Page 200 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes language, both conversational and written, that were current at the time", from parliamentary
eloquence, to the language of the speculators' dealings. For instance, in one of the excerpts he
supplies from Dickens's Little Dorrit, "the speech of another" (in a highly ceremonious tone) is
inserted for the sake of parody into the author's discourse, in a concealed form, that is without any
formal markers such as quotation marks. Bakhtin observes that this is not a mere case of another's
speech in the same language, but "another's utterance in a language that is itself 'other' to the
author".
He commends mostly those writers and literary forms which exemplify heteroglossia, that is a
"Galilean" language consciousness: Dostoevsky as compared with Tolstoy, the novel versus poetry.
After a long tradition of prose writings of a monologic type (revealing a "Ptolemaic" consciousness),
such as the Greek and chivalric romance, the pastoral, the sentimental novel, heteroglossia, with
its subversive and liberating potential, began to be foregrounded in prose with Rabelais and
Cervantes, reaching a climax in Dostoevsky's novels.
Although the Russian theorist did comment on the place of heteroglossia in the novelistic genre,
the proper term that describes the dialogic nature of the novel is Polyphony (a concept derived
from music) or Dialogism as such. Actually heteroglossia is a linguistic reality, whereas polyphony
is just a possible (and desirable) fictional mode, to be contrasted with the monologic one. The first
detailed references to novelistic polyphony appeared in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics; yet
Bakhtin reformulated the concept several times in his studies.
Polyphonic novels, such as Dostoevsky's, make up a new novelistic genre, according to the Russian
theorist's initial views. In this kind of fiction the reader hears several contesting voices, which are
not subject to an attempt at unification on the author's part: these voices are engaged in a dialogue
in which no point of view is privileged, no final word is heard. The author stands on the same
level as his heroes, relinquishing his "surplus of vision". He knows nothing more than they do and
may be surprised by their words at any point:
Dostoevsky brings into being not voiceless slaves ... but free people, capable of standing alongside
their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him, states Bakhtin.
Conversely, in monologic novels, such as Tolstoy's, the general perspective is solely the author's
one, and the characters' points of view are orchestrated in accordance with his positions. (We can
notice that there is a slight resemblance between Tomashevsky's concept of skaz in the narrative,
and Bakhtin's polyphony.)
In the polyphonic, non-Aristotelian plot, despite the plurality of independent and unmerged
consciousnesses, the unity of "the given event" is preserved, but this is a dialogic unity, based on
the coexistence of spiritual diversity. The dialogic process is basically unfinalizable, unlike the
closed product of the monologic whole: each thought of Dostoevsky's heroes looks like a rejoinder
in a never-ending tense debate.
One particular aspect of polyphony is Double - Voicing - a case when in a single utterance two
voices are meant to be heard as interacting: the words should be understood as if they were
spoken with quotation marks. This mode of speaking reflects the fact that, according to Bakhtin,
the language of communication is never free from the intentions of the other people socially
involved in an event. Single-voiced verbal constructions can be found only in professional discourse,
not in rhetorical or fictional language. In the cases of passive double-voicing the two voices may
seem to be in agreement or in disagreement (as in parodic speech); when resistance or tension
between them appear, the double-voicing is active: such is the status of the "word with a loophole",
in which there is included a statement, its rebuttal, the response to the rebuttal, and so on, possibly
ad infinitum.
Embedding is a specific type of double-voicing form, in which the hero's perspective on himself is
infiltrated by "someone else's words about him". Bakhtin illustrates this with a scene from
Dostoevsky's novel, Poor People, in which the protagonist is writing a letter to a woman, confessing

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