5. The Mechanism

The mechanism has two parts. Multiplicity, the principle that one unit of text should do several jobs, takes a particular form in dialogue; and the two channels of text and subtext are the means by which it does so.

Multiplicity under a motive

Narration can address the reader, description can dwell and interiority can explain. Speech can do none of these without breaking, because every function an exchange performs must be routed through sentences that a particular person would plausibly say aloud to a particular hearer for a reason of her own. A line of dialogue has one channel of production and two of meaning, and it must serve the book while appearing to serve only the speaker. Dialogue’s multiplicity is therefore motivational rather than arithmetical: the constraint is not space but the need for every function to be discharged by a sentence someone had a reason to say. The common failure is the exchange that serves one domain, two characters trading the facts the reader needs, and the fix is never to remove the information but to make it cost something, so that the same facts arrive while a relation moves and a character is revealed by what the disclosure costs her.

Four turns near the opening of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) show the principle at full stretch. A man and a young woman wait at a Spanish railway station while failing to discuss whether she will have an abortion. She says the hills look like white elephants; he drinks his beer and says he has never seen one; she answers, No, you wouldn’t have; and he objects that her saying so doesn’t prove anything. Every turn serves at least three domains and none announces any of them. Her image is character (she is the one still trying to play), relation (a bid for shared attention) and theme, since a white elephant is a costly gift that cannot be got rid of, and neither speaker notices that the phrase has named their situation. His reply answers the words and refuses the invitation, which flouts relation at the level of the act while keeping it at the level of the sentence. Her retort is the status move of the exchange, and his defensiveness about proof previews the only vocabulary he will bring to the real subject. No fact passes and no decision is made. What changes is permission: after the third turn they can no longer talk about the hills.

In revision, multiplicity is seldom found in what characters say about large matters. It lives in four humbler places. The first is the choice of noun or idiom: white elephants, not the hills look strange. The second is the form of address, which carries relational value on every line where it appears and which most drafts leave constant for a whole novel. The third is what the answer does to the question: delivered, delayed, partly given, over-given or refused. The fourth is the action beat. A gesture in place of a tag (turning a key between two fingers, refilling a glass, not looking up) tells the reader who is speaking and carries texture, relation and character in a clause. Elaborate figures in characters’ mouths are the riskiest instrument, because a metaphor that misses draws attention to the author; Hemingway’s works because it is a dead idiom used literally, the kind of figure people do produce.

Multiplicity has a ceiling. When every line is quotable and every line oblique, obliquity stops signifying; an exchange needs some turns that do only one thing, because implicature needs a norm to depart from.

The two channels

Every working line runs on two channels. Text is the literal content, the words a court reporter would take down. Subtext is the want, fear or withheld fact driving the line, legible through context, contradiction or omission and seldom stated. In a flat exchange the two have collapsed into one. Subtext is not ambiguity: an ambiguous line is one whose meaning the reader cannot settle, while a line with subtext has a surface meaning the reader settles easily and a second meaning she also settles, and the two do not match. Nor is it always concealment. A character may know what she means and know that her hearer knows; the indirection is then a courtesy, or a way of leaving both parties an exit. Concealment tends to produce suspense, and shared, courteous indirection poignancy.

A novel has two hearers for every line, the character addressed and the reader, and they need not compute the same thing. The second meaning can be shared, which produces complicity between two people managing a subject neither will name; it can be the reader’s alone, which is dramatic irony; or it can be the character’s alone for now, so that the reader knows something has passed without knowing what, which produces suspense and much of the pleasure of rereading. The narrator adds four resources a stage lacks. It can withhold interiority, so the reader stands where the other character stands; supply one speaker’s interiority and not the other’s; refuse to arbitrate when it could; or contradict the speech by reporting an action the words deny. A character who says take your time while checking the clock has been contradicted by the narration. This contradicting action beat transfers to any book, because it is available on any line and costs a clause, and a good deal of the difference between drafted and published dialogue is that published dialogue puts the counter-evidence in the room.

Twelve mechanisms

The gap between the channels is opened in a small number of ways, most of them a flouting of one of Grice’s maxims. The table names twelve, with the maxim where one is involved.

The table is for substitution rather than classification. A flat exchange is often the right material in the wrong mechanism, and the productive move is to take its most direct turn and rewrite it four times, as an evasion, a changed subject, a too-precise reply and a delayed agreement. The versions imply different people, and choosing between them is a decision about character that the writer did not know she was making. Each principal character can be given a default mechanism and one she never uses.

The gap-closing move

Everything above concerns widening the gap. The opposite operation is rarer and stronger. Closing the gap, so that a character who has deflected for three hundred pages says once and plainly what she means, is a climactic move available once or twice in a novel and spent when used. Its power is positional: the reader has learned the gap and registers its closing as an event, so the line need not be eloquent. Darcy’s second proposal in Pride and Prejudice, in short unqualified clauses that offer Elizabeth the power to silence him for ever, is the classic instance. The prohibition on on-the-nose dialogue is therefore not a rule against direct speech but against direct speech everywhere, which leaves a book with no plainness in reserve for its climax. The move does not need both parties. In The Remains of the Day, read in the worked analyses, one speaker closes the gap and the other keeps his open, and the asymmetry is the tragedy.

See also: the Reference account of multiplicity, with the four turns tabulated by domain and the domain audit; the Reference account of the two channels, with an exemplar, a gain and a cost for each mechanism and the historical drift of the subtext ideal.