Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction by Elizabeth Alsop (review)

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Reviewed by: Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction by Elizabeth Alsop Joy Landeira Elizabeth Alsop. Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction. The Ohio State UP, 2019. 187 p. What started in 1898 as British artist Francis Barraud's painting of his dead brother's terrier Nipper listening to a recording of his master's voice (which accounts for the painting's title) on a cylinder phonograph was soon copyrighted and transformed into The Gramophone Company Ltd.'s advertising mascot for its Camden, NJ, U.S.-affiliate, the Victor Talking Machine Company. I conjure this dog-at-the-Victrola image as I reflect upon Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction because it illustrates the coming of modernism's machine age and the central exercise of Elizabeth Alsop's study: "paying attention to how characters say as well as what they say" (161--my italics). When we as readers incline our ears to a fictional character, are we listening to what they say just to follow the plot or character development? Do fictional characters even have their own voice, or are they only heeding and mimicking their master's-author's-ventriloquist's voice? By being attentive to how characters say, readers are attuned to how conversation is made, not just to what is said. With this latest book in The Ohio State University Press "Theory and Interpretation of Narrative" series, Alsop evaluates what happens when authors and their creations "make conversation." Careful examination of specific literary works yields four categories: (1) consensual voice and fantasies of reciprocity in Henry James and Ernest Hemingway; (2) exceptional voice and the dream of autonomy in James Joyce and William Faulkner; (3) paradoxical voice and implausible speech in Faulkner and Virginia Woolf; and (4) choral voice of democratized talk in Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Together, these dialogues form Alsop's theory of a poetics of talk that distinguishes modernist literature from former periods and that traces a trajectory towards the "otherness" of postmodernism. Pause for a moment [End Page 217] to consider the characters that are all children of Henry James's imagination who, like their author, seek reciprocity and fitting in to a consensual, well-defined world in comparison to Stein's communal, choral identity "and its general movement away from what Fredric Jameson terms 'protagonicity' and toward 'polycentricity'" (131). Alsop intertwines convincing textual analysis with erudite theoretical background and references. She successfully demonstrates James Phelan's stance that "conversation is always a form of narration," (2) and reaches beyond it to reconceive fictional dialogue "as a work of poiesis rather than mimesis … something not just 'imitated' but truly made" (3). Dialogue in modernist fiction, as she reveals, is not copycat talk, but is a poetic structure in its own right—purposely crafted, created, "made." Stylistically Alsop constructs and "makes" her own arguments with elevated academic references, tone, and parlance. I would advise non-specialists in narratology to build a glossary of theoretical concepts and vocabulary--ie: "involuntary homology" (85) "inquits," "speechtagging" (120)—and to read at a study—and steady—pace. Scholars will appreciate "making conversation" in modernist fiction and will welcome the challenge of pondering carefully wrought questions, answers, examples and discoveries. Joy Landeira University of Wyoming Copyright © 2020 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association