Dear Daily Themes subscribers,
Thank you to all who have signed up for this Substack since the last post and apologies to others for the long break between instalments. I was busy with the last stages of a big writing project and will be sending these more regularly over the coming weeks.
This week’s edition is on dialogue and stichomythia – the classical Greek technique of dialogue in quick, alternating lines. As ever, the exercises below were written by John Hollander with the intention that students carry out one activity a day on five successive days, but please feel free to use them however you wish.
There is a long list of examples today. The first few are examples of stichomythia in drama. They come from Antigone, Richard III, Moliere’s The Misanthrope, Waiting for Godot, and finally, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Above the examples in bold are the names given to them by Hollander.
Below the stichomythia are examples of dialogue in prose by Iris Murdoch, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, H.D., Gertrude Stein, and Malcolm Lowry.
Please share your results with us! Even if you only do one or two of the exercises, we really want to see them. If you’re happy for us to share them – under your name or anonymously – we will do so in a separate post. If you’d like to share your work, please send it by next Monday (though later is better than never)
Thank you for reading Daily Themes and we hope you have fun with the exercises.
Exercises:
A and B are two speakers of the same or different sexes, ages, conditions of life, etc. You may name them, give them identities, as you please. At some point in the course of the dialogue between them – which itself occurs at some interesting or important point in the history of their acquaintance – there is a rapid exchange between them. (See examples on handouts.)
1. Write a page of stichomythia between A and B (about 20 lines). They should speak either speech or prose, unless you can write good blank verse. Your page should point or build toward a change in the relation between A and B that takes place during the course of the dialogue, or because of it. Use strictly dramatic form, with no stage directions.
2. Rewrite what you wrote yesterday in indirect discourse. Be sure to vary the verbs of discourse (not "A said..., then B answered that..., and A said that...," but "A maintained that..., which B denounced as being..., at which A whimpered that..., whereupon B bellowed that...," etc.), thus making the verbs do the work that the conversational fencing had done before.
3. Take A's first line in part 1 and a retort of B (not necessarily the next line, but any of B's lines). Embed them each in a paragraph (of which each can be the topic sentence, a closing one, or somewhere in the middle). The bulk of the paragraphs should be a narrator's account of A's and B's thoughts, feelings, motives, etc., or (as a substitute for these) some kind of external description of their actions: the point is to frame the two direct quotations in description.
4. Describe the scene – indoors or out – in which part 1 is set. You can have it remain static during their exchange, or modulate it as the exchange progresses. (If it does change – why? As a result of what is said? Can an environment comment on what people say to each other within it?)
5. Write a description of either A or B.
Examples:
STICHOMYTHIA
Family Brawl
CREON:
You consider it right for a man of my years and experience
To go to school to a boy?
HAIMON:
It is not right
If I am wrong. But if I am young, and right,
What does my age matter?
CREON:
You think it right to stand up for an anarchist?
HAIMON:
Not at all. I pay no respect to criminals.
CREON:
Then she is not a criminal?
HAIMON:
The City proposes to teach me how to rule?
CREON:
And the City proposes to teach me how to rule?
HAIMON:
Ah. Who is it that’s talking like a boy now?
CREON:
My voice is the one voice giving orders in this City!
HAIMON:
It is no City if it takes orders from one voice.
CREON:
The State is the King!
HAIMON:
Yes, if the State is a desert.
[*Pause.*]
CREON:
This boy, it seems, has sold out to a woman.
HAIMON:
If you are a woman: my concern is only for you.
CREON:
So? Your “concern”! In a public brawl with your father!
HAIMON:
How about you, in a public brawl with justice?
CREON:
With justice, when all that I do is within my rights?
HAIMON:
You have no right to trample on God’s right.
CREON: [*Completely out of control.*]
Fool, adolescent fool! Taken in by a woman!
HAIMON:
You’ll never see me taken in by anything vile.
CREON:
Every word you say is for her!
HAIMON: [*Quietly, darkly.*]
And for you.
And for me. And for the gods under the earth.
CREON:
You’ll never marry her while she lives.
HAIMON:
Then she must die. ––But her death will cause another.
CREON:
Another?
Have you lost your senses? Is this an open threat?
HAIMON:
There is no threat in speaking to emptiness.
CREON:
I swear you’ll regret this superior tone of yours!
You are the empty one!
HAIMON:
If you were not my father, 615I’d say you were perverse.
CREON:
You girlstruck fool, don’t play at words with me!
HAIMON:
I am sorry. You prefer silence.
