Mikhail Bakhtin - Dialogism

Dialogism – Bakhtin

Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogism is the culmination of his series of four essays The Dialogic Imagination (1981).  Written in the 1930’s they were not studied widely for their merit until their translation in the 1980’s.  He arrived at a theory which highlights the way a novel has a dialogue with not just its reader but with other literature past and present, rather than being as traditionally thought a one way monologic conversation written for a reader by an author. 

Bakhtin’s ideas on language influenced the theory as he saw language as being a duality or polyphonic, ie a two-way system.  Lodge (1990) calls them ‘an orchestration of diverse discourses culled from both writing and oral speech’ (p76).  It incorporates two areas which affect its interpretation; that of the customary configuration of meaning which exists to each language user and another unique meaning made with each utterance by the user at each given time.  This allows for meaning to be continually formed and recreated through a dialogic process. Bakhtin applied this to novels by illustrating the conversations they engage in with other works of literature and between the author and the reader.  Lodge (1990) comments ‘It senses its own listener, reader, critic and reflects in itself their anticipated objections, evaluations, point of view, in addition it senses alongside itself another discourse, another style – that of peers, rivals and precursors, which it rejects, compete with, seeks to supplant’ (p.86).

Bakhtin identified various speech types, which Pearce (2006) summerised as follows:

a) direct speech of the author,

b) the represented speech of the characters, and finally

c) these combined which Lodge (1985) called the double voiced discourse.  This double voiced discourse is then broken down further to stylization, skaz, parody and hidden polemic.  Stylization is the author borrowing from previous works but maintaining its original meaning.  Skaz is when this borrowing has the characteristics of spoken discourse.  Parody is when the borrowing is then turned to form the opposite of the intention of the original and hidden polemic could be described as the answers to the original borrowed works, hidden within the original and highlighted by the borrowing.   Bakhtin used these finding when reviewing the works of Dostoevsky in which he looked at his novels in terms of them being living genres that speak and create a dialogic conversation between the author and the readers. 

Post-structuralist Julia Kristeav’s concept of Intertextuality, which could be considered an extension of Dialogism and Bakhtin’s other Heteroglossia theory.   Heteroglossia is described by Pearce (2006) of the ‘mixture of tongues’ (p229) and considers the mixing of, and conflict between the speech of the narrators, the author and the characters.

I initially struggled to absorb this theory but upon considering this as a form of intertextuality it made more sense and became and interesting tool to consider the Kiss of the Spider Woman in greater depth.

Bakhtin Bibliography

Lodge, D. (1990) Dialogue in the modern novel Chapter 5, from After Bakhtin Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge.

Pearce, L. (2006) Bakhtin and the dialogic principle. In: Waugh, P. (ed) An Oxford Guide – Literary Theory and Criticism.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bahktin, M. M. (1981) (Translated by Holquist, M.) Dialogic Imagination – Four Essays.

London: University of Texas Press.