NIVELES DE TRATAMIENTO

R O B E R T P A U L L A M B

From Twentieth Century Literature 42, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 453–80. Copyright © 1996 by Twentieth Century Literature. Revised for Art Matters: Hemingway, Craft, and the Creation of the Modern Short Story, pp. 169–203. Copyright © 2010 Louisiana State University Press.

H

emingway’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 schol-arship 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 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 fi c-tion? Before the mid-nineteenth-century advent of realism, dialogue served a limited set of functions. For instance, in romances and sentimental fi ction, it was confi ned 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 Off ences” 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 diff er-ence 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 confl icts and psychologi-cal 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;

diff erent characters spoke diff erently, and many of the intricacies of real-life speech emerged in fi ction. Additionally, due to a new interest in regional diff erences 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

Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue 65

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). As dialogue moved from the overwrought speeches of Poe’s characters, the high rhetoric of Mel-ville’s Shakespearean sailors, the commonplaces of the domestic novel, and the schizophrenic verbosity of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo to the shrewdly cal-culating speeches of Twain’s Jim, Huck, Hank Morgan, and Roxy, the idio-syncratically specifi c and characterizing speeches of Howells’ Lapham family, and the brilliantly modulated registers in the verbal battlefi elds of James’s and Wharton’s novels of manners, dialogue benefi ted from Howells’s realist mandates of fi delity to experience and probability of motive. In short, one of the consequences of the movement toward verisimilitude was that fi ctional characters began to sound as though they were actual human beings.

But even as the quality of dialogue improved immeasurably, its role in fi ction changed very little. For James, whose theory of dialogue was exem-plary in the late nineteenth century, dialogue was purely complementary; its proper and only function was to be “directly illustrative of something given us by another method” of presentation (“London” 1404). Th e idea that dialogue could crystallize situation or advance plot was, to James, ludicrous. Com-plaining that the “fashion of our day” is “an inordinate abuse of the colloquial resource” (too much quoted speech), he believed that “there is a law” govern-ing the use of fi ctional dialogue, and that while “admirable for illustration, functional for illustration, dialogue has its function perverted, and therewith its life destroyed, when forced . . . into the constructive offi ce” (“Balzac” 137).

Any attempt to have dialogue play more than this limited illustrative role he termed “singularly suicidal” (“London” 1404). Th e notion of “really construc-tive dialogue, dialogue organic and dramatic, speaking for itself, representing and embodying substance and form” was an “abhorrent thing,” appropriate to the theater, which “lives by a law so diff erent,” but never to fi ction (Awkward Age 1127; “Balzac” 137). Moreover, James, for whom mimesis and a direct impression of life were the paramount goals of fi ction, did not believe that direct speech was even capable of being mimetically reproduced, and so he called for writers to recognize “the impossibility of making people both talk

‘all the time’ and talk with the needful diff erences.” To get characters to do that, he frankly admitted, “is simply too hard. Th ere is always at the best the author’s voice to be kept out. It can be kept out for occasions, it can not be kept out always. Th e solution therefore is to leave it its function, for it has the supreme one” (“London” 1404).

In truth, James wrote dialogue superbly and used it liberally. But he could not countenance allowing it out of its box. Take, for instance, this brief passage from Th e Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which young Ned Rosier comes

to Gilbert Osmond’s house in pursuit of Pansy, Osmond’s daughter, unaware, as is the reader at this point, that Osmond already knows the purpose of the visit:

“I saw a jolly good piece of Capo di Monte to-day.”

Osmond answered nothing at first; but presently, while he warmed his boot-sole, “I don’t care a fig for Capo di Monte!” he returned.

“I hope you are not losing your interest?”

“In old pots and plates? Yes, I am losing my interest.”

Rosier for a moment forgot the delicacy of his position.

“You are not thinking of parting with a—a piece or two?”

“No, I am not thinking of parting with anything at all, Mr.

Rosier,” said Osmond, with his eyes still on the eyes of his visitor.

“Ah, you want to keep, but not to add,” Rosier remarked, brightly.

“Exactly. I have nothing that I wish to match.”

Poor Rosier was aware that he had blushed, and he was dis-tressed at his want of assurance. “Ah, well, I have!” was all that he could murmur; and he knew that his murmur was partly lost as he turned away. (Ch. 37, 569–70)

Here we see many of the distinguishing features of James’s dialogue. Rosier and Osmond speak in character and, as do all James characters, they speak with skill. Rosier, torn between his predisposition to diffidence and his desire for Pansy, attempts to soften up his auditor by addressing a subject of which Osmond is fond but is caught short by his host’s unforeseen rudeness.

