My Own Private Oklahoma

"The novel may thus serve as a document for gauging lofty and still distant destinies of literature's future unfolding." M.M. Bakhtin, "Epic and Novel"

"I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them." Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre"

Form and aesthetic have lost ground in this postmodern age, especially in literary and composition studies. As recent aesthetic scholars, such as George Levine, Maria Dibattista, and Susan Wolfson, currently reevaluate the absence of aesthetic in ideological and poststructural criticisms, the composition class maintains a similar complication between the current-traditional and organic model of language. First, current-traditionalism, "which emphasized expository writing and prescriptivism in grammar, usage, and style" (Bizzell 903), attempts to resurrect the classical rhetorical modes as forms for articulating pre-existing knowledge. Since the premise of the current-traditional model, at least according to its opponents, accepts that knowledge exists in the scientific, objective world, which is considered outside language, many scholars criticize how current-traditionalism separates discourse (or language) from knowledge. Organicism, in contrast, rejects rhetorical modes, outlining, and other methods that constrain language to a predetermined formula and offers an alternative process that promotes the relationship between discourse and knowledge. In Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing, C.H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, both advocates of organicism, attack current-traditional teaching methods: "The process of composing belongs to writers; production recipes belong to teachers. Whenever a teacher's own notion of some orderly procedure for writing usurps writers' personal choices in determining how writing 'ought' to be undertaken, the teacher is working from a pseudoconcept of 'process'" (81). Current-traditionalism, Knoblauch and Brannon argue, limits students' desires to create knowledge through flexible processes by offering only a few narrow methods (description, narration, argumentation, cause and effect, and compare and contrast). The problem with teaching rhetorical modes is that some teachers design an essay around a specific one without offering the students the opportunity to mix all the rhetorical modes in each of their essays. However, organicism contains its own paradoxical problems. While refusing to teach methods of writing, students are forgetting the relevance of forms or genres that can lead writers to specific quests and revelations. I am not advocating a return to current-traditionalism, for teaching prescriptivism simultaneously exalts a form and could diminish content, at least for some beginning writers; nonetheless, I will claim that rhetorical modes and other methods of writing, which are often socially constructed and do not always display themselves naturally in a student's writing process, improve a writer's discourse and reflective thinking. In "Discourse in the Novel," M.M. Bakhtin writes, "Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon-- social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning" (259). Because language is social, students need to recognize how the power of traditional formats and genres allow for individual creativity and imagination to operate there. In the essay "Epic and Novel," Bakhtin's theories of the novel directly apply to composition studies because he traces how the novel mixes and subverts prefabricated forms to create the genre of the novel. Similarly, subverting and mixing genres in the composition classroom crack open the conventional essay and produce new expressions, ways of thinking, and ultimately new knowledges.

Positioned firmly in the mold of literary criticism, Bakhtin's works are mutating to other academic disciplines, such as public affairs, anthropology, history, psychology, communications, and cultural studies to name a few.(1) "Epic and Novel" seems at first glance to reduce Bakhtin's theories to a specific genre, the novel, and to privilege it over other literary genres, such as the epic, poetry, the essay, and all academic discourses.(2) However, limiting Bakhtin specifically to the novel negates his original intentions to liberate all discourses from a standardization like the epic, whose conventions are "fixed," "antiquated," "hardened and no longer flexible," canonized, and, in a sense, dead (3). In contrast, the novel and 'novelized' genres are organic, evolving, polyphonic, fluid, and resemble "a creature from an alien species" (4). The novel, a metaphor that subverts or positively changes conventional forms and epistemologies, speaks to all academic disciplines if we willingly search for the complex relationship between language and form, between discourse and community. Interesting to composition theory, we can translate 'epic' and 'novel' into metaphors for particular epistemologies, such as modernism and postmodernism respectively, but we should first explore what Bakhtin means by these important terms.

How shall we define epic and novel? To label these genres, we could treat them each as separate units, discussing the details of epic as if epic reveals nothing of novel and vice versa, but while retreating to this kind of epic format, where a definition maintains its solidarity and methodology throughout the argument without permitting other methodologies to enter and refute the conversation, we are deluding ourselves from the other side of the story, or what the sophists called the dissoi logoi-- contrary argument. We cannot define each genre simply in binary opposition but must engage in a comprehensive dialogic between these traditions. If we juxtapose them or anything as polar opposites, suddenly it appears as if we privilege one over the other, which makes one of lesser value seem strange, insignificant, and wrong. As Levi-Strauss remarks in The Raw and the Cooked (which Derrida latches onto in "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"), "just when you think you have disentangled and separated them [myths], you realize that they are knitting together again in response to the operation of unexpected affinities" (qtd. in Derrida 89). We should think of Bakhtin in relation to Levis-Strauss's argument and Derrida's play with logocentrism; while Derrida critiques the center or attempts to decenter privileged interpretations, he in no way rejects the working function of the center. To have deconstruction, one must first have tradition. Just as logocentrism creates deconstruction, epic creates novel. For our interpretation of epic and novel to make complete sense to us, we need both epic and novel working against each other and tangling together before we can completely recognize the complex issues of language and epistemology. If we understand that much, we also will realize how modernism and postmodernism are woven together not as warring opposites but as competing epistemologies within the same paradigm, or within the same mind, working with and against each other.

