Is Dialogism for Real?
[In the following essay, Hirschkop examines the conflation of dialogue and dialogism in Bakhtin's work and in the academic discourse that has subsequently developed around it.]
Is dialogism for real? In one sense, absolutely. How could one doubt it when discussion of this concept and of its most well known theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, has given rise to such a torrent of articles, books, conferences and commentary? It's for real at least in the sense that, say, the 1986 Mets or rap turned out to be “for real,” its phenomenal success as a theoretical concept indicating it was an idea whose time had come. But even rap and the Mets, however dynastic their ambitions may have been, never claimed to have been there all along; the concept of dialogism, on the other hand, claims to identify a feature of language which was waiting to be discovered, something we hadn't noticed about the texts we worked with, but which, once acknowledged, would bring us at least as much pleasure as victory in the World Series or an evening with Bell Biv Devoe. When Bakhtin told us that those works we knew as “novels” were really dialogues in disguise, and that their stylistic techniques—irony, parody, free indirect discourse, and so forth—were really the indices of some fundamental dialogical quality of language, he provided not only analytical tools but cause for celebration. Dialogue—we always knew what that was, and for a long time we've known it was good—but to learn that it was a force active even in something as unspontaneous as a novel: this was a pleasant, and only initially surprising discovery, now well on its way to becoming common sense.
Just why such a discovery would be welcomed is obvious enough. Dialogue is so powerful a value in a liberal democratic political culture, so evident a political virtue, that the invitation to find it in literary works may prove impossible to refuse. So, let me warn you in advance, my argument is bound to appear somewhat churlish and mean-spirited. Much of what currently passes for Bakhtinian analysis would have us believe that novels are for all intents and purposes dialogues, despite the rather obvious fact that a single person composes them. What I wish to do in this article is to remind myself, as well as my readers, of the difference between a dialogue and a novel, and thus of the difference between dialogue and what we call dialogism. We need to remind ourselves of this so that we are forced to consider what is at stake when Bakhtin attempts to apply the idea of dialogue to formally finished works, like novels, works which, whatever their linguistic complexity, are composed by historical individuals, often with the luxury of great care and conscious reflection and without the spontaneous dangers of actual linguistic exchange. As you will see, my argument will not be that this application represents a regrettable error on Bakhtin's part: I do not wish to act like a schoolmaster, certainly not in relation to someone obviously more clever than myself and to whose work many of us have devoted far too many of the best years of our lives. Instead I will try to show that the confusion or overlapping between dialogue and dialogism is what makes Bakhtin's work interesting and provocative. In what follows I will argue that we will do ourselves, and dialogue, a favor by keeping it separate from dialogism, and from finished texts. We will do ourselves a favor by, well, not kidding ourselves that one person can speak on behalf of two; we will do dialogue a favor by showing that what Bakhtin calls novels are necessary, precisely because they do things which we cannot rightfully expect of dialogue. In short, I hope that my discussion of dialogism will reveal the limits of dialogue, limits which need airing in liberal democratic regimes such as ours, which overload dialogue with expectations and responsibilities.
What sort of expectations? In American public political life, dialogue signifies the resolution of conflicts by verbal means, implying the acceptance of certain liberal political tenets: an understanding of the necessity to find compromise solutions between opposing positions, an acknowledgement of the importance of discussion and debate, recognition of the private nature of many social interests. To have or start a dialogue between individuals or between political or social actors (Washington and Baghdad, let us remind ourselves, are capable of having dialogues, unlikely and strange as this may seem) is to put oneself into a scene of compromise and negotiation, of ideological give-and-take, and to agree that language rather than physical violence is the preferable means of ending a dispute. This political charge is perhaps what distinguishes modern dialogue from its private cousins, the conversation and the chat. Of course, our conversations are often also dialogues, strictly speaking, but for significant reasons we don't choose to label them so, reserving that honor not for gossip with the grocer or repartee with the cabbie but for occasions of a more formal sort.
