Bakhtin's Terminology

Below are definitions, examples, and quotations for four key terms in Bakhtin's theory of the novel.

Incompletedness. Synonyms for this include "developing," "evolving," and "reevaluating." For Bakthin, genres such as epic and romance are "complete," while the novel is "incomplete." This incompleteness occurs on two levels:

1. The novel has no fixed (completed) form, but each new novel must create its own form.
2. Since the world and characters of the novel are not distanced, but close to our own life world, we as readers must "complete" the novel's meaning. Unlike other forms, the novel tends to hint that its own account of things is not the only one, or the absolute truth.

This does NOT mean that novels don't have endings.

"Thanks to this epic distance, which excludes any possibility of activity and change, the epic world achieves a radical degree of completedness not only in its content but in its meaning and its values as well. The epic world is constructed in the zone of an absolute distanced image, beyond the sphere of possible contact with the developing, incomplete and therefore re-thinking and reevaluating present [which is the sphere of the novel]."

Hybridization. When two or more forms come together to make something distinct.

Characteristic for Don Quixote is the parodied hybridization of the "alien, miraculous world" chronotope [time and space] of chivalric romances, with the "high road winding

through one's native land" chronotope that is typical of the picaresque novel.

Polyglossia. Literally, "many languages." The presence of two or more languages or dialects in a literary text, including sociodialects. For example, Sancho Panza speaks like an illiterate peasant, with many proverbs, Don Quixote like a walking book. Most literary genres attempt to create a "pure" language, while the novel embraces polyglossia. "The new cultural and creative consciousness [of the novel] lives in an actively polyglot world. The world becomes polyglot, once and for all and

irreversibly."

Dialogism. The dialogue implied in this term is between forms, not between people. When other forms appear in the novel, they become relativized, lose the authority they had as "monologues," and are forced to enter into dialogue with other forms. The songs and proverbs of the Ibo world are dialogized when they appear in Things Fall Apart.

"The novel gets on poorly with other genres. The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them."