I.  "The novel as a whole is a phenomenon multiform in style and variform in speech and voice.  In it the investigator is confronted with several heterogeneous stylistic unities, often located on different linguistic levels and subject to different stylistic controls."  Bahktin lists these "unities" as:

 (1) Direct authorial literary-artistic narration (in all its diverse variants);
 (2) Stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration (skaz);
 (3) Stylization of the various forms of semiliterary (written) everyday narration (the letter, the diary, etc.);
(4) Various forms of literary but extra-artistic authorial speech (moral, philosophical or scientific statements, oratory, ethnographic descriptions, memoranda and so forth;
 (5) The stylistically individualized speech of characters*

II.  Drawing on the above stylistic unities, Bahktin discusses the various "compositional forms for appropriating and organizing heteroglossia in the novel" (301).  The "most basic forms" are:

(1) The comic novel

In the comic novel, a "‘common language’ ? usually the average norm of spoken and written language for a given social group -? is taken by the author precisely as the common view, as the verbal approach to people and things normal for a given sphere of society... Another’s speech... -is at none of these points clearly separated from authorial speech: the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous, often passing though a single syntactic whole, often through a simple sentences, and sometimes even dividing up the main parts of a sentence." (301, 308).

The comic novel is distinguished by two features:

 (i.) Incorporated into the novel are a multiplicity of ‘language’ and verbal-ideological belief systems ? generic, professional, class-and-interest group (the language of the nobleman, the farmer, the merchant, the peasant); tendentious, everyday (the languages of rumour, of society chatter, servants’ language) and so forth, but these languages are, it is true, kept primarily within the limits of the literary written and conversational language; at the same time these languages are not, in most cases, consolidated into fixed persons (heroes, storytellers) but rather are incorporated in an impersonal form ‘from the author,’ alternating (while ignoring precise formal boundaries) with direct authorial discourse.

 (ii.) The incorporated languages and socio-ideological belief systems, while of course utilized to refract the author’s intentions, are unmasked and destroyed as something false, hypocritical, greedy, limited, narrowly rationalistic, inadequate to reality.  In most cases these languages ? already fully formed, officially recognized, reigning languages that are authoritative and reactionary are (in real life) doomed to death and displacement.  Therefore what predominates in the novel are various forms and degrees of parodic stylization" (311-12).

  (2) A story ‘not from the author’

"The posited author and teller assume a completely different significance when they are incorporated as carriers of a particular verbal-ideological linguistic belief system, with a particular point of view on the world and its events, with particular value judgments and intonations ? ‘particular’ both as regards the author, his real direct discourse, and also as regards ‘normal’ literary narrative and language" (312)

"The speech of such narrators is always another’s speech… and in another’s language  (i.e., insofar as it is a particular variant of the literary language that clashes with the language of the narrator).  Thus we have in this case ‘nondirect speaking’ ? not in language but through  language, through the linguistic medium of another ? and consequently through a refraction of authorial intentions...

The author manifests himself and his point of view not only in his effect on the narrator, on his speech and his language… but also in his effect on the subject of the story ? as a point of view that differs from the point of view of the narrator.  Behind the narrator’s story we read a second story, the author’s story; he is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about the narrator himself.  We acutely sense two levels at each moment in the story" (313-14).

  (3) The language used by characters:

"The language used by characters in the novel, how they speak, is verbally and semantically autonomous, each character’s speech possesses its own belief system, since each is the speech of another in another’s language; thus it may also refract authorial intentions and consequently may… constitute a second language for the author...

Thus even where there is no comic element, no parody, no irony and so forth, where there is no narrator, no posited author or narrating character, speech diversity and language stratification still serve as the basis for style in the novel.  Even in those places where the authors voice seems at first glance to be unitary and consistent, direct and unmediatedly intentional, beneath that smooth, single-languaged surface we can nevertheless uncover prose’s three-dimensionality, its profound speech diversity" (315).

"The zone surrounding the important characters of the novel is stylistically profoundly idiosyncratic: the most varied hybrid constructions hold sway in it, and it is always, to one degree or another, dialogized; inside this area a dialogue is played out between the author and his characters ? not a dramatic dialogue broken up into statement-and-response, but that special type of novelistic dialogue that realizes itself within the boundaries of constructions that externally resemble monologues" (320).

  (4) Incorporated genres

"The novel permits the incorporation of various genres, both artistic (inserted short stories, lyrical songs, pomes, dramatic scenes, etc.) and extra-artistic (everyday, rhetorical, scholarly, religious genres and others).  In principle, any genre could be included in the construction of the novel, and in fact it is difficult to find any genres that have not at some point been incorporated into a novel by someone.  Such incorporated genres usually preserve within the novel their own structural integrity and independence, as well as their own linguistic and stylistic peculiarities.

There exists in addition a special group of genres that play an especially significant role in structuring novels, sometimes by themselves even directly determining the structure of a novel as a whole… Examples of such genres would be the confession, the diary, travel notes, biography, the personal letter and several others.  All these genres may not only enter the novel as one of its essential structural components, but may also determine the form of the novel as a whole (the novel-confession, the novel-diary, the novel-in-letters, etc.).  Each of these genres possesses its own verbal and semantic forms for assimilating various aspects of reality" (321).

"A similar situation is the novel’s incorporation of every possible kind of maxim and aphorism; they too may oscillate between the purely objective (the ‘word on display’) and the directly intentional, that is the fully conceptualized philosophical dicta of the author himself (unconditional discourse spoken with no qualifications or distancing" (322).
 
 

* Mikhail Bahktin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981) 261-62.