Yet the political value of dialogue doesn't depend on this formality alone; it is not merely a question of the arena in which a discourse takes place. So, for example, it turns out that many exchanges between social actors aren't really dialogues, although they resemble them at first glance. Both speakers come to the table, they talk, one utters, the other responds, there is give-and-take, yet in the end it doesn't quite work. It's this which distinguishes, in current parlance, the “meaningful dialogue” from the mere going-through-the-motions version. For true dialogue to take place one has to exchange not only statements or sentences but something else—ideas, positions—and one has to do so with a willingness to take on board those proffered by your interlocutor.
It's this more abstract consideration which opens the door for Bakhtin. For he will argue that such an exchange or interaction of positions is possible even in the absence of the formal written or verbal structure of dialogue, that the single work and even the single utterance may embody such an exchange by being, as he says, “double-voiced” or “double-directed.” By this Bakhtin means that a single utterance or statement may contain two, in principle, separable meanings: “two socio-linguistic consciousnesses,” as he puts it “come together and fight it out on the territory of the utterance.”1 Parody, the representation of oral speech, stylization, the critical representation of social dialects: all these literary phenomena may be thrown together by virtue of the fact that they seem to combine the intentions or semantic position typical of a speech form with a second accent, added, so to speak, by the author, who orchestrates the target language in line with his or her own aesthetic purposes.
It is in the first work published under Bakhtin's name (canny distinction that!), Problems of Dostoevsky's Art, published in 1929 and reworked into the now better known Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics in 1961-2, that Bakhtin first proposed to invest so much significance in novelistic style. In fact, he argues that Dostoevsky can create dialogue within the confines of the novel precisely to the extent that he can “make present” the heroes of his work:
… everything [in the novel] must touch the hero's raw nerve, it must provoke him, interrogate him, polemicize with and taunt him if necessary, everything must be addressed to the hero, must face him, it should be experienced as discourse about someone present …2
Put like this, the case appears somewhat ridiculous: how can you call this a dialogue when the hero can't actually answer back? The answer lies in the distinctions drawn above: if dialogue isn't merely the formal alternation of speech acts, and is only truly realized when actually different interests or values face off against each other, then arguably one can take the next step and do without the formal alternation of positions, the actual two-sidedness of dialogue, altogether.
In fact, Bakhtin does not so much step as leap to this conclusion, literally bounding across the practical difficulties. For, as you may be aware, Bakhtin argues that dialogical interaction is built into the very structure of language itself, so that any statement actually involves debate with alternative value positions. Thus: “Every concrete discourse or utterance finds the object at which it is directed always, so to speak, already spoken about, argued over, evaluated, enveloped by the obscuring fog or, if you like, the light of other, already spoken, discourses about it.”3 Since reading these words of Bakhtin's, many a literary critic has slept easier in his or her bed, happy in the knowledge that even most isolated statement encounters, or “makes present” if you like, partners in dialogue, who are somehow buried in the language itself. What I want to draw your attention to, however, is Bakhtin's need to describe dialogism in the language of encounter, for it indicates some recognition of the fact that the good stuff one gets from dialogue, the political and social payoff, depends upon the “presence” of multiple speakers. Hence that rather bizarre sense that by opening your mouth or lifting your pen (two, I realise, antiquated forms of expression) you are magically transported to something resembling the House of Commons or a family squabble. “A living utterance” Bakhtin claims, “cannot avoid becoming an active participant in social dialogue”4: one cannot speak without getting into an argument.
