Bakhtinian Double Voicing in Dickens and Eliot

Abstract

M. M. Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, the implicit or explicit dialogue of differently situated voices that is both generated by and is the condition of all discourse, easily lures one into labyrinthine theoretical constructs. It would seem that the reader's understanding of a discourse results from a dialogical relationship with the author that is also in dialogical tension with other persons' dialogical understandings of that discourse, which are in themselves internally dialogical as well as externally dialogically related to an indeterminate number of other internally and externally dialogical discourses. Simple linear post-structuralist indeterminacy in which the meaning of each sign is determined by the meaning of other signs seems humdrum beside such a fractal structure. However, to rush too rapidly from generating insights to theoretical pleasure domes of vast dimensions is frequently to lose sight of the difference between analytical and ideological application. While Bakhtin's preoccupation with the universality of the dialogical in human experience and especially human communication has led him to recognize and name a set of specific narrative devices, it is not the case that these devices necessarily reproduce the ultimate dialogicality to which he is philosophically committed. While Dostoevsky may create polyphonic novels that are truly dialogic in the sense that the author in no way presents a final resolution to conflicts between the dominant ideas (ideologies in Bakhtin's sense) of the characters, the irreducible mental structures he gives them are nevertheless creations of the author-minds and interrelations so constructed as to be irreducible and beyond final external evaluation. Moreover, even Dostoevsky's celebration of dialogism is ideological in the Bakhtinian sense and thus ultimately monological. To make this argument does not deny Bakhtin's ultimately Platonic principle that human experience is so complex that no novel, no philosophy can sum it up: it simply means that that very principle denies the possibility of achieving a final dialogicality through any possible text. The necessary dialogicality can, in any case, be represented, its effects achieved, in the novel, and Bakh-