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8. The New Art of Constructive Dialogue: From James to Hemingway
- Louisiana State University Press
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8 The New Art of Constructive Dialogue From James to Hemingway [Hemingway’s] is an obscuring and at the same time a revealing way to write dialogue, and only great skill can manage it—and make us aware at the same time that communication of a limited kind is now going on as best it can. —Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story As a writer I was astonished by Hemingway’s skill . . . I have never understood , to this day, how Hemingway achieved his powerful dialogue . . . What Hemingway offered . . . was not dialogue overheard, but a concentrate of it, often made up of superficially insignificant elements—mere fragments of everyday phrases, which always managed to convey what was most important . —Ilya Ehrenburg, “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence” There is not a living writer in England who has been unaffected by the laconic speed of his dialogue, the subtle revelation of character that lies behind a spoken phrase. —Alan Pryce-Jones, “The World Weighs a Writer’s Influence Hemingway’s most original and influential contribution to the art of fiction was his creation of an entirely new role for dialogue. Between the completion of his sixth story, “Indian Camp,” in February 1924 (the first new story written for In Our Time) and his thirtieth story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” in May 1927 (the last story written for Men Without Women), he so thoroughly revolutionized dialogue that, had he done nothing else, this accomplishment alone would have secured his reputation in literary history. But although critics have frequently commented on his distinctive dialogue, the exact nature of his achievement remains rudimentarily explored .1 I can posit only two reasons why. First, since the academy is dismissive of scholarship on articulated technique in fiction studies—if not in poetry, music, or art criticism—an examination of the craft of dialogue is, unfortunately, of far greater interest to writers, the direct beneficiaries of Hemingway’s achievement, than to critics. Second, as renowned novelist Anthony Powell observes, “Hemingway systematized a treatment of 169 170 Art Matters dialogue in a manner now scarcely possible to appreciate, so much has the Hemingway usage taken the place of what went before” (110). How, then, did Hemingway forever change an entire element of fiction? Before the mid-nineteenth-century advent of realism, dialogue served a limited set of functions. For instance, in romances and sentimental fiction , it was confined to melodramatic speeches, the communication of information , commonplace exchanges, and displays of the author’s erudition and verbal wit. It was rarely used for characterization, especially since, as Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” makes devastatingly clear, characters either tended to talk alike or else speak in a way, often ad nauseam, that was meant to be illustrative (180–81, 189–90). Frequently, there was little difference between their speech and that of the author or narrator, and even the speeches of the same character would vary widely throughout a text. Worse, with a few notable exceptions such as Jane Austen in her novels of manners or Nathaniel Hawthorne in his romances, dialogue lacked subtlety: characters said what they consciously thought, meaning lay on the surface, and their words were remarkably free from the sorts of inner conflicts and psychological complexities inherent in the speech of real people. With the emergence of realism and its focus on character, the art of dialogue advanced. As characters became consistent, so too did their speech; different characters spoke differently, and many of the intricacies of reallife speech emerged in fiction. Additionally, due to a new interest in regional differences in America stimulated by the Civil War and a thriving postwar market for national magazines, the accurate depiction of dialect became a convention, not only in the works of such masters as Twain, William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe (in her later works), Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Charles W. Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, and Kate Chopin, but across the literary landscape (see Jones, Strange Talk). As dialogue moved from the overwrought speeches of Poe’s characters , the high rhetoric of Melville’s Shakespearean sailors, the commonplaces of the domestic novel, and the schizophrenic verbosity of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo to the shrewdly calculating speeches of Twain’s Jim, Huck, Hank Morgan, and Roxy, the idiosyncratically specific and characterizing speeches of Howells’s Lapham family, and the brilliantly modulated registers in the verbal battlefields of James’s and Wharton’s novels of manners, dialogue benefited from Howells’s realist mandates of...