That Bakhtin should be compelled to describe dialogism in terms of encounter and making present the other is no accident, for the virtues of dialogism are too closely bound up with the actual situation of dialogue to admit any distinction. The great things achieved by the novel depend on its ability to summon up “other persons,” as the following makes clear:
To the fully embodied consciousness of the hero, the author can only juxtapose one kind of objective world: a world of other consciousnesses having equal rights.5
One finds here the not so surreptitious introduction of a central political concept, that of equal rights, into a description of linguistic style. It is a concept essential to Bakhtin's idea of dialogism, and yet it is not really a linguistic concept at all. Equal rights are characteristic of liberal political orders, they exist by virtue of formal constitutions and legal institutions to protect them, and while their existence has a central bearing on language, one can't distinguish as a matter of style voices with rights from voices without them. Dostoevsky's dialogism is presented as discourse which simply reveals possibilities latent within language itself, but further scrutiny reveals an unstated reliance on the project of Western liberalism.
It could not, I would like to argue, be otherwise. Bakhtin needs to borrow such concepts, for he is asking language to bear some additional weight, to carry ethico-political baggage which it can't generate from its own resources. Analyse language as much as you please: you cannot really derive the social and political values bound up in the idea of dialogism. Pace Bakhtin and others as well (like Habermas), the structure of speech itself seems to me too neutral to be made the basis of a moral or political philosophy. It's not that I'm against communication; it's just that speech seems too various in its uses and forms, too willing an accomplice of every sort of social relation, friendly or exploitative, empowering or oppressive, to provide by itself standards for our social life. There is no such thing as speech by itself, in a void, without people, bodies, social relations and a natural world, and it is only from speech in collusion with all of that that we may extract some well-founded guidance for politics and social value.
Bakhtin, however, would appear to think he can do without a more inclusive account of the human and social world. He, of course, is practically legend for his insistence on the situatedness, the context-boundness of language, but he rarely if ever discusses the structure of that world or that context; he consistently attempts to derive his criteria for dialogue from language itself. It's this feature of his argument which lends dialogism its flexibility: dialogism is not language given such and such a social world, it's language per se, and so dialogism of the novelistic sort justifies itself as language which does what language gotta do.
Close inspection reveals, however, that to endow language with some kind of inner political impetus Bakhtin is forced to smuggle into it social and political attributes which really don't belong there, or which can't be assumed to follow from the mere act of speech. The characterization of language as a scene of encounters, as in essence “social dialogue,” effectively introduces social and political values of two kinds. In the first place, by endowing linguistic units with the attribute of personhood, it renders them eligible for the protections afforded by Kantian ethics. Consider just what Dostoevsky's dialogism consists of—a refusal to reduce heroes to instruments of an authorial plan, the granting to personal discourse of a certain measure of autonomy, the treatment of language as deserving of respect merely because it is the language of other human beings—and you realise that its principal features come, not from a theory of language or discourse, but from Kantian ethics, a link made explicit when Bakhtin at the end of his days described discourse itself as the “kingdom of ends.”6 In the second place, the making present of others by means of linguistic derring-do allows Dostoevsky, according to Bakhtin, to create a kind of miniature Gemeinschaft within the space of the novel, a Buberian religious community in which the presence of others in the guise of the purely human makes possible a radically new form of personal relation. I have no particular argument with either of these projects, but they represent precisely that: projects with an interesting and chequered political history, not realisations of ontological attributes of language.
The celebrated essay “Discourse in the Novel” is another exercise in community-making, only in this case the act of discourse plunges you not into a religious Gemeinschaft but into the rather more heterogeneous world of the public square. The “novel,” whatever Bakhtin means by that (which isn't entirely clear), summons up not persons but entire social groups:
The necessary prerequisite of the novel as a genre is the internal stratification of a national language into social dialects, group habits, professional jargons, generic languages, the languages of generations and age-groups, the languages of authorities, of movements, of circles and passing fashions, the languages of socio-political days and even hours. … The novel orchestrates all its themes by means of this social heteroglossia …7
What appeared to be a novel is in fact something between a bazaar and a political meeting, and it can be so because the novelist is able to double-voice his or her language, to make it serve both the aesthetic intentions of the novel itself and those embedded in the social speechtypes or languages of society. Surely at this point one is entitled to believe that dialogism recreates a kind of linguistic interchange, that it embodies language as “social life”—interaction, linguistic exchange, verbal to and fro—in opposition to the isolation of the individual. After all, the very opening of the essay reminds us of the novels' contact with “the social life of discourse, outside the artist's study, in the open spaces of public squares and streets,” in contrast to the “the cloistered artist” offered as an embodiment of the traditional poet.8 And surely it is no less true that the novelistic genres, in this text lauded as dialogism in its purest form, are therefore literary embodiments of dialogue, for they offer to summon up not actual persons, but points of view. Indeed, as we are all aware, something close to an entire critical industry has grown up around this basic premise: that the novelistic form, as defined by Bakhtin, incarnates that openness to exchange, that interest in diversity of points of view, which we consider intrinsic to dialogue in its social and political sense.
