Talk Fiction: Literature and the Talk Explosion

Preface

ix Preface Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a di√erent name for conversation.—laurence sterne, Tristram Shandy As a graduate teaching assistant in a course called ‘‘Comedy and the Novel,’’ I had an encounter with a student that has intrigued me to this day. Indeed, in many respects the kernel of this book lies in that interaction (and for this reason I am particularly sorry I have long forgotten the name of the student). The professor had assigned Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and just before we began our small-group discussion on the novel, a male undergraduate rushed in and blurted out: ‘‘This book was so cool. It was talking to me. I never read a novel before that was about me.’’ I wasn’t amused. I was puzzled and annoyed by his reaction. I had read the novel for the first time to prepare for this class and had been thoroughly irritated by it, so the student’s enthusiasm alone irked me. My initial hunch about the di√erences between this student’s a√ect and my own was based on gender: the inscribed reader in Calvino’s novel is male, and this student was able to identify with him because he too was a ‘‘he’’; in contrast, I was put o√ by yet another instance of the ‘‘male’’ masquerading as the ‘‘universal.’’ That the student hadn’t overtly noticed the inscription of gender in the text didn’t particularly surprise me; after all, it is less immediately apparent in the English translation the class had read than in the Italian original (a topic I take up in chapter 4). But I continued to be perplexed—and initially discouraged—by how a Harvard undergraduate who’d been through an entire semester of a novels course could think that the text actually ‘‘was talking’’ to him or could actually ‘‘be about’’ him. Hadn’t I spent a significant proportion of our discussion time in the previous months introducing narratological terms, distinguishing, for example, between the narratee , the inscribed reader, and the flesh-and-blood reader? Ironically, I appeared to have failed as a teacher where this student succeeded, for his conviction that the novel was talking to him eventually taught me to revise how I read—at least how to read certain novels like Calvino’s. More precisely, I realized that this novel aims for readers to have both the Preface x student’s reaction and mine: delight and annoyance, engagement and disengagement, identification and alienation. My frustration turned to pleasure when I started trying to have both reactions simultaneously. I propose to call If on a winter’s night a traveler and novels in the same mold ‘‘talk fiction,’’ because they contain features that promote in readers a sense of the interaction we associate with face-to-face conversation (‘‘talk’’) and a sense of the contrivance of this interaction (‘‘fiction ’’). Furthermore, I mean my phrase to signal a mingling of elements from spoken and written communication: these texts contain ‘‘talk’’ in ‘‘fiction,’’ as in prose fiction. This hybridity of orality and textuality links the works I’m considering to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a sense of literature as ‘‘but a di√erent name for conversation’’ had not yet been banned from the developing novel form, a period, too, when literacy itself was becoming a mass phenomenon. It also links talk fiction to the twentieth century through the phenomenon of ‘‘secondary orality,’’ a term referring to the resurgence of oral communication made possible by technology like the telephone, radio, film, television, video, and computer. I submit that we can’t know whether talk fiction is a response to the talk explosion or a response to the same forces that led to that explosion. In either case, it seems to me that to fully appreciate the communicative hybridity of our age, we need to register the presence (reemergence? persistence?) of oral elements in literature, the verbal form that the twentieth century nevertheless posited as the most unlike speech. Contrivance connects my phenomenon to its auditory template, ‘‘talk radio’’ and the television ‘‘talk show,’’ related genres based on mediated engagement of speakers and interlocutors, not on passive transmission of music, news, or other information. While not arguing for the direct influence of developments in radio or television on prose fiction or vice versa, I do intend ‘‘talk radio’’ to echo...