Resonance: Reading “Homoglossia” across Narration and Dialogue

While on a conscious level, readers of fiction take for granted that quoted text represents words spoken by characters to other characters in a diegetic story-world, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories on polyphony and Franz Stanzel’s (and, more recently, Wolf Schmid’s) ideas on stylistic “contamination” of narrators’ speech by characters’ speech have long nuanced our understanding of quoted speech as always being read as purely diegetic. The article suggests how a reader’s stance toward a narrator’s voice can be mirrored by a similarly dialogically positioned pair of diegetic characters, with implications for the reader’s empathy. It examines how “resonance” between paired voices on separate narrative levels occurs when repetition of a deictic across juxtaposed passages or narration and dialogue leads readers to sense a rhetorical continuity despite the grammatical discontinuity.