Art, Nature, and the Written Word in Pericles

Abstract

Dialogism in contemporary discussions of literary theory is a term associated with the writings of the Russian critic M.M. Bakhtin, and almost exclusively with prose fiction. The concentration on prose to the exclusion of poetry follows from Bakhtin's own identification of 'pure' poetry with the extreme opposite of dialogism, monologism. 'The poet is a poet insofar as he accepts the idea of a unitary, monologically sealedoff utterance,' writes Bakhtin. In Bakhtin's view, the poet achieves his aim partly by transcending the inherently dialogic nature of language; the lyric poet privileges a single voice—his own —and strives to situate his discourse in a 'utopian' realm purged of all external historical and social forces. In this essay we wish to show, on the contrary, how poetry remains importantly 'dialogistic' despite Bakhtin's own prejudices, derived, perhaps, from the residual Romanticism that tinges all Russian scholarly writing of the first half of the twentieth century. We will illustrate this point with a survey of several kinds of poetic texts that are to be analysed by examining the role of the (sometimes implied) addressee, the unheard 'other voice' that provides part of the poetic context. We argue further that there is a productive way of looking at Bakhtin by comparing dialogism with Charles Peirce's concept of semiosis, the production and interpretation of signs. Lyric poetry is a sign system in the same sense that any literary work is. To the extent that dialogism informs semiosis (as Peirce himself argued), the analysis of lyric—as well as lyric itself—will be simultaneously 'dialogistic' and semiotic.