The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin by Hirschkop Ken

Author:Hirschkop, Ken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2021-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

The narrator is speaking, describing the character of Matvei Ilych Koliazin, a scion of the landowner culture just mentioned. But the narrator is using the socio-ideological language or style of the culture itself in the narration, describing Matvei Ilych in the words he would use to describe himself. And yet, even in this small quotation, one can also see that the novel is ironising this language, questioning the words and manner in which members of this social class portray themselves. In ‘Discourse in the Novel’, the novelist always stylises, parodies, or ironises the language being appropriated. Just as the melody played by a single instrument sounds very different when it is complemented by the lines played by other instruments in an orchestra, so the distinctive social dialect used in a novel sounds different when it is ‘subordinated to the higher stylistic unity of the whole’ (DN 262/15). The coexistence of the original significance or ‘directedness’ of this style and the second, ironising ‘directedness’ it acquires in the novel is what Bakhtin calls ‘double-voiced discourse’.

But there is a paradox at work here. For while you might assume that stylising or ironising a language variety would weaken it, render it less persuasive or compelling, a central plank in Bakhtin’s argument is that this novelistic treatment makes language more powerful, that it thereby allows the language of a novel to tap into fundamental social forces. Double-voiced discourse in the novel

draws its energy, its dialogised ambivalence, not from individual disagreements, misunderstandings, or contradictions (even if these are tragic and profoundly grounded in individual fates); in the novel this double-voicedness is deeply rooted in an essential socio-linguistic heteroglossia and multilanguagedness. True, in a novel heteroglossia is basically always personified, incarnated in individualised images of people with individualised disagreements and contradictions. But in this case contradictions between individual wills and minds are immersed in social heteroglossia and given new meaning by it. Contradictions among individuals are now only the rising crests of the spontaneous forces of social heteroglossia, spontaneous forces which play through them and force them to be contradictory, which saturate their consciousnesses and words with their own essential, historically creative, heteroglossia. […] The inner dialogicity of authentic prose discourse, which grows organically from a stratified and heteroglot language, cannot be essentially dramatised or dramatically completed (genuinely ended), it cannot be completely encompassed within the bounds of a direct dialogue, a conversation between people, it cannot be conclusively separated into sharply demarcated replies. This prosaic double-voicedness is prefigured in language itself (in both authentic metaphor and myth), in language as a social phenomenon, historically becoming, socially stratified and torn up by this becoming.

(DN 325–26/79–80)

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