Competencias generales en el marco de la educación básica en México

The prevalent concept in Bakhtin’s work is dialogism. It informs and underlies all other aspects of his theory. Bakhtin’s dialogism is more than a specific concept, it is a method that he often proposes

as the alternative to its opposite, monologism (Bakhtin 1984). It cannot be confused with dialogue, as dialogue can be dialogic or monologic, depending on the nature of the interaction. Because it is a method, dialogism can be applied in various ways, depending on the subject it is being applied to. In the context of human interaction, dialogism is the exchange of utterances, verbal structures put forth by specific subjects and demanding a response. In the context of signification, dialogism is the presence of ambiguity, of plural, un-finalised meaning, as opposed to the rigid definitiveness of monologism. In the context of ideas, dialogism is the interaction that produces, unlike dialectics, not a new formation, but a hybrid entity. In the context of textual discourse, dialogism studies the way in which different voices interact within texts but also the way that texts interact with each other. Essentially dialogism is a way of thinking that operates in the void between the entities that it examines, making it ideal for the study of any kind of transfer or transformation.

It could be argued that if Bakhtin had been so inclined, he would have been able to incorporate non- linguistic systems in his theory. Although that is not the case, it is not hard to speculate on how Bakhtin’s dialogic approach could inform discussions of adaptation. It can inform an examination of the role of the author. It can also study the interaction of the source with other texts, of the adaptation with the source and of the adaptation with other works. Furthermore, it can be used to model the process of the adapter. Because dialogism is based on situated utterances, it can address issues of environmental influence on novel and film and examine them in the context of their time. It can study “the assemblage of factors that inevitably mediate any process of adaptation, the very sites that a sociology of adaptation must investigate in order to be true to the spirit of the cultures which produce and consume those adaptations, not just the original intentions of the writers and filmmakers” (Collins 2011, p.241). This is a reason why Apocalypse Now is an apt case study for this thesis: it juxtaposes two works that are crucially linked to their time and culture, that also share creative and thematic affinities.

2.3.2 Authorship

Bakhtin chooses the novel as his field of operation because he considers it the best linguistic formation in which to study language. In the essay “Discourse in the Novel” he writes: “The dialogic orientation of the word among other words ... creates the potential for a distinctive art of prose, which has found its fullest and deepest expression in the novel” (Bakhtin 1982, p.275). He sees it as more flexibly structured than other literary systems like poetry, and able to accommodate the co-existence of multiple interacting voices. Bakhtin uses the term “heteroglossia” to describe the existence of dialogism in spoken language. He terms its representation within the text polyphony. His preference to view all the phenomena that he studies as unstable, dynamic, un-finalised systems is made clear by his definition of the novel as a force that strives to reveal the limits and constraints of the literary system. The logical question that arises, after a decision has been made to see the novel as a web of interacting voices, is how the author is defined and what place he holds in this model. Bakhtin’s type of analysis would not be incompatible with a post-structuralist approach, and could be extended to a denial of the author. But as Stam points out, Bakhtin “questions the notion of the author as a primary and sacrosanct source of the text, while at the same time restoring a kind of dignity and importance to the author as the stager and metteur-en-scene of languages and discourses” (Stam 1989, p.14). Barthes suggests that the author’s agency is irrelevant since meaning does not exist in the work but is created in the reader. Bakhtin goes in a different direction. He gives the author the role of the conductor, the organiser of the voices, their incentive. David Lodge explains in After Bakhtin: “Barthes says: because the author does not coincide with the language of the text, he does not exist. Bakhtin says, it is precisely because he does not so coincide that we must posit his existence” (Lodge 1990, p.99).

context of this thesis. The recognition of the author as an organising agency is exactly the view that has been suggested here as best suited to accommodate an examination of the transposition of the work. There are only two elements of Bakhtin’s thinking that are incompatible with this project. While Bakhtin talks about the biographical author, this thesis will be using the notion of the implied author, the authorial agency as inferred from the text. This does not really contradict Bakhtin’s argument, as his concept of the author is also quite abstract. The second point is the author’s specific function. A wider definition of that function is necessary, for the concept to be applicable to non-linguistic systems. It could be argued that the author cannot be viewed solely as an organiser of heteroglossia into polyphony without narrowing the scope of the reading in the context of adaptation.

If the adapter is placed in the position of Bakhtin’s author, the analytical potential is significant. The adapter perceives all the different voices: the author’s, the character’s, other works’, the environment’s and internalises them. Then they are organised into a polyphonic new entity. Thus the product can again be seen as a complex of interacting utterances. Criticism can observe an adapted film in terms of its handling of the potential offered, the choice of voices utilised and their transformation. Another benefit of this approach is that by recognising authorial agency in modernist and post-modernist fiction, a notion that has been disputed by the post-structuralists, a large area of literature immediately becomes theoretically open to adaptation.

