[W]e must deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multi-languaged world.
-- Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”
Dialogism
In order to better explicate my dialogic approach in this thesis, a few perspectives from critics of Bakhin’s dialogism are taken into account. Because dialogism’s linguistic model focuses on the dualistic nature of speech, the dialogic idea of hybridization becomes the fundamental in the dialogic model. However, dialogism does not simply propose equality in the dualistic mode; it contains internal stratifications that prove to be hierarchical and performs the concept of the
hybridization while embodying the authoritative voice. In fact, the political features actually consolidate Bakhtin’s dialogism. Dialogism consists of multiplicity expressed in a political fashion.
Focusing on Bakhtin’s 1941 critical essay “Discourse in the Novel,” I explore his accounts of the structure of language and the novelistic style that demonstrates the dialogic and parodic. A dialogic novel, according to Bakhtin, incorporates
heterolgossia, which is “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (324). Two different intentions are expressed in one utterance, which reveals the reprocessed authorial intention.
According to the hybrid model, the multi-voiced world is a place in which the consciousness relies on otherness and every center is a decentered center; that is, a
relative rather than absolute state of being—a world that parody complies with. If we apply Bakhtin’s dialogic discourse to the reading of the enchanted past in Rushdie’s novel, the East-West encounter may be reckoned as a mobilized, open text. The dialogic discourse enlivens a historic text because it draws on the presence of relations: every wholeness is a part of the relation to another unit.
Since dialogism “is built into the very structure of language itself,” the
distinction between dialogue and dialogism is also worth noting (Hirschkop 104).
Ken Hirschkop points out that to have a dialogue, one must engage in actions such as compromise, negotiation and “ideological give and take” (103). Meanwhile,
dialogism, being the result of a novelist’s project, does not have real dialogues “but an interesting kind of complexity” (Hirschkop 107). Dialogism’s task is to “cite and represent” the primary texts’ language but not respond on equal terms (Hirschkop 108). In other words, dialogism does not work on an even “ideological give and take”
model. Although dialogism brings to the surface the voices of the people, and seemingly advocates populism, dialogism does not necessary consist of equality that real dialogues do. Hirschkop says: “[dialogism] is valued not for the equal rights embodied within it, but for its quasi-Nietzschean ‘liveliness,’ its earthiness and vulgarity, its imbrication with interests and struggles” (108). Consequently, dialogism takes its form from dialogue, but it contains no such evenness one requires for real dialogue.
The crux of dialogism is double-voicedness. “Double-voiced discourse is always internally dialogized,” and examples for this dialogic discourse would be “comic, ironic or parodic discourse” (Bakhtin 324). In these texts, the narrator refracts the discourse through characters’ voices.
Applying dialogism in the anthropological realm, Vincent Crapanzano points out the parodic nature of cross-cultural communications. Not only does the second
speaker inevitably re-contextualize the first speaker’s utterances (stereotypically,) but the utterances also coexist in an antithetical and thus hierarchical relationship
(Crapanzano 437). This reveals not only the linguistic nature of dialogism but its political aspect. Correspondingly, parody “must evoke or indicate another utterance; it must be antithetical in some respect to that utterance; and it must have a clearly higher semantic authority than that utterance (Crapanzano 437). Their relationship exists as a form of competition; each voice always seeks to be the dominant one.
Meanwhile, Hirschkop draws on parody to exemplify the working of double-voicedness; he says that parody appears to “combine the intentions or
semantic position typical of a speech form with a second accent added, so to speak, by the author, who orchestrates the target language in line with his or her own aesthetic purposes” (104). Namely, the novelist purposely re-accentuates the primary source to achieve an aesthetic goal. Similarly, Sofya Khagi asserts that most postmodern parodies carry with them heteroglot languages, and they expose each other’s multiplicitous presence via coexistence (586). These examples of dialogism—
cultural-exchange and parody—shows us that the dialogic novel is not a static, enclosed text whose discourse is well-kept and unchanged; instead, this parodic discourse expresses itself as an open text that invites contemporary voices to complicate its structure, its intentions and its problems.
The fact that the efficacy of dialogism is based upon the concept of otherness reveals its link to Einstein’s relativism in the nineteenth century. Dialogism develops in a paradigmatic shift from the Newtonian idea of the world. Seeing dialogism as a version of relativism, Michael Holquist argues that within the concept of dialogism,
“the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness”. Language, to which dialogism owes its debt, is built upon otherness as well: “Language becomes ‘a language’ when perceived alongside another language, and it is the relationship of the
text’s heterogeneous components to one another that compromises the components […]” (Kahgi 586). In other words, otherness helps to reveal and thus defines one’s consciousness. The participatory act in dialogism further denotes the idea that
consciousness relies on the relation between the center and that which is not the center.
Once again, in the dialogic realm, the center and the non-center are both shifting, rather than absolute ideas.
Since the dialogic relations also entail “differences that cannot be overcome”, the self and other relation cannot be eradicated. Holquist enumerates other dualistic relations similar to the self-and-other unit, such as the signifier and the signified, the text and the context, and the system and history (Holquist 19). These above-stated subjects cannot sustain their existence without their correspondent parts. In like manner, Peter John Massyn points out this interdependency in dialogism, and perceives dialogism as potentially political:
In these later manifestations, dialogism, whether in the guise of novelistic discourse or carnival culture, is thus clearly in the service of a political project. It is dialectically bound to its opposite: dialogism as a subversive tactic is determined by its opposition to a dominant monological discourse. (138)
Moreover, according to Bakhtin, double-voicedness is vitalized not so much by individual contradictions as by a “social-linguistic speech diversity and
multi-languagedness” (326). Dialogism is deeply rooted in the social and political ground and it embodies power-relations in which dialectical opposites coexist and are codependent. In other words, this political mechanism entitled dialogism cannot stay in stasis, and it will always remain a party of at least two members. Dialogism’s nature is inherently self-conflicting as it’s always an inclusion of two or more internal forces.
Finally, there exists a noticeable connection between dialogism and the rhetoric
of parody. Given its paradoxical nature, dialogism sometimes expresses itself in the form of parody. Much like how Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination is composed in a parodic style— praising the multivocality in the novelistic discourse while embodying this hegemonic power that excludes the poetic genre, dialogism, sometimes takes the form of the carnival, possesses both the transgressive and hierarchical phenomena.
Articulating in the form of parody, dialogism embodies the authoritative character and at the same time retains its subversive potential (Massyn 141). This also reveals how dialogism is a form of representation.
Dialogism, therefore, does not simply present a direct, first-hand discourse.
According to Hirschkop and Crapanzano, the second participant or discursive part in the dialogic relationship always re-contextualizes and re-accentuates the first
participant’s speech or the primary discourse. Other characteristics of dialogism:
double-voicedness, hierarchical power structure, and finally, its tendency to perform bent intentions parallel to the structure of parody. They all appear as homogenous groups, but within these singular units there exists the multiplicity that continuously transform.