Autorialità, contingenza e polifonia nell’estetica di Michail Bachtin

Abstract

The notion of contingency seems to apply only improperly to storytelling. From Aristotle to Peter Brooks, the efficacy of a plot is in fact measured by its ability to bind the initial and final situation through a series of events connected according to the principle of causality. Within the plot, each element does not have value in itself, but for the link it has with the preceding and subsequent elements; what at first seemed sensational and fortuitous at a retrospective glance is thus functional to the whole and is cloaked in the veil of necessity. In this contribution, we will see in Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel a way of making contingency coexist with the narrative arrangement of events.