Abstract
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theorization of language as inherently ‘dialogic’ or oriented in interactive engagement with other languages has revolutionized ways of thinking of pragmatic language use, drawing crucial attention to the dynamic and subtle processes that go into the making of speech acts. In the realm of artistic expression in the novel, this dialogic orientation of language, following Bakhtin, translates as the animation of the literary corpus by linguistic consciousnesses that listen to and respond to one another. As discourse in the novel, seemingly made by the narrator/character, is constantly subject to contestation and modification by other voices, the text takes on a ‘living’ quality as opposed to a ‘dead’ text that is unresponsive to other voices. The present article hopes to demonstrate this novelistic contribution of Mikhail Bakhtin by a discourse analysis of Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence, wherein a lively forum of embodied and unembodied consciousnesses are brought to bear, defying interpretation by objective theories of language.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Malinke’ is the name of the ethnic group of West Africa to which the writer, Ahmadou Kourouma belongs.
- 2.
Justin Bisanswa, in “The Adventure of the Epic and the Novel in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Writings,” studies the form of Kourouma’s novels to conclude that the form is a blend of the epic and the novel. Christiane Ndiaye’s “Kourouma, the Myth: The Rhetoric of the Commonplace in Kourouma Criticism” deals with the politics of writing and shows how Kourouma creates authentic African prose to free the African novel from French domination. Amadou Koné, in “Discourse in Kourouma’s Novels: Writing Two Languages to Translate Two Realities,” examines the uneasy relationship between the use of Malinké and French in Kourouma’s writing. Carrol Coates relates the fiction of Kourouma to his real life with special reference to the dictator Houphouet Boigny.
- 3.
An ‘alien’ word is a word that has a different semantic and axiological content and, therefore, contradicts the word of the speaker.
- 4.
«…comment être, à la fois, non personnel et personnel, non impliqué et impliqué, éloigné et présent, contemporain et postérieur? C’est pourquoi ce statut contradictoire et fluctuant qu’adopte le narrateur Monnè.».
- 5.
The ‘living’ social context here is not the objective social context stated to describe a historical point of time but, taken in the Bakhtinian sense implies the dialogically interrelated plural language situation wherein the word of a speaker evokes a response and responds to another in turn. As Bakhtin writes in “The Problem of Speech Genres”, “Any understanding of live speech, a live utterance, is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies extremely” (Bakhtin 1986a: 68).
- 6.
What is implied here by “dialogue” is the Bakhtinian sense of the term meaning “dialogic ties” or evaluations of different speaking subjects converging on a common theme.
- 7.
In Adrian Adam’s English translation, the word ‘Allah’ of the original French text is translated as ‘God’.
- 8.
Bakhtin calls it a word with a ‘sideward glance’, which is an utterance that is made with a certain interlocutor in view, to hint at his/her sentiment.
- 9.
Bakhtin calls a hybrid construction “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses” (Bakhtin 1986b: 358).
- 10.
The same idea is relayed by the marabout when Salimata pays him a visit after being robbed when she tells him that she does not have the means to pay him: “Give what you can. Poverty is God’s doing as well as wealth” (SI, p. 43).
- 11.
In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin writes: “A character in a novel always has, as we have said, a zone of his own, his own sphere of influence on the authorial context surrounding him, a sphere that extends—and often quite far—beyond the boundaries of the direct discourse allotted to him” (Bakhtin 1986b: 320).
- 12.
The ‘third’ party in the dialogue between two parties is explained by Bakhtin in his essay “The Problem of the Text”: “Each dialogue takes place as if against the background of the responsive understanding of an invisibly present third party who stands above all the participants in the dialogue” (Bakhtin 1986a: 126).
- 13.
‘Allah’ has been translated as ‘God’ in Adrian Adam’s translation of Les Soleils des Indépendances.
References
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Journals
Bisanswa, Justin K. 2007. The Adventures of the Epic and Novel in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Writings. Research in African Literatures 38 (2): 81–94.
Coates, Carrol F. 2007. A Fictive History of Côte d’Ivoire: Kourouma and “Fouphouai. Research in African Literatures 38 (2): 124–139.
Kone, Amadou. 2007. Discourse in Kourouma’s Novels: Writing Two Languages to Translate Two Realities. Research in African Literatures 38 (2): 109–123.
Ndiaye, Christiane. 2007. Kourouma, the Myth: The Rhetoric of the Commonplace in Kourouma Criticism. Research in African Literatures 38 (2): 95–108.
Ouédraogo, Jean. 2004. Ahmadou Kourouma and the Ivoirian Crises. Research in African Literatures 35 (3): 1.
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Adhikari, F. (2018). Dead Text or Living Consciousnesses? Bakhtinian Poetics in the Francophone African Context. In: Bandlamudi, L., Ramakrishnan, E. (eds) Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6313-8_14
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