Author: Jessica Ginocchio
What is Heteroglossia? The simplest definition of heteroglossia (raznorechiye) in Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” is “the social diversity of speech types” (263). What does this mean? In the early sections of this essay, Bakhtin explains the unique quality of artistic prose, particularly when it takes the form of a novel:
The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform and speech and voice. In it the investigator is often confronted with several heterogenous stylistic unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls. We list below the basic types of compositional-stylistic unities that the novelistic whole usually breaks down.
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- Direct authorial literary-artistic narration (in all its diverse variants);
- Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration (skaz [1]); Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc.);
- Various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth);
- The stylistically individualized speech of characters.” (Discourse 262)
This description of the novel’s style must strike the contemporary reader as all but obvious, familiar as we are with novels that contain letters, newspaper articles, diary entries, songs, poems, screenplay scenes, and text messages. Indeed, some classic novels are composed entirely of such forms—Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787) or Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (1844)—and those that come to us as a novel, feature narrators of all types, who speak in any number of voices. In the late twentieth century, or postmodern era, novels step up this tendency. We must consider Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) the masterwork of this form heteroglossia that integrates a long poem with elaborate academic commentary into the form of the novel. A fellow scholar of the Russian tradition, Nabokov produces a new and one-of-a-kind novel by combining these essentially hostile discourses. Three decades later, we find David Foster Wallace incorporating a greater range of academic-style footnotes, which contain everything from chemical formulas to bibliographic entries in Infinite Jest (1996), while Mark Z. Danielewski layers an editor’s notes and a reader’s commentary on an academic study of a film to weave a compelling narrative in House of Leaves (2000). Just these examples should be enough to suggest that the recent novels feel perfectly comfortable usurping the discourse of the scholar-critic.
These modern innovations aside, Bakhtin makes very clear that his notion of heteroglossia is a response to the critics of his time, who at best view novels through the same lens as poetry and at worst as simply unliterary. Literary criticism of the nineteenth century in Russia focused largely on thematics, or the treatment of subject matter that indicated how a novel had engaged the major social issues of its time. It wasn’t until the formalists of the early twentieth century (e.g. Viktor Shklovsky) that the novel’s form came into analytic focus. To grant proper heft and significance to Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, we must keep his relation to the literary critical establishment in mind.
The Russian term for heteroglossia is raznorechiye, which emphasizes primacy of speech (“rech” meaning “speech”) in a way that the Greek-derived English translation does not. Although this concept enjoys critical currency across linguistic boundaries, it is a mistake to ignore either its dependence on examples from the Russian literary tradition or the linguistic heterogeneity of early twentieth century Russia, which made the possibilities of heteroglossia necessary to the conduct of both literature and everyday life. To make this point, Bakhtin provides the example of a code-switching peasant, used to moving between different languages in different spheres of life. Indeed, the Russian Orthodox Church, a powerful presence in Russian life until 1917, used Old Church Slavonic in its services and texts. As this suggests, Russia developed a secular literary culture rather late when compared to countries of Western Europe. Witness the facts that non-liturgical literature did not really exist until the eighteenth century and that Alexander Pushkin, widely considered Russia’s greatest poet, is credited with the invention of a native Russian literary language at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This all points to the reasons why novels, as a vernacular form, did not appear in Russia until the nineteenth century as well. In a culture that had separated the written from the spoken word for so long, it only makes sense that the Russian novel would turn out to be an experiment in heteroglossia.
I certainly do not mean to imply that the novel took on the task of incorporating the “vulgar” or commonly spoken forms of language into literary art. This was, after all, how William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge described the mission of writing their Lyrical Ballads in “a selection of language really used by men” (568). Of particular men in a simple and rural setting, they famously claimed:
the language….of these men is adopted…because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions (568).
Arguing for the heteroglossia of British Romanticism, they contend that a poet has “selection of language” even within the relatively standardized English language, then there are indeed any number of possible sub-languages to choose from. Wordsworth and Coleridge understood their insistence on maintaining the heteroglossia of the English language as a means of defending certain spoken dialects from the relentless hegemony of the print vernacular that accompanied the so-called “rise of the novel.”
