..., and the contemporary or earlier cultural context" (Desire 65).
Abstract. The article analyzes Juan Benet's essays on Victorian literature, short stories "De lejos", "Una linea incompleta" and "Viator" and his non-fiction book "Londres victoriano" in which the Spanish writer addresses 19th century Anglo-Saxon writers from Charles Dickens to Joseph Conrad. Benet is mostly known as an author who brought the discourse of European and American modernism to Spanish literature and as the creator of the Spanish new novel, who consciously renounced Spanish realism of both 19th and 20th century. However, his standing as a postmodernist writer is often debated, as the neomythologism and complex narrative structure of his novels are more often associated with American and European modernist landmarks. Proustian, Joycean and Faulknerian heritage of Benet is widely studied, while his connection to Victorian literature stays largely overlooked. Meanwhile, in his essays as well as in his short fiction, the author addresses his favourite 19th century writers, and in short stories he establishes intertextual dialogue with many of them, producing some of his greater postmodernist works. It demonstrates that pastiche, parody and allusions to Victorian discourse in his work are examples of Benet's postmodernist prose, only comparable epistemologically to his novel "En el estado". Therein, intertextuality serves a goal that is undoubtedly postmodernist - that of showing the textual, fictional nature of narrated events, establishing an ironic dialogue with the reader and revealing the nature of the narrator as an entity that creates an illusion of reality rather than describing it, and deconstructing the author's own narrative practices.
For all the avant-garde sword rattling, for all the attempts to mark post-francoist Spain as essentially different from what preceded it, nothing essential has changed. Spain's movement out of dictatorship did not signal a movement beyond the hegemony of modernist discursive practices, only the acceptance of an admittedly later stage of the political, economic and social ideologies that underpin the system" [Compitello 1991, 269]. As for Benet's literary practices, he writes the following: "In Reiss's terms (referring to Timothy J. Reiss's "The Discourse of Modernism") Benet is a writer who explores the limits ad quem of modernist discourse. He uncovers the problems that modernism's hegemony over western thought processes has kept hidden below the surface, and exploits them in his work. He is, in the terms Suleiman describes, a modernist arguing against himself. Benet's work may be symptomatic of modernism's loss of hegemony but not of its usurpation by a different episteme" [Compitello 1991, 268]. Attributing some of Benet's fiction to the realm of late modern writing is fair, yet the works of fiction created in the dialogue with Benet's favourite writers, among which are Victorian authors, can be perceived as examples of postmodernist discursive practices in the strict sense of these words. Therefore, this article aims to highlight and analyse Benet's connection with Victorian literature and the postmodernist turn of his fiction, where this connection is established through intertextuality as seen by Julia Kristeva, and through postmodernist irony, as perceived by Linda Hutcheon.
Benet once again brings up "Daniel Deronda" when analysing and critiquing Henry James's point of view on the mystery of George Eliot as the creator of the modern novel. He cites James's "Daniel Deronda: A Conversation of 1876", establishing a dialogue with James whom he reveres as the creator of the modern psychological prose and an author who united gothic and grand style. Benet disagrees with James in his vision of George Eliot, as for the Spanish writer the most prominent feature of her character was not her education, nor her enthusiasm for experimenting, but the following ambiguity:
Although Benet does not appreciate "Deronda", in which Eliot in his view succumbs to realism and betrays her original way of narrating, there is a striking similarity between the setting of this book and Juan Benet's first novel "Volveras a Región", only published in 1967, but written across nearly 10 years, starting in 1952. Benet's novel is divided into two parts: a hundred-pages long exposition - a mock historiography of Región - and a dialogue between Doctor Daniel Sebastian and Marré Gamallo who meet in the 1960s, on what is to be the last day of their lives, to remember their past and the Civil War that left them with no future. The starting point of the plots of the two novels is thus a meeting between a man and a woman in a fictional locality (Leubronn in Eliot's Germany and Región in Benet's Spain); both of them revolve, among other things, around gambling and jewels. Gwendolen in "Daniel Deronda" is a gambler, at one point betting the only valuable thing she has got - her heirloom necklace; Benet's female character María Timoner, a love interest of Doctor Sebastian, becomes a victim of her gambling fiance, who bets many of her jewels, even the engagement ring with a diamond that he had given her. More relevantly, in both cases the meeting becomes a framing device for two parallel flashbacks - those of the male and the female protagonists. In "Volverás a Región", these flashbacks take the form of parallel monologues which are organised as a strange, non-sequitur dialogue. The exact plot, the content of those monologues, is extremely difficult to reconstruct as the voices of the narrating characters and the voice of the author are intertwined, stripped of all individuality, going back and forth in time. Their monologues can be read as textually organised streams of consciousness, so that the exact events remain unclear, the points of view stay uncertain, and the truth of each event is questionable. Although the plot disintegrates and the reader is left to wonder about the missing lines, it is clear that the framework was inspired by George Eliot's novel (the male protagonists even share the same name). Yet there seems to be no consciously introduced intertext of "Deronda" in "Volverás a Región": the author does not quote Eliot nor make any apparent allusions to her writing.
In 1973 Benet publishes a collection of short stories entitled "Sub rosa", which corresponds to the idea of a secret that cannot be revealed. The namesake novella is a sea adventure; Benet's only take on that genre. While "Sub rosa" combines the traits of Melville's and Conrad's marine narrative and preserves such typical features of Benet's fiction as the presence of a mystery that remains unsolved, there is a short story in the second part of the collection, called "De lejos" ("From far away"), that is a postmodern dialogue with Conrad's "The heart of darkness". The story is a third person narration that quotes the dialogues heard at a party and a story told by one of the dinner guests. He speaks about the mines of Región where an evil man named Conrado Blaer is looking for minerals that beforehand were known to be obtained from quartzite in Silesia (both the man's name and the placename are certain references to the ethnically Polish writer). The relationship between the guest who at that point was a young mining engineer and for whom it was the first job and Conrado Blaer is akin to that between Marlow and Kurtz in "The Heart of Darkness". The most prolific researcher of Benet's short prose Epicteto Díaz Navarro states that "a great part of Benet's text can be viewed as a response to Conrad's text in which the narrator and the protagonist are rewritten" ("buena parte del texto de Benet puede considerarse como la respuesta al de Conrad en la que se reelaboran el narrador y el protagonista" [Díaz Navarro 1992 b, 135]), as both structural parallelism and the characteristics that bear similarity to those of Conrad's protagonists, are partial. But the main similarity between the texts is their inscrutability and ambiguity.