"Novelization" and "radio literature"?

In the introduction to The Dialogic Imagination, a collection of four essays about the novel by Bakhtin, editor Michael Holquist discusses the term "novelization":

"[N]ovel" is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system. Literary systems are comprised of canons, and 'novelization' is fundamentally anticanonical. It will not permit generic monologue. Always it will insist on the dialogue between what a given system will admit as literature and those texts that are otherwise excluded from such a definition of literature. What is more conventionally thought of as the novel is simply the most complex and distilled expression of this impulse. (xxxi)

As Holquist discusses, the novel is not a convention that can be characterized as we would characterize a sonnet, for example: 14 lines with a rhyme scheme expressing the deeply held (often romantic) feelings of an individual speaker. Unlike sonnet, epic, lyric, tragedy, etc., the novel is characterized rather by its incorporation of other literary modes (it can include the dramatic, the epic, and the lyric in a single work) and its refusal to submit to any boundaries. The novel, therefore, presents a "dialogue" among literary "systems."

Novelization, crucially, exposes the conventions that uphold inclusions (what is "admit[ted] as literature") and exclusions. The arbitrary nature of literary forms is thus revealed by the novel.

As I was reading this description of the novel, it felt to me somehow similar to my thoughts about electronic media and their interactions with literature (through adaptations among media and references within one artistic medium to another). Many accounts of these new media--and of the art works and art forms that they make possible--try to establish the legitimacy of their subject matter by claiming that a radio play, for example, or a film is unique and distinct from previous forms. With radio plays, people (like Everett Frost, in the article I'm now reading--"Mediated Drama, Dramatized Media") comment on what radio drama can do that no other art form can do (Frost references the subjective confusion expressed by Kopit's Wings). Attempts are made to form a "canon" of radio plays, which are demonstrably distinct from stage plays.

Like Frost and his ilk, I have been trying to come to some understanding about what is unique about radio plays, what can be said to be their character. I have been going about this, paradoxically, by thinking about the various other genres that influence and constitute the radio play--poetry, stage plays, prose fiction. Until today I have seen radio plays both as unique and as hybrids of all these constituent forms.

But it might be that what is most significant about radio plays is not a distinct character. Rather, the complete opposite may be true: perhaps radio plays (and many other art forms expressed through new(ish) media) are most significant as hybrids and collages of other art forms. They are not unique forms, then, but rather occasions for gathering the other various literary forms together. And perhaps radio plays function something like the Bakhtinian novel: they reflect on and reveal something about other literary genres.

I'm not sure yet how this relationship between radio drama and literature works. But to suggest that there is a significant relationship, akin to the process of "novelization," would fit with claims that I have started to formulate about the role of radio drama in the work of authors. Radio drama, I want to say, acts as a space of exploration for writers whose primary work is in different genres. Dylan Thomas, whose "serious" work is poetry, or Samuel Beckett, whose efforts are mainly directed to the stage and to his prose fiction, use radio drama as a venue for exploring the meaning of literature as such (or of various subdivisions of literature). And perhaps they use radio in this way not simply because it is something separate from their primary literary work but rather because radio drama actually is formally suited to such explorations.