CREON:
Now, by God––!
I swear, by all the gods in heaven above us,
You’ll watch it, I swear you shall
(To the SERVANTS:)
Bring her out!
Bring the woman out! Let her die before his eyes!
Sophocles, Antigone (Trs., Fitts and Fitzgerald)
HATEFUL WOOING
A. The Proposition
LADY ANNE
Didst thou not kill this king?
GLOUCESTER
I grant ye.
LADY ANNE
Dost grant me, hedgehog? then, God grant me too
Thou mayst be damned for that wicked deed!
O, he was gentle, mild, and virtuous!
GLOUCESTER
The fitter for the King of heaven, that hath him.
LADY ANNE
He is in heaven, where thou shalt never come.
GLOUCESTER
Let him thank me, that holp to send him thither;
For he was fitter for that place than earth.
LADY ANNE
And thou unfit for any place but hell.
GLOUCESTER
Yes, one place else, if you will hear me name it.
LADY ANNE
Some dungeon.
GLOUCESTER
Your bed-chamber.
LADY ANNE
Ill rest betide the chamber where thou liest!
GLOUCESTER
So will it, madam till I lie with you.
LADY ANNE
I hope so.
GLOUCESTER
I know so. But, gentle Lady Anne,
To leave this keen encounter of our wits,
And fall somewhat into a slower method,
B. The Capitulation
GLOUCESTER
Take up the sword again, or take up me.
LADY ANNE
Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death,
I will not be the executioner.
GLOUCESTER
Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.
LADY ANNE
I have already.
GLOUCESTER
Tush, that was in thy rage:
Speak it again, and, even with the word,
That hand, which, for thy love, did kill thy love,
Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love;
To both their deaths thou shalt be accessary.
LADY ANNE
I would I knew thy heart.
GLOUCESTER
'Tis figured in my tongue.
LADY ANNE
I fear me both are false.
GLOUCESTER
Then never man was true.
LADY ANNE
Well, well, put up your sword.
GLOUCESTER
Say, then, my peace is made.
LADY ANNE
That shall you know hereafter.
GLOUCESTER
But shall I live in hope?
LADY ANNE
All men, I hope, live so.
GLOUCESTER
Vouchsafe to wear this ring.
LADY ANNE
To take is not to give.
(She puts on the ring)
Shakespeare, Richard III
POETIC PUT-DOWN
Oronte: And I maintain my sonnet's very good.
Alceste: It's not at all surprising that you should.
You have your reasons; permit me to have mine.
For thinking that you cannot write a line.
Oronte: Others have praised my sonnet to the skies.
Alceste: I lack their art of telling pleasant lies.
Oronte: You seem to think you've got no end of wit.
Alceste: To praise your verse, I'd need still more of it.
Oronte: I'm not in need of your approval, Sir.
Alceste: That's good; you couldn't have it if you were.
Oronte: Come now, I'll lend you the subject of my sonnet;
I'd like to see you try to improve upon it.
Alceste: I might, by chance, write something just as shoddy;
But then I wouldn't show it to everybody.
Oronte: You're most opinionated and conceited.
Alceste: Go find your flatterers, and be better treated.
Oronte: Look here, my little fellow, pray watch your tone.
Alceste: My great big fellow, you'd better watch your own.
Philinte: [stepping between them) Oh, please, please gentlemen! This will never do.
Oronte: The fault is mine, and I leave the field to you.
I am your servant, Sir, in every way.
Alceste: And I, Sir, am your most abject valet.
Moliere, The Misanthrope (tr., Wilbur)
VOICES NEAR THE VOID
A. Undermining
Estragon: Let's go.
Vladimir: We can't.
Estragon: Why not?
Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.
Estragon: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause) You're sure it was here?
Vladimir: What?
Estragon: That we were to wait.
Vladimir: He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.) Do you see any others?
Estragon: What is it?
Vladimir: I don't know. A willow.
Estragon: Where are the leaves?
Vladimir: It must be dead.
Estragon: No more weeping.
Vladimir: Or perhaps it's not the season.
Estragon: Looks to me more like a bush.
Vladimir: A shrub.
Estragon: A bush.
Vladimir: A--. What are you insinuating? That we've cometo the wrong place?
Estragon: He should be here.
Vladimir: He didn't say for sure he'd come.
Estragon: And if he doesn't come?
Vladimir: We'll come back to-morrow.
Estragon: And then the day after to-morrow.
Vladimir: Possibly.
Estragon: And so on.
