Poesis is the process by which history negotiates the relationship between these two spheres.[i] Words are themselves hybrid actors, comprised in part of the “living rejoinder” contributed by a speaker/writer (chronotope A1), and of the “alien” contribution of the “word already in the object,” (chronotope A2). This is best shown diagrammatically:

 

World in the work                                         World outside the work

 

Chron. A1                                          Chron. A2

 

beginning      ¬—————        ends

ends               ¬—————        beginning

 

The arrows in this diagram are like the points in a spacetime graph; they appear as two dimensional, linear events, when in actuality they represent a three dimensional process of the ray-word, conveyed thus: [the following entry]

[i] “Historical Poetics” is the subtitle of “Forms of the Chronotope in the Novel,” and, for Bakhtin, is to literature what historical materialism is to political economy.