CHAPTER 9
Conversational and Authorial
Disclosure in Dialogue Narrative
GEORGE HIGGINS’S THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE
AND JOHN O’HARA’S “APPEARANCES”Reading is not a spectator sport . . . it is a participatory event.
—GEORGE V. HIGGINS, ON WRITINg (109)T
HIS CHAPTER moves from the focus on character narrators to one on
characters as the somebodies who tell. It picks up the discussion in
chapter 1 about the way authors use character-character dialogue as
both events and modes of telling in order to accomplish their purposes. It
also expands the discussion in chapter 2 of how readerly dynamics influence
textual dynamics. Returning to my example from chapter 1, George V. Hig-
gins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and then turning to John O’Hara’s intriguing
short story “Appearances,” I further develop the distinction between conversa-
tional disclosure (what characters communicate to each other in a scene of dia-
logue) and authorial disclosure (what authors communicate to their audiences
through the conversational disclosures). In addition, I highlight a resource
that follows from that distinction, authorial disclosure across conversations
(what authors communicate to their audiences by means of the links between
and among the scenes of dialogue). Authorial disclosures across conversations
are the core features of the art of the dialogue novel. They are crucial not
only to the dynamics of character-audience relationships (do characters know
more than audiences or vice versa? and what follows ethically and affectively
from these epistemological relationships?) but also to the activity of the autho-
rial and actual audiences. It is authorial disclosure across conversations that
transforms the experience of reading dialogue-narrative, in the words of my
epigraph, from a spectator sport to a participatory event. At the same time,168