When Speech Was Speech

 

We know a character is speaking because fiction tells us so. ‘Dialogue is dramatic and should be used sparingly,’ cautions Patricia Highsmith in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, a reminder that dialogue is unique among literary conventions. The presence of speech marks imparts a clarity that a metaphor could only dream of: the narration has paused to let a character speak.

Plenty of novels take a quieter approach by dropping speech marks altogether, a feature so remarkable that we keep discovering it anew. No matter how many Booker winners avoid using speech marks, there is a lingering sense in literary journalism that a difficult and baffling choice has been made. It receives a mention in a Guardian interview with Jenny Erpenbeck and Michel Hofmann, after their novel Kairos won the International Booker in May, despite the same article noting that speech marks are also absent from the 2023 Booker winner, Prophet Song. Nor are they used in the 2021 winner, The Promise, or one of the 2019 winners, Girl, Woman, Other, so this is hardly an exception.

There is something patronising about the insistence on a literary device as newfangled when it has evidently been around for much longer. The modernists removed speech marks or swapped them for dashes, and later writers like E. L. Doctorow and Cormac McCarthy continued the experiment. They too may have been subject to the same ventriloquising about what the casual reader will find difficult. Can the conversation move on? Humanity has many unsolved problems, but the identification or attribution of dialogue is not one of them. If an author has not used speech marks to make it clear who is speaking or when, we are left with the more haunting implication that they have decided it does not matter.

What then is gained from not using speech marks? The voice of a novel becomes more singular, proceeding uninterrupted through thought, dialogue and observation without differentiating between them. Consider a book like Normal People by Sally Rooney, the success of which indicates that unmarked dialogue is not beyond the abilities of a wide readership. Normal People is told through the perspectives of two characters, Marianne and Connell, moving between them over the course of a fraught multi-year romance. The lack of speech marks makes this split more pronounced. It is typical to allow readers to access the inner life of a point of view character, but more interesting to take on the proportions of that mind and filter the events of a novel through it.

One effect of this is to produce less strain on the reader’s credulity as Marianne and Connell stumble through a plot built on romantic miscommunication. What exactly is the obstacle here? A less highly strung person might wonder why these apparently in love characters are unable to work it out. Luckily, the reader lives in the neurotic space where the misunderstandings happen, with just enough distance to see the problem but not so much that it looks easily solved. Their anxieties frame the narrative, so the reader understands better than they do why their relationship keeps breaking down: the unfortunate reality of the ideas in their heads.

This makes for an uneasy, cloistered novel, where the reader clings ever harder to the character they know, only to resent them for the same frailties as everyone else. Why is Marianne haughty, why is Connell withdrawn? Where other novels might deepen a character by showing events from their point of view, in Normal People it relieves us of the Stockholm syndrome brought about by the limited perspective. Suddenly, we see these characters from the outside, the way everyone else does, where they seem as confident and desirable as they are pretending to be.

Changing to another perspective reintroduces some of the detachment that is lost in the novel without speech marks. Under normal conditions, one line of dialogue can do the work of a longer and more expository sentence. ‘Gin and tonic, please,’ is the first thing said in Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, an unremarkable sentence that nevertheless announces the world of the novel. Compare it to Normal People, which begins with a couplet that is ostensibly Marianne and Connell greeting each other, although not obviously so:

Oh, hey, he says.

Come on in.

The effect here is far soupier, a narrative more concerned with ambience than clear distinctions in story or character. It is difficult to work out who is speaking and what they have said let alone answer the bigger questions that normal dialogue so neatly puts to bed, such as where are we? And is this really happening?

The need for clarity in such a novel can sometimes lead to an overreliance on language that was previously invisible: he says, she says, he smiles, she laughs. Speech tags become a de facto punctuation, pacing the dialogue, identifying the speaker and cueing the reader’s response. This is especially true when adhering to the perspective of one character. So while Henry James can say of Isabel Archer that she should ‘awaken on the reader’s part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant’, a contemporary author observing a strict third-person limited point of view in one of her very successful novels might have to say, ‘She laughed and covered her face.’

Deference to the point of view character means that we cannot be sure we are seeing anyone else as they are, as might be the case with clear dialogue or other modes of direct address. Even letters, emails and text messages tend to occupy a more marginal position in these novels, giving the reader a break from undifferentiated prose rather than fuelling the plot with the drama of conflicting perspectives, as found in a classic like Dangerous Liaisons or a more recent metafictional novel like Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. The conflict between Marianne and Connell may seem unbridgeable, but the ambience of the novel lightens the prognosis: despite their apparent differences, the overall experience of being these characters is remarkably similar.

