The Many Voices of Owls Do Cry: A Bakhtinian Approach‪.‬

The style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its styles; the language of a novel is the system of its 'languages'. (2) Janet Frame's novel Owls Do Cry (3) impresses immediately with its striking and sometimes bewildering fluctuations in style, embodying a 'range of diction and imagery unequalled in New Zealand literature'. (4) In this essay I will approach the text as the convergence of different 'voices', drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of 'polyphony'. Bakhtin saw the hallmark of the novel as its capacity to bring together 'a diversity of social speech types ... and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organised', made possible by the 'internal stratification' of a language. All national languages, such as English, consist of a number of 'sub-languages' or styles: 'social dialects, characteristic group behaviours, professional jargons ... languages of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day ...'. (5) Each style implies a 'world view' or ideological orientation, including that of the narrator and the author (here and throughout this article used in the sense of 'implied author'). In the truly 'polyphonic' (or 'dialogic') novel the author's voice does not dominate, but rather joins with the other voices in a dialogue of unresolved ideologies. As this article will show, an application of Bakhtin's model to Owls Do Cry proves fruitful in analysing the voices interwoven in the narration, but also demonstrates the difficulty of achieving a fully dialogic text.