Life is a diversity of various social voices, evoking links and interrelationships between
individuals through their utterances through the medium of language. A novel is a piece of
writing with invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that
deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of
events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. A novel is a representation of life:
“A novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types...And a diversity of individual
voices, artistically organized…”
In “Epic and Novel,” Bakhtin argues that the novel flourishes on diversity, making it uniquely
suited to post-industrial society. The novel can “swallow” and ape other genres without
losing the integrity of its form (unlike the epic, for example). In “Discourse in the Novel,”
Bakhtin introduces his idea of heteroglossia, based on “extralinguistic” features common
across languages, like perspective, evaluation, and ideology, so that language cannot be
fully neutralized because it is always defined by context. The focus of this essay is the
insistence that literary study must neither be “formal” nor “ideological,” but that form and
content are unified in discourse. The fixation on style, cut off from the sociality of discourse,
is flat and abstract and the two must be put in conversation. “The novel as a whole is a
phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice” 1192. Its “structured
artistic system” is made up of direct narration, stylized narration, stylized everyday forms
like the letter or diary, other literary but extra-artistic forms like scientific or journalistic texts,
and stylized individual speech of characters 1192. They form together “a higher stylistic
unity of the work as a whole, a unity that cannot be identified with any single one of the
unities subordinated to it” 1192.
“The stylistic uniqueness of the novel as a genre consists precisely in the combination of
these subordinated, yet still relatively autonomous, unities (even at times comprised of
different languages) into the higher unity of the work as a whole… the language of a novel is
the system of its ‘languages'” 1192.
“The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted
and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing
individual voices that flourish under such condition”
For Bakhtin, poetic discourse is closed off to alien languages, indisputable, whereas
novelistic discourse is open to them, variable.
“At any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it
represents the coexistence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the
past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the
present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form… each…
requires a methodology very different from the others” 1214.
“The poet strips the word of others’ intentions, he uses only such words and forms (and only
in such a way) that they lose their link with concrete intentional levels of language and their
connection with specific contexts… Everything that enters the work must immerse itself in
Lethe, and forget its previous life in any other contexts: language may remember only its life
in poetic contexts” 1217.
This seems like a sort of “poetic suture” for Bakhtin. I think it is overstated, to be sure,
especially given the existence of Eliot, but it is interesting to think about how this could be
compared with the especially heteroglot, object-oriented worlds of the contemporary novel
or TV series, which take Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s ideas about heteroglossia to their most
fecund point.
“When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to an artistic reworking. The social
and historical voices populating language, all its words and all its forms, which provide
language with its particular concrete conceptualizations, are organized in the novel into a
structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological position of the
author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch” 1220.
