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PARTISAN REVIEW
Finally, discourse
in
the novel is characterized as being much more
"dialogical" or "polylogical" than "monological ," so that the
novel itself is seen to be less a genre than a site whereon many
discourses and genres meet, are subjected to parodistic defamil–
iarization, brought into communication or conflict with one
another, and their respective claims to authority (linguistic, literary,
social, cultural, even political) more or less ironically assessed.
As can be seen readily from my much too schematized
characterizations of Bakhtin's "theses," these essays are replete with
theory; but they are not given-as Holquist assures us in his helpful
introduction-to that impulse to formalization conducive to the
construction of a "system." Bakhtin's theory is the kind that
provides fresh perspectives on familiar objects of study by daring to
consider the results of a systematic inversion of pious dogmas. For
example, Bakhtin simply denies that poetry is in some way
superior-as a kind of language, a mode of discourse, or a form of
literature-to prose. And he denies it on what turns out to be ethical
grounds. Poetry, he suggests, always tends to celebrate the poet's
own voice and to feature the project of subjecting language to the
constraints of some formalization. Poetry, in his view, is inherently
monological or tends in the direction of monologism. Its voice is the
voice of "authority," the same voice with which officialdom speaks
whenever it assumes the dignity, nobility, and privilege of dilating on
"serious" matters. Prose is looser, and prose discourse is more
dialogical simply by virtue of the fact that , as Roman
J
akobson
might say, it is less concerned with fIxating attention upon its own
performance than with establishing contact with another, conveying
a message, eliciting a response in kind . Monologism is a moral
failing, in Bakhtin ' s view, not only because language itself is
"heteroglossic" (multivoiced) in its essential nature, but because
monologism is the mode of " authoritative" discourse.
Which is not to say that prose may not wear the mask of
authority, seek to lodge itself in the consciousness of its addressee as
the very paradigm of what authoritative messages should consist of,
and reduce the polyphony of human voices to the dull monotone of
an offIcial idiom . On the contrary, prose discourse tends toward
monologism the more "serious" it becomes, the more it associates
itself with or speaks in the name of "propriety," "morality,"
"legality," even "utility." This is why, in Bakhtin's theory, the fate
of novelistic discourse, the career of the novel as a genre, and the
history of "novelness" are considered as both objects worthy of