While I am about to reveal the conventions of each in a list, we should remember Bakhtin's proverbial animosity with literary theory: any "definition . . . would make of it a system of fixed generic characteristics" (11). So what then shall we do? Keep the structure mystified, as organic theorists suggest, or delve into a circumstantial definition, as current-traditionalists and structuralists attempt? Bakhtin at least realizes that we cannot function in language unless we try to stereotype or define reality, which is an epic quality; nevertheless, Bakhtin justifies his own discomfort with definitions by announcing that he is instead peering into a camera where he can "determine the direction of its [the novel's] peculiar capacity for change and of its influence and effect on the rest of literature" (11). Since he only examines the novel from a subjective perspective, that is, through a lens limited in its focus, visible spectrum, and angle, he allows for the genre to evolve itself instead of fixing sequenced characteristics that will identify the novel as a static genre throughout literary history. In contrast, literary theorists, writers, and communities kill the epic or discourses with epic qualities, if they do not allow for (un)conventional codes to evolve socially, according to the shifting values of a particular individual or discourse community.

Now I will list some differences between novel and epic which extend beyond fiction to the realm of contemporary reality, but remember these points are mere sketches from a notebook that change positions as soon as you read them. You, the reader, have the authority to erase my ideas, shade them differently, or add to them at will. We will never, I believe, finish the sketch even when the drawing is completed, for we will amaze ourselves to where the drawing led us and wonder if in fact the finished product was even our original intention. Nevertheless, let us begin sketching:

[1] Epic always idealizes a valorized past, while novel celebrates, predicts, and fears a nebulous future;

[2] Epic celebrates national tradition, while the novel distorts "official culture" and embraces traditions typically ignored;

[3] The epic ignores present politics or reality, while the novel is "historically active" and caught in direct fire of social conflict; in other words, the novel engenders presence, while the epic upholds absence;

[4] Epic anticipates fixed conventions (realize here that other genres, including the novel, can stand in for epic), while novel invites other genres to mix with novel and thus continue its evolutionary voyage;

[5] Epic is authoritative and monophonic; the novel is polyphonic and decenters the author's and the narrator's voice;

[6] For epic, knowledge is static, already invented, and finished, while the novels' knowledge is dynamic, flexible, and incomplete;

[7] The novel can be epic and the epic can be novel[ized].

More assumptions can be made, but these will give us a firm ground to articulate a new theory for composition and other studies.

According to Bakhtin, we access the past through language, which constructs the past's perception and yields mythic, fictional, and narrative qualities instead of an objective reality.(3) Narration and our anticipation of the present push the past away from us to a world we cannot fully imagine, although we consider in detail its relevance to the present. Bakhtin writes, "The epic . . . has been from the beginning a poem about the past, and the authorial position immanent in the epic . . . is the environment of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendant" (13). We should first notice the epic characteristic of pastness-- the past's ability to transform the speaker who never participates in or completely imagines the past. While Christians, for example, attempt to relive the Passover and Christ's resurrection through symbols such as the cross, baptism, and communion emblems, they never experience first hand God's destruction of Egypt's firstborn or Christ's "historical" resurrection. Instead, two thousand years of oral tradition, historical documents, and Christian discourse communities filter their transcendental, divine experience. Although interpretations may shift according to social contexts and implications, epics typically do not change their universal and transcendental values. Consequently, all cultures who participate in Christianity construct a similar idealization of Christian ethics that specifically follow the written word of God, the text that remains the same over hundreds of years. They relive an inaccessible and mythic past through the fixed language of a real document. The biblical narrative or the narrative in general "makes the real desirable, makes the real into an object of desire, and does so by its imposition, upon events that are represented as real, of the formal coherency that stories possess" (White 20). While historically we can never return to the garden of Eden, find decaying cypress wood that resembles the measurements of Noah's boat, view God's hands molding the universe, or witness Christ's miraculous birth and awakening from the dead, mythic or narrative language attempts to maintain the epic tradition from dying. Through the certainty and familiarity of language, the unfamiliar past reveals itself and shows us our point of origin, the beginning or the Alpha, and how the Alpha positively unveils itself to contemporary reality. We thus idealize epic through the language we speak, hear, and write and desperately want to fix its specific values in a contemporary context. Epic centralizes its function in the presence by carrying forth the traces of an original origin, or what Derrida calls the transcendental signified. Because our language is more conservative than speech, we still write with epic diction, such as thee, ye, olden, and children (which maintains the -en plural ending from Old and Middle English traditions). When Christians pray, they lose their presence by speaking in dialects of the past, which usually are influenced by the Geneva and King James versions of the Bible and not Christ's direct words. As Plato suggests in his hierarchy of truth, if we classify reality as a series of movements toward absolute truth (or, in this case, toward an absolute language), we can ascend the historical past and reach the Almighty Origin, the creator of origin.(4)

