Dialogue

Peter Womack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781134331833
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Dialogue is a many-sided critical concept; at once an ancient philosophical genre, a formal component of fiction and drama, a model for the relationship of writer and reader, and a theoretical key to the nature of language. In all its forms, it questions 'literature', disturbing the singleness and fixity of the written text with the fluid interactivity of conversation.

In this clear and concise guide to the multiple significance of the term, Peter Womack:

• outlines the history of dialogue form, looking at Platonic, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Modern examples
• illustrates the play of dialogue in the many 'voices' of the novel, and considers how dialogue works on the stage
• interprets the influential dialogic theories of Mikhail Bakhtin
• examines the idea that literary study itself consists of a 'dialogue' with the past
• presents a useful glossary and further reading section.

Practical and thought-provoking, this volume is the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this diverse and fascinating literary form.

1

THE GENRE

‘Whoever philosophises, simulates a dialogue.’

Konrad Lorenz (Mittelstrass 1988: 128)

The default verb for essay questions in the humanities is ‘discuss’. ‘Discuss Shakespeare's uses of disguise’; ‘“The First World War was entirely avoidable.” Discuss.’ Because this imperative is so familiar, we tend not to notice that it is also contradictory. As an examination candidate, I am required on the one hand to produce a discussion, that is, an exchange of views, a conversation with others. But on the other hand, I am forbidden to exchange a single word with the people around me. Moreover, the purpose of the prohibition is to make sure that what I ultimately hand in will be my own unaided work, uncontaminated by the contribution of anyone else. Thus what I am supposed to be doing is described as a dialogue, but the circumstances in which I am to do it are vigilantly monologic.

This equivocation is not confined to the examination hall. Classic works in the humanities, especially in philosophy, often describe themselves as ‘enquiring’ or ‘investigating’. The eighteenth-century writer Edmund Burke made his reputation with A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Karl Marx announces on the first page of Capital: ‘Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein's most influential book is entitled Philosophical Investigations. These ways of putting it suggest a speaker who is asking questions, listening to answers, formulating further questions, engaging in the back-and-forth interactions with others that take up the time of real-life enquirers and investigators. But in fact, once again, the texts turn out to be the uninterrupted discourses of their authors. The promise of dialogue is not to be taken literally; it is a false prospectus, or a metaphor, or something in between.

So as we work in history, or philosophy, or the social sciences, or the study of literature and the arts, we find that our writing is as it were haunted by the idea of dialogue. The lecturers’ lectures are distracted and enlivened by a feeling that they ought to be, or would like to be, conversations. This resonant absence is felt most of all in the dialogue genre, that form of philosophical exposition that goes so far as to invent imaginary characters and write out their supposed exchanges complete with speech headings, so that the text looks rather like the script of a play. Normally, a dialogue of this kind purports to be the transcript of an actual conversation, as if the represented philosophers had been chatting away in the company of a shorthand reporter. But only the most unsophisticated reader believes this: rather, the differentiated speakers are understood to be a literary device, a way of writing an essay so that it really does appear to ‘enquire’, to ‘investigate’, and to ‘discuss’.

The dialogue in this sense is very old indeed. It is the form of almost all the works of Plato (427–347 BCE), and is in that sense the original method of writing philosophy in the West. Plato wrote some two dozen dialogues, most of them presented as records of the teaching of his mentor Socrates (469–399 BCE). Socrates himself wrote nothing; he is shown going about Athens asking people hard questions, challenging their metaphysical and ethical assumptions, and teaching students in ones and twos by an intensive method of question and answer. He therefore appears as the person who actually did the questioning and investigating which writers only say they do. Understandably, then, Platonic dialogue has had a secular prestige and influence. It is imitated, for instance, in Cicero's writings on rhetoric and metaphysics (55–45 BCE), in Thomas More's Utopia (1516), in Galileo's demolition of the geocentric cosmos (1632), in George Berkeley's Three Dialogues (1713). The history of European thought cannot be done without dialogues. Yet despite this cultural grandeur, there is also something about the genre that is obscure, marginal, almost whimsical. Nobody anthologises or teaches it like ‘tragedy’ or ‘the novel’. Some dialogues do deal with classical philosophical issues, such as the nature of language or the existence of God, but many deal with much more limited topics, like archery, or English policy in Ireland, or whether the Elizabethan age was better or worse than the eighteenth century. Many of the more recent examples come from a distinctive and intriguing class of epistemological troublemakers: David Hume, Denis Diderot, the Marquis de Sade, Heinrich von Kleist, Thomas Love Peacock, Oscar Wilde, Edward Gordon Craig. One slightly surprising recent English exponent was Vivienne Westwood, who in 2008 produced a wide-ranging cultural ‘Manifesto’ in fantastical dialogue form. The genre was appropriate, both to the oddity of her decision, and to the half-serious subversiveness that has characterised her career in fashion. Despite its originary status, dialogue seems typically to be the preferred medium of eccentrics and provocateurs.

