Chapter One
The Fractal
Pretext
The intention of this study is to read literary texts so as to illuminate their discursive interactions. Texts by Shakespeare and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz were selected because these texts manifest a particularly broad range of discursive activity. Characters differ widely in both Shakespeare's poetic drama and in Sor Juana dramatic poetry, but more importantly for this study, their discourses differ widely.
The discourses which constitute the literary texts interact in relationships of power. That is, not only do the characters interact in a drama of power, their speeches interact in a discourse of power. Rather than focus on the interactions of characters, their psychologies, their historical referents, their human struggles, I intend to focus on the interactions of the discourses themselves. Discourses constitute texts and manifest narrative events, but in another sense, they realize a conflict among discourses of relatively different levels of authority. The focus of this study is therefore a reading of the interrelationship between literature and authority, between discourse and power.
Such a reading requires a theoretical model that would enable the resolution of three potential problems. First, the theoretical model must be able to treat the texts as discursive activity. Second, the model must permit analysis of the full range of discursive activities contained in the texts. Three, it must allow a means of identifying power relationships. The model must empower the reading of Shakespeare's Richard II and 1 Henry IV and Sor Juana's San Pedro Nolasco as sites of interactions among heterogeneous discourses.
These texts contain very complex discursive interactions. Richard II and 1 Henry IV represent a struggle for the English crown involving kings, noblemen, tavern folk, and Welshmen. Sor Juana's San Pedro Nolasco juxtaposes poet, student, slave, and Aztec. These different characters are represented by very different discursive styles: there is the poetry of Richard, the prose of Falstaff, the Latin of the student, and the Nahuatl of the Aztec. The range of discursive styles contained in the texts includes disparate discourses as well as disparate languages.
The theoretical method must be able to account for the interactions among heterogeneous discourses (poetic and prose) and among heterogeneous languages (Latin and Nahuatl). In addition, a model which would further enable the reading of prediscursive and paratextual material would make possible a complete reading, one from the level of languages to the level of the sentence and below. Therefore, an ideal model would make possible the reading of the multiplicities of languages and of prediscourses and paratexts in a similar manner to the reading of discourses.
The dialogical principle of Mikhail Bakhtin affords a theory of reading which fulfills two of the model's requirements. In delineating a theory of heteroglossia, Bakhtin offers a means of treating conflicts among languages and among voices. Heteroglossia offers a vocabulary for reading the interactions contained in a multilingual text, such as the interaction of Latin and Nahuatl in San Pedro Nolasco. Similarly, the notion of heterophony offers a means of relating individuals discourses in conflict, such as the interaction of Richard and Bolingbroke. Bakhtin's notion of dialogism offers the method of identifying the relative levels of authority manifested by conflicting languages or discourses. His theory offers two parts of the required model: the ability to read languages and discourses as discursive interanimation and the ability to read power relationships.
The final area of concern, that of reading the conflicts among prediscursive and paratextual material, poses difficulties not remedied by Bakhtin's theories. Because prediscourse is, by definition, outside the domain of discourse and because paratext is somehow beside the text, both areas are difficult to treat as discourse. Semiotics offers a solution. The treatment of prediscursive and paratextual material as signs enables the discussion of what is normally considered preliterary or extraliterary material. The semiotic theory of Groupe µ, which is a rhetorical semiotics, enables a rhetorical treatment of prediscourse and paratext.
I propose a model which combines elements from the theories of Bakhtin with those of Groupe µ. The model enables a similar analysis of interactions at the levels of language (heteroglossia), discourse (heterophony), and sign (heterosemia). The model takes its name from the fractal: a repeating form at different levels.
Introduction
What follows is a discussion of Bakhtin's theories and the delineation of the fractal model. The discussion Bakhtin's dialogical principle is divided into three sections, Bakhtin's Voices, The Stratification of Discourse, and Historicism and Polyglossia. This is followed by, the theoretical model in Fractal. The model differentiates three levels of discursive interaction: that of languages (heteroglossia), of discourses (heterophony), and of signs (heterosemia). The discussion of model is divided into two sections, Models and The Fractal.
The reading of the texts is reserved for the subsequent chapters. In chapter two, Heteroglossia, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's San Pedro Nolasco is analyzed. The fractal model is applied to the reading of a multilingual text, that is, a text composed of multiple national languages. Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl interanimate in San Pedro Nolasco. Chapter three, Heterophony, treats Richard II and 1 Henry IV. The interanimations at this level are those of discourse. The variety of discourses are characterized according to social language and to voice. Chapter four, the last, is entitled Heterosemia. This chapter returns to the previously discussed texts but focuses on the interanimation of prediscursive and paratextual signs. Heterosemia begins with a thorough discussion of the theory of Groupe µ and its integration into the fractal model.
Bakhtin's Voices
Bakhtin's methodology is based on the investigation of slovo, which is variously translated both as word and as discourse. The notion of dialogism is based on the variant manipulation of slovo, word and discourse. As Michael Holquist suggests in his translation, The Dialogic Imagination, perhaps the Greek logos is best, in that it signifies both word and use of words (427). One major benefit of a discursive based analysis is that it allows for the similar treatment of the literary and nonliterary alike. In providing a means for the classification of literary genres, it provides means for the analysis of all discourse, since all discursive activity is a manipulation of logos.
The key to Bakhtin's analysis is its focus on the interaction of discourses. That is, literary texts are treated as discourses, or groups of discourses, which relate in a multitude of ways with other discourses. His is an analysis which characterizes all discursive activity, literary and nonliterary, according to the degree of interanimation (or interillumination, vzaimnoosvescenie) within the diversities of voices and of languages. In Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle, Todorov explains Bakhtin's position by defining his terminology:
If we go now from the model of the particular utterance to the set of utterances that constitute the verbal life of a community, one fact appears, to Bakhtin, more striking that all others: the existence of types of utterances, or discourses, in a relatively high but nonetheless limited number…. The stress is not on the plurality but on the difference (there is no need to conceive of higher level unit of which all the discourses would be variants; Bakhtin takes a stand against the idea of a unification). To name this irreducible diversity of discursive types, Bakhtin introduces a neologism, raznorecie, which I translate (literally, but with the aid of a Greek root) by heterology, a term that inserts itself between two other parallel coinages, raznojazycie, heteroglossia or diversity of languages, and raznogolosie, heterophony or diversity of (individual) voices. (56)
Holquist's translation and glossary and Todorov's translation and commentary complement each other. Some of the complexities of Bakhtin's theories can be gleaned by comparing the different works. For example, Holquist does not employ the term heterology and instead translates both raznorecie and raznojazycie as heteroglossia, and identifies the cognate, raznorecivost', as diversity of speech (294, 428, 430). He does not explicitly note raznogolosie nor does he use the term heterophony (he does use polyphony, following Bakhtin's metaphor of the musical novel) (430). Todorov's use of three terms seem to condense into one for Holquist. For Holquist and many critics, heteroglossia is sufficient and is used in a broad sense to encompass all discursive diversity, whether it be at the level of languages or of voices.
Heteroglossia, in the broad sense leads to much more than a static accounting of diverse discursive elements. Todorov identifies one of the basic tenets of heteroglossia, "There is no utterance without relation to other utterances, and that is essential (Mikhail Bakhtin 60). Heteroglossia and the related terms, polyglossia and monoglossia, designate the discursive diversity which is the precondition for discursive interanimation. Heteroglossia indicates the quality of language diversity; polyglossia, mnogojazycie, and monoglossia, odnojazycie, indicate the quantity of diversity. Bakhtin's analogy for this discursive interanimation suggests its appellation, "These relations… are analogous (but certainly not identical with) the relations between the exchanges of a dialogue," and, "Two verbal works, two utterances, in juxtaposition, enter into a particular kind of semantic relation, which we call dialogical" (qtd. in Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin 60-61). Hence Bakhtin's term for discursive interanimation: dialogism. Discourses, including those in literary texts, exist in dialogical relationships: it is as if they speak with one another. Todorov offers the brief definition, "Ce mot un peu pédant, dialogisme, désigne la duplicité des voix que l'on entend à travers chaque énoncé, la pluralité de discours que caractérise tout sujet parlant…" ("Dialogisme et schizophrenie" 565)
And it is precisely this notion of dialogues of literary texts that forms the basis for Bakhtin's discussion of dialogism and its antithesis, monologism. The move from literary discursive activity to dialogism is accomplished as follows. First, Bakhtin understands that all linguistic expressions and all literary genres are discursive, and that "The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse" (Dialogic Imagination 279). Literary and nonliterary discourse alike are approached with a single understanding, one which defines any discursive genre as a set of relatively stable types of utterances. As Todorov observes, this theoretical move locates literary discourse within the world of speech, "The unseverable bond between a genre and its linguistic reality makes it always possible to relate literary genres to other discursive genres. For the notion of genre is not the exclusive prerogative of literature; it is rooted in the everyday use of language" (Mikhail Bakhtin 81).
