Jack London: The Law of Life; theory of prose language; narrative parallelism; interpretation

What is it about?

It is well known that one of the most important questions of Bakhtin’s theory of discourse is the “image in artistic prose”. In his widely read essay Discourse in the Novel, Bakhtin gives a detailed analysis of the word, which “on all its various routes toward the object, in all its directions, [the word] encounters an alian word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction”. Bakhtin named this phenonemon “the internal dialogism of the word”. According to his theory, the specificity of prose language (the “image in artistic prose”) consists of this kind of dialogism. There is a common process in each and every short story and novel: the prose language always prevents “the intention of the word, that is, its directionality toward the object”. Prose language sets the word against all the alien words and evaluations that are directed toward the same object. That is how the “dialogized image” emerges. While the subject of discourse seems to disappear behind the mass of words, the image of the object manifests itself in its greatest richness.It is easy to apply Bakhtin’s prose theory to the analysis of those words that are directed toward non-ostensive objects in a short story or a novel. In the cases of words like crime, punishment, war, peace, pride, prejudice, sense, sensibility and so on, the directed objects are non-ostensive, they have a discursive mode of being, so they are open to dispute. But prose language has another special aspect that is said to be―by other theroists―as typical as dialogism: the detailed description or depiction. Descriptive discourse in prose language always uses words that are directed to ostensive objects―to familiar objects that are hard to argue for or against. It is quite rare to hear quarrels over the meaning of words like chair, table, window, room, tree, knife and so on; and obviously it would be going too far to say that all these words “form concepts of their objects in a dialogic way”. But all these do not mean that the descriptive utterances of prose language are lacking in dialogism. My main aim is to revise and re-define the analysis of the processes of descriptive discourse in prose language with the help of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. How does prose language over-dialogize all those words that are directed toward ostensive objects? What happens to the ostensive object when it becomes a verbal “image in artistic prose”? A short story by Jack London―The Law of Life―will help me to develop these problems.

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