THE MONO-DIALOGIC NARRATIVE IN AMERICA (BAKHTIN, NONFICTION)

Many important American writers have used generically hybrid narrative forms to create a distinctive discourse that foregrounds its socio-political significance. Works as seemingly diverse as Franklin\u27s Autobiography, Thoreau\u27s Walden, Twain\u27s Life on the Mississippi, James\u27s The American Scene, Adams\u27s The Education of Henry Adams, Agee\u27s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Mailer\u27s Armies of the Night have in common the need to authoritatively affirm or repudiate particular ideologies and polemicize to their readers as well as to question authoritativeness both as a linguistic construct and as a social phenomenon. I call these works Mono-Dialogic Narratives. As a genre, the Mono-Dialogic Narrative is significant in the sheer complexity with which it mixes what Mikhail Bakhtin calls monologic (ideologically unified) and dialogic (ideologically conflictual and diverse) forms of discourse. Bakhtin\u27s theoretical framework is particularly useful in studying these texts both because his theories question generic hegemony and because the writers of this genre have, in different ways, used the mono-dialogic form to serve their political needs. These works therefore demand that their stylistics be viewed ideologically. Bakhtin\u27s emphasis on language social phenomenon allows for an analytic strategy sensitive both to the verbal and ideological features of this discourse. Emphasis throughout this study is on examining the confluence between the politics of these writers and the particular configurations of the mono-dialogic tension in these works, especially as manifested in the status of the authorial voice in relation to textualized readers and other ideological voices in the text. Franklin\u27s politics of national consolidation and Thoreau\u27s politics of artistic priesthood lead to the privileging of primarily monologic authorial voices. Twain\u27s attraction to class structure and subversive democracy expresses itself in a bi-univocal monologism. Recognizing the inadequacy of narratives of consensus, James and Agee attempt to dialogically decenter their voices while their politics of racial purity and apolitical divinity respectively compel them to legitimize hegemonic authorial voices. Finally, Adams\u27s cognizance of multiplicity in the political and cultural spheres and Mailer\u27s advocacy of a politics of differentiation generate narratives in which the authorial voice is dialogically dispersed and monologic authority remains only as a trace