Second, because of the precondition of heteroglossia, all discourse, every word, is internally dialogized. All language functions in relation to language which precedes it, to language which is apart from it, yet which contextualizes it. "The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object" (Dialogic Imagination 279). This can be graphically represented by the discourse of the self linked to a previous discourse (See figure 1).
Figure 1
Internal Dialogism: Bakhtin
For Todorov, dialogism is a transhistorical intertextuality:
After Adam, there are no nameless objects nor any unused words. Intentionally or not, all discourse is in dialogue with prior discourses on the same subject, as well as with discourses yet to come, whose reactions it foresees and anticipates. A single voice can make itself heard only by blending into the complex choir of other voices already in place. This is not only true of literature but of all discourse…. (Mikhail Bakhtin x)
He augments Bakhtin's notion of internal dialogism. Todorov sees not only connection to the discourse of past others, but to future others also (See figure 2).
Figure 2
Internal Dialogism: Bakhtin + Todorov
Third, despite this pervasive heteroglossia, there do remain the possibilities not only of polyglossia, but of monoglossia as well; and not only of dialogism, but of monologism too. Bakhtin defines a discourse as dialogical if it engages in heteroglot dialogue, monological, if it engages in monoglot monologue. As one critic notes, "the concepts of dialogism and monologism which underlie the novelistic/poetic division are anti-formalist…" (Hirschkop 77). For Bakhtin the key distinction is whether a discourse, of any sort, seeks dialogue with the other discourse, or whether it seeks to inhibit dialogue in favor of its own monologue.
Bakhtin aligns the dialogical/monological dyad with what he understands to be the essential distinction between poetry and novel.
But—we repeat—in the majority of poetic genres, the unity of the language system and the unity (and uniqueness) of the poet's individuality as reflected in his language and speech, which is directly realized in this unity, are indispensable prerequisites of poetic style. The novel, however, not only des not require these conditions but (as we have said) even makes of the internal stratification of language, of its social heteroglossia and the variety of individual voices in it, the prerequisite for authentic novelistic prose. (Dialogic Imagination 264)
For Bakhtin, poetry becomes synonymous with a monologic style. He marks poetic discourse by its internal orientation. The thrust of such discourse is not outside itself toward a dialogue among the diversities of voices and of languages but rather, an inward move toward a solitary and monologized discourse:
The language of the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic world outside of which nothing else exists and nothing else is needed. The concept of many worlds of language, all equal in their ability to conceptualize and to be expressive, is organically denied to poetic style.
The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse. Contradictions, conflicts and doubts remain in the object, in thoughts, in living experiences—in short, in the subject matter—but they do not enter into the language itself. (Dialogic Imagination 286)
This discursive monologism is an essential feature of the genre: the poetic image-trope works in the space between discourse and its object, as the image-word. Poetic slovo, discourse and word, suppresses the possibility of intertextualization which heteroglossia offers. Instead, the image-word dynamics collapses poetry into itself, effectively cutting off the possibility of outward interanimation: a unified and singular, monologized image-word activity, devoid of dialogism. In this sense, poetry is an utterance, a direct and single-voiced speech act.
Bakhtin then proceeds to characterize the novel in an equally adamant but opposite definition. "The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized" (Dialogic Imagination 262). Novelistic discourse is the converse of poetic discourse. Novelistic discourse embraces heteroglossia and dialogizes discourse. It becomes the textual locus and occasion for interanimation among voices, among languages:
The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of social diversity of speech types [raznorcie] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorecie] can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization—this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel. (Dialogic Imagination 263)
This differentiation of poetry and novel seems rigid, idiosyncratic, and of little use for the classification of many modern texts. But Bakhtin's use of the poetry and novel do not signify the popular categories. Poetry and novel are relatively stable sets of discourse in a universe of such sets. The novel signifies a style of writing which seeks to dialogize, "Should poetry attempt to avail itself of this resource, it is immediately drawn to the side of the novel. Bakhtin constantly cites Pushkin's Eugene Onegin as an example of the novel, not of poetry" (Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin 64). Poetry signifies a style of writing which seeks to monologize; in fact, he identifies poetry with myth, a discourse rooted in the past which suppresses present dialogue:
Bakhtin sketches an opposition between the novel and myth, two "genres" that seem to him to constitute the opposite poles of the intertextual continuum. Myth implies a transparency of language, a coincidence of words and things; the novel starts out with plurality of languages, discourses, and voices, and the inevitable awareness of language as such…. (Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin 66)
The importance of this opposition lies in the opposition of dialogism and monologism. Novelistic discourse is marked by, and consequently comes to signify, the acknowledgement that slovo belongs only half to the individual and half to the alien other. Poetic discourse is linked with "unitary language," "single voicedness," and the marginalization of the alien other. The distinction is further elaborated upon in the following sections. Verse form, for example, in its adherence to traditional form, its establishment of a hierarchy of quality of verse, and its suppression of spontaneous speech, becomes identified as poetic and therefore, monologic discourse.
The Stratification of Discourse
Discourses can not only be identified through their temporal and spatial relationships (internal and external dialogism), they can also be stratified into a hierarchy. This is part of the reason for Todorov's insistence on maintaining the distinction between the diversity of languages and that of voices, between hetero-glossia and hetero-phony. For Bakhtin, the forces that make dialogism also exert a stratifying force on language. This stratification is not a stable and fixed hierarchy, but rather a dynamic shuffling. He identifies three main levels of discursive interaction where dialogism can occur:
first, amid others' utterances inside a single language (the primordial dialogism of discourse), amid other "social languages" within a single national language and finally amid different national languages within the same culture, that is, the same socio-ideological conceptual horizon. (The Dialogic Imagination 275).
Dialogism is the epistemic and semantic mode characterizing discursive interanimation at each of the three levels: one "social language" amid one national language; multiple "social languages" amid one national language; or multiple national languages. It is difficult to imagine a further stratification, because of the difficulty in imagining a single "social language" amid multiple national languages.
The first level is locus for the "primordial dialogism of discourse." Within a single language dialogism occurs temporally and spatially, because of heteroglossia and heterophony. There can be many voices, different speakers represented or implied, as in the case of the speaker to the self. Whether the dialogue occurs within one speaker or among many, there is a common language. Yet because of the internal dialogism of slovo, that discourse can only be half the individual speaker's, there exists the possibility of dialogism. Words take on meaning because of the difference, play, and conflict caused by the previous resonance and co-temporaneous interaction (See figures 3 and 4). Even within a single "social language" within a single national language, heteroglossia and heterophony establish the conditions for intertextuality. This is so because there is always, "the problem of heteroglossia within a language, that is, the problem of internal differentiation, the stratification characteristic of any national language" (Bakhtin Dialogic Imagination 63).
Figure 3
Dialogism: Bakhtin
Figure 4
Dialogism: Bakhtin + Todorov
At Bakhtin's second level (multiple "social languages" amid one national language), the phenomenon of social'nyj jazyk, social language, comes into play. "Bakhtin distinguishes up to five types of differentiation: by genre, profession, social stratum, age, and region (dialects, in the strict sense of the term)" (Todorov Dialogic Principle 57). Each of these social languages functions within the single national language. This is a much more complex situation than that of the first level because in addition to the heteroglossia and heterophony of the single national language, there are the heteroglossia and heterophony of the multiple social languages too. In addition, there exists the potential for dialogism among any combination of the heteroglotic, heterophonic, national language, and social language discourses:
Thus at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These "languages" of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying "languages." (Dialogic Imagination 291)
This dialogism occurs across the social strata, among diverse ages, professions, classes, regions, and notably, among genres. In this way, both the nonliterary world of speakers and the literary text partake in the same phenomena. This is partially the reason Bakhtin can describe the novel as a system of languages.
