Listening and Conversing

My wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, has an interesting insight on the relation of reading and listening.  As an inveterate reader of fiction from early childhood, then an English major, she found when, as an adult, she worked as a counselor, that the skill she had acquired over the years in paying close attention to the flow of a narrative helped her greatly as she listened to clients and their stories.

In reading fiction, we put our own "issues" aside for a while and let ourselves be absorbed in discerning the motivation of the characters we encounter: we lose ourselves, as it were, as we pay attention--the key point here--to what the characters say and do and to why they do it.  So reading novels becomes not only an exercise in interiority but an essential skill in dealing with people.

So often, it seems to me, people meet and fail to connect at a deeper level. I notice this quite often with most of the people I know: we meet at a restaurant, and  although they might show perfunctory interest in what I am doing, their focus in on themselves; and when I do talk about my life or activities, they fail to pay close attention; they seem distracted, unaccustomed to following the short narrative I am unfolding, perhaps because they are mainly concerned with their own ideas.

As a result, the encounter is superficial, and I come away unappreciated. I know several people who, after more than twenty years of seeing me, never really get to know me because they fail to pay attention. They don't know how to listen as well as talk, how to ask questions to further the conversation.

In fact, there is often no conversation or mutual exchange at all, merely an exchange of information, which can be pleasant but forgettable. We have not nourished each other.

It seems from my observations of the British royal family (and other such celebrities) that they have mastered the art of the polite question, putting people at ease with a series of questions while providing no answers of their own. The result is not a real conversation, but the technique of asking questions of the other is a skill seldom practiced, in my experience, when people get together.

If reading fiction provides essential background to following someone's story during a conversation, then it seems to me that asking a few questions is not a matter of politeness but a basic part of what it is to converse.

The limits of conversation is the subject of several books I have looked at, most recently Sherry Turkle's "Reclaiming Conversation."  She provides abundant examples of people in our technological age who have "sacrificed conversation for mere connection."  Her key question is: Does our passion for smart phones and other technology help us avoid genuine encounter?   The answer seems self-evident.

Turkle makes the point that to grow and love and understand oneself and the world around us, we must converse, not merely send Tweets.  She says that many college students she has met yearn for their friends to put down their cell phones long enough to really talk.  They have learned in school to avoid seeing faculty during their office hours--too personal and embarrassing--in favor of email relationships, which are not real relationships at all.

The result of growing up without genuine conversation is a lack of empathy, the very thing that Lynn, a fine counselor and teacher, has mastered.  No doubt she has spoiled me because most of the other people I talk to give monologues, as if unaware of that dialogue requires attentive listening.

The harmful effects of over-reliance on gadgets rather than face-to-face encounters are chilling to contemplate.  Tweets and emails provide rewards, Turkle says, in their little bursts of information; and they more we feel such rewards, the more we tend to crave more such instant stimulation.

I don't see Turkle, or for that matter, Stephen Miller, whose book on conversation I wrote about here in 2013, defining the art of conversation in any real sense or relating it to listening, the kind of listening that requires patience and some humility as well as the experience of giving attention, a form of love, to another person.  

To listen well takes maturity, skill, and the polite attention we need to follow another's unfolding narrative, with the reward being that we, too, will be listened to in the same way.  This kind of personal exchange is becoming rarer in our speeded up world, where connections are more important to many people that genuine friendships and where conversations are rare. No wonder there is so much unhappiness.

What it means to read

I have written posts in the past about the way slow, careful reading of fiction, especially, can lead us to a deeper level of consciousness--quite apart from the value it has as a window into understanding reality.

A recent article in The Nation by Joanna Scott on the challenge of reading difficult books caught my eye, but mainly because she quoted a scholar from American University (Naomi Baron) who asks the question: Are digital media altering our understanding what it means to read? 

Of course, the answer is yes, but how? Baron's study concluded that the attention span in the U.K. has decreased by half--from five minutes to seven seconds--since 1998. I don't know the scope of her study, but I was struck by another of her findings: that among university students in the U.S., Germany, and Japan, there is a widespread preference for reading printed texts--even as many libraries are, regrettably, disposing of much of their print collections.

What happens when young people today, with their penchant for text messaging, confront a long, serious novel?  No data exists yet, apparently.

What effect does the lack of sustained reading have on writing--a topic of major interest to me as a teacher of writing?  I continue to remind would-be writers, especially if they want to become authors, that the first step in being skillful as a writer is to be a good reader, paying attention to the style and structure of what they read.

Reading--the kind that promotes interiority--is basic to learning and understanding the world and the self, and it seems to me that without it, the attention span of students will continue to decline, with disastrous results for them and for society.

My Japanese Novel

Before mentioning my take on the first Japanese novel I have attempted to read (in a fine translation by Jay Rubin), I should mention that my habit of reading is not always conducive to  fiction. I tend to have two or three books going at the same time and dip into each of them for an hour or two, as the mood strikes.

When faced with a 600-page novel, as is the case with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, I must ask myself, What does it take to get me to complete this lengthy piece of fiction, an amusing, original concoction whose plot seems to go nowhere and whose characters talk a lot, at great length?

It takes, I find, the ability to sit still for long periods (which is not always easy). That is my function. The author's function, which in this case is mainly successful, is to stimulate and maintain my interest to forge ahead with a narrative that moves quickly but whose overall significance remains, at the half way point, unclear. It has to be more than about the search for a lost cat, which ostensibly occupies much of the initial action.

Strange, supernatural events occur here, a la magic realism, and neither the narrator nor the author seem to care whether they are real or imagined.  The narrator is a not uncommon postmodern creation: a thirty-something young man, passive and a bit lazy, a stay-at-home suburban Tokyo husband and unemployed lawyer who encounters a series of wacky, assertive females, most of whom assault him with a volley of words that seems unending, with descriptions that can be at times annoyingly repetitious, at times hilarious. One of them asks him, "tell me, have you got guts?"

"No, I was never one for guts. Not likely to change either."

Do I want to follow such a character through several dozen more escapades and exchanges, knowing he will remain, at the end of his urban odyssey, the same rootless young man we encounter on the first page when he is at home cooking spaghetti and listening to Rossini?

The first thing that struck me about the narrator and his world is how Westernized (Americanized) his Tokyo is, with its Dairy Queen hamburgers and a virtual absence of Japanese cultural references. I gather that Mr. Murakami is gently satirizing the loss of native culture in post-war Japan, where a certain bland boredom coexists with an unpredictability that the Coen brothers would appreciate.

The novelist has had many successes; and this book, from 1997, is his attempt at a "big novel," full of important ideas, yet the emphasis is on the mundane details that make up the world of Toru, his wife, her missing cat, and his weird female companions. Whether this Proustian attention to detail adds up to something significant depends on my ability to finish it.

So far, the main idea I have noticed is the difficulty, often the impossibility, of knowing one another. Love, as Flannery O'Connor once said, is the effort to understand the mysterious fellow creatures we encounter. Life is full of mysteries.

What else? What is real in the narrative, and what is imagined? Are the voices Toru hears on the radio real?  What do we make of the fantastic stories of World War II, as told by an amusing fortune teller: did they happen or are they fairy tales? More important is whether Toru, the passive narrator, will be able to understand his troubled wife and the other women who confront him as he drifts through Tokyo.

Do we, the readers, care?  The experience of reading a long novel has to involve more than being intrigued by a series of quirky characters.

I hope Toru meets a few shy people who, instead of being compulsive talkers, listen to him. I suspect I will not learn a great deal about Japan from him in the second half of the novel and that the missing cat will never be found. But then I could be in for another surprise in this novel of surprises.