And yet … again one runs into the fundamental problem, that in fact novels, even when we include as disparate a range of works as Bakhtin would have us do, are not spontaneous acts of conversation or political meetings, and that, the author, for better or worse, must represent the language of these various social, historical and temporal groups. Whatever the values made flesh in the novel, the openness and spontaneity we deem essential to dialogue aren't found there. It is as if George Bush and Dick Cheney proposed a dialogue with, say, their Iraqi antagonists, in which the latter did not actually show up, but were, by dint of the speech act of George Bush and company, represented linguistically. We would rightly regard such a dialogue as a sham, and we could do so even if we had absolute faith in the literary abilities and moral sincerity of our own national leaders. To the extent that dialogue is seen as a legitimating social and political good, it requires the participation of actually different individuals or what we would call “accredited representatives” of the relevant social groups. Dialogism can't claim this legitimacy for its own speech acts, for there is no real dialogue there, but an interesting kind of complexity, itself the consequence of the novelist's peculiar task in the relation to the language which surrounds him or her.
However, as I mentioned at the beginning, my aim is not to wag a theoretical finger at those who believe reading Dickens is like taking the floor of the House of Commons. On the contrary, the point I am most concerned to make is that the difference of dialogism from dialogue is what renders the former relevant to our social and political life, that in fact “dialogism” as a distinctive kind of discourse calls attention to fundamental features of our social and political life too often obscured by our obsession with dialogue. In brief, my claim will be that dialogism describes the work of those “secondary genres” whose job it is to cite and represent the languages generated in so-called primary genres (everyday speech, etc.), and that this citation and representation is an ineluctable feature of the socio-political life of the modern nation-state. In the case of such genres, dialogue is neither possible nor appropriate, and it provides no standard or critical ideal.
A careful examination of the text of “Discourse in the Novel” reveals two quite different socio-political justifications for dialogism: it is valued not only for reproducing the spontaneity of dialogue, but also as a literary form which puts us in touch with a vital, popular, “public square” world of struggling historical discourses. The novel, Bakhtin argues, infuses its language with an “intentional feeling for the historical and social concreteness and relativity of living discourse, for its participation in historical becoming and social struggle,”9 bringing us closer to the ground of some putatively real, popular, actually living discourse.
So while the rhetoric of dialogue continues from Bakhtin's Dostoevsky book, “Discourse in the Novel” in fact inaugurates a sharp populist turn away from Kantian ethics and its interest in autonomous self-regulating individuals. It's not that the conversation of the public square, now idolized, isn't composed of dialogues, it's just that it is valued not for the equal rights embodied within it, but for its quasi-Nietzschean “liveliness,” its earthiness and vulgarity, its imbrication with interests and struggles. That one can continue to call this dialogism isn't, on reflection, that surprising, for in both the earlier and later works what's at stake isn't dialogue itself, which is in any case out of the question, but some broader social project.
