S0o, I am also reading The Brothers Karamazov and let me tell you the two novels share what Bhaktin calls elements of the canivalesque. I understand this term in reference to sound. At a carnival as one proceeds it is structured to pull at the individual's desires in multiple directions thus disorienting them. For Bhaktin this disorientation is dialectically oppositional but frees up the audience to embrace the actuality of what the expressions and gestures that make up language are saying underneath what they are saying. Bhaktin also revised Aristotle's rhetorical model adding something he calls the "hero." In the case of this book the hero is India in all her manifestations.
The whole of the book employs subjective speakers inter-playing against each other. The language riots (241), the conference, but the example that stuck out to me as particularly Dostoevskian is the scene on p279 where Shiva gives a tirade asking why there is evil in the world (sounds an awful lot like The Grand Inquisitor speech given by Ivan Karamazov).
No comments:
Post a Comment