Ottava Rima and Novelistic Discourse

Abstract

In Discourse in Novel, Mikhail Bakhtin goes to some lengths to distinguish novelistic from poetic discourse. And yet, as noted by Neil Roberts (1), he uses a poetic text, Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, as one of his prime examples of novelistic discourse (Bakhtin 322-24, 329). Bakhtin's theory is that poetic genres are monologic, presupposing the unity of language system and . . . of poet's individuality, as opposed to novel, which is dialogic, heteroglot, multivoiced, multistyled and often multi-languaged (264-65). This paper contends that, by Bakhtin's own criteria, some verse forms are especially well designed for novelistic discourse. The form chosen for particular scrutiny is ottava rima, a stanza that has been used for narrative purposes for many centuries, originating in Italian oral tradition of cantastorie (Wilkins 9-10; De Robertis 9-15). Clearly, ottava rima could not have originated as an English oral form, for it requires too many rhymes for this rhyme-poor, relatively uninflected language. Using a heroic line-in Italian hendecasyllabic, in English iambic pentameter-the stanza's rhyme scheme is ABABABCC. Thus it resembles English sonnet in a sense, for it begins with an alternating structure and concludes with a couplet that is alien to both rhymes and rhyme pattern that precede it. As with this type of sonnet, a potential appears for a rupture in discourse between alternating structure and couplet. Alternating verse tends to lean forward not to next line but