This chapter traces the possibilities of this paradoxical genre by taking five canonical dialogues, from the ancient world, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the very edge of modernity, and exploring their particular structures in order to arrive at a general understanding of what is at stake. Since the genre works differently at different cultural moments, the formal account has also to be, in the same breath, an outline history.

PLATONIC DIALOGUE: PLATO, PHAEDRUS

Plato's Phaedrus was written between 375 and 365 BCE, and the conversation it presents is supposed to have taken place about 50 years earlier. Socrates, out walking, meets his friend Phaedrus, who has just been with a fashionable orator called Lysias, and has brought away a copy of his new speech. They make themselves comfortable beside a stream, and Phaedrus reads the speech aloud. It comes out of the pederastic culture of its time and place, when it was conventional for mature men to adopt adolescent boys as both intellectual protegés and physical lovers, and it argues that a boy is better advised to grant his favours to a man who does not love him than to one who does. Phaedrus thinks this speech very clever, but Socrates disagrees, and makes his point by improvising a cleverer one to the same effect. Then, suddenly ashamed of this game of denigrating love, he makes an even better speech in its praise. In the aftermath of this trio of speeches, the friends discuss rhetoric itself, asking whether it is an art, and what the conditions of excellence in it are. This exploration leads to a famous final section in which Socrates argues that writing is a trivial and careless use of words, and that the only serious communicative medium is conversation; so the dialogue concludes with an implicit reflection on its own form.

For our purposes the conclusion is crucial: why is writing inferior to talk? According to Socrates, a man who possesses knowledge communicates it by planting it in the soil of a receptive soul. Since he is doing something important and difficult, he is careful to choose an appropriate recipient, to speak to that person in a way which is suited to his nature, to confirm by questioning him that he has understood, and to deal with his perplexities by inviting him to ask questions in his turn. Only through this painstaking process, which Socrates calls dialectic, will the transplanted knowledge take root and live. By these standards, writing a book is an act of shocking indifference to the fate of one's thought. Written discourse has no idea who it is addressing; it says the same thing to everybody whether it is appropriate or not; and although it may appear articulate and intelligent, if anyone questions what it says it is unable to reply. It can neither accommodate itself to its friends nor defend itself against its enemies, but wanders around the world useless and helpless (Plato 1995: 274c–278e). Thus writing is condemned by comparison not with speech in general, but specifically with interactive speech, that is to say, with dialogue. What the text represents becomes the occasion of a devastating critique of what it is.

This paradox points us towards the heart of dialogue as a literary form. After all, the point is not just that writing and conversation are different. It is that (as Socrates argues it) the opposition between them is constitutive: conversation, in its responsiveness, its adaptability, its interpersonal life, defines exactly what writing is not. By mimicking conversation, then, the written text latches onto its own structural opposite; this is writing trying to escape its own essential condition. That is of course impossible. But what is the effect of trying?