Finally, the third and highest level of discursive interanimation is that of multiple national languages: English, French, Spanish, Nahuatl and the like. At this level, the participants in discursive interaction are the national languages themselves. It is difficult to imagine a further stratification at this level, that is to two levels of multiple national languages, one with a single social language, the other with multiple social languages. Dialogism can occur among any combinations of national languages in a manner similar to the dialogisms of social languages and of voices. That is, given the fundamental condition of heteroglossia, the range of potential dialogisms extends across the full scope of discourse.
This stratification and dynamic hierarchization establish the structure upon which is laid the strategy for the analysis of literary dialogism. As Bakhtin observes:
By stressing the intentional dimension of stratification in literary language, we are able, as has been said, to locate in a single series such methodologically heterogeneous phenomena as professional and social dialects, world views and individual artistic works, for in their intentional dimension one finds that common plane on which they can all be juxtaposed, and juxtaposed dialogically. The whole matter consists in the fact that there may be, between "languages," highly specific dialogic relations…. (Dialogic Imagination 293-94)
Complex texts function as sets of languages, as matrices of discourses, brimming with the possibility of dialogism. In Shakespeare's Richard II, Falstaff and Hal can be conceived not only as distinct characters, but distinct voices, distinct discourses, distinct social languages. This multiplicity of discourse is characteristic of the novel, but, as many modern critics argue, it is also possible in film, drama, and some poetry: each work, a multiplicity of combinations of voices and languages. Each voice interplays and competes in a matrix of other voices and languages, that is, each voice dialogizes other semantic manifestations and organizations.
Dialogism can occur across the planes of discourse. In defining Bakhtin's use of the term, orkestrovka, orchestration, Holquist elaborates on the phenomenon in the "polyphonic" novel:
Within a novel perceived as a musical score, a single "horizontal" message (melody) can be harmonized vertically in a number of ways, and each of these scores with its fixed pitches can be further altered by giving the notes to different instruments. The possibilities of orchestration make any segment of text almost infinitely variable. (The Dialogic Imagination 431)
This vertical interanimation also occurs downward, toward smaller and smaller units. Beginning with the early articles signed by Voloshinov, Bakhtin continually maintains an interest in semiotics and the stratification of language, from very large organizations, to the smallest elements that can be imagined. Todorov notes that in Voloshinov's "The Word as Ideological Sign" Bakhtin considers the study of signs as synonymous with the study of ideology (17-18). Discourse for Bakhtin consists of sets of signs. Dialogism occurs within and across these levels of signs:
Le phénomène dialogique existerait alors à un nombre indéfini de niveaux, partant de la signification du mot, allant jusqu'au texte entier et même dépassant ses limites pour toucher à ce que nous pouvons appeler le contexte, c'est-à-dire le réseau de rapports socio-discursifs dans lequel le texte s'inscrit—ce que d'autres ont déjà nommé l'intertexte. (Sabo and Nielsen 77)
Consider modern theorists' views on the stratification of language downward. In the opening paragraphs of "Le découpage du discours," the first chapter of the Rhétorique générale, Groupe µ begins a rhetoric of small (and the smallest) elements of language:
Nous verrons que toutes les opérations rhétoriques reposent sur un propriété fondamentale du discours linéaire: celle d'être décomposable en unités de plus en plus petites….
Que ce soit sur le plan du signifiant (phonique ou graphique) ou sur le plan du signifié (sens), la chaîne manifestée peut être considérée comme un hiérarchie de plans, où s'«articulent» des unités discrètes. Plusieurs unités de même niveau son emboîtées (ou «intégrées» dans la terminologie de Benveniste) dans un unité d'ordre supérieur et chacune d'elles emboîte des unités d'ordre inférieur.
La décomposition se poursuit, sur chacun des deux plans, jusqu'à un niveau atomique ou insécable. (30)
A.-J. Greimas devotes the chapter, "Isotopy of Discourse," of his Structural Semantics to a heterogeneous and multivoiced discourse which occupies one plane of the semantic universe (78-115). Umberto Eco stresses the interrelationships among codes, "the plurality of codes works, so to speak, vertically, superimposing many levels of signification upon the first and basic one" (A Theory of Semiotics 57-8). Todorov sees the planes of discourse as various registers, of which even the lowest, the sub-discursive, warrants study, "This preliminary study of the linguistic properties of preliterary materials is necessary to the knowledge of literary discourse itself… especially since there exists no impassable frontier between the former and the latter" (Introduction to Poetics 20).
Yet for Bakhtin the smallest unit of real interest for discursive analysis is that of the sentence. This concurs with Benveniste's identification of the sentence as the smallest unit of discourse. For Bakhtin it separates the two realms: linguistics, below the sentence, and that of translinguistics (his term for discourse analysis) which begins with the sentence. Benveniste also discusses these two realms:
There really are two different universes here even though they take in the same reality, and they give rise to two different linguistics, even though their paths cross all the time. On the one hand, there is language, an ensemble of formal signs, identified by rigorous procedures, ordered in classes, combined in structures and in systems, and on the other, there is the manifestation of language in living communication. (110)
The sentence may constitute the basic unit of discourse, but the real interest of translinguistics is among units of a much higher level.
It is worth noting at this point that the various preceding discussions of linguistic units and their stratification (isotopies, registers, unités, translinguistics) are structural descriptions. They are similar in effort to other structuralist descriptions proposed primarily earlier this century from the efforts of Pierce and Saussure to those of Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, and Chomsky. The original scientific and semiotic imperative for linguists to emphasize the fragmentation of language into its essential components has altered so that in the last thirty years the emphasis on structure has changed to one on model. Thomas Pavel notes the movement from the structural descriptions of classical linguists (well-constrained), through those of theorists like Lévi-Strauss (programmatic), to the models and grammars of theorists like Burke:
A structural description thus contains a series of findings related to the structure of the object or field under study. These findings should be more complete and systematic in a well-constrained description than in programmatic descriptions. But neither well-constrained nor programmatic structural descriptions provide a theoretical model of the way in which the object or the field is structured, although they can point to the possible construction of such a model. Indeed, the results of structural descriptions often prove crucial in the process of devising a model. Model construction belongs nevertheless to a different range of theoretical activities. (Poetics of Plot 4-5)
What follows later in this study is precisely that "different range of theoretical activities:" a model of linguistic relationships which springs from this preliminary discussion of linguistic units and their stratification.
Historicism and Polyglossia
In discussing dialogism at the macro level of different languages, Bakhtin emphasizes its historicism. This is to say, he emphasizes the historical context of heteroglotic intertextuality. While heteroglossia signifies diversity of languages, language can signify either social language, social'nyj jazyk. or national language, nacional'nyj jazyk. Recall also, Todorov's distinction between heteroglossia (raznojazycie, diversity of languages) and heterophony (raznogolosie, diversity of individual voices). A dialogism of Latin and Spanish, for example, occurs at the level of national languages but can also occur at the level of social languages. Consider the diversities of national languages and social languages in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Respuesta: America's first feminist dialogizes Saint Paul's dictum, "Mulieres in ecclesia taceant" [Let women keep silent in church].
The diversity of languages within the same culture, the heteroglossia within the "same socio-ideological conceptual horizon," is designated as polyglossia. In the glossary appended to The Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist translates mnogojazycie as polyglossia, "The simultaneous presence of two or more national languages interacting within a single cultural system (Bakhtin's two historical models are ancient Rome and the Renaissance)" (431). Polyglossia is then the specific condition under which national language dialogism occurs. And as indicated in Bakhtin's choice of models, polyglossia is best understood when historicized, when the dialogism occurs across time.
Ancient Rome and Renaissance Europe offer for Bakhtin two historical instances of intense ployglossia:
Roman literary consciousness was bilingual. The purely national Latin genres, conceived under monoglotic conditions, fell into decay and did not achieve the level of literary expression. From start to finish, the creative literary consciousness of the Romans functioned against the background of the Greek language and Greek forms. From its very first steps, the Latin literary word viewed itself in the light of the Greek word, through the eyes of the Greek word; it was from the very beginning a word "with a sideways glance," a stylized word enclosing itself, as it were, in its own piously stylized quotation marks.
Latin literary language in all its generic diversity was created in light of Greek literary language. (Dialogic Imagination 61-62)
But Roman polyglossia is yet more complex than this bilingual, dialogical writing "through the eyes" of the Greeks. Because there occurs in lower Italy an intersection of three cultures —Greek, Oscan and Roman—the literature of Rome, "was born in the interanimation of three languages—one that was indigenously its own, and two that were other but that were experienced as indigenous" (63). Roman polyglossia was then a dialogism that in the Latin-Greek interanimation worked across time and in the Latin-Oscan interanimation worked between contemporary languages. A point being that the polyglotic bilingualism is no simple matter.
