Most music is polyphonic, but it has come to mean a complex interweaving of melodies associated with counterpoint, for example, Bach’s fugues, where each part is written against the other, intertwining, playing off the main melodic line, sometimes playing it in reverse, harmonizing at opportune moments.

The word “polyphonic” is a musical term, referring to simultaneous lines of independent melody making a whole. įrom the novel too, we have come to expect a more fluid, democratic pluralism of voice. Did this bother the audience who had to multi task? No, this was the point: to situate Hamlet in a contemporary multimedia milieu a modern audience understood. Actors were on their mobiles for much of the play, the audience was subjected to constant upstaging by other actors and mini-scenes, and at one point the three screens projected live camera footage taken by the actors of the performance itself so that it could be seen in quadruplicate. Hamlet Psyched was recently staged at the University of the Sunshine Coast by our drama students, an adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy which involved (as well as the conventional live performance) three large screens where text messages, scenes and clips flashed throughout the performance. It is a stand too against the authority of a monologous voice. It is more than simply multi-tasking: it is a way of experiencing and interacting with the world. And they’re texting their friends a running commentary of the lecture. They’re googling a reference they’re writing a sentence of a new story that pops into their head because of something he said-they’re checking out the new Creative Writing website to look at the assessment criteria he has just mentioned. Surprised, hurt even, they say they are listening. The lecturer at the front of the hall rails against what he calls such antisocial behaviour, admonishing them to close their laptops, pull the plugs out of their ears, turn off their mobiles and concentrate on the monotask at hand. They can flip over to playing a game too when bored.

They are also listening to the lecture, looking at the PowerPoint slides, slouching in front of a laptop which feeds them Facebook news. Students sit in a lecture theatre, plugged into their iPhones. Keywords: multi-tasking, polyphony, creative writing, Bakhtin, multigraphic, contrapuntal, graphomania, Cokcraco, African literature. This paper will examine the complex process of writing the polyphonic novel and highlighting its potential value in today’s multiplicitous climate. Recently, there has been a resurgence of novels of this type that play with simultaneity, contradiction, and the empty space between voices, echoing our post-modern, multi-tasking reading practice.Ĭokcraco is an inadvertent polyphonic novel whose layers of discourse evolved during the fifteen-year writing process and the author’s struggle to find its “voice”.

Mikhail Bakhtin borrowed the phrase from a musical concept referring to the diversity of voices in Dostoyevsky’s novels. The polyphonic or dialogic novel is nothing new. The only way to resolve the issue of voice in this book was to create a multi-layered narrative in which contradictory voices emerged to create a polyphonic whole. My novel Cokcraco (2013) took fifteen years and many layers to complete. The journey to finding the right voice for a novel can be an arduous one.

Define polyphonic