Introduction

Summary

The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed a marked increase in novels written with a setting in Malaysia and Singapore by those who have grown up in this region, some of whom have either migrated to other countries or are now living abroad. I have selected novels written about this region by non-European writers that offer possibilities for discussion. As my objective is to reveal the underlying relationship of the represented speech of the person speaking in a multilingual environment, such as Malaysia and Singapore, to the thematic intent of each novel, I have selected novels that suggest that multiple meanings are possible. Therefore, the choice of the texts depends very much on the dialogic quality of the language. In other words I have chosen novels where an internal dialogue in the narrative is present. It is this that allows multiple interpretations.

The theoretical basis for the discussion of the text will be the notion of heteroglossia, the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance, postulated by Mikhail M. Bakhtin and the interanimation of languages through the person speaking. Bakhtin says that the novel “orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions” (The Dialogic Imagination, p. 263). Bakhtin' notion of heteroglossia gives an appropriate framework for analysing the novels I have selected because he sees the novel “as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organised” (p. 262). Bakhtin also sees the “distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types” (p. 263) as the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.

Bakhtin' insistence on the person speaking as the central dynamic of the narrative (p. 332) offers a challenge to writers who embark on writing a novel in English in a multilingual speech community such as Malaysia and Singapore, because of the linguistic composition of these societies.