Perhaps consciously, perhaps not, he tips his hand by continuing to talk ostensibly about china when the real subject of the conversation is Pansy, and he is more seriously rebuffed when Osmond substitutes “anything” for

“a piece or two.” With his blushing indicating a dawning awareness, Rosier attempts a witty rejoinder, verbally pursuing his goal from a slightly differ-ent angle. But Osmond’s use of the verb match in his final rebuff (to Rosier’s cleverly implied notion of “adding” a son-in-law) makes it unambiguously clear to Rosier that both know what the conversation is really about and that Osmond has strong feelings on the subject. The suitor turns away, feebly protesting, with diffidence momentarily overcoming desire.

For an author who abhorred “the colloquial resource,” James included a great deal of dialogue in Th e Portrait of a Lady. Nevertheless, none of it confl icts with James’s theory. Th is brief, dramatic confrontation is embed-ded in paragraphs in which James’s narrator probes the consciousnesses of

Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue 67

the characters, and, for all its artful execution, the dialogue merely illustrates what is given us by that other, main method of presentation. In the paragraph preceding this passage, James prepares us for Rosier’s performance by stating that Rosier “was not quickly resentful, and where politeness was concerned he had an inveterate wish to be in the right” (569). Even in the passage itself, James tells us that Rosier “forgot the delicacy of his position” rather than allowing the dialogue to make that clear on its own, and Rosier’s fi nal remark only illustrates the distress that James’s narrator describes instead of allowing Rosier’s words to indicate that discomfi ture on their own.

Ezra Pound fi rst directed Hemingway to the works of James, and Hemingway’s fi rst wife, Hadley, was a James enthusiast. Although Heming-way alternately ridiculed and praised James and was loath to acknowledge any infl uence (his usual response to any writer who had truly mattered to his development), and although the impact of James on his work would not reach full fruition until the late 1940s and 1950s when Hemingway was trying to write Jamesian novels, nevertheless early in his career his predecessor’s texts had shown him, as Michael Reynolds has insightfully noted, that the signifi -cance of “dialogue appears frequently in the white space between the lines”

and that “it is what the characters do not say that is highlighted by their con-versation” (30). In this manner, James’s dialogue served as a powerful model for Hemingway in its indirection, ambiguity, and portrayal of communica-tion as veiled, partial, and diffi cult. As Sheldon Norman Grebstein observes, both authors “employed a technique of brief exchanges which tended to refer obliquely to the subject under discussion rather than to name it outright”

(96). Carlos Baker terms this technique “the hovering subject”:

Another remarkable similarity in the conduct of dialogue by James and Hemingway is what may be called the hovering subject. James often establishes the subject of a conversation by hint and allu-sion rather than overt statement. At other times he introduces the subject briefl y (often it is a single word at the end of a sentence), and then conducts the dialogue by reference to it, while it hovers, helicopter-like, over the surface of the conversation. In either instance the neuter pronoun it, or its unuttered equivalent, is the index to what is being talked about. It is the apex of a pyramid whose base is the dialogue, and the real subject is the star at which the apex points. (185, n. 32)

In addition, both authors share a technique that Grebstein calls “incre-mental repetition” or a “type of stichomythia”: “In this rhetorical scheme each speaker will pick up a word or phrase from the other’s speech and utilize it

as the basis for his own remarks, but adding, subtracting, or changing, so that the dialogue continuously rehearses itself yet evolves as it proceeds” (96).

Note for example, in the James passage, the repetitions of “Capo di Monte,”

“losing . . . interest,” “not thinking of parting,” and “I have,” and also such substitutions as: “I don’t care a fi g” for “I saw a jolly good piece”; “old pots and plates” for “Capo di Monte”; “anything” for “a piece or two”; “nothing that I wish to match” for “want to keep, but not to add”; and “I have [something that I wish to match]” for “I have nothing that I wish to match.”

It sometimes seems as though the main diff erence in their dialogue—

aside from James’s pervasive use of access to his characters’ consciousnesses—

consists of Hemingway’s complete abandonment of James’s stage directions.

Hemingway’s favorite identifi cation tag is the simple “he said” or “she said,”

and even these he often eliminates. But in James, as Baker observes, “the phrases range from ‘I gaily confessed’ through ‘she rather inscrutably added’

and on to ‘I attempted the grimace of suggesting.’ Like his use of italicized words [in dialogue], these phrases are meant to mark the tone and emphasis, the special ring, of a particular speech. James is in eff ect gesturing silently from the prompt-box.” Baker concludes by demonstrating how, if we remove the prompts from a James passage, “the dialogue proceeds in a manner scarcely distinguishable from Hemingway’s” (183). Here, though, I must demur, for however much Hemingway learned about dialogue from James, his decision to let it play the constructive role that James considered inappropriate—to remove the author’s voice and allow dialogue to speak solely for itself—was revolutionary.