In the case of the essay on the novel, the field of extra-linguistic value which provides the novel with a purpose is a vision of the life of “the people.” Of course, like every kind of populism, Bakhtin's entails the projection onto popular life of values which are the product of intellectual meditation on the life of “the people.” So while the dialogism of the novel endows discourse with a vigour and liveliness associated with the popular, this liveliness itself is only made visible by the novelist himself or herself. It depends on the novelist being able to see, beneath the surface details of popular social life, the fundamental drama of heteroglossia played out within it:
Behind every utterance in a genuine novel one senses the elemental force of social languages with their inner logic and inner necessity. The image reveals not just the actuality, but also the possibilities of a given language, its, so to speak, ideal limits, and its total integral meaning.10
By making “formal markers of languages, manners and styles into symbols for social points of view”11, the novelist infuses the mundane stylistic marker with the force of popular life, and it is precisely this process, referred to throughout this essay as the making of “images of languages,” which defines the distinctive phenomenon called dialogism. The key to novelistic dialogism, then, is not an immersion in the authentic plebeian sociability of the public square, but the novelist's ability to endow so-called popular or everyday language with an historical or social significance it lacks in its everyday context. Such a transformation or refraction of everyday language is not really a dialogue at all: it lacks the most elementary features of actual political dialogue, and could not possibly claim legitimacy on that basis. It should be described in quite different terms: as representation or, if you like, “citation” and “reaccentuation,” the aesthetic processing of the language of others for specific ends. What the novelist does to so-called everyday language or heteroglossia is distinctive and important on its own terms. In actual dialogues we don't necessarily ponder the historical significance of word choice, pronunciation, or syntax: but in the novel, as theorised by Bakhtin, the most intimate and throwaway stylistic feature becomes the index of a grand historical drama, the simple conversation an arena for sociological conflict.
If nevertheless novelistic dialogism appears to be confused with some other kind of dialogue, this is an almost inevitable consequence of populism itself. For “the people,” as a rhetorical category, has the advantage of designating both a separate group within society, opposed to the official or to the lordly or both, and a form of society in its own right, a form which can be valued as somehow more real or authentic than the pretentious world of self-regarding individuals which opposes it. It's possible to contrast the popular ersatz peasant community with the intellectual one, arguing that the former is more social, more dialogical if you like. Such a vision, however, represses the fact that the novel has its own formal properties: it doesn't only take the languages of the public square into itself, but changes the way we see them, endowing them with a depth of social meaning they lack in everyday intercourse. In doing so, it doesn't so much violate the norms of dialogue as call to our attention the fact that dialogue cannot achieve everything, that the difference between a novel and the public square is not only inevitable, but productive, valuable, essential to our social life. For the novel does things to heteroglossia that heteroglossia can't do to itself, providing a kind of insight into language which is not immediately available.
This isn't a terribly populist, let alone popular, view, and, not surprisingly, Bakhtin's own discussions of the novelistic and the dialogical are criss-crossed by resistances to it. So, for example, one could read “Discourse in the Novel” as conflating the irony of the plebeian folk, their rustic native scepticism, with that more properly historical sense of language available in the nineteenth century novel. Both of these are called dialogical, as if the public square was populated with peasant Balzacs and merchant Dostoevskys. In the same vein, Bakhtin's own history of the novel can never quite decide whether its mode is cyclical, depicting a high poetic literary language periodically engulfed by popular heteroglossia, or developmental, as in the chronotope essays, where the novel gradually perfects its narrative technique, the better to depict so-called real history and social struggle. One cannot help thinking that behind these ambiguities lies a “populist” unwillingness to admit that dialogism may itself be the fruit of a long developmental process, that it might be linked to the specific historical conditions of modernity and might require its peculiar resources—a concept of historical record-keeping, high rates of literacy, a varied and cosmopolitan urban social life, historical consciousness, democratic and secular beliefs, and so on—none of which would be available to the peasant, however refined his or her irony in the public square.
