Dialogue in fiction
February 13, 2006 | 12:00am
Dialogue is one of the most difficult things to do in fiction, more so in Filipino fiction in English, because of the obvious differences between the way we speak in real life and the way our characters speak on the page.
But before we get into the nuances of the situation, what’s dialogue for, in the first place?
Writers employ dialogue – what the characters say to each other, in an exchange of lines – to add another dimension to those characters as well as to convey information that can move the story forward. In other words, characters don’t just say things because the author can’t think of anything else for them to do, or because the author can’t think of anything else to do. The use of dialogue – where, when, how, between whom, and for how long – is a deliberate authorial decision. As an author, you have to know when to make your characters speak for themselves, and why.
The basic idea behind effective dialogue is that what we say and how we say it tells other people something about who and what we are – whether or not we mean to project that impression. So authors use dialogue as a means of character development, of fleshing out the character beyond our surface of knowledge of him or her.
We can be told that a character is 37, in law school, comes from a small town in Surigao, had entered and then left the seminary earlier, and is hoping to meet the right girl and start a family before turning 40 – all of which details are important and helpful in making up our minds whether to sympathize with him or not – but somehow we feel that we can’t really know a person unless and until we’ve heard him speak.
Even the most casual speech says something about the speaker. In John Updike’s "A&P," three girls dressed (or undressed) for the beach come into a grocery store in a conservative town. Their unexpected entrance provokes a range of responses: "Oh, Daddy, I feel so faint!" from one young man, and "Girls, this isn’t the beach" from the much older, stuck-up store manager.
More emphatically, Miss Mijares in Kerima Polotan’s "The Virgin" uses not just speech but language to create an impression on her seemingly hapless addressee, a carpenter looking for a job:
"Since you are not starving yet," she said, speaking in English now, wanting to put him in his place, "you will not mind working in our woodcraft section, three times a week at two-fifty to four a day, depending on your skill and the foreman’s discretion, for two or three months after which there might be a call from outside we may hold for you."
To this the man simply replies: "Thank you."
People speak in different ways: some use long, elaborate sentences, others curt monotonal phrases; sometimes we use one and sometimes the other, depending on our moods. Those moods can be suggested through dialogue, and it is a test of one’s acuity as a reader as much as of the author’s craft for those moods and attitudes to emerge through the veneer of words. A moment of flirtation is caught by this snippet of repartee from Paz Marquez Benitez’s 1925 story "Dead Stars," an exchange made even more poignant by the mutual awareness of its transience:
"Mystery–" she answered lightly, "that is so brief–"
"Not in some," he added quickly, "not in you."
"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
"I could study you all my life and still will find it."
"So long?"
"I should like to."
Ernest Hemingway’s "Hills Like White Elephants" – the story I most often use to illustrate masterful technique (and which, interestingly enough, was published just two years after "Dead Stars") – is almost 80 percent dialogue, and the near-absence of speech tags (those "he said, she said" indicators of who said what) doesn’t make it any easier to palpate a complex dramatic situation from so seemingly simple a conversation. Hemingway sets up quick exchanges like the following – using the plainest words, but endowing them with deep, unspoken meanings:
"We can have everything."
"No, we can’t."
"We can have the whole world."
"No, we can’t."
"We can go everywhere."
"No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more."
"It’s ours."
"No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back."
In a sense, the art of dialogue is the art of saying just enough, and always leaving something for the reader to fathom, without being too arty or contrived about it. Good dialogue never says too much. Dialogue is the worst place for sheer exposition, the kind of information overload that anxious or incapable writers inflict on their readers, such as when two characters bump into each other in a less than reputable bar and say:
"Oh, hi, Frankie, fancy meeting you here! What’s a successful man like you with an accounting and a law degree and a plum job as the CEO of one of the country’s biggest corporations – not to mention a pretty wife and such lovely children – doing in a place like this?"
"Well, Joey, I didn’t expect to see you here, either, you fat, balding, gout-ridden fifty-two-year old! Aren’t you supposed to be enlightening the young as a professor of humanities instead of pawing these rice farmers’ daughters? What was that you said when we were both undergraduates and members of the Libertarian Society? Ah, ‘The exploitation of poverty is worse than poverty itself!’"
As this same example shows, gratuitous speechifying is another sign of bad dialogue, and it happens when a writer can’t resist grabbing the microphone from his or her character and spewing out some atrociously philosophical line. Again, remember: fiction operates best through indirection – by treating and representing human experience obliquely but concretely, rather than through frontal encounters with grand abstractions like "love," "justice," and "freedom", although all of them may be at the heart of the story’s concerns. The writer needs no mouthpiece character; the story itself, as a whole, is the writer’s mouthpiece.
