Reading at face value: the double distance
9. Dialogue and Character Discreditation
© Florence Goyet, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0039.09
It is clearly not part of Conrad’s purpose to confer language on the ‘rudimentary souls’ of Africa. In place of speech they made ‘a violent babble of uncouth sounds.’ They ‘exchanged short grunting phrases’
even among themselves. At first sight these instances [of quoting the characters] might be mistaken for unexpected acts of generosity from Conrad. In reality they constitute some of his best assaults.1
So far we have looked at some of the most common techniques that create a sense of distance between reader and character in the short story. There are, however, two devices that are rather more subtle and deserve a longer look. In this chapter we shall analyse the first of these: what happens when the story makes room for the character’s “actual” words. Then, in the next chapter, we will pause to look at the interaction among the various participants in the narrative process: author, narrator, reader and character.
The short story is at its most exquisitely subtle and complex in both of these cases. The result, however, is once again the distancing and “discrediting”
of a character, even though these techniques are usually thought to have the automatic effect of creating a sense of intimacy with the reader.
The analysis of speech is of crucial importance to us, because any discussion of it is intimately bound up with the problem of polyphony.
By making room for his characters’ words, by retiring from the scene in order to let them speak, the author, in fact, reveals his concept of them;
the degree of validity of the speech permitted them will be a touchstone
1 Chinua Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday 1989), pp. 8-9.
138 The Classic Short Story
for their status in the story. But before analysing the short stories in our corpus to see how these techniques are used, we shall first take a look at the criticism surrounding them, especially since one of our authors, Giovanni Verga, has been at the centre of a rich and complex discussion in Italy.
More often than not critics agree, a priori and without discussion, that the use of direct speech provides proximity to the character.2 This systematic belief, however, is often undermined by the theorists themselves when they take time to analyse the contexts in which direct speech occurs: we shall see that they then often come to reverse their previous assertions.
When critics as far apart as Luigi Russo and Valentin Voloshinov approach the issue of direct speech, they do so in a remarkably similar fashion: their first assertions are to say that quoting someone’s own terms, reproducing not only the “what?” of a discourse but also the “how?” is a guarantee of “immediacy” (in the case of Russo), or of “tolerance […] a positive and intuitive understanding of all the individual linguistic nuances of thought”
(in the case of Voloshinov).3 To use Chinua Achebe’s words in this chapter’s epigraph, this corresponds, in their mind, to an “act of generosity”, of letting a foreign character express himself in his own words.
Reported discourse, on the contrary, for Voloshinov is the sign of a rational, reductive understanding: the character’s thoughts are filtered through the narrator. This, for both Voloshinov and Russo, means that the author refuses to make room for the character’s own idiosyncrasies, that he digests his character’s being and allows it no expression of its own.
Reported speech is reduction, where direct speech indicates freedom and respect for the character. The two critics thus adhere to what seems to be the credo of criticism since the nineteenth century, from Verga himself to
2 Even Helmut Bonheim, who is known for questioning the reader’s immediate feelings, argues that “Direct speech suggests the closest possible nexus between character and reader, as the term direct suggests. Indirect and reported speech by contrast blur the impression and distance us from the character”. Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes:
Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), p. 52. We all know, however, that repeating someone’s words and intonations is a classic device of satire. According to Bakhtin, this is even the essence of parody, which can “expose to destroy”. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 364.
3 Luigi Russo, Giovanni Verga (Bari: Laterza, 1941); and V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. by Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language has been attributed to Mikhail Bakhtin, although I am going to follow Emerson and Morson’s belief that it is indeed by Voloshinov. See Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).
9. Dialogue and Character Discreditation 139 twentieth-century critics such as Helmut Bonheim and Gérard Genette:4 the use of direct speech would indicate being “with” the character.
What is interesting in Voloshinov and Russo is that, when they submit this abstract statement to textual proof, both end up renouncing it.
Voloshinov, for example, very quickly tempers the abstract proclamation that “tolerance” is inherent in direct speech. He recognises at once that quoting the character’s own words is essentially a question of “coloration”, of something “picturesque”: this is very different from the theory of giving the character his own space through “all the linguistic nuances of his thought”. He then states something which is a truism, although generally not recognised: “The authorial context […] is so constructed that the traits the author used to define a character cast heavy shadows on his directly reported speech”.5
The image of the character that has already been built conditions our perception of his words, giving us in advance his essential tone. Voloshinov describes it as being of the same order as the make-up and costume of a comic actor — we are prepared to laugh before he even opens his mouth.
Direct speech provides the character’s words but “at the same time the author’s own nuances are added: irony, humour, etc”.6 This challenges Voloshinov’s initial idea about the direct relationship between mimesis of conversation and “immediacy”. By the end of his work, Voloshinov swings to a diametrically opposite position from where he began. Talking of Pushkin, he shows that it is only in reported discourse that it is possible to achieve immediacy:
Such a substitution [of the author ‘speaking for’ the character] presupposes a parallelism of intonation, the intonations of the author’s speech and the substituted speech of the hero (what he might or should have said), both running in the same direction.7
4 Verga expresses the theory of “impersonality” in Gramigna’s Mistress; the author must efface himself, and leave the reader face to face with the “bare fact”, with the characters who express themselves in their own terms. Giovanni Verga, The She-Wolf and Other Stories, trans. by Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), pp.
86-88. See also Bonheim (1986) and Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Le Seuil, 1972), pp.
189-93.
5 Voloshinov (1973), p. 134 (emphasis mine).
6 Ibid, p. 133.
7 Ibid, p. 138 (emphasis Voloshinov’s).
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In other words, it is the reported discourse that is “with” the character;
critical distance or judgement is best obtained by using the character’s actual words. Voloshinov is even clearer on this when he writes about Jean de La Bruyère: “He invested quasi-direct discourse with his animosity toward [the characters] […] He recoils from the creatures he depicts”.8 And later: “All of La Bruyère’s figures come out ironically refracted through the medium of his mock objectivism”.9 We are far from the initial validation of “tolerance”, and much nearer to Achebe’s vision of the character’s language as an “assault” on him. Interestingly, Russo, who also changes his opinion on direct speech, sees this as a matter of genre. As we shall see, this is the case of a rift not so much between two techniques (direct speech and reported speech), but between two ways of using speech: in the best novels, direct speech creates immediacy, while in short stories, it results in distancing the character.