Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin writes,
Language—like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives—is never unitary. It is unitary only as an abstract grammatical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is characteristic of all living language. Actual social life and historical becoming create within an abstractly unitary national language a multitude of concrete worlds, a multitude of bounded verbal-ideological and social belief systems, within these various systems (identical in the abstract) are elements of language filled with various semantic and axiological content and each with its own different sound."
Given Bakhtin’s stress on the heteroglossia in all language, we might expect him to embody it noticeably in his own writings, like Plato or Kierkegaard or Melville. In fact, the only thing resembling heteroglossia that I noticed in the essay was his tendency to say everything more than once. His prose is plain, sturdy, and reasonably clear—though for this we may have the translators to thank. They write in their introduction that “Bakhtin’s style, while recognizably belonging to a Russian tradition of scholarly prose, is, nevertheless, highly idiosyncratic.”
Saussure’s object of study is langue—the timeless, universal structure of language-as-such—and his method is synchronic and ahistorical, abstract and reductive, systematic and “scientific.” Bakhtin, on the other hand, argues that there is no such thing as language-as-such, only parole, and he takes as his starting point the particular, individual, situationally embedded utterance, which he sometimes misleadingly calls “the word.” His frame of mind is a nominalist one, or to put it another way, he is “hostile to all ‘instantiation’ models… which understand particular acts as mere instantiations of timeless norms.” In taking a diachronic, historical approach, he is returning to the nineteenth-century, pre-Saussurean traditions of philology and etymology; but what makes his theory a novel one (pun intended) is his emphasis on dialogue.
This means several different, but related, things. First, language is dialogue-with-the-world. Words represent concepts, each with an inherent value judgment, and concepts are formed and reformed in interaction with objects. The way we speak doesn’t just mirror or parallel the way we think, it is the way we think. Thought is internal dialogue. Since each person’s experience of the world is different, our language tends to diverge, a process Bakhtin calls “centrifugal force” and which contemporary linguists call “linguistic drift.”
But at the same time, every utterance, thought or spoken, is also a part of what we may call dialogue-with-the-other. In everything we say, we both respond to and anticipate our audience. As we strive to be understood by the other, we try to negotiate our way sympathetically through the complex filter of his language, thought, and perception. Here Bakhtin’s phenomenology is brilliant, and in trying to put this delicate and indescribable process into words he resorts to some of the most picturesque language of the essay. But anyone who has ever thought “I need to watch my words carefully,” or said “No, that’s not what I meant,” or been in an argument that felt like two elephants battling each other through a keyhole, knows what it is like. (Try discussing “free will” with a college student.) Understanding, on this model, can never be complete, but it certainly isn’t impossible, and through dialogue our individual languages come closer together. Groups of people with similar experiences and a high level of interaction—by age, region, ethnicity, class, profession, political party, or whatever—form discourses, jargons, what Bakhtin means by “languages.” This “centripetal force” makes the members of these groups more like each other, but it also results in “stratification,” making the groups more distinct.
(The men of Gilead said unto him, “Art thou an Ephraimite?” If he said, “Nay,” then said they unto him, “Say now ‘Shibboleth.’” And he said “Sibboleth,” for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him and slew him at the passages of the Jordan; and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.)
So every society has a multitude of different languages, “heteroglossia,” from which each individual can choose. Since none of these languages is good for all-purpose use, we are all multilingual. Cessationists to the contrary, we all speak in tongues. And since the groups that these languages represent are themselves constantly in dialogue, realigning, recombining, “making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling-Free,”language itself is in constant motion, full of tension and conflict. Another example: after the Norman Conquest and subjugation of Britain, the Anglo-Saxon servants in the stables called their animals cows, pigs, and sheep, while the French nobles in their palaces called the cuts of meat sizzling on their plates boeuf, porc, and mouton—French for cow, pig, and sheep. Now we English speakers use both sets of words. Ancient class conflict is built into our vocabulary.
But from Saussure’s mountaintop, it all looks peaceful. Or, if you like, it looks the way a Petri dish looks to the naked eye. Since he focuses on the purely formal elements of phonetics, syntax and grammar, which are also those that vary the least, language appears to him as an elegant edifice rather than a raging battleground. For him, languages are large discrete, homogeneous wholes like “English,” “French,” “German,” and “Russian,” rather than points on a continuum. What’s worse, for Bakhtin, is that Saussure’s specimens for dissection are flash-frozen and extracted from their natural habitats. The language that structural linguists call English, or Standard English, is not an organic language at all but an artificial abstraction. So is any attempt to fix a “national language,” or a “literary language.”
Writing from a small Russian village in 1934, Bakhtin strikingly anticipates some the insights of the later French poststructuralists. His concept of heteroglossia resembles Barthes’ concept of intertextuality. Like Derrida, he argues that the author can never be fully “present” even in his own words. Like Foucault, he associates discourse and power. And like all of them, he distrusts systems, abstractions, and universals. At the same time, for reasons we haven’t fully seen yet, he doesn’t push these ideas to radical or skeptical or destructive or antiauthoritarian conclusions. His theory of the novel as an orchestra (not a cacophony) of different voices still allows for “constructive criticism” and for literary appreciation. The author, in Bakhtin’s view, is still alive and well.
No position, of course, is immune to objections. It’s not clear that, on the theory of language he presents here, Bakhtin’s later untangling of voices in Dickens and other novelists is warranted or even possible, even without the temporal and cultural distance. It’s one thing to point out differences in speech styles between characters, another to argue that a conjunction in the narrative discourse is an instance of heteroglossia for the purpose of ironic distancing (305).
Still, I think that stretching Bakhtin’s thought to cover new situations will be more profitable than looking for holes in it. The Bible may contain more heteroglossia than any other book, from the putative four authors of the Pentateuch to the Egyptian influences on the wisdom literature to the Greek Hebraisms of the New Testament. Although heteroglossia has always been part of society, it is increasing all the time. A deeper awareness of the ways in which our thought and language are dialogic “all the way down” may help us better understand our place in the dialogue, and it may improve our ability to engage in dialogue with other faiths and traditions. Babel is a part of the human condition, but Pentecost is a possibility.
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