Unfortunately, this definition of epic is too simple on the written page, although we desire Plato's conception of a dichotomized reality. When we define the inaccessible past, we recognize how definitions and truths begin to dissolve and compete in language. The novel, then, begins to negate epic simplicity and idealization by dusting off traditional interpretations and misinterpretations that have accumulated as a polished surface over the years. The novel (and deconstruction and carnival for that matter) reveals cracks and holes and invites a new analysis and ultimately a mess of competition. To return to my Christian analogy, suddenly Christians and non-Christians see the beginning of time not as a clear representation of God's architectural design, but instead as an ambiguous past that humans cannot fully interpret. The cracks reveal two creation stories, one after another in Genesis, which originate from two different sources(5). A crack still stands between the new and old testament; the birth of Christ refutes and accepts the epic traditions of Hebrew culture and changes the Hebrew jealous, vengeful God into the Christian merciful, forgiving dove. We see these cracks dividing nations apart--Jewish, Christian, and Muslim nations--and setting up separate histories and traditions that still live with each today. We see cracks expanding this fixed and determinate book as Protestants and Catholics analyzed the truth in light of each community, while even the Protestant Reformation allowed for more cracks to terrify what everyone considered universal and transcendental, when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a catholic church and then intelligently fled. God's text becomes weak, incomplete, and uncertain as each of us reads each parable and phrase differently from another because of our own traditions, social contexts, and individuality. Genesis predicts this event at the Tower of Babel, that is, the inconclusiveness of words; Christ also accepts the human tendency to view reality as discursive, when he scribbles a hidden message in the dirt that nobody understands or speaks in parables that language cannot confine.(6) He is the mysterious I am that we cannot name or repeat because our language has changed over time. He is the I am that is caught between a written text and a transcendental image; he usurps and destroys textual certainty. The Word thus (such an epic word thus is) no longer welcomes a fixed, determinate meaning; it anticipates novel, the uncertain origin where the readers and their contexts create new evolving meaning from the fixed or unstable past and the uncertain present. Novel and epic, then, present themselves in real situations and do not exist in the objective or transcendental structures of a text. Meaning lies in subjective responses to what may appear as an objective structure or an epic, but, of course, there is objectivity embedded in every subjective response.

This study of objectivity and subjectivity moves us directly into the epic/novel conflict that occurs in Freudian psychology and composition theory (and specifically the narrative essay). To understand epic and novel fully, we need to mention Freud's contribution to composition theory, since Freud's notion of competing illusions of the self clearly influenced Bakhtin's conception of dialogism. Freudian psychology teaches us to return to the unconscious repression of the past so that we may pinpoint where the fragmentation of our "original self" began. Inevitably, Freud traces the origin of the objective self through an understanding of neurosis, a flaw in human stability or the novelized crack in the epic wall. If we can locate the neurosis through free association or a pattern of cause-effect analysis, we can self-actualize a means to becoming whole again. While some postmodernists stress fragmentation and a disillusioned view of the Humpty Dumpty theory (or at least many critics abuse this argument to refute some forms of postmodernism), Freudian psychology assures us of our completeness, that glueing together a full representation of us through analysis will improve our health and function in society.(7) The problem, though, is the same simplification of the Bible as epic. How do we construct a past when memories delude us from seeing the past as an objective structure? Freud attempts to overemphasize logic and structure for achieving the thing itself--the object of the original self-- the unconscious, the Alpha, the point of origin where other selves begin taking over and obstructing a clear view of reality.

We have serious contention between epic idealization and novelistic fragmentation when discussing Freud and the familiar conception of writing. During a psychoanalysis, Lacan argues against Freud's simplification of objectivity and introduces us to multiple patterns of competing narratives which ultimately create a fictional past for the patient and analyst. First, the analyst listens to an explanation of the patient's neurosis, which is not completely an individual discussion on the patient's part. In fact, the analyst leads the patient to a specific cure by the questions the analyst asks the patient and the responses he or she gives the patient. Thus, we have at least five competing narratives of the so-called objective past happening simultaneously: the patient's explanation of the neurosis; the patient's inaccessible past; the analyst's conception of the patient's past; the double narrative between the patient and analyst which influences each to interpret the problem in a specific way; and the analyst's induction into a specific theoretical approach to the patient's problem. Which past, then, are we speaking of when we attempt to understand each other and ourselves? Attempting to resurrect the object which engenders neurosis, the patient stumbles through competing pasts that still do not seem to correspond. All of a sudden, the analyst's words make sense and seem to provide some closure, whether the neurosis is closed or not. However, it is a human mystery how this advanced system functions in reality and how such a dialogue between analyst and patient (a talk that is polyphonic and novelized) or author and reader usually work out in the end, until the end begins a new beginning for the reader. The clue to its mystery rests in the social and biological function of language-- the relationship between social discourse and the human body.

Freudian theory and Bakhtin's consideration of the inaccessible past dominate how readers construct their identities in the narrative essay. First, I should continue to say that the author and reader have a tacit contract with each other that announces clearly what to anticipate when reading and/or writing a work; this contract, of course, is one measure of establishing certainty and harmony in the textual universe or the discourse community the universe upholds, or so that is the claim by modernists dating from John Locke and George Campbell and progressing into scientific and literary discourse communities. This universe is epic in the sense that we somehow have lost contact with the reasons to why we write and read or establish scientific certainty in a specific format. We are borne into languages which accumulate unconditionally and unconsciously and which limit us from envisioning other paradigms and conventions. The inability to imagine other paradigms or the ability to remain locked in a paradigmatic realm contributes to our obsession with epic harmony and with healing the neurosis that, if left alone to swell and grow however it wishes, could free rather than fragment us. Freud and others treat neurosis as fragmentation and rarely analyze how fragmentation allows for process.