Vladimar: The point is- /
Estragon: Until he comes.
Vladimir: You're merciless.
Estragon: We came here yesterday.
Vladimir: Ah no, there you're mistaken.
Estragon: Whad did we do yesterday?
Vladimir: What did we do yesterday?
Estragon: Yes.
Vladimir: Why… (Angrily) Nothing is certain when you're about.
Estragon: In my opinion we were here.
Vladimir: (looking round). You recognize the place?
Estragon: I didn't say that.
Vladimir: Well?
Estragon That makes no difference.
Vladimir: All the same … that tree …(turning towards auditorium)
that bog …
Estragon: You're sure it was this evening?
Vladimir: What?
Estragon: That we were to wait.
Vladimir: He said Saturday. (Pause.) I think.
Estragon: You think.
Vladimir: I must have made a note of it. (Hefumbles in his pockets, bursting with miscellaneous rubbish.)
Estragon: (very insidious). But what Saturday? And is it
Saturday? Is it not rather Sunday? (Pause.) Or Monday? (Pause.) Or Friday?
Vladimir: (looking wildly about him, as though the date was inscribed in the landscape). It's not possible!
Estragon: Or Thursday?
Vladimir: What'll we do?
Estragon: If he cam yesterday and we weren't here you may be sure he won't come again to-day.
Vladimir: But you say we were here yesterday.
Estragon: I may be mistaken. (Pause.) Let's stop talking for a minute, do you mind?
Vladimir: (feebly). All right.
B. Meantime
Estragon: In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.
Vladimira You're right, we're inexhaustible.
Estragon: It's so we won't think.
Vladimir: We have that excuse.
Estragon: It's so we won't hear.
Vladimir: We have our reasons.
Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like leaves.
(Silence)
Vladimir: They all speak at once.
Estragon: Each one to itself.
(Silence)
Vladimiri Rather they whisper.
Estragon: They rustle.
Vladimir: They murmur.
Estragon: They rustle.
(Silence)
Vladimir: What do they say?
Estragon: They talk about their lives.
Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.
Estragon: They have to talk about it.
Vladimir: To be dead is not enough for them.
Estragon: It is not sufficient.
(Silence)
Vladimir: They make a noise like feathers.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like ashes.
Estragon: Like leaves.
(Silence)
Vladimir: Say something!
Estragon: I'm trying.
(Long silence)
Vladimir: (in anquish). Say anything at all!
Estragon: What do we do now?
Vladimir: Wait for Godot.
Estragon: Ah!
(Silence)
Vladimir This is awful!
Estragon: Sing something.
Vladimir: No no! (He reflects.) We could start all over again perhaps.
Estragon: That should be easy.
Vladimir: It's the start that's difficult.
Estragon: You can start from anything.
Vladimir: Yes, but you have to decide.
Estragon: True.
(Silence)
Vladimir: Help me!
Estragon: I'm trying.
(Silence)
Vladimir: When you seek you hear.
Estragon: You do.
Vladimir: That prevents you from finding.
Estragon: It does.
Vladimir: That prevents you from thinking.
Estragon: You think all the same.
Vladimir: No no, impossible.
Estragon: That's the idea, let's contract each other.
Vladimir: Impossible.
Estragon! You think so?
Vladimir: We're in no danger of ever thinking any more.
Estragon: Then what are we complaining about?
Vladimir: Thinking is not the worst.
Estragon: Perhaps not. But at least there's that.
Vladimir That what?
Estragon: That's the idea, let's ask each other questions.
Vladimir: What do you mean, at least there's that?
Estragon: That much less misery.
Vladimir: True.
Estragon: Well? If we gave thanks for our mercies?
Vladimir: What is terrible is to have thought.
Estragon: But did that ever happen to us?
Vladimir Where are all these corpses from?
Estragon: These skeletons.
Vladimiri Tell me that.
Estragon: True.
Vladimir: We must have thought a little.
Estragon: At the very beginning.
Vladimir: A charnel-house!
A charnel-house!
Estragon: You don't have to look.
Vladimir: You can't help looking.
Estragon: True.
Vladimir: Try as one may.
Estragon: I beg your pardon?
Vladimir: Try as one may.
Estragon: We should turn resolutely towards Nature.
Vladimir: We've tried that.
Estragon: True.
Vladimir: Oh it's not the worst, Iknow.
Estragon: What?
Vladimir: To have thought.
Estragon: Obviously.
Vladimir: But we could have done without it.
Estragon: Que voulez-vous?
