🦋 Saramago and the rhythm of speech
When I was just getting started on Blindness, I wrote that Saramago's style of rendering dialog was "dismissive," and threatened to make his characters "sound like automata." I don't think that was exactly right (although it may have accurately described my impression at the time) -- based on how completely human his characters seem to me. But I want to pick at this for a bit and figure out what is my impression of Saramago's dialog -- it has certainly struck me as one of the most important aspects of his novels. Allow me to quote some portions of a conversation between Marta and her husband, Marçal, about Marçal's parents wanting to come live with them. Sorry about the ellipses, the passage is too long to quote in full:
What's wrong, asked Marta, suddenly uncertain, Nothing important, just a few niggling little problems, At work, No, What then, We have so little time together and yet they still won't leave us alone, We don't live in a bell jar, I dropped in at my parents' house, Did something happen, some complication. Marçal shook his head and went on... I said that we were intending having your father to live with us when we moved..., You told them that, Yes, but they took no notice, they practically started yelling at me and crying, well, my mother did, my father's not really the sloppy type, he just protested and waved his arms around a lot, what kind of a son am I, putting the interests of people who aren't of the same blood over the needs of my own progenitors, they actually used the word progenitors, heaven knows where they found it..., And that was the final word, To be honest, I don't know if it was or not, I've probably forgotten a few others, but they were all out of the same mold. ...Marçal said, I know a son shouldn't say things like this, but the fact is I don't want to live with my parents, Why, We've never understood each other, I've never understood them and they've never understood me, They're your parents, Yes, they're my parents, and on one particular night, they went to bed, happened to be in the mood, and I was the result... Marta took Marçal's left hand, held it in hers, and murmured, All fathers were sons once, many sons become fathers, but some forget what they were and no one can explain to the others what they will become, That's a bit deep, Oh, I don't understand it myself really, it just came to me, pay no attention, Let's go to bed, All right. They got undressed and lay down. The moment for caresses came back into the room and apologized for having spent so much time outside, I got lost, it said, by way of an excuse, and suddenly, as sometimes happens with moments, it became eternal. A quarter of an hour later, their bodies still entwined, Marta said softly, Marçal, What is it, he asked sleepily, I'm two days late.
What is it? -- It seems to me the dialog has a certain fuzzy quality, you are constantly reminded that it is the narrator who is speaking, not the characters. But you get the impression that he is a faithful and a sympathetic narrator, that his paraphrase captures accurately the rhythm of language as spoken and heard by his subjects. In most novels, dialog serves in part to crystallize the scene, to bring sharply into focus what is happening and whom it's happening to; the dynamic in Saramago's novels is kind of the opposite -- dialog pulls the lens back and mutes the focus. You identify with the characters but with the understanding that you are identifying with the narrator's descriptions of them, and thus with the narrator.
posted evening of Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
➳ More posts about The Cave
➳ More posts about José Saramago
➳ More posts about Readings
Partly the simple lack of quotation marks blurs the distinction
between narrator and speakers, of course. But I think the main
difficulty with the dialog is that it is unusually realistic. And
real dialog contains a lot of halting and repetition, because
people's memories are fallible, and there's no need for that in
printed texts. There's more here than in typical fictional dialog,
I think, but less than in real speech.
posted morning of July 16th, 2008 by Randolph
There's more here than in typical fictional dialog
Where are you seeing halting and repetition here? Note -- the
ellipses are not in the original, they mark where I have dropped
some text, not a pause.
posted morning of July 16th, 2008 by Jeremy
I'd have to mark the whole thing up to find all the instances, but
two examples:
Halting: "We don't live in a bell jar, I dropped in at my
parents' house, Did something happen, some complication."
Repetition: "We've never understood each other, I've never
understood them and they've never understood me,"
It's also less directed than most written dialog; it wanders like
real speech, generated by limited human concentration.
posted evening of July 16th, 2008 by Randolph
Hm -- interesting. I'll keep that in mind as I continue reading. I
was having some trouble understanding that "bell jar" line.
posted evening of July 16th, 2008 by Jeremy
|
