Tuning in to Conversation in the Novel: Gatsby and the Dynamics of Dialogue

I decided to play football, to smoke, to go to college, to do all sorts of irrelevant things that had nothing to do with real business of life, which, of course, was proper mixture of description and dialogue in short story. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Who's Who--and Why Some talk has an obvious meaning and nothing more, he said, and some, often unbeknownst to talker, has at least one other meaning and sometimes several other meanings lurking around inside its obvious meaning. [...] Everything depended, he said, on how talk was interpreted, and not everybody was able to interpret it. Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould's Secret To degree that readers of novel have listened for sound of narrator's voice, they have turned a deaf ear to all those other kinds of talk that makes novels novels. This widespread bias makes a certain kind of historical sense: developed through close reading of poetry, methods of formalist criticism have always worked best on texts distinguished by a verbal purity typically associated with traditional lyric. Yet, by treating novels like poems in order to read them more closely, most formalist criticism has slighted Novel's distinctively messy, mongrel quality, its capacity to represent what Bakhtin calls the real business of life by employing on plane of a single work discourses of various types, with all their expressive capacities intact (200). [1] The impact of this selective attention becomes clear when one considers how rarely critics choose to explicate an excerpt from a novel that includes characters speaking to one another. Close readings almost always analyze passages of narration, not of dialogue. As David Lodge points out, When [...] we take what is deemed to be a representative passage (of a novel...], we invariably choose a passage of narrative description that is either authorial, or focalized through a character with whom implied author is in sympathy (76). But novels, as Lodge argues, are of what he said and she said, as well as a range of other discourses that intermingle with speech of characters--and a critical method that would do justice to novels should be able to account for ways in which they are full of other people's words (After Bakhtin 200). In illustrating such an approach, this essay will focus on The Great Gatsby, a novel famous for lyrical splendor created by its narrator's voice. In memory of of its readers, Gatsby exists as a series of magnificent descriptions: a green light glimmering across bay, eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg hovering over a valley of ashes, colors of silk shirts falling. Few readers remember what Daisy says or way Myrtle talks. Gats by, then, would seem to be kind of novel that would lose very little from being treated as poetic prose. Yet, to same degree that we concentrate on sound of Nick's transcendent narration--a tuning fork [...] struck upon a star--we have trouble hearing almost-as-thrilling inflections of Daisy's banter, no-nonsense tone of Tom's manner of speaking, and flatly prosaic note sounded by smallest of Myrtle's small talk (117). In his Notebooks, Fitzgerald offers us an invitation to reconsider our critical method, to broaden our sense of how much novel can hold: There never was a biography of a novelist, he writes. There couldn't be. He is too if he's any good (1037). [2] By insisting that there could not be a unitary author behind a novel, Fitzgerald suggests that there could not be a single, stable narrative voice within it. In so doing, Fitzgerald points us toward a kind of reading that could better comprehend novel's range of voices. This sense of many people that novelists are made of seems related to Fitzgerald's fascination with dialogue, way that characters (and people) speak to each other. …