On Writing - Dialog

 Although, I mean this for any potential writers who happen to find themselves here, what Richard Hughes Gibson says about conversation may transcend writing.

Professor Gibson wrote in The Hedgehog Review's Conversation Pieces:

Richard Hughes Gibson

The question Saramago raises, in turn, is a common one to dystopian literature: What language is adequate to the disordered world into which the characters fall? What kinds of talk are possible there? Blindness suggests that under such conditions the coordinates of our identities quickly lose significance, and dialogue becomes chiefly pragmatic. Faced, presumably for the first time, with the challenges of bare survival (acquiring food and shelter, sustaining basic hygiene), the internees are uninterested in trading life histories with their cohabitants. They don’t learn each other’s names. Character development—especially through shared speech—is largely impossible in this environment; character deterioration is the more natural trajectory. People continue to talk (and sometimes shout)—there is no shortage of spoken lines in these pages—but widespread social disintegration means that conversation withers.

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The second reason is that Darcy and Elizabeth here treat conversation in the same way that we, the readers, do: as a kind of reconnaissance—an effort to “make out” a person’s character based on his or her spoken words. Elizabeth, of course, says this directly in the present scene. But Austen has also alerted us (back in Chapter VI) that Darcy is on the same mission. Having reconsidered his infamous initial impression of Ms. Bennet (“She is tolerable”), which she had overheard, he seeks, by snooping on her conversations, to “know more of her.” Nowadays, one in Darcy’s position would begin by consulting the apps with which we surveille each other, thereby gleaning @thereallizzybennet’s culinary preferences, political views, team affiliations, professional networks, and relationship status. But in Austen’s world, talk is the principal means of self-disclosure or, in the case of misspoken or reckless words, self-exposure. We take special relish in Elizabeth and Darcy’s exchanges, polished and stumbling alike, because they are our companions in “close listening.” To learn to listen well, as Elizabeth and Darcy eventually will do, isn’t just a question of acquiring a social grace; it’s nothing less than the novel’s moral crux (and, if we read well, one of its enduring lessons).

Listen, learn.

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