2.3.3 Typology of Voices

A closer look at Bakhtin’s typology of voices within the literary text as described in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics also offers potential analytical tools. The first two of his categories predate his work. They are representative, objective discourse, the author’s voice (diegesis), and represented, objectivised discourse, the character’s speech (mimesis). His contribution is the third category,

double-voiced discourse. While the first two are monologic (single voice), this last one is dialogic, it is “discourse with an orientation toward someone else’s discourse” (Bakhtin 1984, p.199), mimesis of an existing discourse. Bakhtin’s introduction of this type of discourse and its subcategories (stylisation, skaz, parody, hidden polemic) makes any analysis of a text more complex.

It would be useful to see how Bakhtin’s categories could be translated into filmic terms and what could be gained by such a translation. The first two, author’s voice and character’s speech, seem straightforward but their distinction in literary texts is not always clear, as in the case of free indirect speech. In film this distinction is complicated further. While character’s speech is easy to define, the author’s voice is not. On the level of language, the distinction remains the same as in literature, the represented speech belongs to the characters and any objective voice-over could be attributed to the author. But the latter is a rare occasion and the authorial agency is mainly present through the image. More so than in literature, authorial voice is hard to establish because image is harder to attribute. It is often unclear who the agency behind the frame is. It could be an objective observer, a commentator or one of the characters. This uncertainty is integral in discussions of narration and point of view. The extra complication presented by Bakhtin’s third category disrupts even the few elements of stable signification that are identifiable. At the same time though, it offers great potential for new interpretations of the texts themselves but also roads for their possible transposition. Double-voiced discourse fits ideally in a medium that can offer a multitude of information simultaneously in the frame but also through its double-track visual/audio nature. The identification of double-voiced elements in the novel offers a key for their transition and also a flexibility in their cinematic interpretation. At the same time, the transfer of non-dialogic literary elements can also be creatively approached through a structure of double-voicedness.

2.3.4 Chronotope

Possibly the most appealing among Bakhtin’s concepts to film scholars is the chronotope. The reason suggests itself from an examination of Bakhtin’s definition of the term in Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 1982, p.84). The elements of time and space are concepts that are more literally relevant to film than to literature due to the form and nature of the medium, so an examination of their mechanics seems to constitute a rather easy transfer to film theory. Martin Flanagan (2009) in Bakhtin and the Movies suggests that “Time and space, then, are the main constituents of film form, elevating the chronotope to an essential factor in any study of how cinematic texts create narrative effects” (Flanagan 2009, p.57). Flanagan also points out that Bakhtin uses the term to describe three different aspects of the novel’s existence: the connection and mechanics of time and space within the novel, the generic conventions that can be identified throughout the history of literature on the basis of treatment of time and space, and finally, the reader’s connection with the text through the latter’s appropriation of elements of the former’s environment. All those aspects of the discourse bear relevance to adaptation.

Robert Stam points out the proximity between the notions of chronotope and genre. He understands the chronotope as a set of temporal-spatial parameters in the service of the representation of a world. “Through the idea of the chronotope, Bakhtin shows how concrete spatio-temporal structures in literature limit narrative possibility, shape characterisation, and mold a discursive simulacrum of life and the world” (Stam 1989, p.11). But the chronotope’s function goes beyond the rendering of a world, of an Aristotelian unity of time and space. It offers the possibility for a historical analysis of narrative forms, and this is where genre is addressed. The chronotope allowed Bakhtin to observe patterns, trends and the evolution of literary genres. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel (1981) is appropriately subtitled Notes Towards a Historical Poetics. In it, he discusses the

evolution of chronotopic mechanics as a series of literary genres from the ancient Adventure Novel, to the Chivalric Romance, the Picaresque Novel and the Rabelaisian model that he examines as a genre in itself. Literary and filmic genres do not coincide. Correlations can be made but identifications would in most cases be misleading. The differences of chronotopic mechanics between the media, especially related to matters of form, do not allow simplistic transfers. Nevertheless, a chronotopic analysis can constitute a great tool for the examination of a genre or the reading of an individual work. The study of the temporal-spatial poetics of a work, in the context of its generic conventions, would serve ideally in the transposition of the work into a new medium and a new genre. The chronotope essentially can be a vehicle for the most transferable information between the media that also incorporates a contextualisation of that information. Bakhtin does not see the chronotope merely as a setting for the narrative. He suggests that “The chronotopes are the organising centres for the fundamental narrative events of the novel ... to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative” (Bakhtin 1981, p.250). This suggests that the information gathered from a chronotopic analysis is not only transferable but also potentially part of an essential distillation of the novel.

