Dialog Redux

Dialog is a dramatic force that resides in what is said but not intended, in what is intended but not said. It propels the Sisyphus boulder of story up the hill of expectation, where it pauses, lurches, then begins its downward tumble toward the discovery of damage. It is an attempt to communicate something, either to the person making the utterance, the person to whom it is putatively directed, or some abstraction of audience, perhaps even the gods.

Dialog is the drawings on the cave walls, exquisite evocations of something real, functional, beautiful; in some ways it is recognition and proof of our own existence because someone has uttered our name. But it is not all good news, not by any means; it is a Wagnerian opera when we were expecting Puccini, it is no when we were hoping for yes, it is a broken heart when we were expecting the kite fly of elation, it is the who? when we were hoping to be remembered.

In real life, the life from which we flee or seek to redesign whenever we sit or stand or lie down to write, there is conversation. In the alternate universe of fiction there is dialog, what we might have said had we been our characters, what we might have said had we known more clearly what we were doing. Conversation in fiction becomes a speed bump, a device that causes the story and our sense of it to lurch, jostling us out of our abandon. In fiction, dialog may be contrived to sound like conversation, but when have you seen individuals in story actually rely on such a thin veneer? Thus does conversation in fiction become a betrayal or motive or goal or self by the way it offers up proof of a recognized weakness.

The remarkably apt literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) recognizes dialog as a duality attempting to organize life, imparting to it the potential of being an agent as a specific aspect of message. This is a position I believe most writers come to accept as they grapple with the duality of dialog and their own attempts to set it into motion with action and intent. We don't have to wait for the Pinter and Miller and Stoppard of today, we can start way back in the day with, say, act one, scene two of Richard III, in which the dialog between he who wishes to become Richard and Anne, rages before us in a fiery clash of agenda and duality.

Dialog is the kindling for story; it should make us aware of the smoulder manifest when individuals--any individuals--gather to debate agenda--any agenda. To get to this place, we need to position ourselves firmly within the sphere of influence of each character who steps onto our stage. We have to become the three bag ladies waiting outside for Macbeth as well as the Rob and Laura Petrie of Macbeth. Anything less is conversation.

The Writers' Tool Kit

An absolute pushover for gadgets, I fall upon mail order catalogs from any number of purveyors, whether the tempting kitchenware or sophisticate espresso makers of Dean & Delucca or Williams-Sonoma, whether the electronic inducements of Radio Shack or Circuit City, the high-priced exotica of Harrington, perhaps even the Hammecher-Schlemmer or, indeed, Russell's; so long as it is a tool or gadget, I want it, sometimes even as much as I want the knowledge and expertise to use these--these utensils. I have already had problems with the Mac Store, thus arranging for their notices to appear in my in box as junk mail.

Working editorially on a project about our early Homo sapiens forbears, the Cro-Magnon, I am particularly acute to how ingeniously they contrived tools for projects at hand such as hunting, fishing, curing hides, carrying the equivalent of a lighter for starting fires. It might be accurately said that some among the Cro-Magnon invented the needle by using a sharpened sliver of bone or antler to link hides by sewing them with tendon.

Everywhere I look, professions carry about the tools of their choice: artists carry charcoals or pastels or oils or watercolors; sculptors carry chisels, knives, saws; chefs carry knives.

I sometimes carry a MacBook or a CMOS (Chicago Manual of Style), but never my unabridged American Heritage; often my Ancora fountain pen or my Mark Twain Conklin, even from time to time a Moleskine notebook (graph grid, of course). My more favored tool is my curiosity, which surely gets me into more trouble than a terrorist-suspect at an air port. Curiosity--what if, and would would it be like? There is also the possibility of a book, which at the moment is Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin, but that can change. There is also the presence in the tool kit of enthusiasm, which is the fuel that keeps the writing and the curiosity going against the enormous inertia of distraction, the same kind of distraction that seizes the attention of a scent hound catching a whiff of--of an interesting scent.

What else should be in a writer's tool kit? What quality or element? Perhaps an ear for the music of words and ideas, perhaps an eye for a subterranean pattern or perhaps a lack of pattern. Perhaps a feel for a person, place, or thing? Perhaps a voice, cynical or not, optimistic or not. Perhaps a sense of humor, the ability to see myself at the root of all folly, made more foolish yet by my attempt to embody seriousness and decorum. Perhaps a Faulknerian belief that Mankind will prevail, this in the face of growing evidence that we as a species are on an endangered list.

Perhaps the most useful tool of all, the Swiss Army Knife of writers, the fact of having loved and perhaps won or perhaps lost, the fact of having given a damn, the fact of caring

The Carnival and the Grotesque: Some Words on Humor

The Russian Formalists working in the early years of last century and, thus, about a hundred years ago, were seeking a way to investigate and interpret poetic language, placing more of a premium on it than, say, the language of psychology. Such critical thinkers as my own favorite,Mikhail Bakhtin (November 17, 1895 – March 7, 1975), were looking for a means of removing the inconsequential and mundane from those very aspects of life, the inconsequential and mundane. They were looking, in other words and, of course in simplistic apercu for the miraculous and extraordinary embedded in the quotidian. These critics in Russia pushed the world of literature into the twentieth century, into modernism, into an investigation of the connection between the writer and the text.

Bakhtin's major work was an explication of Rabelais, a writer misunderstood and denied validity in a manner similar to the very misunderstanding and denial associated with Bakhtin. By dealing with what he called the carnival and the grotesque, and by studiously analyzing portions of Rabelais that had been excised in the interests of good taste, Bakhtin demonstrated how crowds, social classes, and uses of language demonstrated a workable metaphor for The Body Politic, which is to say for the entire range of social classes, where each strata emerged in Rabelais' writings as embodiments of society.

Such musings, beyond the confines of the academy and the peer review help us see how our own work may reflect the very spark, the lightning in a bottle we seek to make it ours and to give it the life of what I will call reflective entertainment, which is to say those things that make us think even while we are enjoying ourselves.

Although I much admire most of the work and purpose of Carl Hiaasen, and have read in him at some length, his novels are not my emotional favorites even though some of his characters have taken up residence in my own imaginative reflections, my own casting of landscape and dramatic terrain. Hiaasen's work approximates the tone and intent of Rabelais.

The grotesque is the term used by Bakhtin to describe the emphasis on bodily changes through eating, evacuation, and sex: it is used as a measuring device for the body politic. The carnival, that glorious pre-Lenten eruption of convivial behavior, represents the activity of the group. As seen by Rabelais and, later, by Hiaasen, these activities give us something to measure. Most of us who read Rabelais or Hiaasen measure them by laughter, which is another subject dear to the literary hard of this amazing critic, so long forgotten, just now beginning to reemerge from the shadows with a focus we can use as we sweep the night skies, looking for our own pole star by which to orient ourselves.

If we chose what seems funny to us, we have begun looking for the miracle of explosiveness in the illusion of the ordinary.