chapter six
Dial oguing
We usually understand by the term dialogue a conversation between two
or more people. So the important feature of dialogue is that it involves
an exchange, the nature of which I will be exploring in this chapter. The
exchange can be of many different types, and can also change as the
dialogue progresses.
Dialoguing is fundamental to the way that we use language: we are
usually speaking to, or writing for, someone. Words and meanings are con-
stantly modified by social interactions, which is why literary theorist
Mikhail Bakhtin called language dialogic (Holquist 1981). Dialoguing is
extremely important in all cultural and political contexts, and is funda-
mental to communication. The breakdown of dialoguing, the failure to be
able to creatively exchange views and understand another point of view,
can produce extreme tension in personal relationships. But it can also
lead more widely to social prejudice and cultural divisiveness: to racism,
sexism, and ultimately to violence and war. Literary dialogue can explore
the ups and downs of communication, and the way power relationships
can underlie even the most innocuous verbal exchanges.
Dialogue can be part of any type of writing, so whatever your particular
interests you can include it in your work. Although it is most commonly
found in novels or plays, it can form the basis for poems, or may feature in
performance pieces which are not conventional plays. And writing can be
construed as dialogue, even if it is not technically in dialogue form. For
example, there can be internal as well as external dialogue, characters may
talk to themselves as well as to other people. Or dialogue can occur between
voices that are not involved in a conversation, in the normal sense of the