Has the world always been as full of talkers as it is now? I can’t imagine it has. We would have had more testimony down through time about the plague of chatterboxes that was besetting the human race—filling the air with their clamor, polluting all public space and most private, and drowning out the music of the spheres. Alexander Pope seems to write about a comparable situation in The Dunciad. But so gifted and to the point was Pope that almost anyone outside himself and his esteemed circle of friends (Swift and Arbuthnot and the rest) might seem a clamoring dope. Plutarch wrote an essay on nonstop-talking bores. Yet it is, rather shockingly for that fascinating writer, a bit of a bore itself.
No, the plague of yackers that besets us seems to be something of a current phenomenon. It is, maybe, a sign of our era. Everywhere you go, people seem to be pinning others, often (nominally) their friends, to the mat and having at them with words. Listeners are tied to the track and run over with nonstop discourse. What is a dinner party now but a site where all the alphas present (and everyone now aspires to alpha status) vie for the position of king of the oratorical hill? This status is usually achieved not by being the most articulate, the most learned, or the most original. It is achieved by being the loudest, the most aggressive, and the least sensitive to the desires of others to be—every hour or so and ever so softly—heard. But there is an upside to this. At least there is for the writer: you can convert this pain to pleasure. You can take it from gap to gain.
True to the spirit of the original child’s game, the grown child who seeks to be king of the oratorical hill pushes other aspirants down by talking more—and more loudly—than anyone else. He goes on and on and on. Challenge him and he raises his tone higher until it sounds like he is bellowing in a church. Or he resorts to subtler stratagem to hold the floor. I have witnessed a man make adept use of his stutter to call attention to himself, to incite sympathy and thus silence, and then to take over the dinner table like a mutineer captain taking over shipboard.
Is it necessary to say that the most common dinner-table mutineer captains are male? A woman may do it from time to time, but it seems often a political gesture, a drive for equality, or an object lesson to show the males around the watering hole exactly what it’s like. But usually the orator is phallic.
There is, from what I can tell, a genre of book that aids and abets this practice. Such books are found in airports and often composed by contributors to various glossy magazines. They tell you how the stock market really works, why there is so much poverty in America, what the next wave of computers will be like, what’s hot in real estate, and why in football the left tackle means as much as he does. From what I can tell, males buy these on the way home from business trips, skim them on the plane, arrive home at six, and by eight thirty, fork in one hand knife in the other, are regaling a set of relative innocents with a summary of the book’s contents. Often they do not cite the author. They claim, implicitly, that this knowledge has been compiled by none other than themselves. They never shut up. In small cities, the table toppers may often use New York Times articles to hold the fort; in big cities it seems only a book will do.
These usurpers are, as I say, most often male. I have heard a story about a young woman who put up with one of these dinner party disquisitions for as long as she could stand it. But this time the perp actually named the book he was citing—a breakthrough for him no doubt. She informed him quite directly that she knew the book well. She had read it multiple times. He continued talking. She knew the book she claimed inside and out. On the elocutionist went. This was a book, she averred, from which she could quote freely. Didn’t stop the dude. She then declared to him and all others listening that she had in fact written the book.
The orator took this in. He contemplated the fact. He did not doubt her. After a decorous pause, he spoke again. He took up where he left off, explaining the author’s book to her and all others who could bear to listen. Now I’m not sure I believe this one out and out. But let it stand as an emblem for the current discursive situation in certain provinces of American culture.
The urge to orate is not limited to dinner tables at present. It is everywhere and it is not easy to account for. If Tocqueville were to come back from his aristocratic grave in France and tour America once more, he might well tell us that it all owed to the factor that the author of Democracy in America believed explained most of what mattered in the states—the rule of the people. Sometimes Tocqueville thought that the rule of the people, democracy, brought you uncomfortably close to anarchy. So why does everyone want to talk? Maybe because he who speaks is king, or at least rules for the present. If nobody rules, maybe anybody can. As Springsteen says, “Poor man wanna be rich / Rich man wanna be king / King ain’t satisfied ’til he rules everything.” So everybody wants to hold the floor. And I mean everybody. I’ve listened to interminable monologues by people still residing deep in their teens about their (brief) lives and (thinly perceived) times. At discourse’s end, they inquire to know what my name might be so they can send me a daily chorus of tweets. Tocqueville warned me. I didn’t listen. George Steiner wrote the essay “The Distribution of Discourse” in which he bemoaned the passage from the day when Dad talked a lot and Mom talked a little, but to potent effect—and everyone else simply jammed a fist between his teeth and listened.
