The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

is a ‘we’ and not an ‘I’. Without ever
using religious terminology, Bakhtin
nonetheless assigns to this fact of life an
exalted value: and he turns to the study of
genre in literature, to the novel in particular,
to raise the question of the degree to
which texts embrace or efface this value.
He uses the term monological to designate
the reduction of potentially multiple
‘voices’ (or characters) into a single
authoritative voice. This voice is sometimes
inescapable. The apparent
polyphony of drama, for example,
remains tied to the fact that the dramatist
imposes upon characters what they must
say. But the technical resources of narrative
in prose (the varieties of indirect discourse
in particular) do have an inherent
capacity to represent languages other than
the author’s. Bakhtin celebrates the novel
as the genre most capable of technically
dismantling the dictatorial authorial voice
that regulates and resolves any interplay
of other voices in the text.
The dialogical text remains, nonetheless,
the exception rather than the
norm; it is perhaps better described as an
experimental possibility: the writer thinking,
as it were, in points of view, consciousnesses,
voices, as, for example,
Richardson did in the epistolary form of
Clarissa. In Bakhtin’s account, however,
this possibility has a long and rich historical
foundation in the genres of the
Socratic dialogue and the ancient
Menippean SATIRE, the latter being
directly rooted in the world of carnival
folklore. In the carnival the social hierarchies
of everyday life – their solemnities
and pieties and etiquettes as well as all
ready-made truths – are profaned and literally
outspoken by normally suppressed
voices and energies demanding equal
dialogic status. In this world-turnedupside-down,
ideas and truths are endlessly
tested and contested, and thus
Dialogic structure 53
de-privileged. In Dostoevsky Bakhtin
found a paradigmatic polyphonic structure
where the other voices in the text
come into their own, as it were; they
acquire the status of fully fledged verbal
and conceptual centres whose relationship,
both amongst themselves and with
the author’s voice, is dialogic and carnivalized,
and thus not susceptible to subordination
or reification. Raskolnikov, as
with all the other characters, is a subject
and not an object: therefore never exhaustively
known or defined as he would be
were the implied author to have the first
and last word about him.
The dialogic or polyphonic text thus
puts the much-argued issue of the author’s
‘disappearance’ into a significantly new
light. The character ceases to be the object
of the choices and plans open to the
implied author. Many critics in the Western
tradition have argued (Wayne C. Booth, for
example, in The Rhetoric of Fiction) that
only these choices and plans can guarantee
the ‘unity’ of the text and justify the ways
of the author to the reader. Bakhtin challenges
these long-held assumptions radically:
the monological text is a partial
report. There is even an attractive valuejudgement
implicit in Bakhtin’s constant
invitation to us to distinguish more keenly
between those techniques that favour
polyphony and those that easily give the
final word to the monologue.
See M. Bakhtin, trans. C. Emerson,
Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984);
M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World
(1965); V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and
the Philosophy of Language (1973);
M. Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays by M. Bakhtin
(1981); K. Clark and M. Holquist,
Mikhail Bakhtin (1984); T. Todorov,
Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical
Principle (1984).
TM