“A Resource Under Denial”: The Negative Poetics Of Fictional Dialogue

Abstract: The following essay offers a new way of understanding how Henry James relates dialogue to novel form. First, I demonstrate how the scenic metaphor falls short of the poetics of fictional dialogue and can even obscure how dialogue in fiction operates in ways that are specific to its own genre. Then, I suggest we use these insights about how dialogue in the novel is distinctly novelistic to reinterpret James’s broadly influential thinking about narrative structure. I argue that James’s understanding of narrative structure is less about drama per se than about how dialogue passages offer an occasion to interrupt long blocks of narration and therefore serve a formal function of opposition or diacritical difference. Finally, I use The Portrait of a Lady as an example of how dialogue can be used as a limit to narration, in this case, the narrated representation of consciousness.