Heteroglossia and the Poetics of the Roman Maghrébin

ABSTRACT

Tracing both the critical relevance and translational migration of Mikhail Bakhtin's 1935 essay “Discourse in the Novel” in the Maghreb, this essay explores the theoretical landscape of the roman maghrébin over the last 50 years with a particular emphasis on Morocco. Focusing on the critical concepts of heteroglossia and heterology, it argues that the Arabophone and Francophone Maghrebi novel continues to be written and theorized as pluralistic, polyphonic, and polysemic. The roman maghrébin thus disrupts those monoglossic and monolithic assumptions that inform a view of the novel as the genre par excellence for the hegemonic institutionalization of national identity, language, and literature. As such, the roman magébin relies upon a literary-critical poetics of opacity and untranslatability that in turn engenders particular reading practices and publics. This rendering of the novel as always already under translation, and yet untranslatable, further serves to destabilize not only the formal category of the novel, but also false binaries of the secular/sacred, personal/political and private/public.

KEYWORDS:

• Heteroglossia
• Bakhtin
• Maghreb
• Francophone
• Arabic
• novel

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2. In their translations and critical commentary, the preeminent Bakhtin scholars Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist employ the phrases “social voices” or “social heteroglossia” instead of heterology.

3. Other variations include heterologic [raznorechivoe] and heterological [raznorechivyi]. While Zbinden offers a fascinating and thorough analysis of the Franco-English translational politics of Bakhtin, she does not examine Barrāda's Arabic edition.

4. Bakhtin cites among his many examples of speech genres: militaristic speech, scientific statements, rhetorical speech (both political and judicial), as well as everyday speech. Such spheres subscribe to special “lexical, phraseological, and grammatical resources of the language” and indicate a certain adherence to “the national unity of language” (Bakhtin Speech 60–61). It is worth noting, that while the novel takes theoretical precedence in “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin elsewhere emphasizes the heterologic dimensions of other speech genres, both oral and written. See: Rabelais and His World, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and Speech Genres.

5. Barrāda cites Todorov's text in the copyright section of his translation. Todorov has also published an essay in the collected volume Du bilinguisme alongside Khatibi, Kilito and other renowned Maghrebi theorist-novelists.

6. The terms appear side-by-side in the critical index of the translation. Barrāda coins the phrase ṣūgh ḥawārī—literally “dialogic formulation”—to translate the French dialogisation.

7. For Todorov's explanation of the term hétérologie in distinction to hétéroglossie or hétérophonie see Le Principe Dialogique (Todorov 88-93). As Zbinden elaborates, Todorov's translation emphasizes the etymological distinction between logos [“word”] and glotta [“tongue” or “natural language”] (Zbinden 77).

8. On Bakhtin's context, political views and exile, see Katarina Clark and Michael Holquist's biography Mikhail Bakhtin. On Russian “self-colonization,” see Alexander Etkind's Internal Colonization.

9. The group included Matvei Isaevich Kagan (1889-1937); Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev (1891–1938); Lev Vasilievich Pumpianskii (1891–1940); Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov (1895–1936) and Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinskii (1902–1944) among others. Voloshinov's 1929 Marxism and the Philosophy of Language is a pivotal text in this regard. Notably, its authorship was largely contested for many years during which it was misattributed to Bakhtin. See the translators's preface and introduction (Voloshinov vii–6).

10. Bakhtin's book Rabelais and His World speaks to this phenomenon through the lens of the carnivalesque.

11. An earlier version of Khatibi's essay “Pensée-autre,” which appears in his collection Maghreb Pluriel, was titled “Le Maghreb comme horizon de pensée.” For a detailed discussion of this metaphor in Khatibi's work, see Harrison's “Cross-Cultural.”

12. See El Shakry “Lessons from the Maghreb.”

13. Kilito is certainly not alone in this regard. In the Algerian context, Rachid Boudjedra, Assia Djebar, Malek Haddad, and Tahar Djaout have expressed similar sentiments.

14. Notably, their critical works were published through Paris, Cairo or Beirut until the early 2000s, when much of Moroccan critical and literary production in Arabic, and to a lesser extent French, shifted to various domestic private, state and university presses in Rabat and Casablanca, such as: Maṭ baʿ al-Mʿārif al-Jadīdah, Dār al-ʾAmān, Wizārat al-Thaqāfah, Dār al-Thaqāfa, al-Marqaz al-Thaqāfī al-ʿArabī, Sharikat al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzīʿ al-Madāris, Dār al-Nashr al-Maghribiyyah, al-Rābitah and La Croisée des Chemins.

15. The innovative neo-historical fiction of the Moroccan philosopher Bensālem Ḥimmich is a fascinating example in this regard.

16. Yaqtīne explicitly borrows the terms hypotext and hypertext from Gérard Genette's narratology.

17. The Arabic quote is unattributed but appears to be from Barrāda's translation of “Discourse in the Novel.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hoda El-Shakry

Hoda El Shakry is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University, with an emphasis on contemporary literature, criticism and visual culture of the Middle East and North Africa.  Her scholarship traverses the fields of modern Arabic and Francophone North African literature, Mediterranean studies, gender and sexuality studies, Islam and secular criticism, as well as postcolonial studies and narrative theory.  Dr. El Shakry's current book project explores literary engagements with the Qurʾan and Islamic Thought in twentieth century Arabophone and Francophone fiction of the Maghreb.