Language as Appropriation and Corruption

“He was helpful enough to put his cards face up on the table, that we might examine his hands. Let us, then, for God’s sake, examine them” (Burke 192).

This quote taken from Burke’s “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”, provides the perfect cohesion of both his and Bakhtin’s arguments on understanding literature. Both express distaste for those who cling to examining literature based on limited, pre-set ideas that fail to grasp the extent of language’s implications within works. For Burke, it is the “inattention” of the “hasty reviewer”; for Bakhtin, it is the “divorce between an abstract ‘formal’ approach, and an equally abstract ‘ideological’ approach” (Burke 191, Bakhtin 258). Both examine language’s influence in terms of power, and more specifically how the merging and effective appropriation of ‘languages’ is capable of swaying an entire society to an unspeakably horrendous outcome.

In his essay, “Discourse in the Novel”, Bakhtin essentially argues for the novel as discourse. In other words, a novel contains within it an amalgamation of different languages, which represent “the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and past” (291). Words and their meanings are always tied to its previous uses; they are not cleanly born each time a speaker or writer decides to use them. Instead, these uses are appropriated again and again, carrying remnants from the past. This idea, which he calls “heteroglossia”, allows for multiple belief systems to exist at once, in one place and one time—the novel—“forming new socially typifying ‘languages’” (291). This basis of understanding language as a social exchange sets up this idea of the need for people to appropriate it in their own terms and for their own contexts in order for it to be used powerfully. “The word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language…but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one’s own” (294). This appropriation of language is done through style, and is thus why Bakhtin is so adamant on refusing the notion that language and style are capable of being evaluated separately. He argues that language and style cannot be mutually exclusive—language is style—because the very nature of language is stylistic, and different styles create different languages.

Language’s dependency on style is exemplified in Burke’s examination of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ in which he employed such appropriations of language to serve his own ultimate purpose. “Let us try also to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man has concocted, that we may known, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against” (191). Burke refers to Hitler’s usage of the term medicine, which by default implies the existence of its opposite, sickness, and thus requires some sort of ‘cure’. Metaphor, in this way, creates the double-voicing effect that Bakhtin describes because of the heteroglossic nature of language. Specific discourses are able to transcend their usual contexts and create new meaning in another. We are almost subconsciously required to think of an ailment when the idea of medicine is brought into our minds because this is the context in which we know the word. This ‘stylistic’ technique of language to form connections between multiple languages creates the existence of multiple meanings at once.

By recognizing that style creates language and vice versa, a much more holistic approach can be taken in order to understand power within rhetoric. Bakhtin and Burke both make claims that exemplify the intrinsic existence of power within rhetoric. Moreover, this examination is of critical importance in order to understand language as a social phenomenon, “like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of the verbal artist lives” (Bakhtin 288).