『리틀 도릿』에 나타난 카니발 문체

Abstract

This article focuses on the style of Charles Dickens's representative novel Little Dorrit in the carnivalesque point of view of M. M. Bakhtin. So far we have known Dickens’s novels only as comic ones, including lots of socially critical meanings. But we couldn’t clearly make sure of the clear reasons why such novels are so interesting and critical alike, and couldn't also know exactly what their styles are like. That is why we want to approach his language, concerned with the humor and social criticism in Little Dorrit, on the basis of Bakhtinian concepts. As a famous popular writer Dickens always wanted to make his readers know what the ideological absurdities were in his society while reading his novels interestingly. Accordingly he criticized various problems in his society through the relevant styles, phrases, lines, etc., which his readers already knew well. These can be called heteroglossia totally in a Bakhtinian term. Because of this narrative method his language has an inclination to be hybridized and, as a result, be overflowed with many meanings in the social, historical, and cultural contexts in his age. In Bakhtin's standpoint such novels can be said to have as many viewpoints as the heteroglossia hybridized there. By comic-parodic re-processing method, as Bakhtin said, Dickens could hybridize a variety of heteroglossia, create a carnivalesque style stimulating his readers’ interest and taking out their positive responses, while maintaining the proper distance in his narration, and, as Bakhtin indicated, avoid its pathos-charged, Sentimental narration. Moreover Dickens succeeded in making his narrator extol his criticized characters, and such false praises look like those of many other people by hybridizing different voices, such as public opinion. He reaccentuated his socio-critical intentions by making the false praises so objective and persuasive. So Bakhtin calls this case an example of pseudo-objective motivation. Little Dorrit has many examples making such praises objective, but eventually ridiculous, by parodying the Biblical, epic, lyric styles, and so forth, especially in the narrations concerned with the Merdles and the Barnacles. However Dickens praises some overpowered characters like Amy Dorrit by parodying the historical and epic styles. Especially in the case of using lyric style here, it can be called a parody in that her story isn't like that of William Wordsworth's heroine, Lucy parodied here. In Dickens’s narration all conventional values tend to be upside-down, and for such reason, his humor can be believed to be carnivalesque.