Writing the polyphonic novel

Multi-tasking is now accepted practice in everyday life. When it comes to reading novels, modern writers such as JM Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Jennifer Egan, and many of our University of the Sunshine Coast students have incorporated a multitasking practice in the form and structure of their works through multilayered polyphonic narratives that demand a multitasking reading practice. My novel Cokcraco (Lacuna Publishing, 2013), similarly employs a multi-layered narrative in which contradictory voices emerge to create a polyphonic whole. Such polyphonic or dialogic novels are nothing new. Mikhail Bakhtin borrowed the phrase from a musical concept referring to the diversity of voices in Dostoyevsky’s novels. But 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. Cokcraco 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’. This paper will examine the complex process of writing the polyphonic novel and highlighting its potential value in today’s multiplicitous climate