Why is it that we long for closure, for a signified that correlates with a univocal meaning, or thesis statements, transitions, and conclusions that somehow unite and conclude a paper? Closure inevitably allows us to treat a neurosis figuratively and is not necessarily a negative value to own and use when writing, although Bakhtin would at least infer a different perspective. Closure tells us that a text is finished, while as soon as language enters a social community, we begin to recognize how short our conclusions actually are and how unfinished the dialogue between text and community will continually be.(8) When this happens, we recognize that a text moves beyond the original author; it becomes public discourse as soon as the envelope is sealed and sent to the publishers. Once an author sells a work to the public, she or he can never buy back his or her controversial words. Because of this, we have many authors, including me, repeating Prufrock's curse: "That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it at all."

To remove ourselves from the curse of language slippage, we have always treated the aesthetic literary past in relation to structure; in other words, we as humans want to logically assume that the past somehow links itself structurally or logically to the present and that a previous word logically connects to a latter concept, where we have a language chain strung together like an overexcited amino acid. We humans like to assume the value of pastness within presence, and because of this, our analysis of neurosis during the writing process or on the couch with an analyst not only connects easily with a past we think we can objectify but also with a present that we wholeheartedly believe relates to cause/effect constructions (the past as the cause of the present effect). E.B. White's narrative essay, "Once More to the Lake," will hopefully clarify the neurosis or the fragmentation of what I want to appear as a coherent or finished statement, although Bakhtin asserts the position that an idea is never complete because it remains continuously in its social and dialogic realm, which allows for action rather than stability, and for competition rather than objectivity. Nevertheless, White's essay will interpolate a clear transition from theory to application of Bakhtin.

"Once More to the Lake" is typically taught in freshman writing courses when introducing the narrative essay because of White's ability to recall a past experience and to reflect upon its nature in contemporary time and because of the normative values composition instructors believe exist in the essay. As we have seen from Bakhtin, the Bible, and Freud, a reflection of the inaccessible past is an archetype to which humans continually return through literature and in real life. To save time, I will skip the long tradition of epic/novel psychology that has influenced the narrative essay and briefly mention the following instances in literature that acknowledge memory as a harmonious idealization of where we want to go in the present: after Hamlet picks up a skull from the graveyard and finds out he holds the head of the jester who worked at the castle in Hamlet's childhood days, he reflects on a childhood free from greed and guilt; Wordsworth writes a poem about the daffodils while he recalls the experience in his isolated chamber; Yeats ponders the wild swans at Coole and unravels the fleeting nature and cycle of time; H.D. mythologizes the obscure present with images from past Hellenic and Egyptian cultures; I attempt to write an essay and remember every relative and useless information I have learned over the years; and so on. White reveals an epic past he wants to access but slowly realizes how the power of youth and the passage of time resist and usurp the past's inaccessibility, allowing only for a novelistic, social present to exist.

The essay begins with a timeless recollection of Maine's lake area, where the speaker visits "summer after summer-- always on August 1st for one month" (286). Already the repetition and memories of the years are wrapped up into one expansive idealized version which, in no way, represents each single, present moment of each day at the lake. In other words, the singularity of time does not exist for the speaker; instead the past always represents a fixed, determinate, and timeless memory which displaces the surprise and chaos of a present moment we typically do not predict since we are living it as it happens. Nevertheless, he returns once again to the lake, but this time he takes his son and "could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before" (287). The same? Perhaps the experience is the same for the father, but the son has never seen a lake in Maine and has never experienced the timelessness of this forgotten town. In fact, while the father sees himself through his son's eyes and seems to make the experience somewhat of a unity between them, where the son's experiences are exactly the same as the father's previous visits to the lake, the son, on the other hand, is caught in the author's trap of epic illusions, which means the reader cannot understand the son's real experience since it is filtered through the father's eyes. What an amazing transposition! All of a sudden, the father wants "to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father" (287). We make this same transposition when we read, enjoying the development of characters because for some reason we value their creation and long to incorporate ourselves into their presence, where sometimes we cannot tell the difference between contemporary reality and the illusion we want to accept, at least for the moment. White transposes his son's present on his past, which makes us believe that process is indeed a natural phenomenon that recycles in each generation rather than emptying itself of previous intertexualities or influences: "Summertime, oh summertime, pattern of life indelible, the fadeproof lake, the woods unshatterable, the pasture with the sweetfern and the junipers forever and ever, summer without end" (289). Here, we finally realize how entangled epic and novel are in language (even in the novel), which we cannot and should not escape completely. The trope of time maintains the strength of a timeless past and feeds into a space (a social context) that is either unaware of epic like the son in White's essay or aware of the displacement from presence. A mixture between the two allows for the ambiguous future to reveal itself in a cause/effect format and a format that is incomprehensible because of the many variations between past and present, between words we have never used in the same sentence before, between a mix of forms that we have yet to combine. White's essay anticipates in prose the aesthetic nature of Romantic poetry, which has been overdone but still touches us in a different way. In a poem like Wordsworth's "Daffodils," we see the memory of the occasion wrapped up in narrative and pantheistic time, while White's contribution infers a narrative he wants to continually establish as the present but cannot because of "the chill of death" that awaits him, a death that reduces his epic past to an incomplete memory within his child's mind.

