Γλώσσα και εκδοχές ετερότητας στην πεζογραφία της Μέλπως Αξιώτη

Abstract

Researching object of the present paper is to highlight cases of heterogeneity in Melpo Axioti’s heretic narrative writing, either through its varying aberrations from formal norms, the rules of literary tradition which determine the stigma of its modernist, innovative writing, which is in general a declination from this tradition, either through manifestations of heterogeneity of the discourse and of the compositional structure of the narrative. Axioti’s prose constitutes an expedient field for the practice of the Bakhtin’s dialogist dimension of the language and its fundamental components: In particular, polyphony and the inextricably linked heteroglossia, aspects of which we are exploring in the entire Axioti’s narrative work, in addition to her first novel, Δύσκολες Νύχτες, where relevant studies have focused on. The inherently dialogic character of Axioti’s narrative, as inferred through examples, is built on its heterophonic constitution. The exposure of the stylistic distinctiveness as a pertinent characteristic of textual creative practice projects the heteroglossic inclination of the social environment ‒the source of its production‒ the cultural and social, in essence, heterogeneity. At the same time, with the author-narrator once to utter the «other’s» voice, self-exiled in Paris and a political refugee afterwards in the countries of former Eastern Europe, except in the case of external dialogism, we are considering internal, covered dialogism; invisible dialog with what Bakhtin calls the «other's voice», echoes of other’s voices into the narrative characters discourse. The language is finally emerged as the common denominator of the versions of otherness throughout Axioti’s narrative production, with the overriding demand for its preservation and her agony on its memory, the language-identity and the homeland that she was deprived of.