To Restore The Voice: Polyphony in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Gravedigger’sDaughter

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of polyphony in Joyce Carol Oates’s novel The Gravedigger’sDaughter. Polyphony is considered not only as a procedure related to textual poetics, but a startingpoint for placing the compositional and stylistic organization of a literary work in the contextof the assumptions of pragmatism and posthumanism. The category derived from Bakhtin’s theorycan be used to conceptualize the phenomenon of „voices”, a form of constructing the identityof the novel’s protagonist. „Voices” are quotations of thoughts and statements of other characters inthe work, penetrating the inner life of the main character. Multi-voice subjectivity, which is suggestedby the procedure of „quoting” voices, establishes a version of identity which is highly dialogical,indeterminate, dynamic and unstable. The world presented in the novel is likely to imply contradictory,ambiguous ideas as to whether American social life supports or prevents individual freedom.Polyphonic subjectivity in Oates’ novel entails the acceptance of the pluralism and indeterminacyof the presented world and of the dialogical, incomplete identity of the characters. Thus, the literaryform develops an epistemology and an aesthetics equivalent to the philosophical stances of pragmatismand posthumanism. Tracing the „voices” scattered throughout the work requires so muchcognitive effort from the reader that it makes them a co-participant in the process of meaning--making.