Reliving the past, White implants epic realizations into his son's memories, allowing for a continuation of an archetypal tradition but also for a new tradition to merge in light of the old. This incomplete memory of the past (our inability to live as a past present) allows for both epic and novelized time to rub against each other and almost mix homogeneously to where it is difficult to locate the ending of epic and the beginning of novel, as Levis-Strauss predicts similarly of myths. Therefore, in contemporary reality we both celebrate and refute the national past and present as Jesus Christ has done in Christian mythology. However, the problem still remains unclear to what we should consider glorious or insignificant about the past and present. When forms were handed to us from the god-like authors and politicians before us and those before them, we begin seeing meaning not as innate but socially constructed; the American Constitution is provisional, for instance, and can be amended with the right amount of votes, although the American people perhaps would feel threatened by throwing out a document that we want to interpret as universal. The point is that forms change yet simultaneously remain connected to a past that may contradict the present. Likewise, when we trace the historical tradition of composition and rhetoric, some recognize how problematic tradition becomes when imbedded in a present culture that already has displaced and moved so far away from the past that, though we are the same creatures, we (the past and present human) now view each other both as complete aliens and forerunners to our methods of thinking.

Hans Robert Jauss suggests a problem with literary history: "A literary object is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period" (165). For this reason, we do not read the Greek classical rendition of Aristotle or Plato, but rather adhere to a modern reinterpretation of classical rhetoric. Thus, we read Plato's Gorgias through the lens of deconstruction, modernism, Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and so on to the point where the Greek original no longer achieves its objective status and is only comprehended within a reversed intertextual interpretation. We tend to think of intertextuality as a means for literature to evolve from past tradition to present reality as we see described in Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. However, Jauss's examination gives us a new method to interpret the past not as a simplified, objective structure but as an ever evolving novelistic system. Therefore, while the present evolves in such a way that is different from the past, the past also changes in relation to contemporary situations.

Reversed intertextualities seem somewhat strange to us because it acknowledges the past as completely uncertain and derivative of the socially constructed present, but whether or not Jauss's discussion (or my wild interpretation of Jauss that is filtered through my own intertextualities) is exactly correct, we at least can see this happening. For example, we have no clue of what philosophical or political system the sophists followed because only a few manuscripts and Plato's revisitation of sophism survives. What we have instead are postmodern interpretations that still remain with us, such as Derrida's deconstruction of Plato's Gorgias. Derrida's work reexamines Plato's philosophical system-- Plato's distrust of language and rhetoric-- and shows how much rhetoric and language are involved in the Socratic dialogues. When refuting the sophistic system, was Plato also acknowledging the relevance of sophism? Was Plato himself a veiled sophist? Again, DeMan's deconstruction revisits Romanticism numerous times to show how non-Romantic the romantics really were. If discourse communities latch on to these reinterpretations, then a contemporary discussion of the past erases some of the previous textures and remarks the boundaries for future interpretations.

While some view deconstruction as plowing forth uncertainty for uncertainty's sake, we should at least justify the scholar's attempts at reimagining history, since this same kind of (mis)interpretation has continued throughout the evolution of rhetoric. If we read Aristotle and apply classical rhetoric to composition, we will misuse, misinterpret, or redirect Aristotle in relation to contemporary theory. When epic merges with contemporary discourse communities, we begin seeing an ambiguous, problematic, and altered fussion that diffuses frequently if scrupulously analyzed but remains consistent as long as a discourse community asserts its continuous power. For example, in the first centuries when Roman despotism dominated the social scene, classical rhetoric lost its power as a unified system; an authoritative (ethos) and persuasive (logos, ethos, and pathos) content mutated to a mere representation of style-- an apolitical format that maintained and supported absolute tyranny. This kind of rhetoric, emphasized in Roman classical texts such as Rhetorica ad Herennium, continued until another discourse community, the Holy Roman Church, began to reign. During this period, interpretations of classical texts were reduced to the dialectic as a method for organizing what medieval scholars considered predetermined knowledge. Aristotle's inventive system, once viewed as a rhetorical model that reveals how human psychology and persuasion relate, was usurped by a greater authority than human design; God's divine truth displaced classical rhetoric, although Augustine and others combined classical texts with the Christian tradition, hybridizing the forms to the degree that Augustine's creation transformed previous writing methods and invited a new system called hermaneutics, the science of interpretation, to rhetorical practices. Without Augustine's risk of breaking against tradition and offering a view of reality based on literary texts rather than oral traditions, rhetoric might have been completely lost during the middle ages. Fortunately, hermaneutics still influences not only theology but also literary and rhetorical theory. The Holy Roman Church would not have taken Augustine seriously if he remained a rhetorician, but his ability to achieve a level of power in the church allowed him to (mis)interpret an epic past and situate its secular history naturally into religious or spiritual doctrine.

