“ Showing” as it is called is obviously more difficult than merely “Telling” because while telling, the novelist can narrate from experience, render judgment, analyze and objectify motives, vent anger and frustration at a degenerate world and assume the position of anything that he or she desires: A sympathizer, a castigator, a Judge or a moralist. Some of the great Victorian novels like Vanity Fair by WM Thackeray, Middle March by George Eliot or the Russian novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy make extensive use of the ‘ authorial voice’ setting the tone, and the tenor of the narrative.
Unlike Telling, Showing is about creating situations and conversation. Conversation from the characters has to take into account all the social, cultural, personal characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the person. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex characters are not supposed to speak in a refined, genteel manner but intone the rustic candor of a rural England. In the novel “All creatures great and small “by James Herriot one gets a sense of the rough and candid Yorkshire farmers speaking in their peculiar Yorkshire music. The effect is so powerful that one feels even the animals that inhabit this novel are a little Yorkshirean in their persona.
The writer has to imagine the characters and their conversation to give them their color, slang, accent, rhetoric, syntax, idiosyncrasies and that peculiarity that distinguishes them from each other to spring them to life from vague imagination. When the writer succeeds, the characters become more real and lifelike than the novel intends to be, to become a part of lore and popular imagination. A number of characters from the novels of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen are ample illustrations of this point. Long John Silver from the novel “The Treasure Island” whose speech reflects his long career as a daring seafarer with many a tale or trick up his sleeve is a case in point. Mark Twain’s genius is at work and his miraculous powers of observation can be seen in the speech and conversation of Huck, Ole Jim, The Duke and the Dauphin in the novel “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
Dialogue or showing is central to the novels of Jane Austen. In the novel Pride and Prejudice for example, the many turns of the story are engendered or resolved over conversations. Elizabeth Bennet falls for George Wickham’s artifice as he fills her with misinformation and alleged injustice at the hands of Mr. Darcy. The conversation between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine revives the hopes of Darcy and eventually leads to their union. Jane Austen makes use of letters to continue the conversational mode and several facts about Lydia’s wedding are cleared for her in the letters she receives from Mrs. Gardiner. In “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway, the author uses several methods of narrative, thinking aloud, Internal monologue, Recalling the past and Dialogue between Santiago the Old man and the fish Marlin. Narrative thus carries the distinctive stamp of the novelist. In the novel Catch -22, though there is an omniscient narrator, some of the characters narrate their story independently. Luigi Pirandello’s play “Six characters in search of an author” presents an open ended play with no settings and the boundaries between reality, identity and sanity are put into a crisis. (To be continued)