There’s a distinction between Socratic dialog and narrative dialog in recorded debates and stories respectively. I hope to show that when both are perfected, the distinction is erased.
Often, my narrative dialog will fall flat when it rises to a Socratic register. And often my Socratic dialogs will feel hollow when they simply serve a sort of plot or titillating conflict. The former can leave the reader feeling like they went to a summer blockbuster and came away with a boring lecture on home economics. The latter can leave the reader feeling like they showed up for an epoch-defining debate between intellectual heavyweights and left with a reality TV show about their next door neighbor. In the first failure, you’re expecting bliss and ending up with pedantic “well actually.” In the second, you’re expecting a level of depth and ending with shallowness.
Neither has to happen. You can preserve the integrity of a dialog if you keep in mind, always, where you are and what you’re writing. And both, it seems, are possible to merge.
Table of Contents
What are Socratic dialogs?
They weren’t necessarily started by Socrates, but if some historians are right to think he met the Jewish theologians, then we know how deep the roots of recorded debate go. Certainly they’re there in the book of Job. The whole point of a Socratic dialog is to move an idea forward, considering all objections and placing the strongest and tallest version of the idea before us. If the idea sustains all objections and remains standing, it’s the truest of the options before us. If another takes its place, then our convictions shift. Often interlocutors are depicted as holding different positions and going head-to-head with one another from those positions. Changed hearts and changed minds within the story reflect those of the reader as well.
Which is interesting because metanoia — changed mind — is the ultimate end of the novel. It’s certainly a post-Christian sort of thing. The idea of repentance and grace, the capacity for a character to actually become someone else and heal from past wounds, wrongs, and wrong ideas.
What is dialog in a narrative?
So narrative dialog, on the other hand, is verbal action. It’s a verbal form of what the feelings and acts of the character are doing. All narrative is the representation of desires, however true or misled, which contradict one another. Or at least hit one another at odd angles. The contradiction of those desires ends up showing which is truer and which is a dud. Man has lock pick, lock is strong, lock wins, man finds another way into house or gives up. The finding of another way or giving up is the tweaking of the initial desire. That tweaking of “no, and”; “yes, but” happens over and over and over in a story until there’s one final tweak, one final change, that is not only irrevocable but fundamentally shifts the interior thinking about the original desire.
Again, that change of heart is where narrative desire and Socratic desire meet.
μετανοια — A change of heart
In a solid narrative, a character will only ever focus externally on what they want. Scenes will show them pursuing a desire against the contrary desires of the various forces of antagonism — material, vegetable, animal, rational, celestial, Theological — and ultimately failing against those forces of antagonism. That failure results in sequences that shows them reacting to their failure, having a dilemma over how they should shift their desire, and deciding what to pursue in the next scene. Ideally scenes and sequences nest themselves in acts and acts in broader narrative moves like parts or just “the story.”
In a solid Socratic dialog, a similar thing happens. Rather than desire, the desire shared by both sides — if there really are both sides and they’re debating in good faith — is towards Truth. Debating in bad faith is more or less the subject of most mystery novels: one side wants the truth, the other side hopes to hide. Truth’s like that sometimes. The best example of this of recent years is Galbraith’s Running Grave where Strike is trying to expose a cult. That’s some tricky, tricky stuff to work around. That’s a mystery novel.
A mystery novel is not the same as a Socratic dialog. In a Socratic dialog, both sides want the truth. So both sides represent their ideas as truly as they can and agree to move forwards once a truth is found and admitted. So you end up pursuing a small idea, conflicting it against another idea, and when one of them fails you react to that failure. You then create a new delimma on what to pursue next related to the idea that won and decide. A new line of questioning is posed and you move forwards.
So how do Socratic dialog and narrative dialog merge?
A few things come to mind.
The one that comes to mind most immediately is the Apology of Socrates where Socrates students are debating with him over whether or not to drink the hemlock the state gives him and kill himself. This is no mind game, no mere debate. His life is on the line. And so the ideas have practical implications at every turn. A similar thing happens in the narrative of Jesus’s life where the disciples are begging him not to turn himself over to the Romans.
What about on the narrative side?
Generally most novelists do this actually rather badly. Good Omens, for instance, is rather biased as is The Name of the Wind, though they present themselves as rather cosmopolitan and diverse. Certain scenes certainly work. The man-mothers scene in The Wise Man’s Fear has direct implications on the sex life of one of the characters.
But what about on a larger scale?
The West Wing and The Newsroom come to mind, but so does Good Will Hunting and Runaway Jury: headier stories where the debates have actual policy decisions. But keep in mind, these are the kinds of people who do Socratic debates with their lives and livelihoods. So it’s more common that (1) they’re debating real issues and seeking real truth, (2) representing their ideas and others very strongly, (3) actually deciding in light of the result of the debate. Of course all of Lewis’s work has this tone to it, but precisely those moments leave it lacking as fiction — especially for any who disagree with him, it tends to cheapen the experience and marks the major difference between Lewis’s work and Tolkien’s.
What else?
Take Shelter. It’s a story about a paranoid schizophrenic man arguing his paranoia before a town so that they take shelter from a coming tornado. He’s wrong. And his wrongness starts to pollute his family. It has direct implications on where and how they live.
Ghandi. It’s a story about nonviolence, its role in fixing society, and the consequences for one man named Mohandas.
What do you think?
Are there others that come to mind?
Do you prefer one kind of dialog to another?
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
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