The polyglossia of the Renaissance is more far-reaching than that of Rome because, "In the Renaissance, this interanimation of languages… reached its highest point. It became, in addition, extraordinarily more complex" (Bakhtin Dialogic Imagination 80). The Renaissance was occasion for "a more general interanimation of languages, when a general, national norm for the country's language was being created" (82). In citing an example of Renaissance satires, Bakhtin identifies the polyglotic tri-lingualism, "three languages thus animate one another: medieval Latin, the purified and rigorous Latin of the humanists and the national vulgar tongue. At the same time two worlds are animating each other: a medieval one and a new folk-humanist one" (81). There was then, during the Renaissance, significant interanimation among the two forms of Latin and the emerging forms of modern European national languages. The Renaissance thus provides Bakhtin and modern theorists with a historical model of a very complex polyglossia.
But if the Renaissance in England provides a good model of historical polyglossia, there is a better one to be found in colonial America. As historical moment, the European discovery of America is the most significant event of the Renaissance. Its consequences, as Todorov states, still affect us today at a very basic level, "the discovery of America, or of the Americans, is certainly the most astonishing encounter of our history…. [I]t is in fact the conquest of America that heralds and establishes our present identity" (Conquest of America 4-5). In other words, just as the modern European national languages were shaped by the Renaissance, so was the modern European shaped by the conquest.
The conquest of America was, importantly, a period of intense polyglossia. It provides a significantly more complex model of polyglossia than either discussed by Bakhtin. Its complexity is of such an extreme nature because of the complex chronotope [xronotop], time-space. The temporal and spatial factors which intersect at the conquest and which shape the polyglossia are marked by three presences: first, the sheer number of languages involved; second, the great degree of dissimilarity among languages; and third, an embryonic and developing single "socio-ideological conceptual horizon."
The historical moment of the birth of this polyglossia, the Spanish discovery of America, coinstantaneously marks other significant events. The year 1492 also marked the unification of Spain through the union of Isabella and Ferdinand but, more significantly, through the conquest of Granada, which ended eight centuries of Moorish occupation. It was also the year Moslems and Jews were evicted from Spain. Then, as Todorov notes, it was an important year for modern European languages:
this year is also the one that sees the publication of the first grammar of a modern European language—the Spanish grammar of Antonio de Nebrija. The knowledge, here theoretical, of language testifies to a new attitude, no longer of veneration but of analysis and of a new consciousness of its practical utility; Nebrija writes in his Introduction these decisive words: "Language has always been the companion of empire." (Conquest of America 123)
The single most important historical event, the discovery, also had major linguistic consequences: an extreme polyglossia in the violent forging of America.
The extreme nature of the polyglossia stemming from the conquest of America offers a clearer picture of an element which coincides with the historicism, that is, the violence of the linguistic interaction. For the conquest is simultaneously waged on physical and linguistic battlefields. The history of the conquest is an account of real violence, the most thorough genocide ever. As Todorov states,
it will be recalled that in 1500 the world population is approximately 400 million, of whom 80 million inhabit the Americas. By the middle of the sixteenth century, out of these 80 million, there remain ten. Or limiting ourselves to Mexico: on the eve of conquest, its population is about 25 million; in 1600, it is one million.
If the word genocide has ever been applied to a situation with some accuracy, this is here the case. It constitutes a record not only in relative terms (a destruction on the order of 90 percent or more), but also in absolute terms, since we are speaking of a population diminution estimated at 70 million human lives. None of the great massacres of the twentieth century can be compared to this hecatomb. (Conquest of America 133)
But there is also the linguistic conquest. Languages too, were conquered, displaced, eliminated. Bakhtin asserts that a polyglossia must be located within a historical context; in the case of the conquest of America, it is an extremely violent context. He also insists that the intertextual interanimation, the dialogism, is marked by violence. Holquist notes this as he comments on Bakhtin's choice of metaphors. Holquist defines Bakhtin's proniknovenie as penetration and states:
Such blunt, often crudely material expressions are characteristic of Bakhtin's somewhat militarized language. Ideologies "battle it out in the arena of the utterance." Novelness "invades" privileged discourse. Boundaries between svoj [self] and cuzoj [other] are "violated." Behind this aggressive talk is Bakhtin's concern that the reader feel the forces involved here as bodies, in concrete competition for limited supplies of authority and territory. A true "penetration" into the novel is more than a mere scholarly investigation of it: it is a sortie onto a battle field, where victory belongs (but never for long) to the one who can best map the movement of hostile forces. (Dialogic Imagination 431)
Todorov's The Conquest of America is a history of the conquest which stresses the linguistic conflict. Bakhtin's military metaphors and his conception of a violent dialogism support Todorov's analysis. The political and cultural war for America is first and foremost a real and physical war; it is also a linguistic one.
The model of discursive interaction as talk is supplanted by that of conflict. Dialogism is a competition: each voice, each social language, each national language, can struggle to supplant any other it engages within the polyglossia. For Paul de Man, dialogism is therefore inherently anti-synthetic:
as a principle of radical otherness or, to use again Bakhtin's own terminology, as a principle of exotopy far from aspiring to the telos of a synthesis or a resolution, as could be said to be the case in dialectical systems, the function of dialogism is to sustain and think through the radical exteriority or heterogeneity of one voice with regard to any other..." (Resistance to Theory 109).
Bakhtin sees the forces at work in dialogism as two kinds: centrostremitel'nyl and centrobeznyj, centripetal and centrifugal in Holquist's translation. (Dialogic Imagination 425). The conservative (homogenizing and hierarchicizing) forces which support the dominant authoritative discourse, avtoritetnoe slovo, are centripetal. Those forces which practice dialogism, challenge the extant authoritative discourse, and exert a relativizing influence are centrifugal. In "Rhizome," Deleuze and Guattari describe the conservative, centripetal politics which support an authoritative discourse, "There is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within political multiplicity" (53). That is, other tongues are denied power and restricted presence. Diane Macdonell outlines the similar theories of Michel Pêcheux, "his work suggests that discourses are not at all peaceful; they develop out of clashes with one another, and because of this there is a political dimension to each use of words and phrases in writing or in speech" (Theories of Discourse 43). The distance between svoj , the self's, and cuzoj, the other's, voices, social languages, or national languages, spans the territories of semantics and power which are under contention.
For Bakhtin, there are politics in any discursive activity. This is so, first of all, because at a very basic level all language is "overpopulated" with the presence of others. "Expropriating it [language], forcing it to submit to one's own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process" (Bakhtin Dialogic Imagination 294). Each complicated expropriation is a discursive process which is, at least partially, dialogic:
Every utterance participates in the "unitary language" (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces).
Such is the fleeting language of a day, of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a school and so forth. It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendencies in the life of language. (272; emphasis added)
These "embattled tendencies in the life of language" determine discursive, and therefore literary, styles. "The internal politics of style (how the elements are put together) is determined by its external politics (its relationship to alien discourse). Discourse lives, as it were, on the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context" (284). Politics, power relationships, contextualize discursive activity.
In this battle ground of language, it is through dialogism, with its centrifugal and relativizing force, that a discourse is able to engage the extant authoritative discourse and its prevalent world view in the struggle for semantics and power. "Moreover, in the process of literary creation, languages interanimate each other and objectify precisely that side of one's own (and of the other's) language that pertains to its world view, its inner form, the axiologically accentuated system inherent in it" (Bakhtin Dialogic Imagination 62). It is because of the condition of polyglossia that such a dialogism is possible, that the interanimation and interillumination of the self and the other is possible. The diversity of languages within a single culture permits the internally persuasive discourse, vnutrenne-ubeditel'noe slovo, to displace the hegemony of the authoritative discourse. Polyglossia allows relativity to replace the apparent absolutism. "Only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language" (61).
