Hemingway and the creation of twentieth-century dialogue - American author Ernest Hemingway

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1996 by Robert Paul Lamb

[W]hile one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as artist, choose one's "ancestors.". . . Hemingway [was] an "ancestor."

- Ralph Ellison (140)

In July 1961, the Saturday Review devoted a special memorial issue to Ernest Hemingway, in which writers and critics from around the world paid tribute to the recently deceased author and attempted to assess his impact on their own national literatures. Although the Hemingway mystique was given heavy emphasis, many contributors also spoke to his artistic influence. The exiled Spanish political philosopher Salvador de Madariaga observed that "Hemingway's manner of writing, his direct, simple, yet forceful prose" had "exerted an undoubted influence on the new generation of Spanish novelists" (18). From Italy, novelist Carlo Levi credited Hemingway's art as fundamental "in determining the character and mode of thought of our time" (19). And Alan Pryce-Jones, the former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, asserted that there was "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" (21). Today, such claims remain undisputed; most critics take for granted that Hemingway's techniques have profoundly influenced subsequent generations of writers across the boundaries of nationality, gender, race, ideology, sexual orientation, class, religion, and artistic temperament.(1)

Pryce-Jones ventured that Hemingway's art, especially his innovative dialogue, might "turn out to be his enduring memorial as a writer, whatever his fascination as a man" (21). However, in the years since his death, Hemingway criticism has focused more on the biographical, thematic, and cultural content of his work than on his narrative techniques, and while it is true that his prose style has been exhaustively analyzed and countless passages of his dialogue read for content, there exists not one single systematic or even a sustained analysis of his art of dialogue. The following essay attempts to redress that neglect. Through a close examination of passages from three stories, written between 1923 and 1927, it will show how Hemingway evolved the techniques that would change the nature of twentieth-century fictional dialogue. The passages are drawn from "Indian Camp," in which he for the first time employed the characteristic devices that distinguish his dialogue; "A Canary for One," in which he elevated banality in speech to the level of art through the extension of repetition to dialogue; and "Hills Like White Elephants," in which he blurred the line between fiction and drama, allowing dialogue an unprecedented constructive role in a story's composition. The essay concludes by assessing the historical and aesthetic significance of Hemingway's revolution in the writing of dialogue.

MINIMUM SPEECH AND MAXIMUM MEANING: THE FUNCTIONS OF MODERN DIALOGUE

. . . Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez (16)

In "Notes on Writing a Novel," Elizabeth Bowen cut to the crux of exactly why modern dialogue is so difficult to write. She observes that it must imitate certain "realistic qualities": spontaneity, artlessness, ambiguity, irrelevance, allusiveness, and erraticness. Yet, behind the "mask of these faked realistic qualities," it must be "pointed, intentional, relevant. It must crystallize situation. It must express character. It must advance plot" (255). It must, in other words, be truly verisimilar - like reality, but not an actual transcription of reality itself. "Speech," Bowen goes on to say, "is what the characters do to each other"; aside from a few extreme physical acts, it is "the most vigorous and visible inter-action of which characters . . . are capable" (255). Consequently, speech "crystallizes relationships. It should, ideally, [be so] effective as to make analysis or explanation of the relationships between the characters unnecessary" (255). Although dialogue is not generally effective as a means of exposition, of conveying necessary information (what invariably occurs at the beginning of a play, and that takes all of the considerable artifice of the theater subsequently to overcome), it can express present relationships and, by implication, their past as well. But to do so effectively requires great talent; dialogue must imply subtly, suggestively, and never through direct statement. Usually, the way characters say something is more important than what they say.

Bowen further observes that each sentence spoken by a character must display either "calculation" or "involuntary self-revelation" on their part (256). Most good dialogue, I should hasten to add, displays both of these processes, for in fiction, as in life, it is virtually impossible not to be, to some degree, self-revelatory (no matter whether "self" is conceived of as socially constructed, dialogical, or autonomous and coherent). Generally, she states, characters should "be under rather than over articulate," and what they "intend to say should be more evident, more striking (because of its greater inner importance to the plot) than what they arrive at saying" (256). Robie Macauley and George Lanning agree, noting that "speech, as a way of characterization, moves forward by means of partial concealment, partial exposure" (78), because what characters say may be the result of inner conflictedness, or they may be saying what they think the other person wishes to hear. In speech, they may become aware of their own confusion, or something the other person does might make them modify their original intention. They may become more confused as they speak, may end up saying the opposite of what they started to say, may even wish that they had not spoken at all. In short, all of the myriad complexities that inhere in real-life dialogue inhere as well in fictional dialogue, the one great difference being that in fiction there is an author who exercises some control over what is being expressed (or incompletely expressed, as the case may be). Dialogue, therefore, demonstrates not only communication but, more importantly, the limits of communication between characters as well.