Obviously, people must achieve power to clean up what they consider faulty doctrine or ineffective formats in discourse communities. Returning to Bakhtin's definition of epic as celebrating national tradition, we should wonder how novel allows for other discourse communities (those communities who exhibit little power and are dominated by "official culture") to seek attention and stability. Thus, we come to this important question: Since discourse communities construct our ideas and presentation of ideas, how then do other powerless communities gain a voice when the reigning community will not allow other epistemologies, dialects, and traditions to create a hybrid of both traditions or a separate tradition altogether? We perhaps are living in a post-Romantic age, when Americans allow individuality to seek out freedom over the greater community. However, we have yet to reach the pinnacle of Romantic philosophy and still are scurrying the ocean's floor and looking for epic treasures that will maintain some equilibrium over the anarchy or nihilism we attribute to absolute subjectivity. The truth is that we desire community; we long for likeness and cultural monotheism, even though we recognize diversity in its politically correct format. The only means for achieving unity in diversity is to assume that our forms and ways of thinking are either based in similar cognitive structures or are purely American, where all "abused" cultures unite and celebrate their adversities. But we leave this paragraph with a problem. Our diversity should allow for a slew of genres and epistemologies to invade composition, rhetoric, and other discourse communities. Postmodernism at least accounts for competing rhetorics; however, as far as structure and style are concerned, it seems we have a huge paradox in theory. If we think in new epistemologies, should not new structures also be represented differently from previous discourses that would mirror the aesthetic effect of the new epistemology?

If we truly want to acknowledge diversity in American culture, then what will we do with traditional writing strategies such as rhetorical modes or standard, edited English that may not represent the epistemologies of certain races, genders, personalities, and identities? Bakhtin is not the first scholar to acknowledge how "unofficial culture" or submissive cultures assert themselves rhetorically. When ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, was instituted in late medieval circles, an anonymous writer published The Principles of Letter Writing, which announces the specific formats if a person of lesser rank writes to another of higher social status or vice versa. When, for example, a subordinate worker wishes to compose a letter to his or her lord, an air of submission and subversion resonates in the language, as if the person without power achieves a kind of control and freedom through language: "When secular subordinates write a salutation to their lords, they should not under any circumstances say 'veneration' or 'allegiance,' but should say instead 'service,' 'compliance,' 'servitude,' 'loyalty,' 'subordination,' and the like" (435). Veneration and allegiance are terms used to describe a letter written to an ecclesiastical monk or bishop, while these other words convey complete subordination on the part of the servant, but, in fact, these words merely hide the original intentions of the author. By calling oneself loyal and a servant actually reveals the operation of a hidden rhetorical system. Each word inevitably yields its opposite meaning when discussing the language of some submissive groups. When one writes, "To his most beloved lord," one does not describe in the letter how little wages the lord pays or complain about how the lord oppresses one's family by forcing long work days with few breaks for meals. When one writes, "Beloved," one surely means the opposite or something near the opposite.

Returning to twentieth-century literary and rhetorical theory, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. proclaims a black literary past that has been denied; this historical, literary past of African-American tradition and literature pre-dates Saussures' discussion of signifier and signified. Inevitably, he claims that African-American traditions, when confronted in an area of white domination, attempt to make themselves known by subverting American culture and its formats. In "The Signifying Monkey and the Language of Signifyin(g): Rhetorical Difference and the Orders of Meaning," Gates traces an African-American historical tradition dating back to pan-African Yoruba mythologies and extending still to contemporary America. His theory ambiguously conveys how blacks subvert standard American English as a means for achieving unity, separateness, and stability in a dominating white culture that cannot understand the subversive language of African-American dialects. This subversion could be, in fact, one reason why some people of color speak in black English, in which the dialect may be different from standard, edited English. When discourse communities face an adversity between two competing languages, the language in power wins and forces the other to become diminished or extinct, such as what has happened to Celtic languages when Germanic tribes invaded England, or become like the epic-- lore of a past history that we no longer can trace.

While the University calls attention to cultural diversity, we should at least ask ourselves if subversive languages should be allowed to exist and thrive in the academy. One of the premises of social constructionism is to help writers adopt the rhetoric of a discourse community, but when students, specifically represented cultures other than the standard, attempt to write the language of the university, then how much of their voices are ruined, changed, or limited by the academic discourse community? How, for example, do people of color, who sometimes speak a different dialect of standard, edited English, adapt to the university without losing an aspect of their individualism, their other discourse communities, their African-American heritages? Writing specifically for an academic setting and separate from other discourse communities dismembers the competition between discourse communities and allows for "official culture" to take over and assert its power. As Kenneth Burke reflects, a community only receives its power by limiting or rather killing off other competition. Subversion even in an academic setting maintains one's identity.

This discussion of subversion is begging this unconscious question: Should academic writing allow black, Asian, American Indian, Ozark, and other dialects to replace or add to the formats of standard American English? Bakhtin would probably agree that more dialects increase not only competition in academic environments but also novelized differences. Nathan McCall, a journalist for the Washington Post, describes the problem with reading white culture when attending school. Not until he read Richard Wright's Native Son did he realize how displaced his identity was when trying to confront and join white academic environments. He writes,

I developed through my encounter with Richard Wright a fascination with the power of words. It blew my mind to think that somebody could take words that described exactly how I felt and put them together in a story like that. Most of the books I'd been given in school were about white folks' experiences and feelings. I spent all my time learning about damned white folks, like my reality didn't exist and wasn't valid to the rest of the world. (274)