What follows is the study of English Renaissance and Mexican colonial texts of Shakespeare and of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The Shakespeare texts of focus are the two plays, Richard II and Henry IV, Part One. The Sor Juana texts are both poetry, the villancicos for San Pedro Nolasco, and El Sueño, as well as prose, La Respuesta a la muy ilustre Sor Filotea de la Cruz. The rationale for the choice of Shakespeare texts is as follows: Richard II and 1 Henry IV provide a cohesive, concentrated, and wide-ranging diversity of discourses which both interrelate in power relationships and which represent language and power relationships. There is a tremendous range of differences among the discourses, the voices, of Richard, Bolingbroke, Hotspur, Falstaff, and Hal. Within the text as set of discourses, these discourses interanimate, interilluminate, dialogize. Then too, the text represents characters who interanimate, interilluminate, and dialogize in the social and political world. There are power struggles among the discourses which represent power struggles among people. The choice of texts from Sor Juana also adheres to a specific rationale: these texts emphasize and foreground the interanimation among the diversities of national languages, of gender and of colonial relationships. The San Pedro Nolascovillancicos provide a very densely concentrated multiple language text in which languages dialogize with the representation of a centripetal discourse. La Respuesta is the foremost feminist statement of colonial America. Shakespeare and Sor Juana: dialogism in literature.
Some of the essence of Bakhtin's theories will be expropriated for this study and applied in the reading of the selected texts. The single most important factor for this study is the notion of dialogism, so central to Bakhtin's thought that it is incorporated into the titles of the two most significant Bakhtin texts in English, Todorov's Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle and Holquist's translation, The Dialogic Imagination. The possibility of reading exotopic power relationships (radical heterogeneity) in Richard II or in San Pedro Nolasco rests on three assumptions: first, the discursive nature of texts; second, the existence of the ambient condition of heteroglossia; and third, the combative nature of the discursive interaction.
This is, however, quite a peculiar and selective expropriation. Peculiar in that it seeks to apply Bakhtin's theories of the novel to poetic and dramatic texts (although Bakhtin himself did the same thing, declaring them "novelistic"). It is a selective study in that it will have relatively little to do with a major concern of Bakhtin, the historical contextualization of discourse; here, the notion of the chronotope will receive little attention. It is true that the texts selected were selected precisely because of their historical context and their particular chronotopic character. And this was done with Bakhtin's theory in mind. Yet the expropriation for this study will be somewhat of a "domesticated Bakhtin," borrowing a term from Hirschkop and acknowledging his horror. That is, it will be a work of literary criticism which focuses on the texts as literature, rather than on the texts as history. The emphasis of this study is on the diversities within the literary text and on the dialogism thereof. This is the focus of study, whether or not historicization is necessary. Bakhtin's history centered discourse will be employed for the light it can shed on a theory of reading literature. Other discourses, especially feminism and anti-colonial discourse, will be employed similarly, as a means of (inter) illuminating a relatively formal analysis. These discourses will provide for a dialogue with the primary efforts of this study, a dialogue over semantic territory with dialogism as a result.
Fractal
Models
In order to illustrate the interrelationship between discourse and the world of speakers and writers, Bakhtin employs a model: discourse and text connect with humans as if by threads. This model of interconnection by means of threads is explained in the statement, "Every element of the work can be compared to a thread joining human beings. The work as a whole is the set of these threads, that creates a complex, differentiated, social interaction, between the persons who are in contact with it" (qtd. in Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin 40). Deleuze and Guattari take this model of threads and expand it to one of puppets, as they consider the notion of multiplicity:
A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, but only determinations, magnitudes, dimensions which cannot increase in number without its changing in its nature (hence the laws of combination grow along with the multiplicity). Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, do not run back to the reputedly unique will of the artist or puppeteer, but to the multiplicity of nerve fibres which, in their turn, form another puppet along other dimensions connected to the first set of strings…. (53-54)
The puppet analogy is used as means to a explain the interconnectedness of the thorough multiplicity which Deleuze and Guattari call the rhizome, after a botanical term: the botanical model. The notion of the rhizome is akin to Bakhtin's heterology, but the range of diversities is much more expansive. Theirs is plane of connections, any point connecting with any other, which lacks the order of other models because:
In the rhizome, on the contrary, each feature does not necessarily refer to a linguistic feature: here, semiotic chains of all sorts are connected to quite diverse modes of encoding, chains of biological, political, economic and other kinds, bringing into play not only different regimes of signs, but also different orders of states of affairs…. A rhizome endlessly connects semiotic chains, power organisations, occurrences relating to the arts, the sciences, or to social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating quite different kind of acts—linguistic, but also perceptual, mimetic, gestural, cognitive ones: there is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialects, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal 'competent' speaker-hearer of language, any more than there exists a homogeneous linguistic community. Language, according to Weinreich is "an essentially heterogeneous reality". ("Rhizome" 53)
The rhizome is akin to what Bakhtin might describe as a thoroughly dialogized polyglossia, except that since, "Every multiplicity is flat," there can be no hierarchal stratification ("Rhizome" 54). But more significantly, because the rhizome finds its origin in semiotics, rather than in discourse analysis, its scope is very much larger than that of heterology. Bakhtin's diverse discourses are connected by threads; semiotic chains in the rhizome are connected like a tuber, like a potato (For an attempt to combine the features of Bakhtin's model and the rhizome, see figure 5).
Figure 5
Dialogism: Bakhtin + Todorov + Rhizome
The Fractal
This study seeks the application of a common method at and across different planes of language. Such a model would locate itself between the model of the threads and that of the potato: it would have a larger scope than the discursive based threads, yet would allow a semblance of order, that of stratification, which is absent from the potato. One such model, borrowed from the worlds of mathematics, is that of the fractal. Fractal equations (Julia and Mandelbrot are two sets), when presented graphically, reproduce a common shape at finer and finer gradations, in smaller and smaller units. Used in computer generated graphics, as in film special effects, fractals theoretically allow zero loss of detail at any level of magnification. "While most curves look straight under a sufficiently powerful magnifying glass, fractals remain unchanged" (Koch). The common form is generated at each level. Imagine examining a book with a microscope. At the first level of magnification, its surface is revealed to be composed of smaller books. You increase the power of magnification. Their surfaces are also, miraculously, revealed to be composed of even smaller books. This continues, level after level. In his Semiotics of Poetry, Michael Riffaterre discusses a similar model in poetry in which the "seed of the text" is fractal in form:
This is an echoing sequence in a Latin verse by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher:
Tibi vero gratias agam quo clamore? Amore more ore re.
How shall I cry out my thanks to Thee? [the question being addressed to the Almighty, who replies:] With thy love, thy wont, thy words, thy deeds.
Each word in the answer accords with the model provided by the preceding word, so that every component is repeated several times over. For each member of the paradigm, it would be easy to imagine a development wholly regulated by the nuclear word of the one preceding. The question clamore serves as a model for the reply amore, and amore serves as a model for the entire sequence—it is the seed of the text, so to speak, and summarizes it in advance. (20)
The rhetorical figures gradatio and auxesis are fractal in form. Nature finds expression in the fractal also: consider the broccoli. Its shape repeats level after level. Even the name broccoli: it is plural of broccolo, that, the diminutive of brocco. A model which allows similar analysis at discursive and nondiscursive planes: not thread, nor puppet, nor potato, but broccoli: the fractal. See the representation below in figure 6:
Figure 6
Dialogism: Bakhtin + Todorov + Rhizome + Fractal
A similar form of analysis is employed at each of the three planes: heteroglossia, heterophony and heterosemia. It is a method which finds its ur-form in Bakhtin's dialogic principle. The effort of this study is therefore the application of this fractal form to shape the reading among the different planes, among the different sized sets of language, discourse, sign. The specific form is a list of concerns; a means of subdivision, stratification, identification; a template which insures the organization of the units of each plane into recurrent, though different sized, forms. This shape is seven faceted, reflecting the division of concerns into those of level, set, genre, locus, tropics, force, logism (See figures 7, 8 and 9).
Level refers to the plane of analysis, to one of three levels of heterology: heteroglossia, heterophony or heterosemia. The middle plane, heterophony, is clearly the locus of discourse. For it is at this level that individual voices interact. The level of largest sets, heteroglossia, that of language, can be imagined as discursive with a minor effort: if discourse occurs among the ascending heterophonic levels of voice, discourse, and social language, the step to heteroglotic national language discourse follows easily. The third level, that of the smallest sets, is more difficult. It is easier to envision heterosemic relationships as semiotic rather than discursive since the sets involved include those composed of elements smaller than the sentence, that is, the preliterary and prediscursive linguistic elements, signs. And yet it is for this level that the model of the fractal is evoked: a form of discourse analysis is applied to the nondiscursive planes of prediscourse and paradiscourse. There are three levels of focus: heteroglossia, sets of national languages; heterophony, sets of social languages, discourses, and voices within one national language; heterosemia, sets of the prediscursive, paratextual, paralinguistic.
