Course Teacher- Prof Ashok K Mohapatra

Class- Sem-II, Sambalpur University

DISCOURSE IN THE NOVEL

Mikhail Bakhtin( 1895-1975) was a Russian literary theorist and philosopher of

language whose wide-ranging ideas significantly influenced Western thinking in
cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics. He is called a historical
formalist.

This essay forms a chapter of Bakhtin’s famous book Dialogic Imagination (1975)

Discourse

By discourse Bakhtin means the modes of communication in language through

utterance or speech. Speech is embedded in various cultural contexts and is made by
speakers occupying ideologically formed subject positions. Discourse is also a
multiplicity of utterances and texts.

Uniqueness of the Discourse of the Novel

Novelistic discourse, unlike poetic discourse, is an ‘extra-artistic medium’, since the

language of novel is like the language of everyday use or that of scientific texts. It is a
complex choreography of wide ranging speeches, from formal to informal, standard to
non-standard dialects as well as sociolects and so on. Style of the novelistic discourse is
to be defined as a combination of relatively autonomous unities of various types of
stylized narratives, beginning from literary to semi-literate to ordinary day-to-day
narratives. It can be defined as a unity of the narrator’s speech (which may be
philosophical, moral, scientific, oratorical, ethnographic and so on) with the
individualized speeches of the characters reflecting their individual uniqueness as well
as class, race gender etc. all these unities are relatively autonomous, but they are
synchronized into a larger unity, which can be termed heteroglossia. We will discuss
this term a little later in detail.

Novelistic discourse is inclusive to encompass a wide array of narratives that may be

philosophical, scientific, legal, uneducated and colloquial. Each narrative is a speech
type in itself. The speech type can be the standard language or regional dialects as well
as highly diverse sociolects. Manifested in contextually appropriate utterances, all these
are also interlinked into the compositional unity of the novel as a whole.

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Inadequacy of traditional Stylistics to analyze the Discourse of the Novel

Traditional stylistics is grounded in the Procrustean notion of poetic structure, which

enforces uniformity and conformity of the individual elements despite their individual
uniqueness and variations. Hence traditional stylistic analysis becomes inapplicable for
the analysis of novelistic discourse.

Traditional stylistics works upon the easily identifiable formal features of poetry that
define its ‘literariness’. It is in fact easy to identify the formal properties of poetic
language and distinguish it from the language of ordinary language of everyday life.
Prague School Formalist Jan Mukarovsky in his essay ‘Standard Language and Poetic
Language’, and Roman Jakobson, Russian American linguist in his essay ‘Linguistics
and Poetics’ have theorized the formalist aspects of poetic language and discourse. But
it is not so when it comes to defining the language and discourse of the novel. The task
becomes difficult to identify the stylistic markers and literariness of the novel in
formalist terms. The novelistic style cannot be defined in the formalist terms such as
deviation, patterning and foregrounding etc. that apply to poetic style.

The categories and methods of traditional stylistic analysis “remain incapable of

dealing effectively with the artistic uniqueness of the discourse in the novel”. This is
because the genre of the novel is stylistically unique.

In the genre of poetry the unity of a language system is an elaboration and a reflection
of the poet’s individual speech, with the maxim that style is the distinctive marker of a
poet, his linguistic identity, as it were. On the other hand, the heteroglossic genre of
novel with its diverse styles and unities requires a different approach.

The style of the novel is not like the style of the epic, in the sense the authorial narrative
does not necessarily predominate in the epic. Nor is the style of the novel is like that of
drama, in which there is no dialogic relation between the individual speeches to the all-
encompassing language. While analyzing the novelistic discourse the traditional
scholars imposes some kind of an overarching symphonic unity upon the novel,
without truly analyzing the complex configuration of its interrelations and heteroglossic
unity.

Indeed, the categories such as ‘the epic style’, imagery, symbols or individual speeches,
which become effective in traditional stylistics, fail to account for the unique complexity
of the style of novelistic discourse.

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The traditional scholar only isolates a specific type of the subordinate style or speech or
dialect or a type of speech act, and concentrates on any one of them to the exclusion of
all others. What it all leads to is a banal description of each of the individualized items.

If the style of the novel cannot be analyzed by traditional categories and methods of
stylistics, which are grounded in the conception of poetics, then is the novel quasi-
artistic, and not fully artistic? This is a dilemma faced by stylistics and philosophy.

The dilemma can be resolved by bringing to bear upon the style of novelistic discourse
the ancient conception of rhetorical forms that involve dialogism, polyphonism and
heteroglossia.

Usefulness of Rhetoric

Bakhtin explored the significance of the dialogic and dialectic methods of thinking and
argumentation in the early Platonic dialogues as in Protagoras and Gorgias, and also
studied the Aristotle’s philosophical rhetoric to understand the structure and function
of discourse as a concrete and living communicative reality, rooted in various social and
historical contexts, and a dialogic process in which interlocutors participate, and
through which goals and themes are defined, and values as well as meaning are
produced. The rhetorical functions of pathos, ethos and logos are also incorporated into
discourse. Further, utterances in the discourse assume the rhetorical function of
persuading, arguing with or answering to an interlocutor. What is produced thereby is
a responsive understanding, the constitutive principle of rhetoric.

