I wanted to post something about circles that I found in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. We were talking about Mikhail Bakhtin in class--and his emphasis on the dialogic and circles. I think this quote applies to music and literature...the cycles it goes through as it leads us through emotional processes:
"That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles."
(page 92, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
"That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles."
(page 92, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
Here is some of the Bakhtin material I had in mind (from Discourse in the Novel), which seems so appropriate in the context of Kundera's novel (with its emphasis on totalitarian usurpation and discursive control, on the ambivalent connotations of circles, etc.): "A unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization.... But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a 'unitary language,' operate in the midst of heteroglossia. At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word ... but also ... into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, 'professional' and 'generic' languages, languages of generations and so forth.... Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralization and unification, the uninterrupted processes of decentralization and disunification go forward."
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