Most obviously, it is to embed the philosophical ideas in a fictional situation. For example, in Socrates’ great speech about the transformative power of love, he assures us that the human soul can acquire wings. He goes into some detail about these wings: when and how they grow, in what circumstances they are damaged or fall away, what kinds of nourishment make them stronger, and so on, all in a rather insanely bland and informative tone (246c–251e). If all this were being advanced by Plato as a metaphysical system, it would be so odd that it would be difficult to take it seriously. But that is not what is happening. Rather, this is supposed to be a speech improvised by Socrates for a number of definite purposes: it is to persuade the hypothetical boy not to be taken in by the dubious arguments of Lysias, it is to take away the bad taste of the false oratory that has just been heard, it is to pacify the God of Love with a speech in his praise, it is to entertain Socrates’ friend Phaedrus, who likes this sort of thing. More inwardly, it is also pedagogic: since previous speeches have denigrated love by calling it a kind of madness, this one questions the assumption that madness is always bad, and prompts the listener to imagine a visionary madness, a delusion which is the perception of a higher reality. In other words, the wings are not a doctrine; rather, they are explicitly offered as one way of putting something. On another day, with a less offensive starting point or a less quickwitted interlocutor, it would be put quite differently. Dialogue, then, has the effect of making the exposition provisional, pragmatic, context-dependent.

This is not to imply, in some general-purpose gesture of scepticism, that all knowledge is relative. On the contrary, the assumption that there is such a thing as absolute truth is the basis of the whole form. Truth, for Plato, is permanent, unchanging and noncontradictory, whereas human speech is transient, inconstant and ambiguous. Consequently, every attempt to put the truth into words is a failure of one kind or another. The great merit of the dialogue form, from this point of view, is that it wears its inadequacy on its sleeve. Socrates and Phaedrus meet by chance; their discussion is casual and improvisatory; both of them change their minds as it proceeds; any conclusions they come to are rendered uncertain by Socrates’ characteristic irony; it is obvious that the whole encounter is partly fictional anyway. All these signs work together not to minimise the unreliability of language but positively to advertise it. Unlike Lysias’ written oration, with its deceptive air of covering everything, Plato's discourse is conspicuously local and partial. The truth about love, or language, is not situated in these words, but born in the minds of the interlocutors; the text reaches out beyond its own limits for a completion it evidently fails to contain in itself.

So the dialogue paradoxically pursues stable truth by means of unstable words. Or, to put it another way, dialogue form foregrounds philosophical processes rather than philosophical propositions. Philosophy, on this interpretation, is primarily a way of living; knowledge is vouchsafed not to those who adopt the right doctrines, but to those who undertake the right exercises, so that their minds acquire the strength and accuracy to apprehend real things (Mittelstrass 1988). Written dialogue constitutes a sort of pattern book for this practice: it shows the mental activity that is required, the patience, cunning, friendliness and daring of truly philosophic conversation. But it is only a pattern book; you cannot learn philosophy by reading about it, any more than you can learn to cook by reading recipes; to make real progress you must begin to do it. On this view, Platonic dialogue is exemplary, saying not so much ‘This is the truth’ as ‘This is the kind of thing you need to do in order to arrive at the truth.’

It is therefore a matter of substance, not just of presentational charm, that the Phaedrus is a kind of idyll. Socrates and Phaedrus leave the city in the heat of the day, and talk under a flowering plane tree with their feet in a cool spring. Socrates plays half-seriously with the idea that the spring is sacred to the Nymphs, and that they are invisibly inspiring his eloquence. The whole conversation, then, is a retreat, a pleasant suspension of normal business. This bracketing is especially poignant in the historical retrospect which is part of Plato's context. Phaedrus was exiled by the Athenian state in 415 BCE, and Socrates himself was put to death in 399 BCE for allegedly corrupting the city's youth. The dialogue commemorates two victims of official suppression by imagining them in a situation where they speak freely and without fear. The image proved influential. For example, De Oratore, Cicero's treatise on rhetoric, written about 300 years later, takes the form of a discussion at a politician's country house. A bruising political confrontation is in progress in Rome, and a group of friends have left the city for a few days’ break. There is a plane tree in the grounds, so they decide to imitate the Phaedrus by settling down in its shade, forgetting the immediate crisis, and instead holding a philosophical discussion of oratory (Cicero 1942: i, vii, 28–30). Like Plato's, the dialogue was not written until several decades after it supposedly took place, and in the meantime many of the participants had met their deaths in the lethal politics of the late Roman Republic. Again, then, the dialogue itself is idyllic, almost utopian: here, in contrast to the follies and brutalities of the city, is the right way to seek wisdom, in ease, sociability, and good faith. The exposition of the ideas is, in the same breath, the evocation of a good way to live.

