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Dissertation Final THE FORM OF TALK: A STUDY OF THE DIALOGUE NOVEL ____________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board ____________________________________________________________ in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ____________________________________________________________ by Matthew Badura January, 2010 © by Matthew David Badura 2010 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT The Form of Talk: A Study of the Dialogue Novel Matthew D. Badura Doctor of Philosophy Temple University, 2010 Doctoral Advisory Committee Chair: Daniel T. O’Hara The “dialogue novel” is best understood as an ongoing novelistic experiment that replaces narration with dialogue, so that such basic narrative constituents as character, setting, chronology, and plot find expression not through the mediation of an external or character-bound narrative consciousness, but through the presented verbal exchange between characters. Despite sustained critical attention to the variety and “openness” of the novel form, dialogue novels have been largely ignored within English studies— treated as neither a sustained tradition within, nor a perverse manifestation of, the novel. This study seeks to address that absence and to situate the dialogue novel within narrative and novel studies. Drawing from analytic philosophy, narratology, literary theory, and the dialogue novels themselves, this study demonstrates how the unique formal texture of the dialogue novel opens onto valuable discussions about such topics as cooperative language communities, narrative desire, the power dynamics implicit in talk, and the relationship between time and narrative. Overriding these concerns is an attention to how the social nature of conversation determines how the dialogue novel represents institutional power and character agency, as well as how the dialogue novel establishes a dynamic between reader and text for the refiguration of meaning and the reconstruction of fictional worlds. Chapter One uses Paul Grice’s Cooperative Principle as a baseline for delineating how communities are formed and maintained through dialogue in Henry iii James’s The Awkward Age. Chapter Two considers Henry Green’s late dialogue novels alongside his novel theory and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire to illustrate how both character and readerly desire function as imitative practices. Chapter Three considers the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett through Aaron Fogel’s theory of “forced dialogue” to argue that dialogue’s constraints can offer liberative structure to the novel form and those who are subject to these strictures. And Chapter Four reads dialogue novels by William Gaddis and Nicholson Baker through Paul Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis and Lubomír Doležel’s possible-worlds theory to argue that the dialogue novel presents an ideal form for examining the complex intersection of formal texture and history, as well as the dialectic between narrative configuration and human time. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee—Daniel O’Hara, Alan Singer, Sheldon Brivic, and Hortensia Morell—for their constructive feedback and support. I would also like to thank Robert Caserio for his early assistance with this project. The Society for the Study of Narrative Literature (SSNL) has been an enlivening community for both this project and other investigations outside my study of dialogue. I am particularly grateful to Alison Booth and Jim Phelan of the SSNL for their sponsorship of and assistance with my 2005 MLA panel, “A Dialogue on Dialogue.” The Center for the Humanities at Temple provided financial and intellectual support during the writing process. I would like to thank my family and friends for their unfailing support of my studies. Thanks also to the College of Liberal Arts and the College of Engineering at Temple University for employing me during my final years of graduate school. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife, Kathy Malone, whose support and counsel made this dissertation possible. My dialogue with her has been the most important of my life. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS................................................................................................ v INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER 1. “GOOD TALK”: THE NOVEL AT THE AWKWARD AGE .................................... 1 2. HENRY GREEN AND THE DIALOGUE OF DESIRE: “THROUGH.................... 32 MISHEARING, A NEW LEVEL OF COMMUNICATION IS REACHED” 3. “SILENCE HAS ITS USES”: DIALOGUES OF POWER IN I. COMPTON-BURNETT..................................................................................... 66 4. WILLIAM GADDIS’S CARPENTER’S GOTHIC AND NICHOLSON BAKER’S CHECKPOINT: “RESCUED FROM UNCERTAINTY, RAISED TO THE SURFACE” .................. 98 CONCLUSION............................................................................................................... 129 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................... 133 vi INTRODUCTION The “dialogue novel” is best understood as an ongoing novelistic experiment that replaces narration with dialogue, so that such basic narrative constituents as character, setting, chronology, and plot find expression not through the mediation of an external or character-bound narrative consciousness, but through the presented verbal exchange between characters. Despite sustained critical attention to the variety and “openness” of the novel form, dialogue novels have been largely ignored within English studies— treated as neither a sustained tradition within, nor a perverse manifestation of, the novel genre. This study seeks to address that absence and to situate the dialogue novel within narrative and novel studies by offering a structurally- and historically-minded analysis of dialogue novels by Henry James, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, William Gaddis, and Nicholson Baker. Drawing on analytic philosophy, narratology, literary theory, and the dialogue novels themselves, this dissertation will demonstrate how the unique formal texture of the dialogue novel opens onto valuable new discussions about such topics as cooperative language communities, narrative desire, the power dynamics implicit in talk, and the relationship between time and narrative. Overriding these concerns is an attention to how the social nature of conversation determines how the dialogue novel represents institutional power and individual agency, as well as how the dialogue novel establishes a dynamic between reader and text for the refiguration of meaning and the reconstruction of fictional worlds. vii The paradoxical character of the dialogue novel originates in its seeming to be simultaneously the most realistic and artificial of genres. The dialogue novel typically displays a greater realism by representing only those fictional elements, like character speech and movement, that manifest themselves in the material world. Ever since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel proposed that the novel is distinguished by its “more largely referential use of language” and “more immediate imitation of individual experience,” fidelity to a represented material world has been seen as characteristic of the novel genre.1 But the dialogue novel’s resistance to representing character interiority—that is, private thoughts and feelings that exist only in the minds of characters—has made the novel seem less realistic because Watt’s realism depends significantly on the purely fictional ability of a novelist to get inside a character’s head.2 So by excising narrative representations of interiority, the dialogue novel forfeits the fictional “reality” offered by the conventions of literary realism even as it presents its reader with a stricter scientific realism. The dialogue novel’s difficult fit with contemporary narrative theory is apparent in the rather scant attention afforded to dialogue in some significant introductions to the field: Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1980), Gerald Prince’s Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narratology (1982), and Mieke Bal’s Narratology (1985). These studies tend to present dialogue as only one of many narrative modes for representing point-of-view (Prince), consider the complex temporal 1. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 32. 2. Cohn, Transparent Minds, 109-16. viii effects of dialogue alongside narrator’s text (Genette), or feature its uses in non-narrative commentary, or argumentation (Bal). As the above studies demonstrate, narratology tends to treat dialogue as subordinate to other forms of narrative discourse—a treatment that proves rather unworkable for the novel that subordinates all else to dialogue. Nevertheless, narratology stands as the most comprehensive attempt by post-1950s literary studies to formulate a comprehensive taxonomy of the forms of narrative discourse. This dissertation, therefore, uses the insights of narrative theory throughout and explicitly attempts to reconcile the dialogue novel with narratology in its final chapter. Recent critical studies that theorize novelistic dialogue tend to examine dialogue either as a mere imitation of speech or as a narrative mode that speaks directly to the cultural milieu of late-capitalist culture.
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