A man walks along a bridge with two friends on a warm and breezy day, when he notices the clouds churning eerily into a dark gray, tumultuous frenzy. Far in the distance, the pastel sky changes to streaks of crimson as if flames of fire are licking from the heavens. He senses that an unbeknownst terror has ripped through nature, stripping her of all her beauty. He becomes paralyzed with fear at the phenomenon he is witnessing, before he grabs his face and the panic spews forth into a high-pitched howl that he cannot contain. His friends continue to walk ahead entranced in their intimate conversation oblivious to any change around them.
In Edvard Munch’s, The Scream, we see a person holding his face and screaming while standing on a bridge. The scene allows for many individual interpretations. Munch’s voice speaks through his character in a compilation of words that become continuous even after one views the painting which follows the discourse of Bakhtin’s philosophy.
In Bakhtin’s, Discourse in the Novel, he states, “The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value and judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile.” (1088)
One can derive from the art that the words used to describe the horror the man is feeling does affect it’s stylistic profile. His terror which is something that is forthcoming unlike anything he has ever encountered before, like demons about to descend upon him, are layered in a way to solidify the complex intricacies of the expression that are intended for the viewer. This artwork is heteroglossic in that the artist intends to evoke something deep through the character by his vocalization of his fear, intended by the painter. This includes the coexistence of the character, the painter, as well as the viewer, where all three play their part.
One could agree with Bakhtin that this is a dialogical painting that speaks to us from previous works of art and will continue on, in other future paintings. One might see the man in the picture expressing anxiety and terror that will resonate his own utterances of fear and other emotions long after he has finished viewing the painting. In essence, it will perpetuate more thoughts and feelings going forward. It’s a continuous cycle where every word to describe the painting remains in conversation with another.
Works Cited:
Discourse in the Novel
Mikhail M. Bakhtin
The Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism
WW Norton & Company - New York/London
Vincent B Leitch, General Editor 2010, 2001, p 1088
The Scream, Edvard Munch
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream
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