The novel itself therefore, as a peculiarly modern genre, has work to do, yet Bakhtin, in keeping with populism, will only justify it with reference to the values of “the people.” He thus avoids confronting all the different respects in which the novel and popular speech are uneven, incapable of entering into a real dialogue: the unevenness, for example, between print technology and oral speech, the unevenness which results from differences in literacy and from the time and resources necessary for reflection on language, the unevenness that corresponds to social position and range of audience. In each of these respects the novel as speech, as that which accents or orchestrates heteroglossia, is constitutively different from that heteroglossia itself. And this unevenness, I will shortly argue, is not peculiar to this situation, but is a constitutive historical feature of our linguistic life.
If it turns out, then, that novelistic or dialogical writing can't embody the values of dialogue, is this a problem? Is dialogism just a sham rendering of dialogue, a case of novelists and intellectuals trying to cash in on the accepted values of dialogue or the notional vitality of plebeian sociability? Why doesn't Bakhtin revel in the distinctiveness of novelistic writing, in its difference from the everyday conversations of the people? The answer is that from his populist perspective, the constitutive, ineluctable unevenness of novelistic dialogism must appear as a limit on the possibilities discourse, as the point at which the brute facts of modern life make real dialogue unworkable, for better or worse. This would be bad news indeed, for it would mean that to have novels—forms of discourse which cite and represent—we have to give up on the ideal of a free and democratized language. The price of modernity, as represented by that peculiarly modern genre, the novel, would be loss of pure dialogue and plebeian sociability. And the absence of pure dialogue, so the argument would go, leads inevitably to authoritarianism, monologism, oppression, inequality.
Unless, of course, there is something wrong with the assumption that dialogue represents all we should hope for in the political and social life of language. That, needless to say, is my point. Or, more precisely, it is Bakhtin's point, even though he does not seem to know it. In describing the relation of the novel to “everyday language” as a dialogue, Bakhtin intended to extend the realm of dialogue. In fact, by pointing out to us all that novels can do, even though they aren't dialogues, he revealed us the limitations of the idea of dialogue. And a good thing too: for in the modern age, the age of print, of mass media and culture, of ostensibly democratic principles, dialogue would seem an impoverished ideal. It misses out too much about our speech life, it proposes models and aspirations unrealisable in all but a few situations. It would be a pity if all we could say in response was: too bad for modern life. Better to admit that there might be something to those genres which cite and represent, something they have that the public square lacks. Perhaps dialogism, to coin a phrase, reaches those parts dialogue cannot reach.
For dialogue, after all, does depend upon a rather peculiar model of language. It envisages language as an endless series of one-on-one encounters, encounters between speaking subjects who could in theory be evenly matched. The believer in dialogue naturally divides the stream of language into millions of roughly equivalent linguistic exchanges, each modeled on that famous Saussurean diagramme in which two heads pass between them the lonely linguistic sign. It is the combination of this model of language with the political ideals of individual autonomy and respect for others which gives the claims of dialogue such force. If language were at bottom composed of such exchanges, then our social and political ideals would surely demand that they all aspire to the exalted state of dialogue.
From the perspective of 1991, however, such a description of language appears a bit out-of-date. In fact, it is more of a fantasy than a description, for language, I would like to argue, has never corresponded to this model. Its fatal defect is that it takes no account of what I will call hereafter the uneven structuring of language, that is, the fact that the discursive world consists, not only of speaking individuals, but of a series of interacting structures or forms of discourse, which vary according to the durability of the utterance, the size and nature of speaker and audience, the degree of literacy required for participation, as well as the social factors highlighted in Bakhtin's own work. To use the face-to-face conversation as a model for the TV broadcast, the government directive, the religious service or cultic ceremony, the written record or the literary text is wrong-headed and restrictive, for all these forms must appear deficient to the extent that they make impossible the pure relations of dialogue. Not only do such discursive structures often entail some kind of internal unevenness, such as a clear and irreversible distinction between speaker and listener, the relations between them are likewise uneven. Writing, then print, then the electronic media of the twentieth century have endowed certain speech acts with a force unavailable to others; conversely face-to-face conversations often have a flexibility unavailable to the more durable utterance. As I will briefly indicate below, the unevenness runs along many different axes, such that no one form of speech holds the trump card. Neither does this unevenness necessarily run parallel to divisions of a social and political kind. The critical point is that the linguistic world always has and always will consist of such a hodge-podge of structures, and that between those structures relations of citation and representation well as dialogue obtain. To describe language as a vast ocean of utterances, all more or less alike, entails homogenizing a much more complicated process.