Vladimir: I beg your pardon?
Estragon: Que voulez-vous?
Vladimir: Ah! que voulez-vous. Exactly.
(Silence)
Estragon: That wasn't such a bad little canter.
Vladimir: Yes, but now we'll have to find something else.
Beckett, Waiting for Godot
ANYONE FOR TENNIS? (LOVE-ALL)
Guil: What a fine persecution--to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.... (Pause.) We've had no practice.
Ros: We could play at questions.
Guil: What good would that do?
Ros: Practice!
Guil: Statement! One--love.
Ros: Cheating!
Guil: How?
Ros: I hadn't started yet.
Guil: Statement. Two--love.
Ros: Are you counting that?
Guil: What?
Ros: Are you counting that?
Guil: Foul! No repetitions. Three-love. First game to …
Ros: I'm not going to play if you're going to be like that.
Guil: Whose serve?
Ros: Hah?
Guil: Foul! No grunts. Love--one.
Ros: Whose go?
Guil: Why?
Ros: Why not?
Guil: What for?
Ros: Foul! No synonyms! One--all.
Guil: What in God's name is going on?
Ros: Foul! No rhetoric. Two--one.
Guil: What does it all add up to?
Ros: Can't you guess?
Guil: Were you addressing me?
Ros: Is there anyone else?
Guil: Who?
Ros: How would I know?
Guil: Why do you ask?
Ros: Are you serious?
Guil: Was that rhetoric?
Ros: No.
Guil: Statement! Two--al1. Game point.
Ros: What's the matter with you today?
Guil: When?
Ros: What?
Guil: Are you deaf?
Ros: Am I dead?
Guil: Yes or no?
Ros: Is there a choice?
Guil: Is there a God?
Ros: Foul ! No non sequiturs, three--two, one game all.
Guil: (seriously) What's your name?
Ros: What's yours?
Guil: I asked you first.
Ros: Statement. One--love.
Guil: What's your name when you're at home?
Ros: What's yours?
Guil: When I'm at home?
Ros: Is it different at home?
Guil: What home?
Ros: Haven't you got one?
Guil: Why do you ask?
Ros: What are you driving at?
Guil: (with emphasis) What's your name?!
Ros: Repetition. Two--love. Match point to me.
Guil: (seizing him violently) WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
Ros: Rhetoric! Game and match! (Pause.) Where's it going to end?
Guil: That's the question.
Ros: It's all questions.
Guil: Do you think it matters?
Ros: Doesn't it matter to you?
Guil: Why should it matter?
Ros: What does it matter why?
Guil: (teasingly gently) Doesn't it matter why it matters?
Ros: (rounding on him) What's the matter with you?
Pause.
Guil: It doesn't matter.
Ros: (voice in the wilderness) What's the game?
Guil: What are the rules?
Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
DIALOGUE
"Was that really it?"
"Yes."
"Are you sure you did it right?"
"My God, I'm sure!"
"Well, I don't like it."
"Girls never do the first time."
"Perhaps I'm a Lesbian."
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
"Do you mean to go back to him or what? Or have you already gone back?" Hugh's mare had also taken a sympathetic step forward. "Forgive my being so blunt, but I feel in a horribly false position. --I'd like to know precisely what the situation is."
"So would I." Yvonne did not look at him.
"Then you don't know whether you have divorced him or not?"
"Oh, I've--divorced him," she answered unhappily.
"But you don't know whether you've gone back to him or not?"
"Yes. No.. Yes. I've gone back to him all right all right.'
Hugh was silent while another leaf fell, crashed, and hung tilted, balanced in the undergrowth. "Then wouldn't it be rather simpler for you if I went away immediately," he asked her gently, "instead of staying on a little while as I'd hoped?--I'd been thinking of going to Oaxaca for a day or two anyhow--"
Yvonne had raised her head at the word Oaxaca. "Yes," she said. "Yes, it might. Though, oh Hugh, I don't like to say it, only--"
"Only what?"
"Only please don't go away till we've talked it over. I'm so frightened."
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
In her own look, however, was doubt. "You see what?"
"Why what you mean--what you've always meant."
She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've always meant. It's different."
"It's something new?"
She hung back from it a little. "Something new. It's not what you think. I see what you think."
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong. "It isn't that I am a blockhead?" he asked between faintness and grimness. "It isn't that it's all a mistake?"
"A mistake?" she pityingly echoed. That possibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind. "Oh no," she declared; "it's nothing of that sort. You've been right."
Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude. "Are you telling me the truth, so that I shan't have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know? I haven't lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven't waited but to see the door shut in my face?"
She shook her head again. "However the case stands that isn't the truth. Whatever the reality, it is a reality. The door isn't shut.
The door's open," said May Bartram.
"Then something's to come?"
She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him. "It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken.
Henry James, "The Beast in the Jungle"
Hermione ran her fingers along a mountain range, the furrowed tree trunk, ran her finger along the damp rain-soaked bark, ran her finger along "Then you will come with me?" "I said I would come if I could come. George Lowndes was waiting for her to say "Yes, I will come." "I'll have to get the tickets." "I can't leave
"Well why don't you get your ticket and leave me out of it?" you out of it." "Why can't you leave me out of it?" Words from a child's primer, She words for a beginner, a Slav, a Russian, a Hindu learning to speak English. ran words along like a child reading out of a first primer, like a Hindu learning to speak English, "But why can't you let me stay here?"
"I can't let you stay here," he went on like the next line in the Reader for Small Children, "because--be-cause I can not let you stay here." He answered her in tone, in time, in rhythm and simple beat, do re mi fa so la ti do. He ran his words together, he separated his words. "Do you re-alize what this week has been without you?"
"A week? A week without you. Has it been a week without you?" Has a week been a week that is not somehow broken slashed and tattered by George and his odd dissassociating harlequin way with everything? "Is it a week without you?"
H. D., Hermione
"Now let us talk," said Jacob, as he walked down Haverstock Hill between four and five o'clock in the morning of November the sixth arm-in-arm with Timmy Durrant, "about something sensible.'
The Greeks--yes, that was what they talked about--how when all's said and done, when one's rinsed one's mouth with every literature in the world, including Chinese and Russian (but these Salvs aren't civilized), it's the flavour of Greek that remains. Durrant quoted Aeschylus--Jacob Sophocles. It is true that no Greek could have understood or professor refrained from pointing out--Never mind; what is Greek for if not to be shouted on Haverstock Hill in the dawn? Moreover, Durrant never listened to Sophocles, nor Jacob to Aeschylus. They were boastful, triumphant; it seemed to both that they had read every book in the world; known every sin, passion, and joy. Civilizations stood round them like flowers ready for picking. Ages lapped at their feet like waves fit for sailing. And surveying all this, looming through the fog, the lamplight, the shades of London, the two young men decided in favour of Greece.
"Probably," said Jacob, "we are the only people in the world who know what the Greeks meant."
They drank coffee at a stall where the urns were burnished and little lamps burnt along the counter.
Taking Jacob for a military gentleman, the stall-keeper told him about his boy at Gibraltar, and Jacob cursed the British army and praised the Duke of Wellington. So on again they went down the hill talking about the Greeks.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
There was a long silence and Adele looked observingly at the stars. Suddenly she felt herself intensely kissed on the eyes and on the lips. She felt vaguely that she was apathetically unresponsive. There was another silence. Helen looked steadily down at her. "Well!" she brought out at last. "Oh" began Adele slowly "I was thinking." "Haven't you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel?" Helen questioned gravely. Adele shook her head in slow negation. "Why I suppose if one can't think at the same time I will never accomplish the feat of feeling. I always think. I don't see how one can stop it. Thinking is a pretty continuous process" she continued "sometimes it's more active than at others but it's always pretty much there."
Gertrude Stein, Q.E.D.
Then they were again very silent, sitting there together, with the lamp between them, that was always smoking. Melanctha began to lean a little more toward Dr. Campbell, where he was sitting, and then she took his hand between her two and pressed it hard, but she said nothing to him. She let it go then and leaned a little nearer to him. Jefferson moved a little but did not do anything in answer. At last, "Well," said Melanctha sharply to him. "I was just thinking" began Dr. Campbell slowly, "I was just wondering," he was beginning to get ready to go on with his talking. "Don't you ever stop with your thinking long enough ever to have any feeling Jeff Campbell," said Melanctha a little sadly. "I don't know," said Jeff Campbell slowly, "I don't know Miss Melanctha much about that. No, I don't stop thinking much Miss Melanctha and if I can't ever feel without stopping thinking, I certainly am very much afraid Miss Melanctha that I never will do much with that kind of feeling. Sure you ain't worried Miss Melanctha, about my really not feeling very much all the time. I certainly do think I feel some, Miss Melanctha, even though I always do it without even knowing how to stop with my thinking."
Gertrude Stein, "Melanctha"