Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

22.1 Speech and writing
Unit 22 Speech and narration
Section 5 Narrative

Characters and events are the building blocks of narratives, as we saw in Unit 20. In narratives (as in life) characters leave home, fall in love, wake and sleep, live and die. However, characters also speak: they argue, seduce, cajole, flatter and entertain each other; and storytelling - whether in the novel or in the everyday anecdote - reflects this: it relies on the expressive and dramatic potential of speech and quotation. The spoken narrative has specialized strategies for capturing the speech of characters. The storyteller, for instance, can mimic tones of voice and pitch to convey emotion and even to distinguish between one speaker and another. Here, for instance, is a fragment of anecdote told by a young casualty doctor:

They come bustin’ through the door - blood is everywhere

on the walls

on the floor

everywhere

[raised pitch]

It’s okay Billy it’s okay we’re gonna make it

[normal voice]

What’s the hell wrong with you?

We look at him. He’s covered with blood y’know?

All they had to do was take a wash cloth at home and go like this

[pause for wiping action]

and there’d be no blood . . .

The teller of the tale switches between narration of action and the speech of protagonists. Indeed, in spoken narratives pivotal moments in the action are often marked by this kind of embedding of enacted dialogue. The successful performance of the tale requires the performance of the voices of those who inhabit it in order to best bring it alive for the audience.

In written narrative, speech is no less important than in oral narrative; but writers have needed to evolve specialized techniques to tackle the management and embedding of characters’ voices and speech within the narrative as a whole.

22.1 Speech and writing

Writers must find ways of replacing the expressive possibilities of voice with techniques for quotation, for the presentation of speech and for the identification and individuation of speakers - techniques of the kind that developed slowly in the history of the novel. They are, it must be stressed, highly conventionalized: writers of narratives rarely attempt to render in detail actual, ’real-time’, conversational speech, or dialogue. For one thing, conversation is full of false starts, repetitions, pauses, unfinished sentences and self-correction, so real-time speech can look messy on the page. Here, for instance, is someone in ordinary conversation talking about arrangements for making telephone calls from a payphone:

well you see (.) I’m sure it would have

I’m sure it would have been possible

if they had known anyone who was a post office engineer

to install (.) a um er (.) rig

so that the the (.)

where you can actually dial from the from the from that phone (.)

er and if you (.) but that could be you know locked away

and the er something like that (.)

so that you could actually dial from that one

by-pass the coin mechanism

A written version of this snatch of conversation - smoothing out the apparent disfluencies - might look like this:

I am sure it would have been possible, if they had known anyone who was a post office engineer, to install the type of pay-phone where you can, if you wish, use a key to by-pass the coin mechanism and still dial out.

This generally is what writers of narrative do: in the first place they tend to conventionalize the raw immediacy of speech - even where, as we saw in Unit 6, Language and place, and Unit 9, Language and society, a writer accentuates the difference between narrative voice and character voice by attributing vernacular forms to characters and reserving standard dialect for narration.