Discourse in a Novel

Abstract

Plato points out in the Republic that epic, antiquity’s most influential narrative form, alternates between diēgēsis and mimēsis. The poet either speaks narratively (diēgēsis) or imitates characters’ speech (mimēsis). (Indirect speech is rare in Homer.) The poet-narrator’s speech is kept clearly distinct from the characters’ because they are so linguistically homogeneous. Characters and narrator speak identically, so the individuality we expect in novelistic speech is impossible. Access to characters’ consciousness is limited to poetic diēgēsis of their actions and mimēsis of their words. Plato’s distinction is fundamental, but Lodge argues it is not “adequate to describe novelistic discourse.…[T]he relationship between mimēsis and diēgēsis in the novel is much more subtle and complicated…; we encounter in the novel a third kind of discourse[,] which…Bakhtin calls doubly-voiced or doubly-oriented.”