The Specific Ideology of Realist Discourse, and the Construction of the Novelistic World

Abstract

The way realism developed its dominant form (the novel) highlights novel’s peculiarities – different speeches (heteroglossia), ideology transformed into two common “parties” (the artistic element of the novel as achievement of the pervasive realism versus romanticism), mimesis as a form of reflection (in the mirror, according to the Stendhal’s parabola), transcendent narrator, related externally to the story and discourse, psychologically motivated characters, etc. In order to describe the ideology of novelistic discourse, we will analyze the specific heteroglossia, and generic transformations that Fyodor M. Dostoevsky developed in his novel “The Brothers Karamazov”. Ever since the progressive scientific and scholar investigations of literature and aesthetics provided by Mikhail M. Bakhtin, terms like polyphony, carnivalesque, and heteroglossia have been used colloquially. However, to demonstrate the way ideology is inscribed into the deeper novelistic structure requires more than a single methodology. Bakhtin uses the term ideology in a sense of “system of ideas”. Regarding aesthetic ideology as something that occupied the ideas and terms of Ingarden’s phenomenology (aesthetic value characters), it is indubitable that these are some of the points to which our investigation can lead to. The analysis strives to provide a rumination of discourse in Foucauldian sense (the way discourse as a non-subjective form provides a specific realist/artistic world, due to mimesis, which is more than a single imitation). In order to explain the mimetic qualities of the realist novel, we will call our attention upon the ontological side of fiction as representation (more than “Dartstellung”). The inspection of Dostoevsky’s novel is important since its demonstrative power, which depicts the peculiar ideology of realism, allows us to name it polyphonic. These assertions also require explication of the verisimilitude of the novelistic truth. We foresee the breach between the classical and contemporary understanding of mimesis, as well as the psychology turned into receptive theory, foisted unconsciously upon the reader.