play as meta

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sat, 24 Feb 96 17:10:53 EST

Can't right now do justice to Judy D.'s further developments on
play and fantasy, but it does strike me that when she writes:

> There's no sociocultural "real" that's not
> defined against the not-real.

that while this has to be true semiotically, this state of
affairs can itself either be foregrounded or backgrounded. What
characterizes a monological voice is the fact that it implicitly
backgrounds it. The meta-stances more implicitly or explicity
foreground it. Dialogue as such is not anti-monological (a
subtlety and paradox of Bakhtin's terminology); not even the
_fact_ of heteroglossia (different, conflicting voices and
viewpoints in a text) is. It is the _orchestration_ of
heteroglossia, the creation of some pattern among the divergent
voices, a pattern which calls their relatedness to our attention,
and so pushes us into the meta-stance that ennables such patterns
to be apprehended, which, for B., defeats or transcends the
monological tendency of the poetic voice. JAY.

PS. Note, contrary to usual biases and intuitions, for B. there
is a contrast between the poet (monologic) and the novelist (late
modern, beginning perhaps with Dostoevsky; dialogical-
heteroglossic as above), which puts scientific discourse, myth,
and legal-burocratic registers of power in the poet's corner as
creating a compelling single-vision of the real (vs. opening up a
multidimensional space of voices and viewpoints in which every
vision offered can only be a vision from some viewpoint --
including the author's and the reader's.)

---------------

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU