Literary critics today invoke polyphony in order to characterize virtually any text that employs multiple narrative voices, languages, or storylines. Mikhail Bakhtin introduced polyphony into literary criticism in the late 1920s in relation to Dostoevsky's novels, and Milan Kundera later popularized the term in The Art of the Novel. However, despite its extensive applications in contemporary criticism, and particularly in discussions of African and Caribbean fiction, it is still unclear what precisely polyphony means to different critics and what kinds of novels it best describes. This chapter takes up the task of situating polyphony, clarifying its mechanics, and attending to the political work it is called on to perform in the novel.

Bakhtin lays out his theory of polyphony in the seminal essay Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics(1929/1973). In his reading, polyphony evokes the particular capacity of the novel to accommodate contradictory positions and multiple discourses without imposing any central authoritative view. Whereas a “monophonic” text affirms the point of view of its author, polyphonic writing embraces dissonance and moral ambiguity. Several of Bakhtin's readers emphasize that polyphony is best understood as a loose metaphor, as an attempt to engage the “aural” and “oral” qualities of language and to account for the simultaneous interplay of voices within a text (Benson, 2003; Emerson, 2004). Jennifer Judkins (2011, 140) suggests that “musical forms themselves are generally soft concepts that are stretched and manipulated.” The malleability and multidimensionality of polyphony have made it a particularly appealing term for critics, as it facilitates a consideration of sound, space, and time in relation to the novel, aspects that surface more readily in discussions of poetry than of prose. Yet polyphony implies an act of interdisciplinary translation, as we move from the “simultaneous and harmonious” melodic lines that sound in a work of music to the “multiplicity of independent and often antithetic narrative voices” that interact sequentially and silently in a text.