Bakhtin's Dialogic Imagination

A unitary language is not something given [dan] but is always something posited [zadan] -- and at every moment of its lingusitic life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia...they are forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language, forces that unite and centralize verbal-ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the [centrifugal] pressure of growing heteroglossia.

This is not an abstract grammatical structure that guarantees a minimum of understanding. Instead, it is a language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. At any given time a language is divided into socio-ideological heterglossia: languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages, literary language itself, languages of generations (period languages), and so forth. Stratification and heteroglossia widen and deepen as long as a language is alive and developing.

The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogized heteroglossia, anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accented as an individual utterance.

Parody is aimed sharply and polemically against the official language of its given time. It is heteroglossia that has been dialogized.

The dialogic nature of language is a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view and not an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions.

Artistic work is a rejoinder in a given dialogue, whose style is determined by its interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue (in the totality of conversation).

Real ideologically saturated "language consciousness": one that participates in actual heteroglossia and multi-languagedness.

The interactive phenomena are: that amid others' utterances inside a single language (the primordial dialogism of discourse), amid other "social languages" within a singel national language and finally amid different national languages within the same culture, that is, the same socio-ideological conceptual horizon. [these interactions can work simultaneously with each other]

The dialogic orientation of a word among other words (of all kinds and degrees of otherness) creates new and significant artistic potential in discourse, creates the potential for a distinctive art of prose, which has found its fullest and deepest expression in the novel.

In traditional stylistics, the direct word encounters in its orientation toward the object only the resistance of the object itself (the impossibility of its being exhausted by a word, the impossibility of saying it all), but it does not encounter in its path toward the object the fundamental and richly varied opposition of another's word.

But no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and the object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate. It is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specific environment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape. [choosing this word, now in this way, instead of that word, in that way]. Indeed, the utterance finds the object already overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist--or, on the contrary, by the "light" of alien wrods that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of allien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile. [The way I recoil when I hear simplistic references to "right-wingers" or "liberals" in contemporary political utterances is an example here.]

The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social utterance.

The way in which a word conceptualizes its object [koncipirovanie] is a complex act -- all objects are from one side highlighted while from the other side dimmed by heteroglot social opinion, by an alien word about them. And into this complex play of light and shadow the word enters--it becomes saturated with this play, and must dtermine within it the boundaries of its own semantic and stylistic contours. The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction within the object between varous aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility. If we imagine the intention of such a word, that is, its directionality toward the object, in the form of a ray of light, then the living and unrepeatable play of colors and light on the facets of the image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion of the ray-word, not within the object itself (as would be the case in the play of an image-as-trope, in poetic speech taken in the narrow sense, in an "autotelic word"), but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with the alien words, value judgments and accents through which the ray passes on its way toward the object.

The word, breaking through to its own meaning and its own expression across the fog of heteroglossia, harmonizing with some of the elements in this fog and striking a dissonance with others, is able, in this dialogized process, to shape its own stylistic profile and tone. The novel moves beyond the direct and unmediated intention of a word by presenting it in its full, unfolded complexity and depth -- i.e. full artistic closure.

For the prose writer, the object is the focal point for heteroglot foices among which his own voice must also sound; these voices create the background necessary for his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances cannot be perceived, and without which they "do not sound."

Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates. [me: the tension and dramatic interplay of a dialogue, one person saying something and another responding to it in a way that changes what the first man was going to say next, and so on, both parties continuously pulling back and pushing forward to establish control over directional intent. A great example of this is the "smart guy" in Miller's Crossing, and Bogart in Casablanca, where the characters hide the directionality of intent in their utterances, mask it or dilute it, shifting the conversational choice to the interlocutor, where he can then choose to increase the light or increase the shadow with his next utterance.]

The contradictory environment of alien words is present to the speaker not in the object, but rather in the consciousness of the listener, as his apperceptive background, pregnant with responses and objections. Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishes a series of complex interrelationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is precisely such an understanding that the speaker counts on. [She says, "You should play polo." He says, "Polo? Because of the pants?". An imperative followed by a jocular interrogative: A speaker who senses intent and finds something funny within its horizon of possibility -- expropriates the intentional possibilities of the utterance. His choice becomes a bluff at his predominant conceptualization of 'polo' -- that it has funny pants.]

Thus, this dialogism bears a more subjective, psychological and (frequently) random character, sometimes crassly accommodating, sometimes provocatively polemical. Very often, especially in the rhetorical forms, this orientation toward the listener and the related internal dialogism of the word may simply overshadow the object: the strong point of an concrete listener becomes a self-sufficient focus of attention, and one that interferes with the word's creative work on its referent.

What is important to us here is the intentional dimensions, that is, the denotative and expressive dimension of the "shared" language's stratification. Within these points of view, that is, for the speakers of language themselves, these generic languages and professional jargons are directly intentional -- the denote and express directly and fully [unselfconsciously], and are capable of expressing themselves without mediation; but outside, that is, for those not participating in the given purview, these languages may be treated as objects, as typifications, as local color. For such outsiders, the intention permeating these languages become things, limited in their meaning and expression; they attract to, or excise from, such language a particular word -- making it difficult for the word to be utilized in a directly intentional way, without qualifications. [Being on one expressive plane looking at another, intent becomes a refracted angle -- limited and qualified.]

And not all words for jsut anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation markes against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that is easily owned; it is populated -- overpopulated -- with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process.

Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language.

The development of the novel is a function of the deepening of dialogic essence, its increased scope and greater precision. Fewer and fewer neutral, hard elements ("rock bottom truths") remain that are not drawn into dialogue. Dialogue moves into the deepest molecular and, ultimately, subatomic levels. The novelistic word, however, registers with extreme subtlety the tiniest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere. This stylization is sometimes interrupted by the direct authorial word (usuall as an expression of pathos, of Sentimental or idyllic sensibility), which directly embodies (without any refracting) semantic and axiological intentions of the author. The "common language" -- usually the average norm for written and spoken language in a given group -- is taken by the author precisely as the common view, as the verbal approach to people and things normal for a given sphere of society, as the going point of view and the going value (a view that is always superficial and frequently hypocritical).