The Forms of the Ordinary: Bakhtin, Prosaics and the Lyric

Abstract

I. Forming the Ordinary In Discourse and the Novel (1934-35), Mikhail Bakhtin famously turns lyric poetry into the straight man or fall guy for his properly dialogic hero, prose fiction, or more precisely, the novel. The function of the poet, in Bakhtin's view, is to close up shop on the prose writer's carnival. He is as resolutely single-minded as his lyrics are single-voiced; and he shuns the social uproar and linguistic cacophony that fuel the novelist's art. Perhaps most suspiciously for the student of Eastern Europe, Bakhtin's poet, with his relentlessly hierarchical vision, strives to uphold the social status quo that the novelist works so diligently to subvert. One of Bakhtin's most eminent interpreters, Gary Saul Morson, has recently placed this opposition of poetry to prose at the heart of philosophy of life and art that Morson calls prosaics, which he distinguishes from more traditional poetics. In this essay, I want to suggest that not the novel, but lyric poetry is, in certain of its incarnations, the ideal genre to articulate the vision of the world that Morson following Bakhtin, calls prosaic. Indeed, I will argue here, pace Bakhtin that lyric poetry is in fact the best possible vessel for exploring crucial kinds of ordinary, everyday experience that the novel, in its rambling Bakhtinian incarnation, is unable to accommodate. As a preface to my case against this particular brand of novel imperial-