Overview Bakhtin's views anticipated the analytical school of linguistic philosophy, and emphasized the vitality of language.

Speech and writing come with the viewpoints and intentions of their authors preserved in the multi-layered nature of langua ge, and heteroglossia is therefore an effective argument against some of the mor e extreme views of Postmodernism. Introduction Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) had to survive the turmoil of the Russian Revolution , the Stalinist purges, and the hardships of the second world war before receivi ng even modest recognition. He was born in Orel, south of Moscow, and educated a t the universities of Odessa and St. Petersburg. In 1918 he graduated, and was d rawn into the literary freedom and experimentation of the early years of the Rev olution, making friends with its writers and critics, and perhaps writing parts of works by Medvedev and Volosinov. {1} Bakhtin's first acknowledged book, Probl ems of Dostoevsky's Art, had the misfortune of appearing in 1929, during Stalin' s clampdown, and earned its author a banishment to Kazakstan. He was later allow ed to move to a small town near Moscow, where he supported himself by clerical a nd teaching jobs. Bakhtin eventually defended his doctoral thesis on Rabelais in 1946, and in the sixties and seventies saw his work published in Russia and tra nslated abroad. {2} Always a socialist, Bakhtin was committed to change, though he never abandoned his Greek Orthodox faith. He finally obtained a post at the S aransk Teachers Training College, from which he retired in 1961, becoming well k nown and respected in Moscow literary circles. Details Whereas the Russian formalists drew their inspiration from Saussure, seeing lang uage as a system of signs, Bakhtin took a sociological line similar to that late r developed in Austin's speech acts. The spoken word is primary, and words in co nversation are orientated towards future words they stimulate and anticipated re plies, structuring themselves to do so. Many genres (e.g. epics, tragedy, lyrics ) overlook or even suppress this natural feature of language to present a unifie d world-view. But the novel accepts, and indeed makes use, of many voices, weavi ng them into a narrative with direct speech, represented speech, and what Bakhti n called doubly-orientated speech. Four categories make up the latter: stylizati on (a borrowed style), parody, skaz (oral narration) and dialogue (a hidden shap ing of the author's voice). {3} Bakhtin stressed the multi-layered nature of language, which he called heteroglo ssia. Not only are there social dialects, jargons, turns of phrase characteristi c of the various professions, industries, commerce, of passing fashions, etc., b ut also socio-ideological contradictions carried forward from various periods an d levels in the past. Language is not a neutral medium that can be simply approp riated by a speaker, but something that comes to us populated with the intention s of others. Every word tastes of the contexts in which it has lived its sociall y-charged life. Bakhtin's concepts go further than Derrida's notion of 'trace', or Foucault's ar chaeology of political usage. Words are living entities, things that are constan tly being employed and partly taken over, carrying opinions, assertions, beliefs , information, emotions and intentions of others, which we partially accept and modify. All speech is dialogic, has an internal polemic, and this is most fully exploited by the novel, particularly the modern novel. {4} Evaluation Bakhtin's work anticipated many concerns of Modernist and Postmodernist writing, most notably that of viewpoint. Sociologists recognize communities of discourse overlapping groupings with common beliefs, interests and styles of expressing t hemselves. The groups have no sharp boundaries, and indeed individuals may belon g to several such groups. A white, middle-aged literary critic may be a member o

f the local Church and produce articles of a New Criticism orientation, differin g from a work colleague who espouses a feminist viewpoint and attends political rallies. Their active vocabularies will be slightly different, and many words wi ll evoke different experiences and carry different connotations. Repression for the first will conjure up third-world police brutality, while the second may fin d repression voiced in speech all around her. To what extent do they really understand each other? Many analytical philosopher s would argue that understanding was potentially complete beliefs, emotions, exp eriences must be particular to individuals, but statements otherwise can be conv erted into an objective, literal language, and checked against the facts. Conver sely, some literary critics (e.g. Stanley Fish) would argue that understanding w as inherently incomplete, or perhaps a meaningless term. Fish's interpretative c ommunities have different paradigms or frames of reference, and cannot be compar ed except to some universal frame of reference, which does not exist. Bakhtin's work allows us to recognize both views as extreme. There is no purely literal language, and concepts of truth and meaning have finally to be treated a s ways of reacting to experience rather than as logical concepts applying across all possible worlds. Fish's paradigms overlook the ways we reach understanding, that we are constantly checking and adapting our paradigms against our understa nding of the world. Paradigms which fail to fully make sense of our surroundings are dropped, or held by very few people. {5} And this, very naturally, is how c ommunities evolve, even the poetry community. There is no centralizing programme or policy, but a network of alliances, overlapping and shifting frames of refer ence which are constantly being modified by chance, ignorance, experiences, conv ersations, by television, newspapers, magazines and books. It was Bakhtin's achievement to formalize this approach, and show how the variet y of voices (each with their different community of discourse) make up a modern novel. Novelists have long realized that even if a single viewpoint is adopted f irst person narrator or omniscient author all characters nonetheless have to act consistently, according to their inner motivations, speaking a language that co nvincingly expresses their goals and characters. But Bakhtin devised a terminolo gy which serves Postmodernist fiction with its multiple or indeterminate endings , and so goes further than many western commentators on the novel further than P ercy Lubbock, Cleanth Brooks, Mark Schorer, David Lodge or Wayne Booth. {6} Bakhtin's work also provides an answer to Foucault and others who see language a s an instrument of state repression. There is no common viewpoint in modern writ ing, any more than literature can be written to order, by following some bluepri nt or recipe. Writing of any length inevitably contains what Bakhtin called the carnivalesque the expressive, random, individual viewpoint. Language may be satu rated with ideology, but it never represents the one, monolithic viewpoint. Bakhtin's approach illuminates not only politics and the novel, but many aspects of poetry creation and interpretation. Words in a poem naturally arrive with th eir past usages and intentions, but become hybridized in the good poem i.e. enti rely taken over by the poet, losing their many worlds of reference. Intentionall y and consciously by the poet, and so understood by the reader, the polyglot soc ial contexts are fused into the one horizon. Inevitably this must be so, or the poem would lack autonomy or artistic unity. {7} And so the way lies open to an a uthoritarian, fossilized diction, and to poetry as the preserve of a priestly cl ass, matters which Bakhtin deplored. But neither is inevitable. Poetry in the past drew on a wide range of social reg isters, which are more apparent to the history scholar perhaps than to the casua l reader, but exist nonetheless. Much of Postmodernism poetry tries very hard no t to be literary, to incorporate the raw material of colloquial speech and writi ng into its creations. Indeed some contemporary poetry openly exploits heteroglo

ssia

the poetry of Larkin, Tony Harrison and Brecht, for example. {8}