Expand Your Jargon 2: Dialogized Heteroglossia

(Official disclaimer: I do not pretend to be an expert on snootiness, and I do not pretend that my efforts at simplification may result in a misrepresentation of the term. You have been forewarned.)

You may have noticed that people of the world speak different languages. This, in and of itself, seems to be in the "Duh" category. But have you stopped to think that many people speak different English languages? You've got your regional dialect here, your professional jargon there (with pretentious terms like "analeptic prolepsis"). You've got your generational gap: I do not believe I will ever hear my parents will use the word "cool" as an honorific term for niftiness. You've got the fact that the same word can radically change when placed into a new context just two years later; it used to be that the term "weapons of mass destruction" was a fairly snicker-free word, but now many use it as a synonym for "ludicrous foreign policy." As M. M. Bakhtin writes, "each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases" (The Dialogic Imagination 263). There are different possible meanings of the same word (the meaning often depends on who's uttering it), and Bakhtin uses the word "heteroglossia" to describe this multiplicity and diversity of "languages" within one language. The words we choose express a specific point of view shaped by our upbringing, social class, personal affiliations, etc.

What's cool (in the nifty sense) about novel is that it has a lot of different kinds of heteroglossia. For instance, in My Fair Lady, you get snooty pedant Professor Higgins heteroglossia interacting with common flowergirl Eliza Doolittle heteroglossia. (Okay, that's an example from a play, not a novel, but it's less obscure than the other examples I thought of.) So the world may be characterized by heteroglossia--by having a bunch of different "languages" with their own hidden socio-linguistic assumptions--but in the novel, they are forced to engage with each other, to compete or communicate with opposing perspectives. A liberal can't describe him/herself as a "liberal," and a neoconservative can't refer to "weapons of mass destruction," without being reminded that these phrases are slur-words in certain circles. The English language is "dialogized"--that is, the different potential meanings of a word are almost always engaging with each other. They are "dialoguing," if you will.

So, to put this together: "dialogized heteroglossia" is, according to Bakhtin, "the authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape" (272). It recognizes that utterances enter an environment in which different socio-linguistic points of view are struggling over what that utterance means: for example, whether "patriotism" refers to a noble love of country, or to wicked behavior (as when Samuel Johnson describes it as the "last refuge of a scoundrel").

"Dialogized heteroglossia" is nifty because 1. it it a big phrase and 2. practically every fictional work has it. "Man, I really liked that play we saw yesterday, with those two guys with those different beliefs. Dang, that dialogized heteroglossia was freakin' awesome!" "You know, I've been thinking of only hanging out with computer geeks, but I'm worried that I won't be getting enough dialogized heteroglossia."