4. The Taxonomy

The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) sorts the change a scene makes into domains of purpose, registers in which something can change: plot, character, theme and texture, with a fifth, the relational, proposed there. Dialogue adopts all five, and this chapter takes up the fifth for a reason particular to talk. Speech is the main medium in which people negotiate status, and an exchange can leave two characters unchanged as individuals while altering for good what each may say to the other. A four-domain audit cannot see that change, and it is what a large share of memorable dialogue is doing. The chapter then proposes a sixth domain, for the work done by what is not said. The model is for diagnosing a drafted exchange, not for planning one, and the domains overlap by design.

Plot: a fact or a decision changes hands

An exchange serves plot when a fact passes, a commitment is made, a plan is set or broken, or a lie is caught. Dialogue is the novel’s quickest way to move information, and information transfer is its most often abused mechanism. The remedy the tradition converges on is not to remove the information but to make it cost something. Give the fact to someone who does not want to say it, so that saying it is an event; give the need to someone who already suspects part of it, so that she tests rather than receives; and let it arrive incomplete, as a fragment that raises the next question. A second plot function is less often noticed. A decision made in a character’s head can be revised in silence; a decision said aloud to another character has a witness, and the witness makes it binding, which is why the decision that closes a sequel in Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2) so often lands in speech. The limit case is a fact created by a conversation that transmits none. When Lady Catherine de Bourgh demands that Elizabeth Bennet promise never to marry Darcy, in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth refuses to promise, Lady Catherine reports the refusal to Darcy, and Darcy reads it as hope.

Character: the speaker is revealed

Speech is the one element of a novel in which, by convention, the character rather than the narrator chooses the words, which is why a false note in dialogue does more damage than one in narration. Its carriers are diction, the shape of a speaker’s sentences (their length, and whether she finishes them), what she avoids, what she claims about herself, and how she changes register when the audience changes. The last is used least often. A character who speaks one way to a superior and another to a subordinate is characterised by each register and again by the switch, and the professional target is a consistent repertoire rather than a single consistent voice. Evasion inverts the intuitive relation between speech and disclosure, since an unanswered question is heard as meaningful and the reader is licensed to interpret it. Under-delivery is the interchangeable line, plausibly spoken and attributable to anyone in the cast; over-delivery is the verbal tic, a catchphrase or dialect spelling that substitutes a label for a person. In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), when the townspeople call for a speech from Janie, her husband Jody answers for her that his wife knows nothing about speech-making and that her place is in the home. The refusal characterises him completely, and it characterises her by the silence it imposes.

Relational: the standing between speakers changes

The relational domain, in dialogue, is the balance of power, intimacy, obligation and permission between the speakers: what each may now say to the other, and on what terms. Readers track it continuously and without noticing, through who opens, who yields the floor, who may change the subject, who asks and who must answer, who apologises, who is corrected, and who uses whose first name. Three principles make it usable. Status is a change, not a state: an exchange in which the powerful character is powerful throughout has illustrated a fact, not served the domain, unless the power was contested and held. Partial shifts are more legible than total ones, so a character who yields the ground and keeps the one thing that mattered makes a clearer move than one who capitulates; the household doorway turns on this, when Dov gives up the key and keeps the reason. And the strongest moves are the smallest: a surname exchanged for a first name, a courtesy withheld that every earlier scene granted, an answer addressed to a third party. Physical position belongs here too. A character standing in a doorway controls access, and a character who must ask to pass has already lost something, so moving a person across a room is a relational move that costs no dialogue at all. Under-delivery is static status, an exchange in which nothing was contested; over-delivery is a dominance display with nothing underneath.

Theme: the argument changes

Dialogue is the one place in a novel where a proposition can be advanced by someone the author does not have to answer for, so a book can hold two incompatible positions in suspension because two characters hold them. The theme domain fails often, on this chapter’s reading, because its failure is so attractive: a writer gives the book’s argument to a character, who states it, and the book stops. The useful question is not whether someone says the thematic thing but whether the exchange puts it at risk, and three tests answer it. Is the opposing case made in a form its own adherents would accept? Does the narration refrain from arbitrating, for instance by tagging one speaker reasonably and the other snapped? And does either speaker want something other than to win? The third is the one most often missed. When Ivan Karamazov tells Alyosha, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880; trans. Constance Garnett), that he accepts God but returns his ticket, the argument is hard to bear because Ivan is trying to make his brother agree with him and Alyosha is trying not to lose his brother. Theme can also be served with no argument at all, by dramatic irony, as when a narrator’s sincere account of his own dignity is heard by the reader as a diagnosis.

Texture: the experience of reading changes

Dialogue reads faster than narration or description, so every exchange changes the pace whether or not the writer attends to it. Its carriers are the length and rhythm of turns, register, the density of tags and the proportion of white space on the page; readers see a page of dialogue as dialogue before reading a word, and read it faster. Register is also the quickest way to tell a reader where and among whom she is, through courtesies, jargon handled without explanation and what is treated as unsayable. The principle that governs it is that dialect is carried more reliably by syntax, idiom and vocabulary than by spelling: I don’t have but the one places a speaker without an apostrophe of elision. Under-delivery is a cast that all speaks a mild contemporary standard; over-delivery is the dialect showcase, in which respelling slows reading to decipherment.

A proposed sixth: the silence domain

The five domains describe what speech does, and much of what an exchange achieves is done by speech that does not occur. The chapter therefore proposes the silence domain: the exchange does its work through what is not said, through unanswered questions, interruption, pause, characters present who do not speak, overhearers, and people excluded from a conversation about them. A commercial instance shows how little text it needs. In Lee Child’s Reacher thrillers the line Reacher said nothing recurs so often that Andy Martin, who watched Child write Make Me (2015), took it for the title of his book about the process. The phrase occupies a turn: it stands where Reacher’s answer would be, and leaves the other speaker to fill the silence.

There are three arguments for the domain. Its effects do not reduce to the others: a character present and silent through eight pages produces no characterisation and transacts nothing, yet turns the exchange into a performance for an audience. It has its own failure, the exchange in which everyone says everything they think, and its own remedy. And it is where much of a novel’s serious content lives, since what cannot be said in a society, by a given person to a given hearer, describes that society. The argument against is strong: silence is a means, not a value that changes, and every unanswered question can be filed as a relational or a thematic shift. The chapter adopts the domain for diagnosis while conceding that objection, on the practical ground that writers do not look for what is absent unless something prompts them. The Ending (Chapter 16) is the place to adopt or reject it, with the mother’s unexplained silence in the household novel as its test case. The Ending (Chapter 16) rejects it as a domain of the ending, where the mother’s silence is served by plot resolution as a question visibly declined and the siblings’ silence carries catharsis, and leaves it standing here, at the scale of the exchange.

The table below summarises the six domains with the carriers to look for and the two directions of failure.

One domain served fully outperforms five gestured at: ask which domain an exchange is for, and whether it moves. Early exchanges in a novel tend to lean on character and texture, because the reader needs the voices before the contests; late ones lean on relation and theme, because the accumulated history makes a small move legible.

See also: the Reference taxonomy, with each domain’s carriers tabulated and further illustrations from James, Achebe, Saramago and Brontë; The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1), where the relational domain is proposed.