2.3.5 Carnival

Bakhtin’s most popular notion is that of the carnival. It is another one of Bakhtin’s flexible terms and thus usable in many contexts. Carnival is not a genre and it is not a chronotope. Its literal nature as cultural practice only serves to illuminate the ideas it represents. Bakhtin finds carnivalistic elements in literary genres but the term is more importantly a philosophical approach rather than a specific set of artistic parameters. According to Bakhtin, the most important feature of carnivalisation in literature is the destruction of barriers “between genres, between self-enclosed systems of thought, between various styles, etc.; it destroyed any attempt on the part of genres and styles to isolate themselves or ignore one another; it brought closer what was distant and united

what had been sundered” (Bakhtin 1984, p.135). One could, as in the case of dialogism, extend Bakhtin’s thinking and argue for an application of this way of thinking to the barriers between media. But even without that extension, the environment that Bakhtin is describing seems well suited for any creative and critical artistic endeavour. That is the place that it will take in this thesis. It will be the element of creative chaos on the microscopic level of the proposed system. It will allow intertextual forces to influence the process and will permit the critical subversion of the source. The carnivalistic type of thinking provides a flexible model for textual interactions in the context of adaptation as well as for the fluid restructuring of the source.

These are the most relevant aspects of Bakhtin’s work to this study and the way they will be used here. Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism has informed the principal idea of the thesis, the focus on the space between the source and the adaptation. Bakhtin’s use of situation (cultural/historical contextualisation) will be emulated in order to facilitate the incorporation of environmental parameters into the discussion. Bakhtin’s view of authorship as conducting will be used in two ways. Firstly, to model the implied author’s function and subsequently to describe the adapter’s process. Bakhtin’s typology of voices will be used as a tool in the reading of the texts but also in the discussion of the transposition. The chronotope will also inform the reading of the source as one of the elements of its poetics. Carnivalistic flexibility will be introduced in the process of re-creation under the organising dome of poetics to allow for the necessary departures of inter-medium transposition.

2.4 Methodology

This section will elaborate on the plan for the test of the theory. The aim of this test is to determine if the ideas that have been presented here can advance the discussion on adaptation, whether they can offer productive and original critical approaches, and if they can add to the possibilities of the

practice of adaptation. The test will operate through a specific structure of stages and parameters that will transform the theory presented above into a working application. This testing structure will be based on the theory, and therefore its results will offer some indication regarding its validity. The structure of a test based on this theory could be formulated in a different manner than the one proposed here, in which case it might offer different results. Nevertheless, the specific case studies may offer hints of the possible developments of the discourse.

2.4.1 Adaptation Criticism

In order to determine whether the ideas of this thesis can yield significant results, they will need to be applied to a specific case of adaptation criticism. This application will be planned in such a way as to give insight into the theory itself and its capacity for analysis. The case that will be examined is Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). This adaptation is an example of a transposition that seems to carry the effect of the book, in a very different setting. The initial plan for this test was going to include more than one case study. Options that were considered were The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), The Great Gatsby (1974) and Naked Lunch (1991). Adaptations of the work of Dostoevsky were also considered, most notably Żuławski’s La Femme Publique (1984) and L’Amour Braque (1985). The reason that the other cases were not pursued was that Apocalypse Now proved analytically substantial and provided a clear outline of the thesis.

Adaptation criticism has occasionally been maligned for offering little more that a series of dry case studies, with limited analytical scope. Robert B. Ray in his essay “The Field of ‘Literature and Film’ ” (2000) argues that “without the benefit of a presiding poetics, film and literature scholars could only persist in asking about individual movies the same unproductive layman’s question (How does the film compare with the book?), getting the same unproductive answer (The book is

better)” (cited in Naremore 2000, p.44). Ray opposes the treatment of adaptation through the view of literary New Criticism, arguing that those methods of isolation of a work become irrelevant in a discussion of cinema. His notion of poetics, which refers to the discipline, not the works themselves, points to the construction of a system that can extract general conclusions about adaptation. That is also what is being attempted in this study: the formulation of a system, a way of thinking, that approaches the general along with the specific. The case studies that will be presented here will not be closed examinations of individual works, but attempts to elaborate the overarching structures of adaptation. In the same way that Bakhtin (1984) presented his theory through the examination of the work of Dostoevsky, and Genette in Narrative Discourse (1980) put forth his categories through an account of Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time (1913-1927), this thesis will venture to propose general ideas through studies of specific works.

Heart of Darkness is a canonical work with significant scholarship, that will provide interpretive pluralism. It is a complex work that lends itself to a wide area of analysis, encompassing