Dignity of boundary

Abstract

The thesis couples my creative work, Jack London Slept Here, with an exegesis that argues for an “ethical” approach to the foregrounding of fictional dialogue. My argument will take into consideration the role of the reader and characterisation through dialogue rather than author-intention and self-interest. It invites participation and collaboration as a gesture of abdication of control. My original contribution to knowledge will be found in my argument that this ethical invitation is not the product of ideological positioning or experimentation with novelistic technique, but rather, the result of courage – manifesting through risk; humility – manifesting through erasure; and ultimately, a respect for the boundaries of reader and character. The novel is composed entirely through a series of interviews with my protagonist in his house on a dead-end alley in Hollywood. These interviews take place shortly before and after a shooting massacre at a nearby golf and country club. The interview structure has afforded me the opportunity and challenge to not just reduce narrative description but to eliminate it altogether. It has allowed me to forego all reliance upon speech tags to convey the emotions of the characters. There are no interior monologues and any attempt to interpret character consciousness must be made by the reader based upon their relationship to the dialogue presented to them. The exegesis will investigate the foregrounding of fictional dialogue as a narrative choice for the unobtrusive author and how this function requires a collaborating reader. Bronwen Thomas, who has made significant contributions in the scholarly study of fictional dialogue with her book, Fictional Dialogue: Speech and Conversation in the Modern and Postmodern Novel, was initially inspired by novelist and critic David Lodge’s assertion that novelists who foreground dialogue “have been somewhat undervalued by academic criticism because their foregrounding of dialogue makes them resistant to a method of analysis biased in favour of lyric expressiveness.” [After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990. 83.] My research takes the form of a critical reflection of the dialogue novels of William Gaddis, Henry Green and Manuel Puig by employing the theoretical lens of the nineteenth-century German author and theorist, Friedrich Spielhagen.