I remember the first time I read Shakespeare.  It was Romeo and Juliet, in junior high, in the wake of the awful Baz Luhrman adaptation.  Over the years, I have grown to hate the perception of the play as romance (it is, after all, a tragedy), but the experience was valuable nonetheless–it was the first time I noticed artificial dialogue.  That is not to say unrealistic dialogue or awkward dialogue, but dialogue that noticeably differs from regular speech patterns to make an artistic point.

I think we’re mostly used to realistic dialogue, which is itself a misnomer because all speech is (or should be) condensed and enhanced when it is translated into an artistic medium.  Stephen King and Elmore Leonard are authors that come to mind–they take speech patterns of a group of people (say, Mainers and crime bosses) and imitate them effectively in novel form.  The effect is to make the characters believable as regular people; the characters are artistic creations, yes, but we generally need some connection with them.

Artificial dialogue is much more difficult.  Few people spoke like Shakespeare’s characters, even the clowns, but they’re never flat or unrealistic.  Prospero’s rage and Romeo’s damned love* are completely believable within the space of the plays.  The artificial dialogue, with its brilliant turns of phrase and poetic rhythm, succeeds in probing the deepest parts of our selves, the parts of our selves  that we hide in what we say to others.  Artificial dialogue is almost always** more effective at probing the human self than realistic dialogue, but is significantly harder to pull off.  Most of the time, the result is hopeless pretense.

I’ve lately been noticing artificial dialogue in my reading and viewing.  I’ve been reading Douglas Coupland’s first novel, Generation X (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991) and I recently saw John August’s directorial debut, The Nines.  I haven’t finished Coupland’s novel, but the first third or so epitomizes the ideas of the generation he’s examining without actually mimicking its speech patterns.  A great deal of it is realistic, but much of it is not:

Well, Dag.  I see a farmer in Russian, and he’s driving a tractor in a wheat field, but the sunlight’s ogne bad on him–like the fadedness of a black-and-white picture in an old Life magazine.  And another strange phnomenon has happened, too: rather than sunbeams, the sun has begun to project the odor of old Life magazines instead, and the odor is killing the crops. (7)

What amazes me about passages like this is that Coupland maintains a tension between showing the spirit of the generation (narratives, impressions, doubts) without the pretense and hesitation of the generation’s actual speech patterns.  His characters’ speeches to each other are highly poetic and deeply insightful, but only because they don’t actually represent reality.

I’ll blog about The Nines later on.  Any other examples you can think of?

*Note: Not Romeo’s sincere, mature love but his damned love–damned from the start because he’s still a boy infatuated with the pretty women around him.  Juliet is much the same.  I’d even be willing to make the case that the impulse driving them together is primarily sexual and only secondarily emotional.  “Star-crossed lovers” is a deeply ironic phrase, and it is a misreading to interpret it as straightforward (as is supposed by the popular culture markers surrounding the play).

**I would make an exception for cultures in which people generally say what they mean.  Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, a book I have recently fallen in love with, uses highly realistic yet brilliantly poetic dialogue because the culture she’s examining airs its anxieties out loud.

This week, I present to you one of Bunny’s taxing days.

We catch Bunny as he wakes up from a long rest.

But once he’s awake, he’s ready to pose. First, we have the dignified Bunny.

Next, we have suave, debonair Bunny.

Now he’s doing his relaxed pose.

But look! He’s falling asleep again!

We try to wake him up, but he just settles near the wall.

Oh well. He’s so happy to be asleep that he’s purring. Would you wake him up?

The article is titled, “An Electronic Method for Confirming Documentation,” and it’s in the “Practical Matters” section.  The TOC is here, but you can’t access the PDFs unless you’re a member (and you should join if you have even the slightest interest in medicine and writing).

Of course, I’m perfectly willing to e-mail the PDF to whomever is interested.