Bakhtin, Mikhail. "Discourse in the Novel."
Bakhtin frames this essay as an intervention into conversations surrounding prose stylistics; Bakhtin—like Jameson—attempts to “overcome the divorce” (259) between ideological and formal analysis, arguing that “form and content in discourse are one” (259). In this essay, he focuses on the form of the novel, a genre “multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” (261). The underlying ideology of the novel’s form lies in its inherent heteroglossia; the novel, in its representation of the plurality of speech and language, has ethico-political value. According to Bakhtin, any attempt to standardize a national language is a struggle against the inherent multiplicity of registers, dialects, jargons, etc.—in short the “realities of heteroglossia” (270)—in every tongue. Attempts to standardize or homogenize language—in literature and in other realms of the public sphere—develop in tandem with apparati of ideological control, the “processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization” (271). Consequently, Bakhtin sees the novel’s representation of different ways of speaking as providing space for different ways of thinking and, hence, as resisting ideological coercion.
While heteroglossia remains an important concept in current literary criticism (particularly in conversation with post-colonial scholars of dialect and linguistics like Édouard Glissant), his generalizations about genre are less popular. His assertion of poetry’s essential monologism, while perhaps convincing in the context of Russian epic poetry, does not hold as well in the face of modernist and post-modernist poetics. More pertinent for me is his writing on dialogism and his theory of the ways in which speakers and listeners work together to construct meaning. When mapping his linguistic philosophy on to literature, Bakhtin (not surprisingly) conflates the author with “speaker” and reader with “listener.” This equation seems obvious, but practices of reading aloud complicate such a notion, since, in the scene of oral reading, both speaker and listener are readers. The Victorian reader/listener does not just “listen” to an imaginary author/speaker, but also literally listens to a fellow reader/speaker, who functions as a middle term in the construction and interpretation of a text’s meaning. Bakhtin does resist, however, the assumption that the listener is a passive receptacle that does not affect the speaker and his/her discourse. Listening and the attempt to understand “is active, it assimilates the word to be understood into its own conceptual system,” and the speaker orients his/her discourse “toward the specific world of the listener.” Consequently, the speaker, in anticipating a listener, “introduces totally new elements into his discourse” (282). Hence, in speech and in literature, “Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others” (294). This formulation of dialogic communication suggests that the Victorian reader/listener can affect literature’s meaning at the levels of both production and reception. Both the authors and the oral readers of a text must consider the “intentions” and expectations of their listening audiences.