The language here is obviously standard English written for a wide audience to understand, which is important if one wants to communicate well. However, McCall and others are forced to use the language of the oppressor and, in a sense, reveal an African-American consciousness in a language they do not always speak. What happens, though, if we allow people to communicate through languages and forms they know? This is not to say that each writer has a distinct, individual voice that is different subjectively from other voices. I am saying, though, that discourse communities confine knowledge by disapproving of other voices that would seem to challenge and bring a new light on knowledge and perceptions of reality. Gates's essay not only subverts the logocentric definition of signified and signifier but also recovers epistemological 'black' tropes that, he believes, supersedes Saussure and asserts the authority of African-American heritage as meaningful and rich of a history as the classical rhetorical system we have borrowed from Greek and Roman philosophers. Underlying his and McCall's message is how important are African-American tropes and traditions. When accepting diverse cultures as part of the heteroglossia, we should question our own rhetoric of the occasion. Do we accept other discourses because they are intelligent or because they are merely culturally significant? I hope the university will reevaluate the system and one day view other dialects as a contribution to social heteroglossia. With competing voices and a continued standard that denies the access of competing forms, we have imagined a novelized present that half acknowledges the ambiguity of the present and half accepts the determinate, static patterns of the epic past. As of now, it seems easier to envision African-American tropes as merely a rhetorical analysis without wondering how exactly an African-American trope would appear not in literature but in literary theory, the composition classroom, or other discourse communities.

Black tropes, prevalent in African-American writing and subverted in black writing that a white audience reads, leads us to other tropes, such as female tropes, which until this century have been ignored in literature and writing. The feminist movement has allowed for new studies of female literature, which not only analyzes the themes of women's literature but also the different forms or presentations of themes differing from the historical tradition. While the epic construction of preexisting forms asserts its position of power, feminists writers like Helene Cixous decenter traditional forms and engage in what some consider a form representing the female body rather than the patriarchal abstractions of the cognitive mind. In The Laugh of the Medussa (1975) Cixous believes that new female forms, by specifically implanting the female body into the words an author generates, will yield a new kind of knowledge: "Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse . . . " (315). Writing, then, in the epic sense upholds the structure, the system, the ideology of the dominant discourse community-- the male race. While I am male and have some concern at the radical edge to her bodily voice, I believe she is correct in assuming that male writers dominate discourse conventions, although other factors, Foucault would argue, contribute to an oppression we cannot locate completely. However, Cixous' manifesto, echoing Marx and Engels, locates a center in which women writing cannot function unless women are allowed to speak outside the center instead of within it:

If woman has always functioned "within" the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this "within," to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. And you'll see what ease she will spring forth from that "within" --the "within" where once she so drowsily crouched--to overflow at the lips she will cover the foam. (316)

The female chews up the epic center and redefines structure, aesthetics, ideology, and the organic body and mind; "to break up, to destroy, and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project" allows for the female novelized voice to vibrate the language, to respond publicly rather than privately, to reconcile or redeem a repressed knowledge, and to impregnate the epic product with a circulation of infinite possibilities and desires. Female writing initiates Bakhtin's "process of becoming" by recognizing the potentiality of the body as a new form and trope that "distributes in its own special way, without model or norm, the nonfinite and changing totality of its desires" (Cixous 318).

Is Cixous dreaming, or is there some truth evolving in her controversial tone? While her ideas nearly decenter the tradition by creating another center, one involving a feminine construction, we must wonder how far we should respond to her feminism. Although she writes in a revolutionary tone and attempts to disregard the relevance of male-based traditions, we need to read between her lines and understand the social context of her essay and the implications of her theory. What happens when a system is completely destroyed? We might think that a new system displaces the old without any connection to the old, but, as I stated earlier, the center cannot hold without a center, that is, we cannot deconstruct without recognizing the tradition. Peter Brooks argues that "scholarship in humanities cannot free itself from tradition without becoming autistic. Teaching the humanities involves submerging one's individual personality into something larger, into a cultural tradition which one speaks through, and allows to speak through oneself" (163). Therefore, Cixous does not tear down the system; in fact, she does the opposite. By breaking up the system, she reconstructs the patterns or foundations, mixing the old with the new. Cixous writes that "it's with her body that she vitally supports the logic of her speech" (312). Logic, usually understood through a long tradition of male philosophers, is accentuated by the body, which some poststructuralists have thrown out of language. Cixous, then, does not dismiss epic completely, but instead adds the novelized body to epic in order to invoke logic, to make logic more powerful with the body's weight (expressed in language) supporting it. All the body's processes (menstruation, lactation, pregnancy, etc.) hide behind the product of the language, and if we respond to the hidden intonations of the female tropes, a constructed phrase will jump out and grab us, pull us into the language pool, into the female body, urging, forcing us to tread the undercurrent, and testing us as much as we are testing it.(9)

If female, black, and other languages differ from tradition, then scholars and teachers need to rethink their positions on academic forms that are presented to undergraduate students. While it is certainly true to say that we need some kind of regularity for the greater community to follow, since writing, in general, seeks to respond to an audience, we at least should not remain so naive to think that an academic or non-academic audience is not intelligent enough to follow the experimentation of writers who seek out new methods for generating knowledge. After all, the new methods, as we see from Cixous, Derrida, Fish, Foucault and all writers who break from traditional forms, are nothing new; they are amalgamations of preexisting forms which have been changed over many centuries or connected to a change in the social structure. While Cixous believes she is patterning new forms, one can certainly recognize the correlation between romanticism and her notion of the body as a rhetorical system. Walt Whitman's The Leaves of Grass, for example, expresses the bodily rhetoric and revolutionary energy that Cixous achieves in her essay. "I am the Poet of the body" and "the scent of these armpits," Whitman writes. Metafiction (Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, for example), notorious for breaking free from realistic fiction, depends solely on the tradition for its parody to work. Modern poetry, when it decided to rid itself of some traditional forms and experiment with new rhythmic styles, still depends on the same literary allusions and definitions that have been used for centuries. (Eliot's The Wasteland is one extended allusion after allusion.) And finally, while some students and scholars refuse to have intercourse with Derrida's deconstructive imagination, reading Gorgias, Heidegger, de Saussure, Montaigne, Descartes, Rousseau, Hegel, Sartre, Husserl, and Nietzsche will partially explain him. When we break from tradition and attempt a new form we think we cannot decipher, we understand it because of its intertextuality and its decision to free itself from previous parents and relatives. In other words, we get the new because we know the old.

