Polyphonic voices and the influence of social media on the contemporary novel

Composed of interlocking critical and creative parts my proposed thesis will increase understanding of the ways in which social media, whilst alleging to be democratic and polyphonic, has to a large extent become the monologic narrative of our time. The research will be grounded in Virginia Woolf's notion of 'a saturation of detail' in 'The Waves' and 'Between the Acts' and Bernadine Evaristo's 'fusion fiction', evidenced in her 2016 novel, 'Girl, Woman, Other'.

I have chosen to focus on these texts, despite the radically different positionalities of their authors, because they align closely with the thematic concerns at the heart of my novel: the narrating I, the identification and diversification of self and an enduring concern for those who are 'othered'. Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the polyphonic novel, and the critical discourse which surrounds it, will inform the project's theoretical framework.

I will also look at how the modern polyphonic novel, which embraces simultaneity, empty space, and multimedia intrusions into the text (for instance, Jenny Egan's 'Visit to the Good Squad'), can more accurately reproduce the ways we construct and negotiate our modern narrative self in the world.

The question of voice is central to my novel, which will focus on a ten-year-old child's decision to stop speaking, following a prolonged Covid lockdown with her family. Competing voices in the novel will seek to establish reasons for her decision, creating counter stories: her aunt is a climate activist and has paralysed the child with anxiety, her mother has lost touch with her family over Brexit and is now depressed, her grandparents are contemplating divorce, her brother is being bullied online, her father is a fitness fanatic and failed businessman.

Opinion will divide on questions of what explains the silence; desiring a harmonising truth that is impossible to establish, thereby setting up tension of form and subject in a polyphonic novel that will push against Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia. The effect of the child's silence will ripple beyond the family and immediate community, as she becomes a social media sensation, where the choice of silence is seen by some as a rebellious, even treacherous, act and by others as a stand against a world that insists a 'self' only exists when it is in dialogue.

I have in mind the image from 'Between the Acts' where Giles steps on the snake having so much trouble swallowing the toad that it seems to become a 'monstrous inversion' of the birth process. The child in my novel, raised to socialise and be fluent in both verbal and nonverbal language, is similarly choked by the competing voices. The novel will explore how the family negotiates the attention, opprobrium, incendiary and violent language emanating from 'public opinion' as mediated via social media.

It will use white space (the equivalence of silence), inference, gaps in story and multiple viewpoints to disrupt the generic narrative structure and challenge the authority of voice(s), as the question all the characters want answered, why won't the child speak, cannot be resolved unless she chooses to. The close analysis in my critical thesis, regarding the scope and metamorphoses of the polyphonic novel, and my practice-based writing of it, is timely as it reflects new technology, plays with it, rails against it and explores its potential to shape a modern sense of self in a world filled with so much competing noise.