Bakhtin adopted the Socratic methods of dialogic discourse because it allows the
interlocutor to express his point of view and ideas, confronting one’s own and
challenging one’s monologic authority. Bakhtin was of the view that the dialogic mode
of discourse is the instrument to arrive at the truth by challenging the authority of any
particular discourse, especially the official discourse.

Thus the novel, unlike the other forms of art, is inherently dialogic.

Dialogism in the Novelistic Discourse

In his study Discourse in the Novel (and other texts) Bakhtin defines the hero’s voice is
not as autonomous as the authors, it is only a more or less typical “image of a voice”.
(Let us recall that also an idea and a human consciousness consist of the same substance
– the ideology.) An image of hero is therefore – because it is a part of a novel, i.e. a

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single secondary utterance – always overcast by a more or less intense “objective
shadow”of the author. If the authorial overshadowing is very intense, the word of the
other loses its individual meaning and becomes a thing, a characteristic of a reified hero.
On the other extreme there is the weakening of the objective shadow, which enables the
hero’s own (more or less) autonomous voice to dialogically interact with the author.
This happens in a polyphonic novel that is discussed in the two versions of Bakhtin’s
monograph on Dostoevsky Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (1929) and Problems of Dostoevsky’s
Poetics (1963). The criterion defining polyphony are the image of man and of his idea.
The hero of polyphonic novel is a subject and therefore (relatively) independent from
the author and authorial language. All his reality is his relation to the world and to
himself. The hero’s self-consciousness as the dominant element in the creation of his
image is sufficient to break down the monologism. The hero is pure voice, unfinished
and, accordingly, active in the dialogue.

Dialogue in the novels does not describe the heroes and their relationships. On the

contrary, in the external dialogue, which is a part of composition, we can distinguish

two closely connected layers: the inner microdialogue within the consciousness of hero

is split into multiple voices and as such it is the substance for the external dialogue. In

Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Karenin vacillates between whether to divorce Anna or to

forgive her, but ether of the choice manifested in words and action is conflicted from

within through internal dialogism by the motive of revenge.

Anna, for her part, shows her conflicting choices through external dialogues to either

stay as Vronsky’s mistress or his wife, and these choices are formed at the level of

external dilogization vis-à-vis her lover. However, once again, each choice is conflicted

through internal dialogism –in terms of conflicting impulses of extreme passion and

anger towards her lover.

In Dostoyevsky’s novels, some heroes relate to one group of voices, and the others to

the other groups. For instance, in Brothers Karamazov Ivan Karamazov wants and at the

same time doesn’t want to kill his father; Smerdyakov hears one group of voices,

Alyosha is more focused on the other group. In this situation the other in the dialogue

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(and the dialogue itself) exits his position in the plot (exits authorial unity of the novel)

into “the abstract sphere of the pure relationship between human beings”.

Heteroglossia

In the dialogic mode of discourse, a differentiated speech, together with its energy and

meaning is called heteroglossia. One may understand this term as multilingualness. As

Michael Holquist explains in Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World:

Dialogism's drive to meaning should not be confused with the Hegelian impulse
toward a single state of higher consciousness in the future. In Bakhtin there is no one
meaning being striven for: the world is a vast congeries of contesting meanings, a
heteroglossia so varied that no single term capable of unifying its diversifying
energies is possible.(24)

In the words of David Lodge, heteroglossia is "doubly-oriented or doubly voiced

speech". This is because a potential dialogue, which is embedded in the discourse

referred to, is fundamentally "a concentrated dialogue of two voices, two worldviews,

two languages." Thus double-voiced construction is possible not only through

characters or narrators, since characters constitute only one means of novelization

achieved through heteroglossia.

Polyphonism

Another important and related concept is polyphonism that signifies multi-voicedness

as germane to the dialogic principle of the novelistic discourse. The multi-voicedness

consists in the modes, in which the author’s voice interacts with those of his characters

without curtailing each other’s freedom. In other words, characters and narrator enjoy

the freedom to speak on equal terms. Michael Holquist states brilliantly the history of

the coinage of the term "polyphony" by Bakhtin thus:

The author of a novel, for instance, can manipulate the other not only as an other, but as

a self This is, in fact, what the very greatest writers have always done, but the

paradigmatic example is provided by Dostoevsky, who so successfully permits his

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characters to have the status of an· "I" standing over against the claims of his own

authorial other that Bakhtin felt compelled to coin the special term "polyphony" to

describe it. In Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics Bakhtin's analysis of Raskolnikov's

"dialogized interior monologue" from Crime and Punishment as an illuminating example

of the "dialogic content of the voices" constructed polyphonically : "all words in it are

double-voiced, and in each of them a conflict of voices takes place."

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