Now, to the peculiarities of our situation as Filipino writers of dialogue in English. Generally speaking, we don’t and really can’t complain when a Japanese character says (as one does in "The Handstand" by Ogawa Mimei, translated by Ivan Morris), "A good job? Hell, there’s no such thing as a good job! It’s all a lot of sweat! If anyone thinks it’s fun making a living, he’s crazy." We accept the statement unquestioningly, knowing that it’s foreign material to begin with, only translated into English. We don’t flinch when we watch a local English production of, say, "The Cherry Orchard" by Anton Chekhov, knowing that these are Russian characters played by Filipino actors speaking in translation.
It’s much more difficult to suspend our disbelief when it comes to dealing with Filipino characters in Filipino stories speaking in English – probably and precisely because we do speak some English some of the time, but not all the time, and certainly not flawlessly all of the time. In other words, it’s hard to tell whether Filipino dialogue in English is meant to be taken literally or as something translated from, presumably, Filipino or some other local language. Paradoxically, the pretense of realism fails at the very point when the characters begin speaking "real" or "correct" English.
It isn’t too much of a problem when the characters are middle-class Filipinos (as they predictably are in most of our stories) who normally speak in English, albeit in an English heavily inflected with local words and local usage. The gap between language and the reality it supposedly represents becomes most disconcertingly obvious when poor, unschooled, or even illiterate characters begin holding forth in impeccable English.
On the other hand, why the heck not? A Filipino master like the late NVM Gonzalez took this particular bull by the horns and had a character like the midwife Tia Orang in "Children of the Ash-Covered Loam" say "Do you know what happened to his wife as well? The woman was with child, and when she was about to deliver, the misfortune came. No child came forth, but when the labor was done, there were leeches and nothing else!"
Artificial? Of course. But by drawing attention to the artifice, Gonzalez habituates us to it, relaxes us, and – in an important political decision – invests his lowly characters with a nobility and integrity of expression, liberating them from the banality and inarticulateness that have marked stereotypical representations of the poor.
For his part, the late Freddie Salanga did away with quotation marks altogether, on the premise that nothing his Filipino characters ever said could have been a direct quotation, anyway.
My own solution – a not entirely successful one – has been to make my characters speak as plainly as possible, only when they need to, and almost always to suggest something more than what they’re saying. I also try to prime my readers for the inevitable dialogue with long descriptive passages, just to get them used to the fact that this is a Filipino sensibility finding a voice in English.
It’s interesting in this respect to recall the astounding claim that NVM once made (recalled for us by Gani Cruz) that what he was really doing was to "write in Tagalog – using English words." That’s the artistic challenge – and the artistic opportunity – we have to face in producing sharp, credible, and memorable dialogue.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html.
But before we get into the nuances of the situation, what’s dialogue for, in the first place?
Writers employ dialogue – what the characters say to each other, in an exchange of lines – to add another dimension to those characters as well as to convey information that can move the story forward. In other words, characters don’t just say things because the author can’t think of anything else for them to do, or because the author can’t think of anything else to do. The use of dialogue – where, when, how, between whom, and for how long – is a deliberate authorial decision. As an author, you have to know when to make your characters speak for themselves, and why.
The basic idea behind effective dialogue is that what we say and how we say it tells other people something about who and what we are – whether or not we mean to project that impression. So authors use dialogue as a means of character development, of fleshing out the character beyond our surface of knowledge of him or her.
We can be told that a character is 37, in law school, comes from a small town in Surigao, had entered and then left the seminary earlier, and is hoping to meet the right girl and start a family before turning 40 – all of which details are important and helpful in making up our minds whether to sympathize with him or not – but somehow we feel that we can’t really know a person unless and until we’ve heard him speak.
Even the most casual speech says something about the speaker. In John Updike’s "A&P," three girls dressed (or undressed) for the beach come into a grocery store in a conservative town. Their unexpected entrance provokes a range of responses: "Oh, Daddy, I feel so faint!" from one young man, and "Girls, this isn’t the beach" from the much older, stuck-up store manager.
More emphatically, Miss Mijares in Kerima Polotan’s "The Virgin" uses not just speech but language to create an impression on her seemingly hapless addressee, a carpenter looking for a job:
"Since you are not starving yet," she said, speaking in English now, wanting to put him in his place, "you will not mind working in our woodcraft section, three times a week at two-fifty to four a day, depending on your skill and the foreman’s discretion, for two or three months after which there might be a call from outside we may hold for you."
To this the man simply replies: "Thank you."
People speak in different ways: some use long, elaborate sentences, others curt monotonal phrases; sometimes we use one and sometimes the other, depending on our moods. Those moods can be suggested through dialogue, and it is a test of one’s acuity as a reader as much as of the author’s craft for those moods and attitudes to emerge through the veneer of words. A moment of flirtation is caught by this snippet of repartee from Paz Marquez Benitez’s 1925 story "Dead Stars," an exchange made even more poignant by the mutual awareness of its transience:
"Mystery–" she answered lightly, "that is so brief–"
"Not in some," he added quickly, "not in you."