The distinction between Wordsworth’s poetry and the novel, as Bakhtin would understand it, is that Wordsworth is choosing just one, singular language from among the many spoken varieties that were disappearing with the relative autonomy of local and regional dialects. Novels, by contrast, incorporate plural languages and make them available to those with reading literacy, which is distributed to a significantly narrower demographic group that than those only conversant in a spoken dialect. It was as they subordinated the many varieties of spoken English to a relatively standardized print vernacular that novels paradoxically acquired their apparent ability to represent the social world in all its multiplicity. Where Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to preserve the qualities of spoken English against the standardizing force of modern print culture, Bakhtin sees heteroglossia as the very foundation of the novel form: “This internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre” (Discourse 263). In other words, he understands heteroglossia as a quality of social life that the novel captures as a literary form. Bakhtin is very clear that heteroglossia is not a feature of just some novels, but the very thing that sets them apart from other forms of verbal art: “These distinctive links between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization–this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel” (Discourse 263).
Bakhtin begins his essay in direct response to a tradition of literary criticism that he accuses of “[ignoring] the social life of discourse outside the artist’s study, discourse in the open spaces of public squares, streets, cities and villages, of social groups, generations, and epochs” (Discourse 259). To mount his critique of a tradition of stylistics that brings the formal standards of poetry and the epic to bear on the novel, he relies on the work of the Russian formalists, Shklovsky and Boris Eikhenbaum, who departed from the nineteenth century critical tradition by considering novels from a formal perspective.
Heteroglossia and Polyphony
In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin puts forward the concept of polyphony (polyphonism) to address the reader’s sense that, with Fyodor Dostoevsky,
one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novels and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers–Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogin, Ivan Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, and others. For the purposes of critical thought, Dostoevsky’s work has been broken down into a series of disparate, contradictory philosophical stances, each defended by one or another character” (5). These characters seem to have their own free and independent consciousnesseses apart from that of Dostoevsky; they are “treated as ideologically authoritative and independent,…the author of the ideological conception of his own, and not as the object of Dostoevsky’s finalizing artistic vision. (Polyphonic 5)
This “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices, he contends, that is in fact “the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels” (Polyphonic 6). Just as the novel incorporates the many languages, genres, and styles that exist out in the world, then, the voices within the novel are diverse their form and sound as well as what they are expressing. Although polyphony, like heteroglossia, emphasizes a diversity in sound, Bakhtin considers the former merely a metaphoric drawn from music, which he means “as a graphic analogy, nothing more” (Polyphonic 22). Polyphony does not ask the reader to focus on the phonemic dimension of language in any traditional formal sense; polyphony is about ideas.
Bakhtin agrees with the critic B.M. Engelhardt who argues that
what [Dostoevsky] wrote were not novels with an idea, not novels in the style of the eighteenth century, but novels about the idea. And just as the central object for other novelists might be adventure, anecdote, psychological type, a scene from everyday life or from history, for him the central object was the ‘idea’ (Polyphonic 23).
Yes, these ideas come from Dostoevsky, but he sucks them into the novel from the social circumstances and public dialogue of his time. For testimony to his well-known involvement in the polemics of his day, we need look no further than the first half of his Notes from the Underground (1864). Writing in response to the radical Fourierist utopian vision presented in Chernyshevsky’s novel What is To Be Done? (1863), Dostoevsky drew inspiration from current events and crimes in the newspaper to such an extent that it is reasonable to consider his social historical milieu a virtual sandbox for modelling his perspective on that world in the form of the novel.
To work with the term “heteroglossia,” thus loosely construed, we need to attend to the subsidiary terms by means of which Bakhtin accommodates it to the subject matter at hand. While in “Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel,” his emphasis is on “voice,” in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin depends on “discourse,” “speech,” and “language.” Although he seems to dismiss “polyphony” as merely metaphorically referring to sound, he nevertheless brings back the phonemic component of language in the term “speech.” For all intents and purposes, then, his shifting use of subsidiary terms suggest the interchangeability of “discourse,” “speech,” and “language” in his discussions of “heteroglossia,” the Russian term for which, “raznorechiye,” translates literally into “various speech-ness.” Here, “speech” refers both to the operation of the human vocal tract to produce meaning and to the genre of written speech commonly used by politicians.
