The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays

Citation

Bakhtin, M. M. (1982). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (M. Holquist, Ed.; C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press.

Chapter Summary

The volume runs to about 480 pages in the University of Texas Press Slavic Series. After a note on the translation, it opens with a long editors' introduction, presents four essays written between 1934 and 1941, and closes with a glossary of Bakhtin's terminology and an index. The essays were selected from a larger Russian collection published in Moscow in 1975, and the editors arranged them by increasing difficulty rather than by date of composition.

Introduction (Holquist and Emerson)

The editors place the essays within Bakhtin's view of language and introduce the vocabulary used throughout. It is worth reading, but most readers will get more from it after one of the essays.

Epic and Novel

The essay defines the novel by contrast with the epic. The epic speaks from an absolute past in a single authoritative language, while the novel is open to the present, to other genres and to a variety of ways of speaking about the world.

From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse

The publisher singles out this essay as the place where Bakhtin treats the novel less as a genre than as a force he calls "novelness". The essay examines early texts for traces of that force, with polyglossia (several languages interacting within one culture) and parody as its main constituents.

Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel

Bakhtin follows narrative prototypes from the ancient Greek romance towards Rabelais and analyses how each represents time and space together, the pairing he calls the chronotope. The essay is literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox manner.

Discourse in the Novel

The final essay turns from the novel to language itself, which Bakhtin sees as stratified into dialects, subgenres and competing social "languages". Heteroglossia, the novel's capacity to orchestrate these voices, and the opposition between homogenising and dispersing tendencies in language are developed here.

Glossary

A reference section explaining Bakhtin's specialised terms, useful when reading the later essays.

Key Concepts

The four essays

• Novelness: Bakhtin's name for a force that works through many forms of writing, not a property of one narrow genre.
• Polyglossia and parody: the interaction of languages and the laughing double of serious genres, both named as sources of the novel's prehistory.
• Chronotope: the fusion of time and space in a narrative, treated as a way of analysing types of story.
• Heteroglossia: the coexistence of many social and ideological voices within a single language.
• Dialogic and monologic language: language that answers other voices, as against language that claims one unified authority.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Editorial support. The publisher lists a note on translation, a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin's thought and a glossary of terminology. For a vocabulary as unusual as this one, that apparatus is a real help.
• A considered order. Placing the essays by difficulty means that "Epic and Novel" works as an entry point, while the densest essay on discourse comes last.
• Range. The essays move from the epic and the Greek romance to Rabelais and to the stratification of everyday language, so the book supports both literary-historical and linguistic readings of fiction.
• Reception. Reviewers quoted by the publisher greeted the volume as a magnificently edited and translated starting point for further discussion of Bakhtin (Comparative Literature) and as the work of a major theorist of the twentieth century (Voice Literary Supplement).

Limitations

• Idiosyncratic terms. The publisher itself calls Bakhtin's use of "novel" highly idiosyncratic, claiming far more territory for it than the tradition does, and the editors need a glossary for his vocabulary. Readers should expect to build definitions slowly.
• A selection. The four essays are drawn from a Russian collection of six, so the volume does not present all of the material Bakhtin wrote in this period.
• Open-ended argument. A review quoted by the publisher (Genre) describes the book as an art of possibilities rather than answers, which can frustrate readers who want a systematic theory with a stated method.
• Assumed reading. The essays refer to a wide range of works from antiquity onward, so readers with little background in the history of the novel will need support.

Where It Fits in the Course

Within the course on the novel, this is a theoretical text for readers who already know what novels do. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lodge's The Art of Fiction are gentler introductions to the components and techniques of fiction, and MacKay's The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel is a short overview with extended readings. Watt's The Rise of the Novel offers a historical argument focused on eighteenth-century England, a useful contrast to Bakhtin's much longer perspective, which reaches back to the epic and the Greek romance.

Lukács's The Theory of the Novel is the other advanced text in the list. It also sets the novel against the epic, but it reads the form through the philosophy of history, whereas Bakhtin reads it through language and social voices. Reading "Epic and Novel" next to Lukács's essay shows two answers to the same question.

How to Use This Book

The book suits graduate students and advanced undergraduates in literary theory, comparative literature and Russian studies, as well as readers who meet terms such as heteroglossia and chronotope in later criticism and want the source. Read several novels first, since every essay needs examples to test against.

A workable plan is to start with "Epic and Novel", then read the essays in the printed order, keeping the glossary open. Go back to the editors' introduction after the first two essays, when its summary of Bakhtin's view of language will make more sense. Readers whose main interest is style and narrative voice may prefer to move on to "Discourse in the Novel" sooner, while those working on plot, setting or genre history can concentrate on the chronotope essay. Whatever the entry point, test each key term on a novel you know well and write a one-paragraph summary of each essay before moving on.