But how does this affect the argument? A short extract from the Phaedrus will suggest an answer. This is from the sequence that directly analyses the art of speaking. Socrates has just attacked rhetoric as a technique for representing things as good irrespective of their actual merit, a system of words divorced from real knowledge. Then he pulls back for a moment:

SOCRATES: But could it be, my friend, that we have mocked the art of speaking more rudely than it deserves? For it might perhaps reply, ‘What bizarre nonsense! Look, I am not forcing anyone to learn how to make speeches without knowing the truth. ... But I do make this boast: even someone who knows the truth couldn't produce conviction on the basis of a systematic art without me.’

PHAEDRUS: Well, is that a fair reply?

SOCRATES: Yes, it is – if, that is, the arguments now advancing upon rhetoric testify that it is an art. For it seems to me that I hear certain arguments approaching and protesting that it is a lie and that rhetoric is not an art but an artless practice. ...

PHAEDRUS: We need to hear these arguments, Socrates. Come, produce them, and examine them: What is their point? How do they make it?

SOCRATES: Come to us, then, noble creatures; convince Phaedrus, him of the beautiful offspring, that unless he pursues philosophy properly he will never be able to make a proper speech on any subject either. And let Phaedrus be the one to answer.

PHAEDRUS: Let them put their questions.

SOCRATES: Well, then. ...

(260d–261a)

The tone is playful: Socrates teases Phaedrus by complimenting him on his ‘beautiful offspring’ (he means the pretty speeches engendered by Phaedrus’ passion for rhetoric), and Phaedrus teases Socrates by imitating his addiction to asking questions. The discursive clowning fills the discussion with imaginary voices. ‘Rhetoric’ indignantly defends herself against Socrates’ attack; then he hears a group of ‘arguments’ approaching with a fresh counter-attack on her; then, at the end of the extract, he is preparing to put their questions to Phaedrus. This subtle ventriloquism extends the principle of dialogue far beyond the two interlocutors who are supposed to be actually present: we hear not simply what Socrates says, but what he imagines saying to Lysias, what he would say if he were Lysias, what the nymphs of the spring cause him to say, what he and Phaedrus might say to a hypothetical defender of rhetoric. Successive speakers are fancifully improvised and collapsed, and so the different possible positions within the argument are articulated in a way that is both light and objective: the playfulness makes for inventiveness, and the teasing for a sceptical lucidity. Thus the pleasure of the conversation, as we watch Socrates and Phaedrus enjoying themselves and each other, is neither a distraction from the philosophical argument nor a device to make it palatable to the reader. Rather, the enjoyment and the argument are the same thing.

It is this celebration of the pleasure of dialectic that forms the Phaedrus’s strongest link between its conclusion (Socrates’ attack on writing) and its apparently remote starting point (Lysias’ attack on love). Lysias’ speech is the only written text within the dialogue, and its fate exemplifies the delusions of writing: initially impressive, it is exposed to increasingly destructive criticism as the discussion develops, because its parent Lysias is not there to look after it, and it has no power to stick up for itself. This neglect on his part is consistent with the nature of the speech itself, which is a rhetorical showpiece, aiming, as Socrates argues, not at what is true, but at what is convincing. Its manner is bright, plausible, uncommitted; we are to suppose that Lysias could argue just as effectively on the other side of the case. He cares as little about the truth or falsehood of his speech as he does about what happens to it. That is consistent, in turn, with the proposition he is advancing, namely, that a dispassionate suitor is to be preferred to one who is in love, because lovers are distracted and unreliable, whereas with a non-lover it is possible to come to a reasonable, mutually advantageous arrangement. So every level of Lysias's speech is characterised by the same uncommitted efficiency: this is the utterance of somebody who doesn't love the boy, do...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Genre
• 2 Dialogue in the Novel
• 3 Dialogue in Drama
• 4 Dialogue in Literary Studies
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index