“Every utterance participates in the ‘unitary language’…and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia” (272).” 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 [alien words, value judgments and accents], woven by socio-ideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance, it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue” (276). The “actual meaning [of an utterance] is understood against the background of other concrete utterances on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory opinions, points of view and value judgments - that is, precisely that background that, as we see, complicates the path of any word toward its object” (281).
“Thus at any given historical moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different schools, circles, and so forth, all given a bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages.” Each of these ‘languages’ of heteroglossia requires methodology very different form the others; each grounded in a completely different principle for marking difference and for establishing units…Therefore languages to not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other” (291).
Bakhtin also argues that each utterance takes into account the potential reaction of the listener, “who actively answers and reacts” (280). More, our language is “infected” with other’s words: “in the everyday speech of any person living in society, no less than half (on the average) of all the words uttered by him will be someone else’s words (consciously someone else’s), transmitted with varying degrees of precision and impartially” (339). These words are words spoken by another person that we retell and/or reinterpret. This is how we learn language and the ideologies and behaviors imbued in the language (342). Bakhtin argues, “The ideological becoming of a human being…is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others” (341). The interpretation of others’ language is also how we gain knowledge (351).
Then, “language and language change historically primarily by means of hybridization” (358)
He introduces the work with the idea that novels are inherently heteroglot, yet we study style thinking only about a unitary language. By the end, Bakhtin asserts, “From the point of view of methodology, it makes no sense to describe ‘the language of the novel’ – because the very object of such a description, the novel’s unitary language, simply does not exist…[W]hat is needed is a profound understanding of each language’s socio-ideological meaning and an exact knowledge of the social distribution and ordering of all the other ideological voices of the era” (417).
Aside combine this idea of genre with “The Problem of Speech Genres”: “Each of these genres possesses its own verbal and semantic forms for assimilating various aspects of reality” (321).
Key Terms
- Novel: “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (262).
- Unitary language: “a system of linguistic norms. But these norms do not constitute an abstract imperative, they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia of language and centralize verbal ideological thought, creating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia” (271)
- Language: “not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view” (271); “specific points of view on the world, forms for conceptualizing the world in words, specific world views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values” (291-2).
- Social language: “a concrete socio-linguistic belief system that defines a distinct identity for itself within the boundaries of a language that is unitary only in the abstract” (356)
- Hybridization: “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of utterance, between two different linguistic consciousness, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor” (358)