James’s theories of fi ction—despite his movement toward increased dramatization, foreshortening, and the eff acement of the narrator—derived from his work in the nineteenth-century novel of manners. Th e sine qua non of that genre was the dense depiction of social texture and the representation of temporality. James asserted that the novelist’s most diffi cult, and there-fore most dignifi ed, eff ort “consists in giving the sense of duration, of the lapse and accumulation of time.” In dialogue, narrative time slows down and begins to approximate real time. Such a “multiplication of quoted remarks”

is an “expedient” that “works exactly to the opposite end, absolutely mini-mising, in regard to time, our impression of lapse and passage” (“London”

1403–4; also see “Balzac” 136). In addition, dialogue silences the author’s

“supreme” voice that, in its judiciousness, probity, and richness, is essential to the discursive texture of the genre. Even when James admired another author’s dialogue—as he did in the case of his friend William Dean How-ells—he believed it needed to be “distributed, interspaced with narrative and pictorial matter. [Howells] forgets sometimes to paint, to evoke the condi-tions and appearances, to build in the subject . . . I cannot help thinking that

Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue 69

the divinest thing in a valid novel is the compendious, descriptive, pictorial touch, à la Daudet (“Howells” 505–6).

Hemingway’s prosaics, however, derived from a diff erent genre, the emerging modern short story, which, as did his earlier journalism, placed a premium on discrete events and delimited moments in time. Th at genre’s demands for radical compression, which led to the need for a high degree of suggestiveness and implication, eliminated the thick portrayal of social texture and sense of duration that lay at the heart of the novel of manners.

Th ese generic demands enabled Hemingway, perhaps compelled him, to rely on and further compress dialogue, allowing it to assume a hitherto unknown role in fi ctional composition, even to the point of removing almost com-pletely the narrative commentary and authorial voice without which, James had felt, fi ction would cease to be fi ction and would cross over into drama.

James, of course, could not have anticipated the new genre’s heavy reliance on direct speech, and even some of Hemingway’s most illustrious contem-poraries found his dialogue-laden stories unseemly. Virginia Woolf, for one, criticized him in Jamesian terms in her 1927 review of Men Without Women:

A writer will always be chary of dialogue because dialogue puts the most violent pressure upon the reader’s attention. He has to hear, to see, to supply the right tone, and to fi ll in the background from what the characters say without any help from the author.

Th erefore, when fi ctitious people are allowed to speak it must be because they have something so important to say that it stimulates the reader to do rather more than his share of the work of creation.

But, although Mr. Hemingway keeps us under the fi re of dialogue constantly, his people, half the time, are saying what the author could say much more economically for them. (8)

But Dorothy Parker, herself a gifted storywriter, in reviewing that same volume understood that Hemingway’s style was “far more effective” in

“the short story than in the novel” (93) and that the modern story genre demanded radically different techniques of construction and representation that empowered readers precisely by giving them a larger role in what Woolf termed “the work of creation.”

Th e clash between Woolf and Parker over the function of dialogue reveals a diff erence between the views of authors who were primarily novel-ists, for instance James and Woolf, and those, such as Hemingway, Parker, Elizabeth Bowen, and Eudora Welty, who were completely at home in the modern short story and willing, in their stories, to dispense with the author’s

“supreme” presence. One traditional notion at odds with the new genre was

that dialogue should be limited to illustration. Bowen observes: “Each piece of dialogue must be ‘something happening.’ Dialogue may justify its presence by being ‘illustrative’—but this secondary use of it must be watched closely, challenged. Illustrativeness can be stretched too far. Like straight descrip-tion, it then becomes static, a dead weight—halting the movement of the plot” (“Notes” 256). Although Bowen greatly admired James, she felt that his stories, for all their virtuosity, represented a “dead end” in the genre’s develop-ment that could neither be imitated nor advanced upon (Faber 39).

James’s dialogue, and that of Edith Wharton—easily the most talented American writers of dialogue before Hemingway—depended upon charac-ters who were highly intelligent, refi ned, and sensitive to the slightest nuances of words and gestures. Granting both authors this donnée, it is nevertheless true that, until Hemingway, no writer was able to write dialogue that dem-onstrated the rich complexities of the speech of characters who were not particularly bright, cultured, or sensitive. Twain, of course, did vernacular characters justice, especially in fi rst-person narration. Th e richest, most com-plex dialogue he ever wrote was for Jim in Huck Finn, and this he did with such subtlety that a century of criticism mistook that character’s shrewdly manipulative minstrel performance for mere minstrel caricature (see Lamb,

“America” 480–83). But although Jim and Huck may not be refi ned, they are assuredly intelligent and sensitive. As for the dialogue of such later writers as Frank Norris, Gertrude Stein, and Sinclair Lewis, it continued to play a limited role and, with regard to the speeches of common characters, was often condescending.

Th e Jamesian novel of manners was written for a pre-Freudian audi-ence and treated the romantic egoist within a fully developed social world.

Th e Jamesian novel of manners was written for a pre-Freudian audi-ence and treated the romantic egoist within a fully developed social world.

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