4 “Oh talking voice that is so sweet”:constructing dialogue in conversation

Oh talking voice that is so sweet, how hold you alive in captivity, howpoint you with commas, semi-colons, dashes, pauses and paragraphs?

Stevie Smith, Novel on yellow paper, p. 46

The previous chapter examines synchronic repetition: repeating one’s own oranother’s words within a discourse. It also, however, says a bit aboutdiachronic repetition: repeating words from a discourse distant in time. Oneway that people frequently talk about a situation in which a speaker repeatsanother’s words at a later time is the situation generally referred to as“reported speech,” generally assumed to come in two forms: “direct” and“indirect” speech, discourse, or quotation. “Direct quotation” is commonlyunderstood to apply when another’s utterance is framed as dialogue in theother’s voice (“Sam said, ‘I’ll come” ’). “Indirect quotation” (or “indirect dis-course”or “speech”) is commonly understood to apply when another’s speechis paraphrased in the current speaker’s voice (“Sam said he would come”).

In this widely-accepted schema, “direct quotation” and “indirect quota-tion” are clearly distinguished in the abstract, but in actual discourse manyequivocal cases arise. For example, Voloshinov ([1929]1986:131) describesthe power of what he calls “texture-analyzing” indirect discourse in thenovel which

incorporates into indirect discourse words and locutions that characterize the sub-jective and stylistic physiognomy of the message viewed as expression. These wordsand locutions are incorporated in such a way that their specificity, their subjectivity,their typicality are distinctly felt . . .

The following example of this strategy is taken from the novel Householdwords (see Appendix I for information on this novel and its choice for analy-sis). A man is telling the novel’s protagonist, Rhoda, why he can only pay alow price for her recently deceased husband’s pharmacy:

He had a lovely new wife, a baby on the way, and he could go no higher in price. (93)

On the surface, the man’s words are reported indirectly; there are no quo-tation marks. Yet the “stylistic physiognomy” – the sound of the man’s

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