Bakhtin, the champion of heteroglossia, is, alas, one of the villains in this drama. For while he acknowledges the diversity of language he irons out the kinds of unevenness I am talking about when he argues that “there is a common plane which … justifies our juxtaposition of these languages: all the languages of heteroglossia, no matter what principle lies at the base of their particularization, appear as specific points of view on the world.”12 The difference between a newspaper and a shout in the street, however, cannot be described as a difference of point of view, and it would be silly to expect or desire that difference to be ironed out in a dialogue.
Neither, however, should we imagine that, having accepted the pervasiveness of citation and representation in the linguistic world, we can then expect this new, enlarged model of language to deliver some updated social and political ideal, capable of replacing dialogue in our politicosentimental life. As I said at the beginning, I would doubt that we can draw social or political standards from an account of language alone, however nuanced. Bakhtin himself only gave the idea of a dialogical novel political flesh by combining it with his own quasi-Nietszchean populism. But the starting point for our reflections, wherever they may lead, should be a vision of language as unevenly structured, full of forms which don't respond, as in a dialogue, but cite and represent. Any modern politics of language has to acknowledge that Gesellschaft is the order of the day, even in speech.
Of course, even to mention that ugly word is to set people on edge, to seem to prescribe an endless diet of linguistic alienation and homelessness. Needless to say, the aim of this paper is not to reassure people, to say: actually this modernity and all its citation is quite a good thing. The point is that it appears as a bad thing when people indulge in a kind of sociological romanticism about language, and that Bakhtin certainly does his part to encourage such romanticism. But at the same time his effusions about the novel, the people and the public square develop in his readers an enthusiasm for modernity which they may not want to own up to. When we become excited or inspired by his model of the novel, we recognise the possibilities or virtues not only of irony and sarcasm, in principle accessible to all, but of extensive historical knowledge, narrative sophistication, range of linguistic reference. These aren't modern features, but they're not something people are born with, either. If dialogism seems to require a certain level of literacy, cosmopolitanism and access to informational resources, then by rights we should look with pleasure, or at least hope, upon these products of modernity, even if they are bound up with the loss of linguistic Gemeinschaft.
If, then, dialogism isn't quite what we thought it was, if it isn't dialogue writ large, we should not despair. We ought to acknowledge the ineluctability of citation and representation in the social life of discourse. If we do not, we condemn ourselves, not to the past, which is, after all, irretrievable, but to a somewhat hypocritical populism, in which we forever pretend that the fruits of novelistic practice are available to all in their everyday dialogues. When we abuse dialogue, when we expect too much of it, we neglect those other forms of language and social exchange which tell us about virtues and possibilities besides those of dialogue, and tell us about the responsibilities of intellectual work, alas, not always reducible to the maintenance of dialogue. Dialogism is, I suppose, for real; for us, it seems, it is too real, for our fantasies of dialogue too often render it invisible.
Notes
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1975), p. 172. All citations from this collection of essays are taken from the essay “Slovo v romane” [“Discourse in the Novel”].
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Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo (Leningrad: Priboi, 1929), p. 70.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, pp. 89-90.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, p. 90.
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Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, p. 57.
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Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow: Isskustvo, 1979), p. 357.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, p. 76.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, p. 73.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, p. 144.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, p. 168.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, p. 169.
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Voprosy literatury i estetiki, p. 105.
My thanks to Bruce Robbins for his generous and thoughtful help with this paper.
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