Humans have been talking to one another for anywhere between 70,000 and 200,000 years, which really isn’t that long, evolutionarily speaking. But it’s still a lot longer than the 5,000 years or so that we’ve been writing things down.
It took another couple thousand years before the Iliad, originally an oral epic told by wandering bards, was written down circa 750 BCE. And then – sticking with the Western canon – it was another few hundred years before Greek tragedy and comedy tiptoed onto the stage.
About 1,500 years after that, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, with which she effectively invented the novel form; although in The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne Doody argues that the ‘ancient novel’ first appeared a thousand years earlier, in Greece and Rome, courtesy of – among others – Xenophon, Chariton and Petronius.
Either way, the novel has been around for a long time, but nowhere as long as we’ve been talking to one another. And there’s a very good chance that this is why, as Elmore Leonard says, no one ever skips dialogue. It also goes a long way towards explaining the visceral immediacy of the theatrical experience, and why cinema is the most lucrative art form in history.
It also suggests that as writers, as novelists, we should be trying to tell our stories through dialogue as much as is practicably possible. That’s not to say we’re shoe-horning in casual chats for the sake of breaking up the prose; it means that we’re progressing the story and developing our characters in their own words.
Why is direct speech more valuable than reported speech? Because, just as we’re hard-wired to respond to speech, we’re also predisposed to believe people when they speak. To quote Tony Davies, from his book Humanism:
“If, as was often said, man is the speaking animal, then we exist most fully not in the intimate interiority of private thought and feeling but in the communality of linguistic exchange. ‘Language most shows a man,’ wrote Ben Jonson, in a vivid phrase borrowed from the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives: ‘Speak, that I may see thee.’ […] The human being is fashioned and defined in language, and belongs inseparably, in its public and private aspects alike, to the medium of discourse.”
