Analysing fictional dialogue (original) (raw)

1985, Language & Communication

We may not in fad understand each other but we have to keep up the pretence, since it is a faith in communization, rather perhaps than communication itself2 that marks our claim to social interaction-M. A. K. Halliday, Grammar, Society and the Noun. Conversation is like playing tennis with Q ball made of Krazy Putty that keeps coming back over the net in a different shape-Morris Zapp, in D. Lodge, Small World. The argument of this paper is that several procedures for the analysis of naturally-occurring conversation are also valuable to the study of dialogue in fictional texts. Fictional dialogue is an artificial version of talk, partly shaped by a variety of aesthetic and thematic intentions and conventions. But I believe that my working hypothesis is sustained by the brief commentaries on texts I present here: that crucial structural and functional principles and patterns are at work in fictional dialogue as they are in natural conversation. My interest then is in developing a stylistic% of fictional conversation, drawing eclectically on the work of a variety of theorists. While these theorists represent different perspectives, their views can be made to converge on the data, so as to provide mutual support for a particular assessment of a dialogue. My main sources are various articles in the Conversation Analysis tradition, e.g. Sacks et al. (1974), selective and modified use of the Birmingham discourse analysis propounded by Burton (1980); and the work of Grice (1975). In attempting to describe the structure and coherence of talk, I believe it is misleading to think in terms of a discourse creativity that is governed by obligatory and specifiable rules (a parallel to what some see at work in sentence production). Rather than talk being characterized by rule-governed creativity, what seem more evident are preferred patterns of talk-sequences. Furthermore the specific goals of talk, and the interpretations of patterns, will themselves be locally-determined by the particular interests of co-conversationalists. That is why the theoretical emphasis of Conversational Analysis (hencefo~h, c.a.) is attractive, where interaction-structures are posited as methodical solutions to ongoing conversational 'problems', and the orderliness of conversation is understood as an achieved orderliness (West and Zimmerman, 1982). The fictional dialogues I will discuss are Melville's 'Bartieby' and Hemingway's Tat in the Rain', but I will begin with a brief critical review of the models and orientations I use in this stylistics of fictional dialogue.