The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin Review English Literature Seminar II

discourse, especially those residing in language choices—vocabulary, syntax, phonics, etc.—can be

Analysis
“What is difficult about Bakhtin,” his biographers, Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, have noted,
“is the demand his way of thinking makes on our way of thinking, the demand to change the basic
categories that most of us use to organize thought itself.” Wayne Booth clarifies the specific nature of
that demand: “No critic of recent years [has] more effectively perform[ed] that essential task of all
criticism: prodding readers to think again about critical standards as applied to various canons and anti-
canons those standards lead to.” What Bakhtin does, at least in part, is to undermine those naive
equations upon which so much of modern literary criticism rests: that the fictive world corresponds to
the real world (naive realism), that the author corresponds to some actual man or woman (naive
biographism), and that the reader corresponds to oneself (rather than to the role of reader which one
adopts when reading a novel). Rather than simple correspondences, Bakhtin calls attention to
simultaneous dialogic relationships. He posits “a dialogic both/and” rather than “a dialectic either/or.”
In other words, the dialogism of language, of word and world and of self and other, is neither dualistic
nor dialectical but is dialogical. (Bakhtin has a strong aversion to dialectics, which he faults for its
desire to dissolve the specific in the abstract.)
Bakhtin bases his theory of dialogism on the concrete utterance, on both what is said and what is
assumed by addresser and addressee about what is said. All utterances, whether of speaker or of
novelist, are directed toward a listener/reader and toward that person’s response. No utterance is
therefore ever autonomous. The same holds true for the literary text, which may be construed as a
macroutterance. Its meaning also depends on the dialogic, or intertextual, relationships among text,
author, and reader.
The individual novel is therefore essentially dialogic, essentially open and indeterminate in its
meaning. The same may be said of the novel as a genre. “The genre of becoming,” as Bakhtin calls it,
is also incomplete, unformed and still developing. Implying “a world-in-the-making,” it is itself in the
process of becoming what it is. Instead of asserting its own rigid identity, it seeks to liberate itself from
convention, including the convention of assigning to the author the ultimate authority for the meaning
of his or her work. Bakhtin’s author exists not above his characters, omnisciently, but in dialogue with
them (this despite the fact that the author does not enter the novel directly; rather, he exists at the point
at which all the novel’s languages/voices intersect). No one character (or voice or utterance) speaks for
the author; all exist equidistantly from him. As Booth has acknowledged,The challenge of such
views . . . about the author’s voice is clear and deep. Again and again I have sought, like most of my

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The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin Review English Literature Seminar II

Western colleagues, to put into propositional form my summaries of what an author is up to, and of
how a given character’s role contributes to the author’s overall plan.
In abolishing the autonomy of the text and the authority of the author, Bakhtin radically opens the
novel to the plurality of intertextual possibilities. Such a gesture makes the novel into a perfect
reflection of that quality which Holquist claims characterizes the mind of Mikhail Bakhtin: his
“extraordinary sensitivity to the immense plurality of experience.” Bakhtin’s gesture, however, does
more. In denying the validity of all direct expressions and all direct meanings and in stressing the
determining factor of contextual relations, Bakhtin makes clear that a language is not only a means of
communication but also a system of belief. Thus, to come to know language in its dialogical essence is
to become aware of the plurality of languages within it and of the plurality of belief systems. This is
precisely the knowledge that the dialogical novel makes possible, for the truly dialogical novel “refuses
to acknowledge its own language as the sole verbal and semantic center of the ideological world.” In
fact, the dialogical novel accomplishes nothing less than the decentering of such a world insofar as it
makes clear that no word is final, that all are inevitably and at best penultimate. Thus, the novel, or
rather the novelistic discourse, no longer seems to “reflect a situation” but itself becomes a situation—
is not a record of utterances merely but is itself an utterance, is self-reflexive rather than referential. It
becomes a linguistic space within which a multiplicity of democratically heard voices present
themselves, where no one can assert an authority in order to silence any or all of the others.
To write and to read/interpret means for Bakhtin neither to define nor to explain but to translate.
Conceiving of understanding as a form of translation puts Bakhtin in the same camp with the
semioticians Charles Saunders Peirce and Umberto Eco, who, a century apart, have claimed that every
decoding constitutes another encoding in a process of endless semiosis. The “relativizing of linguistic
consciousness” that Bakhtin sees at play both in the novel and in language must, however, itself be
understood as a part of yet another dialogical relationship, one which exists within the structure of
Bakhtin’s dialogical mode of thinking. Although he steadfastly resists all that is dogmatic, he is equally
opposed to relativism for being just as simplistic and reductive. Although he celebrates the centrifugal
forces that make heteroglossia not only possible but also inevitable, he understands that equally strong
centripetal forces are simultaneously at work, propelling language toward that elusive unity which must
fall far short of the imagined linguistic paradise, taking as it does the form of an official language
imposed by the few on the many. The longing for some final word is therefore both a danger and a
hope. On the one hand there is the fact of heteroglossia; on the other, there is that faith shared by
Bakhtin and all speakers “that [they] will be understood somehow, sometime, by somebody”; without
that faith, they “would not speak at all.”

Critical Context
The critical context for Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism is, appropriately, double and must therefore itself
be understood dialogically. It must be placed within the contexts of not only the specific intellectual
setting in which it was formulated but also the poststructuralist period of the 1980’s, when Bakhtin’s

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The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin Review English Literature Seminar II

posthumously translated works began to exert such a great influence in the West on critics. Much of
what is included in The Dialogical Imagination was written in response to Russian Formalism, at the
time the most influential school of literary thought in the Soviet Union. Bakhtin’s debt to the Formalists
is undeniable, but it is their differences that are most significant. Where the Formalists stressed the
distinction between literary language and everyday speech, Bakhtin noted the similarities and dialogic
relations. For their methodological precision he substituted a far more speculative approach, concluding
that no text (or utterance) can be reduced to the sum of its literary devices. Bakhtin’s emphasis on the
openness of literature and language made him suspect not only to the Formalists but also to the Soviet
authorities, whose revolutionary Socialist experiment (toward which Bakhtin was sympathetic) had
already degenerated into repressive monologue. It is this same openness, coupled with his having
anticipated so many of the most important ideas of later narratologists, that has made him so attractive
a figure in the 1980’s.
Bakhtin’s challenge to the naive assumptions upon which traditional theories are based is especially
remarkable when one considers when and under what trying circumstances he conceived them. Yet they
are no more remarkable than the evenhanded way in which he has coupled these challenges, as well as
an insistence on the novel’s (and language’s) essential indeterminacy, to an equally strong commitment
to the novel’s social and communicative functions—a commitment that calls into question many of the
most fashionable claims of such influential critics as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.

summary edited by Professor Norma Isabel Ojeda for Educational purposes