Monologue and dialogism in highland new guinea verbal art

The term “dialogism” as used by Mikhail Bakhtin refers not to dialogue in the ordinary sense but to the intermingling of distinct social voices in given stretches of discourse. For Bakhtin, the novel represented the pinnacle of development of such dialogism, whereas epic was the prototypical “monologic” genre. Here I compare what Bakhtin had to say in this respect with recent findings concerning epic-like genres of oral, sung narrative which are found across much of Highland Papua New Guinea. I show that the regional genres that are the most dialogic in the ordinary sense are the least dialogical in Bakhtin’s sense, and vice versa. Contrary to simplistic views of monologic “epic” as the canonical narrative genre in “oral cultures,” the three cases discussed here show how widely even oral genres which are similar in other ways can differ regarding the canonical forms of dialogism and monologism that one finds in them.