What I want to emphasize by returning to the term “rech,” meaning “speech,” is its capacity to refer to the language of a particular speaker including that speaker’s characteristic diction, syntax, and grammatical constructions. The term places emphasis on the relation of form to sound, in that “rech” involves choices and markers that link the particular speech act with a particular “discourse.” “Discourses” are in turn spheres of language use that operate in the world of communication broadly speaking, in which the reader as well as the author participates. Academic discourse, as we know only too well, has its own set of bylaws and expectations, as does that of rural people, and both discourses are sub-languages of, say, Russian or English. These discourses differ from dialects in the latter tend to be geographically locatable speech habits like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lake people. Discourses, by contrast, are specific to a social class, profession, or genre-based language task, like a piece of journalism that has its own norms. Such dissident literary works of the twentieth century as Platonov’s Foundation Pit (1930), drew on Soviet bureaucratic discourse and propaganda for purposes of satirizing the Soviet system. Because it is invariably colored by ideology, one cannot say that “rech” is purely about sound and form. Units of language come with ideological baggage before we put them to some particular use. Furthermore, a novel reader presumably participates in a number of discourse communities and has achieved fluency in multiple sub-languages. Insofar as these languages can be called a voice, which Bakhtin tends to do, each of us has a capacity to recognize and respond in a number of voices. The point of polyphony is that the novel seems to be populated by many such voices rather than that of a monovocal author.
Together, the terms heteroglossia and polyphony situate the author at removal from the novel. Thus, as Bakhtin says of heteroglossia,
a prose writer can distance himself from the language of his own work, while at the same time himself, in varying degrees, from the different layers and aspects of the work. He can make use of language without wholly giving himself up to it, he may treat it as semi-alien or completely alien to himself, while compelling language ultimately to serve all his own intentions. The author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances himself to a greater or lesser degree), but he speaks as it were, through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates. (Discourse 299)
Bakhtin therefore means it when he says in a footnote, “the words are not his.” Similarly, as he says of polyphony, the ideas of the characters do not belong to the author:
In no way, then, can a character’s discourse be exhausted by the usual functions of characterization and plot development, nor does it serve as a vehicle for the author’s own ideological position (as with Byron, for instance.) The consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousnesses, yet at the same time it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness. …it sounds…alongside the author’ word and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of the other characters” (Polyphony 7).
If “the prose writer does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language of his works” (Discourse 299), then the polyphonic novel contains the presence of other people besides the author in the form of its multifarious ideas. Even though the characters that embody these ideas are inventions of the author, the ideas themselves nevertheless come fully formed from the real world and the people actually inhabit it. These barely formulated ideas drift into the polyphonic novel, where they find fertile ground and grow into autonomous characters free of the author who facilitates their creation.
This way of giving independent life to idea is unique to the novel form, by contrast to the language of poetry, which Bakhtin sees as monologic and unitary:
[I]n the majority of poetic genres, the unity of the language system and the unity (and uniqueness) of the poet’s individuality as reflected in his language and speech, which is directly realized in this unity, are indispensable prerequisites of poetic style. The novel, however, not only does not require these conditions but (as we have said) also makes the internal stratification of language, its social heteroglossia and the variety of individual voices in it, the prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose. (Discourse 264)
I cannot help but notice how much this “variety of individual voices” invokes the concept of polyphony, as both are linked by the term “authentic,” which has to do with the novelist’s relation to the outside world, as opposed to the poet whose world is shaped by personal vision. But while Bakhtin uses the novel’s heteroglossia to contrast its authenticity to that of poetry, he turns to the concept of polyphony to distinguish the novel from drama. By contrast to Dostoevsky’s great works of fiction, he laments,
[l]iterature of recent times knows only the dramatic dialogue and to some extent the philosophical dialogue, weakened into a mere form of exposition, a pedagogical device. And in any case, the dramatic dialogue in drama and the dramatized dialogue in the narrative forms are always encased in a firm and stable monologic framework…The whole concept of a dramatic action, as that which resolves all dialogue oppositions, is purely monologic (Polyphonic 17).
Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia positions the dialogism of the novel against the forces that seek to unify, to condense, to monologize. Similarly, polyphony is opposed to forms of discourse that reduce the different voices of its characters to expressions of the author’s monologic frame of reference. On this basis, we might say that both “heteroglossia” and “polyphony” argue for conflict and against entropy. As an active participant in a world of conflicting discourses, the novel does not aim at harmony but rather at capturing within itself the same dynamics of discord that animate the discursive world outside the novel—the conflict of discourses that constitute its historical milieu.