Set refers to the relatively stable discursive groupings which occupy the three levels. At the largest level, heteroglossia, the sets are the relatively stable groupings of language. For Bakhtin, these groupings are the sets of national languages. French theorists, however, distinguish two planes of language, langue and langage (or parole). While this distinction is largely overlooked by the English speaker, it is to a degree reflected in two English definitions of language: first, "a body or system of words and phrases used by a large community or by a people, a nation, or a group of nations;" and second, "the specialized or technical terms and expressions peculiar to a field, subject, or trade" (Merriam-Webster). Heteroglotic sets include Bakhtin's national languages (which are contained in the first English definition) and langue, which is "language minus speech…. It is the social part of language, the individual cannot by himself either create or modify it; it is essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety if one wishes to communicate" (Barthes Elements of Semiology 14). Bakhtin's social languages (which are contained in the second English definition) and langage (parole), which "could be called discourse," are subsets of heteroglossia and sets proper of the level of heterophony (Elements of Semiology 15). At the level of heterophony the sets are the relatively stable discursive groupings of social languages, discourses, and voices (which include, in other terminology, dialect, jargon, argot, idiolect). At the smallest level of heterosemia the sets (and subsets of heterophony) are the relatively stable groupings of prediscursive, paratextual, and paralinguistic signs. Its smallest sets, semes, absolute degree zero, will not be covered in this study. In this study the sets of the three levels are generally designated as language (heteroglossia), discourse (heterophony), and sign (heterosemia).
Genre refers to the general typology of sets. At the level of heteroglossia the types of national languages are the specific languages, that is, the generic distinctions are Latin, Spanish, English, Nahuatl, and the like. In heterophony the typology of discourses follows a modified version of Bakhtin's system of classification. First,
Bakhtin distinguishes up to five types of differentiation: by genre, profession, social stratum, age and region (dialects, in the strict sense of the term). Let us note that social classes do not play a role different from that of professions and age classes: it is a factor of diversification among others. (Todorov Mikhail Bakhtin 57)
To this system are appended two other types: gender and ethnicity, which permit the addition of feminist and ethnographic centered readings. The revised system of seven types permits the generic classification of heterophonic activity. The smallest heterophonic sets, voices, can be located within this classification system but as individual voices they are inherently smaller subsets. In fact it is possible to observe the dialogue between the social language and the subset idiolect. Smaller than heterophonic sets, the sets of heterosemia are identified by the typology of prediscursive and paradiscursive sets. The prediscursive are those sets smaller than the sets of sentences, the elemental level of discourse. Diction is prediscursive. Those sets beside discourse, para-discursive, include paratextual, paralinguistic, and semantic sets. Text titles, character names, orthography, pronunciation, and alliteration are such sets.
Locus refers to the relative positions of genres of discourses in relationship to other discourses and to the authoritative discourse. Locus connotes a series of spatial relationships which are represented by one of two systems: one, a hierarchical ladder; and two, like the solar system, a series of orbits around a common center. Hierarchy implies a vertical stratification; the top is the location of the authoritative discourse, the dictator of semantic power and authority. The bottom is the location of the absence of power, the domain of the weak. Carlos Fuentes replaces the vertical ladder with the plane of circles of various radii, some central, some eccentric ("Central and Eccentric Writing" 84-102). The center is the location of the most authoritative discourse; it presents itself as the most central of genres. Other orbits are viewed by the central discourse as being off center by varying degrees, more marginal and more eccentric. In either model, the authoritative discourse is at the locus of power; other discourses are, to various extents, subordinated and marginalized. Locus, as hierarchical/central location, is the prime factor which combines with tropics to create the direction of force and quality of power in the dialogic process.
In his discussion of Renaissance polyglossia, Bakhtin locates the heteroglotic sets on the hierarchical ladder: classic Latin at the top, vulgar Latin at the middle, and the emerging European national languages at the bottom. Similarly, the Spanish of the conquistador is relatively more authoritative, higher and more central, than the native's Mayan or Nahuatl. In heterophony, the relatively authoritative discourses include the discourses of king, poetry, man, WASP above the relatively marginal discourse of slave, prose, woman, ethnic minority. That British poet George Barker can say, "American poetry is a very easy subject to discuss for the simple reason that it does not exist," reflects a very basic belief in the relative authority of British English, higher and more central than American English (qtd. in Riddel 323). In heterosemia, at least as useful as the hierarchy/centrality of genres is the hierarchy/centrality of set and subset. That is, besides the relative locations of, for example, an authoritative pronunciation and a subordinate and marginal pronunciation (intraset), there are also the relative locations of an authoritative pronunciation and a subordinate and marginal orthography (interset). This is helpful in treating phonemic features such as assonance, alliteration, consonance. Rather than stratify and valorize phonemes, it is possible to juxtapose the relative presence of a single phoneme, as in consonance for example, to its relative presence in a set of phonemes. In this way, the individual presence is opposed to the authoritative and preestablished relative presence. The differences of loci and the consequent differences of hierarchy and centrality, between set and subset, exist at any level, that is, between a national language and one of its social languages, a social language and an individual voice, a voice and its pronunciation, text and paratext. In these instances of interset interanimation, the larger set, as context, functions as the relatively more authoritative discourse; the small set functions as the internally persuasive discourse.
This brings to mind the dialectics of langue and parole which Barthes identifies in his discussion of Sassure's semiology, "Language and speech: each of these two terms of course achieves its full definition only in the dialectical process which unites one to the other: there is no language without speech, and no speech outside language…" (Elements of Semiology 15). The relation of langue to parole is interset but while Barthes (and Sassure) declares it dialectic, the focus of this study is to demonstrate the dialogic nature of the relationship, to demonstrate, not the unity nor synthesis, but as de Man calls it (of Bakhtin's dialogic principle), the "exotopy" and "radical exteriority or heterogeneity" (Resistance to Theory 109). The movement from dialectics to dialogism proceeds as follows: Sassure (and Barthe) observes that, "Whereas speech [parole] is heterogeneous, language [langue]… is homogeneous" and declares the relationship as dialectical (Sassure 15). For Bakhtin (and de Man) the internally persuasive discourse (a parole) asserts itself dialogically against the authoritative discourse (perhaps langue). Dialogism is that radical heterogeneity and exotopy in the face of homogeneity and unity.
Tropics refers to the means of semantics which is aimed from a particular locus and creates the specific nature of the discursive force. Tropics is the method of encoding and semantically organizing, as well as the underlying assumptions of, the enunciation, the discursive action. For Hayden White, tropics is an essential feature of discourse,
for tropics is the process by which all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends to only describe realistically and to analyze objectively….
And troping is the soul of discourse, therefore, the mechanism without which discourse cannot do its work or achieve its end. This is why we can agree with Bloom's contention that "all interpretation depends upon the antithetical relation between meanings, and not on the supposed relation between a text and its meaning" (Tropics of Discourse 2)
Tropics provides the means for the typology of the various discursive genres according to the four tropes which Kenneth Burke calls the "master tropes:" metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (Burke 503-17; White Metahistory 31-38; White Tropics of Discourse 5). These four tropes identify the genres of any level of heterology. The most essential difference among the tropes is that which aligns the two pairs metonymy and synecdoche on the one hand, and metaphor and irony on the other, as syntagm and paradigm respectively. Semantics is determined by discursive play between two axes Jakobson identifies as the syntagmatic (metonymic) and paradigmatic (metaphoric) (239-59). Synecdoche can be aligned with metonymy, as can irony with metaphor because while they present distinct tropic activity, they nonetheless adhere to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes. Discursive genres are therefore identified by the relative dominance of one particular trope and the relative emphasis of one axis. It must be relative dominance and not absolute presence because as Todorov states, "it is never a matter of an absolute presence or absence, but of quantitative predominances (which, furthermore it is extremely difficult to measure: how many metaphors must there be to a page before we can qualify a style as 'metaphorical'?): there are not true oppositions but graduated and continuous characteristics" (Introduction to Poetics 21).
The notion of etymology can be useful in regards to the tropics at the level of heteroglossia. Latin's relationship to Spanish (national language to national language) is that of the etymological antecedent. It exists as the classical patrilingualism from which Spanish struggles to emerge. This is clearly the case for all Romance languages, but it is also the case for non Romance languages, though to a lesser degree. European cultures, and therefore European languages, exist as post classical phenomena. But in that English and German trace less of their glossia from Latin, they are less Latin's legitimate heirs. Spanish and Italian, by the same syntax of etymological claims, are closer to the classical, more obviously Latin's heirs.
