Abstract

In my essay, “The Unfinalizability of the Dialogic in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs” I address the confessional nature of John Berryman’s collection of poetry, The Dream Songs, viewing the songs through the prism of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of polyphony and dialogism. Bakhtin believed only fictional works could be polyphonic, but in this paper I highlight the polyphonic and dialogic nature of the poetry of The Dream Songs, many of which contain a variety of dialogues in and of themselves. According to Bakhtin, the dialogic work is unfinalizable, that is, it leaves meaning unresolved and incomplete, and therefore infinitely responsive. Berryman’s formalistic and innovative invention of the dream sonnet form frames the unfinalizability of the Songs by providing a means to construct his many-voiced poetic vision. The Dream Songs seek to present a montage of voices centered on Berryman’s poetic alter-ego Henry, this polyphony arises out of Berryman’s own trauma, which is in an ongoing conversation with the dialogic elements of the Songs. These dialogic elements construct the confessionalism of The Dream Songs, defined as that which investigates the experience of the individual psyche under the pressure of trauma. The way to investigate Henry’s personality is through dialogue with a diverse array of voices whose unfinalizability construct the final, incomplete, and fractured form of the dream sonnet, which highlights the inability of language to say, but never mean. But this unfinalizability itself is responsible for the resonance of Berryman’s work, whose unfinalizable quality strives above all to communicate with others. In the dream world that Berryman constructs, wordlessness in the face of trauma would be the most tragic thing of all.

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