My comparison of heteroglossia and polyphony calls attention to an obvious question. If Bakhtin argues that heteroglossia is arguably as close as he comes to defining the novel form, then why is polyphony feature specific to Dostoevsky’s novel and not to the novel form itself? Although he acknowledges such precursors as Shakespeare, Dante, and Balzac, Bakhtin insists that Dostoevsky is the origin and master of this phenomenon.
We might see Erich Auerbach’s reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse as an attempt to extend this principle to Woolf’s free indirect discourse. In his concluding chapter of Mimesis, Auerbach elaborates a diversity of voices that prevents the voice of narration from unify these voices in much the same way that Bakhtin identifies the consciousness of a Dostoevsky novel as inherently resistant to unity:
The writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished; almost everything stated appears by way of reflection in the consciousness of the dramatis personae…This goes so far that there actually seems to be no viewpoint at all outside the novel from which the people and events within it are observed, any more than there seems to be an objective reality apart from what is in the consciousness of the characters (Auerbach 534).
What we have here is a multiplicity of consciousnesses and perspectives that seem to operate independently, much as Dostoevsky’s do. The author’s viewpoint outside the novel cannot operate as a controlling force, which leads me to the last point I want to consider, namely, the relationship between Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia and other theoretical concept that address the question of the novel’s boundaries.
I doubt any member of this group considers the novel a hermetically-sealed, monadic form, born solely from the intellect of a writer who is also monadic in character. We have been assuming that the novel engages in some form of dialogic exchange with certain language(s) of the real world, which it has incorporated in its model of that world. What this means is that the language of the novel, down to the individual word, can never stand on its own but makes sense only in relation to its use in the world that it happens to be modelling. Its use of language will ensure that the novel deeply connected to a given society and deeply familiar with the social currents and historical forces that shape the use of language in that society. The novel is composed of social elements, which the novelist sculpts but does not create out of thin air.
No word, no piece of language remains unsaturated with the reality of the discourses in which it has already been used: “Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation with the alien word that occurs in the object” (Discourse 279). To imagine a relation to the world of objects that does not start from an exchange between two already constituted entities, the worlds inside and outside the novel, one is tempted to borrow from Deleuze’s image of the rhizome, whose tendrils and shoots draw life and character from the terrain that they transverse with no respect for boundaries of any kind, and you have some sense of how Bakhtin imagines language into the novel from the discourse communities that supply the novelist’s materials. No work of narrative art can control connections forged in a dynamic relationship with an ever always changing world of discourse.
The porousness of the boundary between the inner and outer worlds of discourse resemble the assumptions undergirding the narrative models of structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss and A.J. Greimas, especially the assumption that no work of narrative art can stand on its own, sealed off in formal isolation from everything except the author’s creative imagination. To the contrary, narrative is at its very core composed of linguistic elements charged with the semantic energy to calls forth certain constellations of features and functions and to repel or simply suppress others. For Lévi-Strauss, a particular myth shares the same deep semantic structure with other narratives that negotiate the contradictory poles that organize a given culture. Despite Bakhtin’s emphasis on the extraordinary heterogeneity of linguistic expression and the diversity of dialogic positions, he too shares this opposition. He may ascribe a rhizomatic quality to the process that forms the novel and to its relation to the larger world of discourse, but the novel is nevertheless unthinkable for Bakhtin without the difference between world and model—namely, the dialogic relation of novel to its discursive milieu and the dialogic relations within the novel that composes a model of that milieu. The job of the novel in his view is the same as that of Lévi-Strauss’ notion of myth, to negotiate the difference between world and model.
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[1] skaz: this untranslated term comes from the Russian word skazat’ (to tell, to say) and is appears frequently in Russian Formalist criticism. A well-known example from the Russian critical tradition is Boris Eikhenbaum’s essay “How Gogol’s Overcoat Is Made.” Caryl Emerson glosses it as a “technique or mode of narration that imitates the oral speech of an individualized narrator” (Polyphonic 8 [footnote])
Works Cited
Auerbach, Erich. “The Brown Stocking.” Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953: 525-553.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
– – -. “Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature.” Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Third Edition. Edited by Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2018.
