There's Nothing Natural About Natural Conversation: A Look at Dialogue in Fiction and Drama

While discussing some of the ideas presented in this paper, a colleague mentioned that after reading David Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross, he thought to himself that the dialogue in the play portrayed the way people really talk. I followed his comment by saying what makes The Great Gatsby such an excellent novel is the dialogue, especially the off-hand remarks that strike my ear as being real. Our remarks were not unusual in the least. Probably everyone reading this paper has experienced the same sort of conversation. Readers from a culture with a long literary tradition bring biases, ideas, and a great deal of information regarding texts to each text they encounter. They know what a literary work should be and should do. Knowledgeable readers can then judge conversation in a literary text to be “natural” or “unnatural,” as my colleague and I had done. What we must consider, though, is that dialogue is only “natural” or “unnatural” within the literary mode or framework, what “natural” conversation in a literary work should be or what we presume it to be, and that even “natural” conversation bears little resemblance to everyday conversation (Bishop 1984:21). In this article I will examine dialogue and its relation to everyday conversation. In doing so, we will see how literacy and knowledge of the literary tradition have infl uenced dialogue and the evolution of conversation as presented in literary works. Therefore, this will be an examination of dialogue writ large, for it will also include the dialogue found between text and readers, as well as within the text itself. And we will see that our judgments regarding “natural” dialogue are determined by our literacy and literary tradition, not by the event of actual conversation we engage in every day. Thus, dialogue will serve as yet another example of Western culture’s preoccupation with mimesis, or representation, and its willingness (even desire) to confuse the map for the territory.