The etymological connection is one manifested in time: Latin came first, Spanish second. It is a syntagmatic arrangement which privileges the ur-language, the past, mythic and dead language. Etymology is a means which solidifies Latin's claim as the authoritative discourse. Spanish and Italian are more contiguous to Latin than are either English or German. Spanish and Italian are closer to the syntagmatic authority. And conversely, English is more paradigmatic; it manifests an alternate selection and does not fully combine according to the authoritative discourse.
The notion of etymology was cast in familial terms because a counterpart at the level of heterophony is genealogy. The relationships among the characters of Richard II and 1 Henry IV are concerned with the genealogy of power: patrilineal authority and the kingship. But just as a syntagmatic orientation valorizes an etymologically past language, such an orientation valorizes a genealogically past discourse. Syntagmatic discourses manifest a genealogical relationship which locates authority is some inaccessible but replicable discourse of the past other, of the dead fathers.
In that poetic discourse valorizes traditional forms which were constituted by the dead poets, it is a syntagmatic discourse. Syntagmatic discourse removes the question of authority from the dialogical situation: authority resides in poetry, myth, song, in some formal but past discourse. Paradigmatic discourses, on the other hand, dialogize such past orientation by engaging in present oriented, spontaneous dialogue. The discourses in the plays can be identified by a genealogy of discourse: the syntagmatic discourses at the level of heterophony, replicate in form, the monologism of syntagmatic languages at the level of heteroglossia.
Because the level of heterosemia deals with prediscursive and paratextual signs, a very different means of description is necessary. At the level of signs, the notions of redundancy and deviation replace those of etymology and genealogy. Briefly, redundancy works to assure communication and deviation introduces rhetorical alteration. The less deviant a discourse, the more syntagmatic it is. The greater the alteration, the more paradigmatic it is. This very simple introduction to redundancy and deviation, as well as to etymology and genealogy, is augmented by much more discussion in the following chapters.
Force refers to the typology of forces which Bakhtin identifies as centripetal and centrifugal. In their metaphors, center seeking and center fleeing, the terms equally well describe Fuentes' central and eccentric forces. Centripetal forces support the authoritative discourse, hierarchy, linearity, and suppress the centrifugal internally persuasive discourse, relativity, selection. Central forces claim universality; they marginalize and exteriorize the other eccentric forces. In the heteroglossia of the Renaissance, Latin is centripetal; Spanish is centrifugal. In heterophony, poetry is centripetal; the novel is centrifugal. In heterosemia, Spanish pronunciation is centripetal, Mexican heteroepy is centrifugal. Force, tropics and locus interact to create the manifestation of power specific to any discursive act.
Logism refers to the nature of the role played in the interdiscursive and intertextual conflict: dialogical or monological. Did a particular discourse support or suppress dialogism? Was the discourse dialogical and was it, according to White, "genuine" and "ironic" discourse? (Tropics of Discourse 4). In heteroglossia, Latin monologizes, Spanish dialogizes. In heterophony, poetry exteriorizes other discourses; the novel dialogizes. In heterosemia, Spanish pronunciation manifests monologue; Mexican pronunciation, dialogue. Logism then, describes both the action of each participant in the discursive interaction and the nature of the interanimation itself.
What follows then, is fractal analysis: the application of a method, inspired by Bakhtin and designed to illuminate the relationship of language and power, at different levels of the literary text. The method is one of reading language and power relationships at three levels, two of which are discursive, the other, a prediscursive level. At any of the three levels, heteroglossia, heterophony, heterosemia, the common method of analysis is applicable. A chapter of this study is devoted to each level: chapter two, heteroglossia in the texts of Sor Juana (Heteroglossia); chapter three, heterophony in the texts of Shakespeare (Heterophony); chapter four, heterosemia in the texts of both Sor Juana and Shakespeare (Heterosemia).
Heteroglossia
The analysis in the second chapter focuses on the reading of dialogism at the level of the largest sets of discourse, that of language(s). The chapter accordingly emphasizes the reading of the dialogue which occurs among those multiple national languages which constitute the particular literary text. Because of the underlying condition of heteroglossia, the dialogism of the multiple language text can be understood as the conflict of language itself: dialogism among national languages or, even more significantly, between national language and language (langue). This heteroglotic dialogism is a complicated affair because at the level of heteroglossia the dialogism not only stratifies like a ladder and treats its sets as discourses which in turn encompass the diversities of each subset (genres, locus, etc.), but dialogism also stratifies like a fractal, to each sub-level (heterophony and heterosemia), each of which in turn possesses similar form (See figure 7).
One text which so dialogizes languages palpably is the set of villancicos,San Pedro Nolasco. Its full title is Villancicos, qve se cantaron en los maitines de gloriosissimo padre S. Pedro Nolasco, Fundador de la Sagrada Familia de Redemptores del Orden de Nuestra Señora de la Merced, dia 31. de Henero de 1677. años. It is 488 lines (excluding paratext) of poetic theater, ostensibly written in praise of the saint, Pedro Nolasco, and although published anonymously in Mexico in 1677, it is ascribed to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. It is highly structured, divided into a dedication and three nocturnes of three, three, and two villancicos. These eight villancicos are further divided into estribillos, and coplas; the eighth also having introduction, dialogue and tocotín. Villancico seven and eight are respectively designated, jácara and ensaladilla.
However the most notable feature of the text is its diversity of language. San Pedro Nolasco is composed of three national languages: Spanish, Latin and Nahuatl. A very intense trilingual interanimation occurs in the final section of the work, in the eighth villancico, designated the ensaladilla. It is precisely this Spanish-Latin-Nahuatl polyglossia, which so thoroughly permeates the ensaladilla, that demonstrates heteroglotic dialogism to so great a degree. The 120 lines are subdivided among the three national languages (the Spanish division is further stratified into heterophony). The national language divisions are as follows: 1) Spanish monologue, estribillo and coplas (in the Afro-Spanish of Afro-Americans); 2) Latin and Spanish dialogue (carnivalesque dialogue: a common man's vulgar Spanish dialogizes a pretentious scholar's Latin bombast); 3) Nahuatl and Spanish tocotín (monologue verse and music in the Aztec tradition). In addition, there is also a Spanish introduction which precedes each of these three divisions. The rest of San Pedro Nolasco is entirely in Spanish except for the epigram, "Cujus est imago haec et super scriptio? Cæsaris. reddite, ergo, quæ sunt Cæsaris, Cæsari c. 22. Mat.." A Spanish dedication follows the Latin epigram. It responds to Matthew's quotation of Jesus rendering to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.
Spanish, Latin and Nahuatl interanimate within a single text, yet the interanimation goes further. There is also the heterophonic interanimation within Spanish (and within Latin to a lesser degree). The heteroglotic precondition for national language interanimation is simultaneously the precondition for heterophonic interanimation. While Pedro Nolasco is read primarily as a heteroglot text, the heterophonic subtext constantly asserts itself. There is dialogue among the various Spanish discourses: the poetic Spanish of the narrator, the Afro-Spanish of the Black, the vulgar Spanish of the common man, and the mixed Spanish of the Indian. These are clearly different discourses, but only really the Indian's could be considered truly heteroglotic, that is, inter-national language. In this same sense, considerations of gender, ethnicity and colonial relationships are heterophonic considerations.
San Pedro Nolasco and the prose Repuesta provide ample opportunity to consider the dialogism among languages. The opportunity is manifold, or perhaps better, the dialogism is fractal like, for in opening a reading of language interaction, other readings open as if by their own volition. San Pedro Nolasco opens up readings of colonial relationships, of colonial discourse. In these readings it is worthwhile to play off each other the formal and the historical reading. The mere presence of Nahuatl in the religious-poetic Spanish and Latin discourse is significant: Nahuatl dialogizes the ritual word, the authoritative discourse. To apply Bakhtin, the Christian and colonial "unitary and singular language of poetry… is always a style adequately serviced by one directly intentional language from whose point of view other languages… are perceived as objects that are in no way its equal" (Dialogic Imagination 288). That is, the colonial and authoritarian discourse sees as object inferior to itself the language of the Aztecs and the Aztecs themselves. While the text ostensibly praises Saint Pedro Nolasco and the discourse which promotes saints, the heteroglossia in and of itself actually dialogizes that centripetal and hierarchicizing discourse of saints. Or to apply another Bakhtin, the carnivalesque, the grotesque, the parodic, dialogizes the dominant discourse: this is the function of the comic and vulgar discourse of the common man, it decenters a self-righteous Latin. The Repuesta provides similar opportunities to read gender discourse dialogism.