"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."
"I could study you all my life and still will find it."
"So long?"
"I should like to."
Ernest Hemingway’s "Hills Like White Elephants" – the story I most often use to illustrate masterful technique (and which, interestingly enough, was published just two years after "Dead Stars") – is almost 80 percent dialogue, and the near-absence of speech tags (those "he said, she said" indicators of who said what) doesn’t make it any easier to palpate a complex dramatic situation from so seemingly simple a conversation. Hemingway sets up quick exchanges like the following – using the plainest words, but endowing them with deep, unspoken meanings:
"We can have everything."
"No, we can’t."
"We can have the whole world."
"No, we can’t."
"We can go everywhere."
"No, we can’t. It isn’t ours any more."
"It’s ours."
"No, it isn’t. And once they take it away, you never get it back."
In a sense, the art of dialogue is the art of saying just enough, and always leaving something for the reader to fathom, without being too arty or contrived about it. Good dialogue never says too much. Dialogue is the worst place for sheer exposition, the kind of information overload that anxious or incapable writers inflict on their readers, such as when two characters bump into each other in a less than reputable bar and say:
"Oh, hi, Frankie, fancy meeting you here! What’s a successful man like you with an accounting and a law degree and a plum job as the CEO of one of the country’s biggest corporations – not to mention a pretty wife and such lovely children – doing in a place like this?"
"Well, Joey, I didn’t expect to see you here, either, you fat, balding, gout-ridden fifty-two-year old! Aren’t you supposed to be enlightening the young as a professor of humanities instead of pawing these rice farmers’ daughters? What was that you said when we were both undergraduates and members of the Libertarian Society? Ah, ‘The exploitation of poverty is worse than poverty itself!’"
As this same example shows, gratuitous speechifying is another sign of bad dialogue, and it happens when a writer can’t resist grabbing the microphone from his or her character and spewing out some atrociously philosophical line. Again, remember: fiction operates best through indirection – by treating and representing human experience obliquely but concretely, rather than through frontal encounters with grand abstractions like "love," "justice," and "freedom", although all of them may be at the heart of the story’s concerns. The writer needs no mouthpiece character; the story itself, as a whole, is the writer’s mouthpiece.
Now, to the peculiarities of our situation as Filipino writers of dialogue in English. Generally speaking, we don’t and really can’t complain when a Japanese character says (as one does in "The Handstand" by Ogawa Mimei, translated by Ivan Morris), "A good job? Hell, there’s no such thing as a good job! It’s all a lot of sweat! If anyone thinks it’s fun making a living, he’s crazy." We accept the statement unquestioningly, knowing that it’s foreign material to begin with, only translated into English. We don’t flinch when we watch a local English production of, say, "The Cherry Orchard" by Anton Chekhov, knowing that these are Russian characters played by Filipino actors speaking in translation.
It’s much more difficult to suspend our disbelief when it comes to dealing with Filipino characters in Filipino stories speaking in English – probably and precisely because we do speak some English some of the time, but not all the time, and certainly not flawlessly all of the time. In other words, it’s hard to tell whether Filipino dialogue in English is meant to be taken literally or as something translated from, presumably, Filipino or some other local language. Paradoxically, the pretense of realism fails at the very point when the characters begin speaking "real" or "correct" English.
It isn’t too much of a problem when the characters are middle-class Filipinos (as they predictably are in most of our stories) who normally speak in English, albeit in an English heavily inflected with local words and local usage. The gap between language and the reality it supposedly represents becomes most disconcertingly obvious when poor, unschooled, or even illiterate characters begin holding forth in impeccable English.
On the other hand, why the heck not? A Filipino master like the late NVM Gonzalez took this particular bull by the horns and had a character like the midwife Tia Orang in "Children of the Ash-Covered Loam" say "Do you know what happened to his wife as well? The woman was with child, and when she was about to deliver, the misfortune came. No child came forth, but when the labor was done, there were leeches and nothing else!"
Artificial? Of course. But by drawing attention to the artifice, Gonzalez habituates us to it, relaxes us, and – in an important political decision – invests his lowly characters with a nobility and integrity of expression, liberating them from the banality and inarticulateness that have marked stereotypical representations of the poor.
For his part, the late Freddie Salanga did away with quotation marks altogether, on the premise that nothing his Filipino characters ever said could have been a direct quotation, anyway.
My own solution – a not entirely successful one – has been to make my characters speak as plainly as possible, only when they need to, and almost always to suggest something more than what they’re saying. I also try to prime my readers for the inevitable dialogue with long descriptive passages, just to get them used to the fact that this is a Filipino sensibility finding a voice in English.
It’s interesting in this respect to recall the astounding claim that NVM once made (recalled for us by Gani Cruz) that what he was really doing was to "write in Tagalog – using English words." That’s the artistic challenge – and the artistic opportunity – we have to face in producing sharp, credible, and memorable dialogue.
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