The Voice of Vibrant Matter: Eco-Polyphony in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

According to Mikhail Bakhtin, every human being speaks a language that is always permeated with many voices derived from the structures of family, class, religion, or country: a chorus of languages expressing the heteroglot essence of social life.Polyphony is, for Bakhtin, a matter of fact, and novels must be understood as representations and embodiments of the multi-centered reality of human life and communication.What happens, then, when more-than-human subjectivities are also recognized as involved in this polyphony, and semiotic analysis broadens to include languages and signs that have previously been occluded by anthropocentric hierarchies and speciesist conceptualizations?How might novels give space (and voice) to the vibrancy of matter?What are the challenges connected to the representation in verbal art of the environment as a web of intertwined agential materialities?This article will foreground a materialist approach to language that, by proposing the category of "eco-polyphony" and illuminating a nonhierarchical view of human and nonhuman signs, resonates with an environmentalist understanding of the vitality of matter as diffused across beings of all kinds, and with a politically significant expansion of the range of beings in existence as discussed by Bruno Latour.The vital materialism systematically