Margaret Drabble’s Artistic Transition In The Trilogy:A Perspective Of Dialogism

As a famous British writer,Margaret Drabble has gained wide recognition and academic respect in contemporary western literary circles for her vivid treatment of women’s lives and realistic social concern for the complicated social reality.Her novels published prior to the 1980s well demonstrate the author’s firm adherence to the realistic tradition.However,the trilogy consisting of The Radiant way(1987),A Natural Curiosity(1989)and The Gales of Ivory(1991),registers a significant transitional period in Drabble’s writing career.As Drabble’s transitional works,the trilogy not only follows the realistic literary mode by showing concern for the individual’s life amidst societal transformations and unmoored moral standards during the Thatcher administration,but also embodies the author’s experimental impulse through its innovative narrative.The trilogy’s broad social perspective bears a certain degree of consistence with Bakhtin’s discussion of "heteroglossia",which corresponds with the multi-leveledness of social reality.Based on this,Bakhtin puts forward the concept of dialogue to describe the complicated reciprocities among distinct consciousnesses and utterances.And he further defines two levels of dialogues:"great dialogue" and "microdialogue".For one thing,the novel as a whole can be structured as a "great dialogue" if all relationships among external and internal parts and elements of this novel are considered dialogic in character.For another,the fictional language becomes double-voiced when it simultaneously expresses two different intentions,the direct intention of the character who is speaking,and the refracted intention of the author,which makes the novel full of "microdialogues" between the two intentions.To some extent,the trilogy’s ideological multi-voicedness can be analyzed in reference to the concept of "great dialogue".It is in the context of the trilogy’s great dialogue that the characters establish various interpersonal relationships,and their inner worlds are rife with the collision and conflicts between distinct consciousnesses.In this way two major types of dialogues come into being in the trilogy,namely interpersonal dialogue and internal dialogue.These two types of dialogues together reflect Drabble’s realistic concern for the contemporary people’s problematic living condition and fluctuating mental state.In addition,the concept of "microdialogue" illustrates the interaction between author and hero in double-voiced discourses,which can be used to clarify the equal author-hero dialogic relationship in the trilogy.Drabble relinquishes the conventional omnipresent and controlling authorial role and leaves enough space for her characters’ autonomous development.This newly-established author-hero relationship "revises" Drabble’s allegiance to the realistic tradition.In a word,this paper employs Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism as its theoretical framework and focuses on three categories of dialogues in the trilogy,namely the characters’ interpersonal dialogues,their internal dialogues as well as the author-hero dialogues.The former two types of dialogues manifest Drabble’s realistic social concern and the third type embodies Drabble’s innovative development of literary realism.The specialized and systematic dialogic study of Drabble’s trilogy hence supplies an illuminating perspective on her artistic shift in the late 1980s.