Chapter two consists of the application of the previously outlined theory for the reading of power relationships in the texts of Sor Juana de la Cruz. It is a reading of dialogism (the juncture of language and power) at the level of heteroglossia. San Pedro Nolasco and the Respuesta are read in light of specific theory; what is illuminated a principle simultaneously poetic, political, and dialogical.
Heterophony
Chapter three focuses on the reading of dialogism among the sets of what is generally termed discourse but is more specifically stratified into the terms social language, discourse and voice. Because of the underlying condition of heterophony, the dialogism of the multiple discourse text can be understood as the conflict of discourse itself, be it among any combination of heterophonic sets or interlevel sets (as in langue and parole). Heterophonic dialogism contains, as a sublevel, heterosemia (See figure 8).
What can be more different than the characters Richard, Falstaff, Hal, Bolingbroke, and Hotspur? We imagine quite different people. But even if one does not make that anthropomorphic leap, the names in the text and the sets of discourses they designate, nevertheless, are just as different. And yet the words are all in English. This is the nature of heterophony: diversity within one national language. And in keeping with the anthropomorphism, just as the characters King Richard II and Falstaff function on different levels of power, the same is true, in form, of the discourse designated Richard and that designated Falstaff. A similar form of the relationships which are represented in the interactions of characters is replicated in the interanimations of the discourses. The struggle for power is waged both in the represented world of the English court and in the sets of discourses which comprise the text. While power for the character Bolingbroke may rest in control of the kingship, power for the discourse Bolingbroke resides in control of the semantic organization. The two manifestations of power are yet more connected: in the interaction of characters, power is represented as residing in control of the logos, that is, in discursive activity. The represented power struggle is a dialogism which replicates the textual dialogism.
The third chapter focuses on the spectrum of dialogism of discourses in Richard II and 1 Henry IV and within the single national language, English. An appended version of Bakhtin's discourse typology (genre, profession, social stratum, age, region, gender and ethnicity) becomes the means to identify the various discourses in the broad classifications of social language. The discourse Richard is identified as poetic, king, male, English. The discourse Lady Mortimer is identified as paratext, lady, female, Welsh. Richard is also a voice, that smallest heterophonic set, an internally persuasive discourse. As a paratextual voice, Lady Mortimer is more difficult to discuss; it is better treated in the final chapter, that on signs. But whether the discourse is Richard or Lady Mortimer or Falstaff, when read dialogically, its analysis as social language or voice remains essentially a discursive analysis.
Dialogism among any two discourses can be characterized according to the particular attributes and dynamics of each discourse. The significant attributes and dynamics are those which constitute the fractal model of analysis: level, set, genre, locus, tropics, and force. These interact and determine logism, the relative dialogism and monologism for that particular discourse. They can be functionally grouped into two divisions: level, set, and genre serve as form, class, as attribute; locus (in the dynamic sense), tropics, and force function as action, politics, as movement. Consider for a moment the dialogue between two distinct Hal discourses, the Hal of the first encounter with Falstaff, and the Hal of the first soliloquy. Tavern Hal has the attributes heterophony (level), discourse (set), prose (genre); and the dynamics low and eccentric (locus), paradigmatic (tropics), centrifugal (force); and as a result of their interaction, dialogism (logism). Prince Hal has the attributes heterophony (level), discourse (set), poetry (genre); and the dynamics high and central (locus), syntagmatic (tropics), centripetal (force); and as a result of their interaction, monologism (logism). The point is to identify as relatively dialogic or monologic a particular discourse in a particular interaction and in so doing, make evident the exotopic principle of language and power.
In the example of the two Hals, the interaction of attribute and dynamics, which determines logism, follows, in principle, Bakhtin's distinction between poetry and the novel. That is, a simple means of identifying a particular discourse, say Prince Hal, is to align it with the poetic (or mythical) or novelistic pole. For as Bakhtin assets, the poetic asserts a single-voiced, hierarchical and authoritative monologism. The novelistic asserts a double-voiced, relativizing and internally persuasive dialogism. Attribute and action intersect so that Prince Hal is a poetic and hierarchical discourse. In its valorization of formal (poetic) discourse, Prince Hal simultaneously valorizes the syntagmatic orientation of metonymy. That is, Prince Hal professes the historical linearity and hierarchy of correct verse and, incidentally, correct genealogical politics.
The politics of discourse is the struggle between the centripetal and centrifugal impulses, that is, the impulses to monologize and those to dialogize. To identify the Prince Hal with poetry is to identify it with a genre which is a highly structured and ritualized discourse. Poetry valorizes the metonymic and asserts its hierarchy and authority. It is centripetal. In Poetry as Discourse, Antony Easthope argues that pentameter, as in Prince Hal, is determined ideologically and, "becomes a sign which includes and excludes, sanctions and denigrates, for it discriminates the 'properly' poetic from the 'improperly' poetic' (65). That is, a discourse which speaks relatively more iambic pentameter than another discourse can be understood to present a greater ideological claim of poetic correctness. This superiority is transferred to the speaker because, "The pattern learned by effort is presented as though it were unstudied, the contrivance is made to seem habitual, the speaker's impersonal and superior tone appears effortless" (67). Prince Hal presents itself as a naturally superior authoritative discourse over and above those less poetic (more novelistic) discourses. Simply put, the centripetal concerns of poetry are the concerns for order; the politics of poetry is the conservative concern for preservation of the established order. This is a discursive characteristic of the genre.
On the level of the represented political conflict, the genealogical politics of the English court interanimate with the discursive politics: Prince Hal monologizes Tavern Hal,Richard dialogizes King Richard II, King Richard II monologizes Bolingbroke. A final note: an equal emphasis is placed on the interanimation between discourses representing one person as is placed on that between discourses representing two persons. This type of analysis is further possible because of the intertextual nature of the texts themselves: the dialogue between quarto Richard II and folio Richard II, for example. The realm of heterophony is discourse. This reading of Richard II and 1 Henry IV remains in chapter three at the level of discourse. The possibility of dialogism among smaller units is the realm of the final chapter.
Heterosemia
Heterosemia. Diversity of signs. Dialogism of small semantic sets. It is an impossible consideration, oxymoronic in its conception: discourse analysis below the minimum level of discourse. It exists because of the fractal: a recurrent form at increasingly smaller levels. In heterosemia the form of dialogism recurs among small semantic sets. While heteroglossia and heterophony avail themselves to a reading, heterosemia invites play. The final chapter will therefore play among the elements of two planes of heterosemia: the prediscursive, which lives in small pieces of the text and the paratextual, which resides somewhere beside the text (See figure 9).
The form of Bakhtin's discursive conflict recurs as semiotic play. The prediscursive and paratextual elements which invite play include elements such as heteroepy, heterography, titles, and names and more. In his discussion of Sor Juana's play, Los empeños de una casa, Gerard Flynn notes a parody of Spanish (as opposed to Mexican) pronunciation in the play on an audience "hissing" a dislike theatrical performance (Flynn 42-44). The Spanish s and z is dialogized by the Mexican s/z. The paratextual includes sets such as titles, epigrams, author's name. The emphasis is not on the stratification of signs into higher and higher units of signification, but rather on the interplay and diversity. This allows a note to interplay with a text:
Y en cambio, nuestro texto depuró su genuinidad —en los de S. Pedro Nolasco—, relegando a las Notas aquellos inferiores y espurios "Villancicos que se cantaron en la Misa", frente a los cuales nos dejó Sor Juana —en su ejemplar de la edición aislada de 1677— esta anotación de su puño y letra: "Éstos de la Misa no son míos"… (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Obras Completas 2, xlvii)
Finally, the reading of the two previous levels, heteroglossia and heterophony, enables the play of heterosemia. The three exercise a dialogism among themselves: in the semantic interplay, semantics is created; in the interanimation of language, discourse, or sign, language and power interact.
Figure 7
Fractal: Level of Heteroglossia
Figure 8
Fractal: Level of Heterophony
Figure 9
Fractal: Level of Heterosemia
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