Questioning and Conviction: Double-Voiced Discourse in Mark 3:22-30‪.‬

Literary irony is usually defined as a radical disjunction between what a text or a character in a text says and what that text or character means. (1) It refers to the controlled divergence of intended from apparent meaning, a divergence the careful reader must discern in order to privilege authentic over ostensible significance. Mikhail Bakhtin, however, provides a theoretical approach to this mode of semantic disjunction that at once resists straightforwardly promoting one level of meaning over another and at the same time refuses to allow the irreducible semantic difference that ensues to undermine a discourse's coherence: he invites the reader to consider the possibility that the contending meanings of a potentially ironic text might stand in dialogic relationship with one another. In a passage from "Discourse in the Novel," Bakhtin considers controlled incongruity between authorial intention and semantic appearance under the heading of "double-voiced discourse." As he defines it, double-voiced discourse "serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author." These two voices, Bakhtin explains, may be "dialogically interrelated": "they--as it were--know about each other; ... it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other." (2) Bakhtin's concept of double-voiced discourse provides a useful lens through which to examine the Beelzebul controversy of Mark 3:22-30, a puzzling pericope in which Jesus's words' apparent meaning and what they must mean when read carefully within the context of Mark's opening chapters stand in sharp, potentially ironic contrast. This semantic incongruity, as Bakhtin helps us to see, actually constitutes a theologically meaningful dialogue, which may be understood as dialogue between Jesus and Mark or, more broadly, between faithful commitment to and skeptical questioning of Jesus's ministry and message. Bakhtin's model of double-voiced discourse ultimately lays bare an important dynamic characterizing Mark's narrative throughout: failure to recognize the theologically significant dialogue inscribed in the double-voiced discourse of this pericope and others forecloses on precisely the ideological tension Mark attempts to cultivate in his readers.