More importantly, Bakhtin asserts that each individual should make ethical choices when reading and writing prose. His acclaimed essay on aesthetics and ethics, "Art and Answerability," claims that each of us "must become answerable through and through" (2). We do not subvert genres or formats to rebel against the system, but rather we utilize the forms to improve upon discourse, to anticipate a contexual evolution/revolution, and to reveal new conceptions of old and new truths to the reader. "Inspiration that ignores life and is itself ignored by life is not inspiration but a state of possession" (2). Accountability in writing (the contract between author and reader) does not break when forms are challenged but intensifies the relationship between writer and reader by forcing each to be aware of the other's presence in the text. My work attempts to speak to the ideal reader, while real readers, who evaluate whether the form prevails or fails, answer me through comments they mark on the page and through ideas my words suspend in their heads. Answerability imbeds itself through all structures, epistemologies, and contextual realities, as long as writers, without self-possession or narcissism, conceive of a reader. We, then, have an ethical choice to make. What readers do we lose if we continually reevaluate structure, epistemology, and context? What knowledge do we gain if we ignore the relationship between these three principles?

We are intelligent enough to follow a fragment, yet we avoid them in writing. We understand how Toni Morrison uses stream of consciousness in Beloved, yet we train our students to write systematic paragraphs. We study Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" and the Socratic dialogues, but we refuse an essay that allegorizes itself, speaks to an audience in dialogue form, or mixes genres altogether. Some scholars still celebrate the aesthetic as a meaningful part of literature, but the aesthetic rarely enters academic writing, as if the aesthetic (the body) is divorced from theory (logos). Allegories and dialogues are not acceptable academic forms. Allegories and dialogues are not essays. What is an essay? And why has the essay become the center of composition studies when other forms still allow for communication and knowledge development? We cannot reinvent the wheel because we train our ears to pick up a familiar epic pitch when reading or writing, to pursue the same frequencies. When frequencies change, will we pick up more voices, rhythms, and the full ensemble of the novelized range?

Works Consulted

Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Art and Answerability." Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990.

- - - , "Discourse in the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

- - - , "Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel." The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Bloom, Harold. The Book of J. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.

Brooks, Peter. "Aesthetics and Ideology-- What Happened to Poetics?" Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Cixous, Helene. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986.

Deleuze Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Psychoanalysis. Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986.

- - - , "The Law of Genre." On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

de Man Paul. "The Rhetoric of Temporality." Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986.

Eliot, T.S. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, 1964.

Ewald, Helen. "Waiting For Answerability." College Composition and Communication. 44(3): 331-348 October 1993.

Faigley, Lester. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Jauss, Hans Robert. Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory. Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986.

Knoblauch, C.H. and Lil Brannon. Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1984.

McCall, Nathan. "Native Son." Perspectives on Contemporary Issues: Readings Across the

Disciplines. Ed. Katherine Anne Ackley. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997.

The Principles of Letter Writing. The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books, 1990.

White, E.B. "Once More to the Lake." Essays of E.B. White. New York: Harper, 1977.

White, Hayden. "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact." Critical Theory Since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1986.

- - - , "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality." On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. 1891. New York: Signet, 1958.

1. For a clear evaluation of Bakhtin's handiness across disciplines and in the composition network, see Helen Rothschild Ewald's "Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies."

2. This paper's focus relies mainly on discourses within a liberal arts setting and is not advocating an attack on the objective sciences, such as biology, chemistry, and physics.

3. In "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," Hayden White makes the same argument: "But in general there has been reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in science" (396).

4. Christians during the medieval and renaissance period believed that the Hebrew language was the origin of all language families. While scholarship has refuted this notion, Christian communities still tap into God's rhetorical energy through what they consider a pure Hebrew or Greek language, as if God's words are more potent in Hebrew or Greek than in English, German, or Chinese.

5. Or, if we want to go further, we can accept Bloom's notion in The Book of J (1990) that the original author of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers was a woman, whose words were changed frequently over the centuries by priests to the extent that the original story of Yahweh was completely lost or transformed into something else. If this is the case, Christians and Jews alike either worship a displaced God they cannot comprehend through the written text or worship a textual God rather than the original God. Bloom's theory, of course, is pure speculation. Or not.

6. The author of John 8:6 writes, "They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger."

7. In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Psychoanalysis (1977), Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari also question Freud's emphasis on objectivity. They convincingly write, "We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued black together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity" (286).

8. Or as Lester Faigley writes in Fragments of Rationality (1992), "a text is never finished, but at some point, the writer decides to quit" (37).

9. To some degree, Cixous' construction of the female body in language corresponds to Bakhtin's discussion of the carnivalesque.