Dialogue Poem by gershon hepner

Instead of thinking only logic
should be promoter of opinions,
perhaps we should be dialogic,
not treating others as dominions
to be convinced by us so we may conquer,
but act as an impartial witness
to thoughts for which our friends may hanker
with logic seeming to lack fitness.
Let us therefore embrace uncertainties
without attempting to impose solutions,
for we should not feel forced on days we seize
to move from their beginnings to conclusions.


Inspired by Richard Locke’s review of J. M. Coetzee’s “Diary of a Bad Year” by Richard Frank in The Threepenny Review, September 2008:

It is not just Dostoyevsky’s formal originality but his “courage” that Coetzee praises in a 1955 review of Joseph Frank’s biography: “A fully dialogical novel is one in which there is no dominating, central authorial consciousness, and therefore no claim to truth or authority, only competing voices and discourses.”…But I would suggest that Coetzee is a covert disciple of Chekhov as well…In his later letters, Chekhov declared, “It is not the writer’s job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc.; his job is merely to record who, under what circumstances, said or thought what about God and pessimism. The artist is not meant to be the judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness….Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers…The writer should be just as objective as the chemist….The substance of [the characters’] opinions is of no value to me as an author…The crux of the matter lies in the nature of the opinions, in their dependence on external influences, and so on. They must be examined like objects, like symptoms, with perfect objectivity and without attempt to agree with them or call them into question.”

Locke concludes:

But the whole novel is a triumph of Keats’s “Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

7/20/08