There’s also, I think, the self-justifying business. Again, it has to do with democracy, a little. To wit: no one knows anything. No one knows with certainty what’s good or bad, right or wrong in the way of the conduct of life. Sure there are laws. Sure there are mores, even a few manners. But people often feel uncomfortably like they are making it all up as they go along. Am I who I say I am? Am I living the right way? Does my life make sense? In the current random, these questions can feel up for grabs.
A lot of what the yackers do in my experience is to justify the peculiar and often rather contingent forms their lives have taken. They are not only telling you, and the rest of the unfortunates standing by with the ice melting in their drinks, who they are. They are telling themselves. When there are not a lot of templates out there, when the Ten Commandments could be nine or four, but probably not fourteen or thirty, it’s hard to figure out who one is and why that matters. Did Mailer write a book called Advertisements for Myself? In our time it seems everyone is advertising for himself. Everyone needs the microphone, everyone needs the floor, everyone is perpetually clearing his throat to set in, and once in he will not conclude until the Dog Star rages (which, I gather from Lord Byron, is quite a long time). The era of the orator is upon us. Everyone wants to be a (relatively benign) dictator—which, as Northrop Frye reminds us, is nothing other than a speaking machine—a nonstop talker.
It’s no pleasure spending one’s life as an ongoing audience. When one of the self-justifiers or front-table monarchs is rattling down the tracks like an empty train with all its couplings loose, you feel crummy. There’s something diminishing about having someone let loose a monologue in your face. You can feel your sense of self shrink a little with every fresh dependent clause. The candle flame of ego begins to splutter. How long before it winks completely out? That’s what the talker wants, naturally. They grow and you shrink. It’s a zero-sum activity. Has anyone ever spoken of castration by conversation?
But. However. Consider.
Once you’ve gone over and become a writer, at least in your own mind, all of this changes. And the purgatory of eternal listening can become something like a pleasure. Now you know that after the storm of discourse is over, you can go back to the room of your own, or to your corner of the coffee shop, and set the truth down as you see it. You can write and rewrite and compose and recompose, and indulge in all the necessary visions and revisions, and have yourself some latte or some hot chocolate while you’re there. In other words, you will get your turn.
Now this may be small comfort to some, but there is more. While being regaled you can stop feeling that you are suffering in silence and realize a critical truth. You are not a passive victim any longer. You are in the role of God’s spy. Whether you write poems or novels or plays or blog posts, you are gathering material. This will be of use. This will pay off.
My wife, the most socially kind person I know, endorses listening to bores with rapt attention. She finds it to be an exercise in Zen self-effacement—good for the modesty, good for the soul. But she is also always on the watch for a fine phrase—fine because it’s artful or (more often) fine because it illuminates a certain personality to perfection. This fine phrase will reappear in an arch short story of hers somewhere down the line. And so will the phrase’s—I was going to say originator. But often the speaker is simply channeling the latest in some form of pop patois: medical, political, environmental, what have you. And the speaker may turn up in her story, too, though charitably disguised.
The final truth about the situation of the writer in the world of windbags is still yet unspoken. Ask Jane Austen about it—or ask her works. And there you will encounter what can only be highly civilized, exquisitely refined writer’s reparation. (Which is something not quite like the wholesale kamikaze revenge I spoke of earlier.) I would eagerly bet that each and every prosing gasbag in Pride and Prejudice had a prototype in the realms of what people sometimes foolishly call Austen’s “limited experience.” I’m guessing that the bumptious social-climbing Mrs. Bennet had one; and that the insufferable parson, Mr. Collins, got his start on a pulpit not far from Ms. Austen; and the drably ferocious dragon, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, spent some time posing for Austen in some sublunary form before she made it into the celestial pages of the novel.
And then all the Mrs. Bennets and Lady Catherines and Mr. Collinses down through time had the pleasure of seeing themselves in the novel—or at least their associates did, since people like Mr. Collins and company are inclined to avoid anything resembling a mirror.
Revenge? Revenge is too strong a word. There is no poison in evidence, no dagger, not even a lawsuit with a well-buttoned advocate pleading one’s case. But there is a measure of mild retribution and it has its savors. The writer may not get the first word at the dinner party, or many of the words that flow in the middle like bland lava. But if she’s anything like Jane Austen, she can always get the last.