Is everyone the same in these novels? Not using speech marks seems to imply that it does not matter who is speaking because anyone could have said it. They are the same kind of person: upwardly mobile millennials at university, trying to acquire social and economic cache under the rules of market capitalism. George Eliot makes her social commentary in Middlemarch by viewing a large cast of characters with a satirical eye. Here it is displaced onto the times, as other characters are deprived of their social distinctions outside of their function in a group.

The exception to this sameness is the character who holds the perspective, whose individuality is maintained through an interior life. While speech marks are gone, their absence relies on another conventional feature of the novel: the protagonist whose point of view is framing the events. It is the neurotic mode in fiction, less a stream of consciousness and more a reminder of its boundaries, with a story appearing to take place inside a particular character’s mind.

Everything comes together in Kairos, the previously mentioned prize-winner where the similarities to Normal People result in a much darker and stranger work. Kairos is a historical melodrama that uses prose without speech marks to entice the reader into particular narratives about love and politics that it will slowly unpick. Life in East Germany is shown through the relationship between Hans and Katharina, whose love is defined by their 30-year age gap even as they seem to transcend it.

Kairos is sensitive to the potential for preconceived notions on the part of the reader about life in an economically isolated Soviet satellite state. By focusing on the daily routines of its characters, such as what they eat, what they do for work, what their homes and families are like, the novel frustrates any attempt to draw broad conclusions about society. If Normal People is interested in social stratification under late capitalism, Kairos shows the melting pot of life in a socialist republic, where people are shown to have different economic positions, sexual politics, fashions and markers of cultural prestige. One of the pleasures of the novel is finding out how different everyone is underneath the apparent sameness in the narrative style, and seeing our own moral judgements undermined in the machinations of plot. Won’t someone take an issue with the age difference? Hans is married, so what about his infidelity? Later, Katharina has a brief romance with a female friend. This will finally raise the hackles of someone, we think, yet the private lives of these characters are never subject to public outrage. Misgivings are sometimes expressed, but the repercussions are always personal.

The perspective of the novel flits between Hans and Katharina, as it must, to lend credibility to the depths of Hans’ feelings and to complicate the reader’s judgements about the imbalance between them. The shifts are subtle and quick. It is sometimes difficult to identify which perspective the novel is in, and the lack of speech marks separating dialogue from thought is especially challenging in the erudite mythology the characters build around their romance, which includes Mozart, Kleist and Brecht in its broad embrace.

This false parity is the trick of the novel: that a middle-aged man and a teenage girl can be so alike in their vulnerability. What they say and what they think are not easily told apart, which only adds to the intensity of their private language of love. How romantic, for a time. Tellingly, as the relationship sours, some of the novel’s darkest moments are found in transcripts from Hans, who makes long tape recordings to berate Katharina about her choices and behaviour. Rather than deepening his vulnerability, the transcripts are a brutal form of power exercised by Hans and one of the only breaks in the undifferentiated style of the novel. Katharina never responds.

Hans and Katharina obsess over the story of their relationship, recreating important moments like the day they met to reinforce their passion. But as they know from the history of their country, if the past can be reinterpreted once, it can happen again. The emotional torment that comes later reveals a hypocrisy that was present from the beginning of their relationship. The reader is denied vindication. Our doubts may have been right, but like Katharina, we have learned the hard way.

Focusing on speech marks alone overlooks what novels can do in their absence. What if ambiguity is the point? Normal People and Kairos are told from perspectives that maintain a clear voice even when they shift to other characters, building intense, closed worlds that appear to open for love. The struggle to do this amid anxious habits of thought is the drama that plays out over Normal People. If the style represents a conspiracy of sameness, here it offers hope that a deeper connection is possible. In Kairos, it obscures the truth, isolates the characters and leads to cruelty. Clearly, a lack of speech marks is a superficial resemblance.

There is no going back to a simpler time in Kairos because it turns out not to have existed in the first place. Nor can novels go back to the good old days when speech was speech, and lovers did what lovers do (exchange letters back and forth until someone dies due to a misunderstanding). Books that seem to represent the current moment will one day be quaint, and no one will care whether we were the first or second to do something, because in a hundred years it will be their turn to invent it again.