[11] I have been influenced in my use of Bakhtin by Paul de Man's suggestive essay upon Bakhtin, "Dialogue and Dialogism" (de Man, Resistance to Theory ). DeMan suggests the ambiguity within Bakhtin about the nature of dialogism—it can be interpreted either as a term that could allow us to fix the relation between fact and fiction, world and novel, or as a term that is fundamentally intralinguistic, and that indexes a more fundamental "otherness" or alterity (ibid., 110–112). De Man advocates reading Bakhtin in terms of the latter possibility, one that would arrest a movement from dialogism to dialogue of an interpersonal sort.