Bakhtin’s Discourse in the Novel has been an interesting read, and has highlighted some aspects of the discourse we use in everyday life that I had not previously considered. I suppose I have already ‘unconsciously’ illustrated Žižek’s philosophy in accepting everything so unquestioningly!

Bakhtin’s notion of the hybrid nature of language; its intertextuality and the relation between each word really demonstrates the power and influence language can have. It can be used to educate or bring down entire systems, purely “through the medium of their specific concrete instancing” (675). The ‘stratification’ of language I think is very important when we think of relations and hierarchies within a society; each social group tends towards their own language, and thus each interpretation, utterance and meaning of an individual word will always be different.

Bakhtin has personified language for me; he speaks of it as having the ability “to infect with its own intention” (675) different semantic meanings. Also that “these languages live a real life” (676); “it exists in people’s mouths” (677) and it tastes of the context in which it has lived. These suggestions seem to point to language as some form of disease – which I don’t enjoy associating it with for one moment, but I suppose we could refer to it as such. It is resilient, and always evolving into new strands of other ‘language’ so as to ensure its survival. Each word we say has previously been someone else’s and we take it and ‘mutate’ it into our own; giving it our own meaning. Language is also “overpopulated” (677) with the intentions of others, therefore it is imperative that we make it our own so as to ensure our utterances bear some significance. Language also faces a constant struggle as it is fighting past social groups and stratification which continually evolve and form new dialogues surrounding their own specific belief systems. Furthermore the novelist must contend with this barrage of numerous systems and stratifications of language, and in turn create his own language, often resorting to “heteroglossia” (679) (which in itself sounds like something you wouldn’t want to catch!); incorporating “another’s speech in another’s language”, as Bakhtin explains. So the novel brings into the conscious mind the diversity and abundance of different social speech types. Also within this cacophony of other voices scrambling for the reader’s attention, the reader must contend with his own voice, which will again take on a whole different utterance and meaning, and so affecting his own interpretation of the novel and the language which lives within it.

I just have one issue with Bakhtin; he talks about “authoritative discourse”, which always remains a “dead quotation” (684) as it is a thing in its own right – I interpreted this to allude to ‘innate’ truths, such as (some may argue) the existence of God, as “its authority was already acknowledged in the past” (683). Bakhtin then goes on to talk about “internally persuasive discourse” (685) which I took to mean something that has been taken, developed, worked on, churned up and spat out in some sense, by our own and other’s interaction with discourse, but surely at one point all discourse has been internally persuasive? So I would like to know when authoritative discourse stopped being internally persuasive and got its promotion in the linguistic realm?