This thesis proposes a new way to encounter the fiction of Marcel Proust, Henry James, and Nella Larsen through the lens of talk. I use the term ‘talk’ to define and theorize a liminal category of expression in these texts, vacillating between the elevated, ineffable significance associated with the art of conversation and the mere inconsequence of chatter, small talk, and gossip. I contend that in Proust, James, and Larsen’s novels, this ambiguous distinction is constituted and contested in the surroundings of talk, in dynamic interactions of affect, temporality, plot, and form. My study of talk thus builds on and draws together diverse theoretical projects that foreground weak, incipient, and implicit forms of thought and feeling: the ordinary language philosophy of Stanley Cavell, the weak affect theories of Silvan Tomkins and Eve Sedgwick, the suspensive intimacies of Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips. In a series of case studies from my three authors, the chapters of this thesis explore the uncertain generativeness of trivial and minor forms of talk and seek to describe the textual forces that condition and constrain it. Throughout, I attend to the elusive capacity of talk in these novels to unsettle and speculatively revise the field of possibilities in the text.

My first chapter analyzes the frustrations of digressive talk in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) alongside the pleasures of digressive narration, seeking points of convergence between the two modes. My second chapter examines a different aspect of the relation between talk and narration in the Search, using gossip as a tool with which to interrogate the limits of the narrator’s expressivity. My third chapter turns to James, considering flirtation as a style of talk in James’s The Sacred Fount (1901) and ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ (1903) that presses against formal and interpersonal closure. My fourth chapter draws from Nathalie Sarraute’s concept of sub-conversation to test the capacity of James’s heroines, Milly Theale of The Wings of the Dove (1902) and the unnamed telegraphist of In the Cage (1898), to shift the significance of transactional events through subtle acts of aesthetic interpretation. My fifth chapter, turning to Larsen, explores the nexus of talk, taste, and identity in Quicksand (1928). I argue that small talk in Quicksand is a mode of attritional suspension between identification and rejection, resembling a kind of aesthetic self-fashioning, but mortally precarious. The thesis concludes with a coda reflecting on the non-event, the occasion when ‘nothing happened’, as an alternative approach to the uncertain possibilities that this thesis perceives around talk.