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

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1996 by Robert Paul Lamb

BANALITY INTO ART: THE USES OF REPETITION

As a writer I was astonished by Hemingway's skill. . . . I have never understood, to this day, how Hemingway achieved his powerful dialogue.... [W]hat Hemingway offered . . . was not dialogue overheard, but a concentrate of it, often made up of superficially insignificant elements - mere fragments of everyday phrases, which always managed to convey what was most important.

- Ilya Ehrenburg (20)

In the remaining stories he wrote to complete In Our Time, and in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway continued to employ the innovative dialogue techniques of "Indian Camp." Dialogue crystallized situation, expressed character, and advanced plot, and speeches were marked by calculation and involuntary self-revelation. Verisimilitude in dialogue was achieved mostly by indirection, banality, simplicity of diction, and pervasive miscommunication, while relevance was produced through irony, juxtaposition, and compression. But although repetition was a significant part of his prose style, he had not yet developed a technique for employing it meaningfully in dialogue.

By early 1926, however, Hemingway was working toward applying the principles of repetition that he had learned from Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Stein's theory of repetition was designed to provide synchrony in, and remove linearity from, narrative, as the three justifications she advanced for repetition - beginning again, using everything, and the continuous present - make clear (516-22). Her influence on Hemingway's use of repetition can be seen in his passages of description, in his attention to surfaces in passages of free indirect discourse, and, unfortunately, in his somewhat amateurish attempts to imitate his mentor in the repetitions of "Up in Michigan," "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," and even "Cat in the Rain." For Joyce, repetition was employed chiefly for rhetorical poetic effects, as in the famous final paragraph of "The Dead." Joyce's influence would be most discernible in Hemingway's pet technique of gathering up selected words and phrases from a paragraph and repeating them in a different order in a summary sentence at the end of that paragraph (e.g., the opening paragraph of "In Another Country").(5)

In extending repetition to dialogue, however, Hemingway put it to unprecedented use. He managed to capture the repetitive, rambling nature of real-life speech while still exercising the selectivity that is necessary in fiction. In Bowen's terms, he made his dialogue seem irrelevant while remaining perfectly relevant. Most people in real life repeat themselves endlessly when they speak, anxious lest their auditors not catch every last detail and all intended meaning. Speech is also replete with repetitive trivial exchanges. On the other hand, the closer people are, the longer and deeper the history of their relationship, the more they tend to speak to each other in a kind of shorthand that would make their conversation incomprehensible to an outsider (or reader). As Edith Wharton states, "all that is understood between [people] is left out of their talk" in real life (73). Thus, if characters in fiction "have to tell each other many things that each already knows the other knows[,]" then the only way "to avoid the resulting shock of improbability" would be to water down the dialogue with so many irrelevant commonplaces that the reader would grow bored and frustrated (73). Wharton's own solution to the problem was to resort to summary treatment or to interlace her dialogue with narrative, which enabled her to control dialogue through narratorial access to the consciousnesses of her characters. But Hemingway found a way out of the dilemma that enabled him to rely heavily on dialogue, which, given the advantages of scenic treatment in the highly compressed modern short story, contributed to his achievement in the genre. By repeating phrases, words, sounds, and even cadences, he made his dialogue seem repetitive, while the different contexts of these repetitions changed their meanings and kept the dialogue pointed and relevant.