FROM THE PREHISTORY OF NOVELISTIC DISCOURSE T The stylistic study of the novel began only very recently. Classi- cism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not recog nize the novel as an independent poetic genre and classified it with the mixed rhetorical genres. The first theoreticians of the novel—Abbé Huet (Essay [Traité) sur l'origine des romans, 1670}, Wieland {in his celebrated preface to Agathon, 1766-1767), Blankenburg ( Versuch tiber den Roman, 1774, published anony- mously] and the Romantics (Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis) barely touched upon questions of style.' In the second half of the nine- teenth century there was an intensification of interest in the the- ory of the novel, as it had become the leading European genre*— but scholarship was concentrated almost exclusively on ques- tions of composition and thematics.’ Questions of stylistics were touched upon only in passing and then in a manner that was com- pletely unsystematic. Beginning with the 1920s, this situation changed rather abrupt- ly: there appeared a large number of works dealing with the sty- 1. The Romantics maintained that the novel was a mixed genre (a mixture of verse and prose, incorporating into its composition various genres jin par- ticular the lrical)—but the Romantics did not draw any stylistic conclusions from this. Cf, for example, Friedrich Schlegel’s Brief tiber den Roman. 2. In Germany, in a series of works by Spielhagen [which began to appear in 1864) and especially with R. Riemanns’ work, Goethes Romantechnik {1902}; in France, beginning in the main with Brunetiére and Lanson, 5. Literary scholars studying the technique of framing ("Ramenerzahlung”) in literary prose and the role of the storyteller in the epic (Kate Friedemann, Die Rolle des Erzahlers in der Epik |Leipzig, 1910]} came close to dealing with this fundamental problem of the plurality of styles and levels characteristic ‘of the novel as a genre, but this problem remained unresolved on the stylistic plane.[42] FROM THE PREHISTORY OF NOVELISTIC DISCOURSE listics of individual novelists and of individual novels. These works are often rich in valuable observations.‘ But the distinctive features of novelistic discourse, the stylistic specificum of the novel as a genre, remained as before unexplored. Moreover, the problem of this specificum itself, its full significance, has to this day not yet been posed. Five different stylistic approaches to nov- elistic discourse may be observed: (x) the author's portions alone in the novel are analyzed, that is, only direct words of the author more or less correctly isolated—an analysis constructed in terms of the usual, direct poetic methods of representation and expres- sion (metaphors, comparisons, lexical register, etc.); (2) instead of a stylistic analysis of the novel as an artistic whole, there is a neutral linguistic description of the novelist’s language;* (3) in a given novelist’s language, elements characteristic of his particu- lar literary tendency are isolated (be it Romanticism, Naturalism, Impressionism, etc.|;* (4) what is sought in the language of the novel is examined as an expression of the individual personality, that is, language is analyzed as the individual style of the given novelist; (5} the novel is viewed as a rhetorical genre, and its de- vices are analyzed from the point of view of their effectiveness as thetoric.* Al these types of stylistic analysis to a greater or lesser degree are remote from those peculiarities that define the novel as a genre, and they are also remote from the specific conditions un- der which the word lives in the novel. They all take a novelist’s language and style not as the language and style of a novel but merely as the expression of a specific individual artistic person- ality, or as the style of a particular literary school or finally as a phenomenon common to poetic language in general. The individ- ual artistic personality of the author, the literary school, the gen- 4. Of special value is the work by H. Hatefeld, Don-Quijote als Wort- -unstwerk (Leipzig-Berlin, 1927) 5. Such, for example, is L. Sainéan’s book, La Langue de Rabelais (Paris, vol. 1,1923; vol. 2, 1923) 6. Such, for example, a8 G. Loesch’s book, Die impressionistische Syntax der Goncourts (Nuremberg, 1919]. 7. Of such a type are the works by the Vosslerians devoted to style: we should mention as especially worthwhile the works of Leo Spitzer on the stylistics of Charles-Louis Philippe, Charles Péguy and Marcel Proust, brought together in his book Stilstudien |vol. 2, Stilsprachen, 1928) 8. V. ¥. Vinogradov’s book On Artistic Prose |O xudodestvenno} proze] [Moscow-Leningrad, 1930] assumes this position,FROM THE PREHISTORY OF NOVELISTIC DISCOURSE [43] eral characteristics of poetic language or of the literary language of a particular era all serve to conceal from us the genre itself, with the specific demands it makes upon language and the spe- cific possibilities it opens up for it. As a result, in the majority of these works on the novel, relatively minor stylistic variations— whether individual or characteristic of a particular school—have the effect of completely covering up the major stylistic lines de- termined by the development of the novel as a unique genre. And all the while discourse in the novel has been living a life that is distinctly its own, a life that is impossible to understand from the point of view of stylistic categories formed on the basis of poetic genres in the narrow sense of that term. The differences between the novel (and certain forms close to it) and all other genres—poetic genres in the narrow sense—are so fundamental, so categorical, that all attempts to impose on the novel the concepts and norms of poetic imagery are doomed to fail. Although the novel does contain poetic imagery in the nar- row sense (primarily in the author's direct discourse}, itis of sec- ondary importance for the novel. What is more, this direct imag- ery often acquires in the novel quite special functions that are not direct. Here, for example, is how Pushkin characterizes Lensky’s poetry [Evgenij Onegin, 2. 10, 1-4] He sang love, he was obedient to love, ‘And his song was as clear As the thoughts of a simple maid, ‘Asan infant's dream, as the moon. ..* (a development of the final comparison follows}. The poetic images (specifically the metaphoric comparisons} representing Lensky’s “song” do not here have any direct poetic significance at all. They cannot be understood as the direct poetic images of Pushkin himself (although formally, of course, the char- acterization is that of the author). Here Lensky's “song” is charac- terizing itself, in its own language, in its own poetic manner. Pushkin’s direct characterization of Lensky's “song’—which we find as well in the novel—sounds completely different [6. 23, 1]: ‘Thus he wrote gloomily and languidly. a, These lines and the following citations from Eugene Onegin are taken from Walter Arndt’s translation (New York: Dutton, 1963), slightly modified in places to correspond with Bakhtin’s remarks about particular words used