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Karnataka
The future of conversation Words and ideas
Where are the brilliant phrases infused with wit and banter?
Conversation and letter writing were once arts naturally and instinctively acquired even as they remained functional means of communication. This was the case as much in the relatively better off material cultures as in deprived cultures, though their cultivation as an art depended on the existence of a class of people who literally lived by their wits: the literate, intellectual class. These natural skills also required to be cultivated. The cultivation of such ‘air s and graces’ resulted in the cut and thrust of conversation, the brilliant phrase or a vivid descriptive passage in a letter, the talent and ability to sustain a prolonged correspondence comprising the most routine of things that could hold the interest of readers generations later.
Such exchanges in speech and in writing became part of civilised discourse only with the decline and finally the destruction of feudalism, a necessary condition for the emergence of a non-parasitical intellectual class. Many European intellectuals since the beginning of the 18th Century have distinguished themselves as brilliant letter writers and conversationalists. Their most casual conversations, marked by affectionate banter, even malice, are now part of a people’s cultural inheritance. Indeed, wit and banter are integral to the best of such exchanges. Is it any wonder that the epigraph to one of the most complexly structured of modern novels, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, should be a passage from Samuel Johnson’s conversation as recorded by James Boswell two-and-a-half centuries ago? Not surprising, for the ‘narrator’ who is also the ‘hero’ of the novel, fancies himself as some kind of a Boswell to the murdered poet John Shade whose poem, Pale Fire, he is ‘editing’ — the whole artifice constituting the actual novel. Jonathan Swift’s Letters to Mrs. Esther Johnson (Journal to Stella) retain their vibrancy and freshness three centuries after they were written. But those were other times, other mores. What is the state of conversation and letter writing now? Or, have such civilised skills enabling one form grammatically correct and complete sentences to communicate ideas in speech, or in a letter, become redundant, now that virtual reality is taking over our lives?
When Abraham Biggs, a Florida teenager committed suicide online last week, with the web camera of his computer recording live his prolonged and agonising death, none in the estimated audience of 1,500 of the macabre seemed to care. Those who did follow what was happening were jeering at the unhappy young man, daring him to go ahead. The image took over even so solemnly enacted a ceremony as self-inflicted death; virtual reality silenced the tongue that could help but only jeered.
Though the Good Book tells that in the beginning was the Word, conversation certainly came almost conterminously with the less vainglorious ‘word’, lower case. The conversation was face to face, between two persons unless it was a dialogue among a group of people sharing ideas along with liquid and solid nourishment, the exchanges marked by joy and laughter and a fine sense of camaraderie, or rancorous hostility.
Correspondence is another form of conversation through writing letters, in many cases carried on in a sustained manner over several decades between friends, lovers, sometimes even enemies. This was the state of exchange of ideas through the spoken and written word till well into the 20th Century. However, as new advances in technology have taken over our lives, the written word was the first to beat a retreat, soon followed by the spoken word, face to face. The challenge posed by the telephone has gradually prevailed over the earlier forms of communication. Functional, aseptic, emotionally neutral though only seemingly, the mutually invisible participants in control and free to walk away at will, though this is not always easy, especially if the participants are emotionally tied to each other, the telephone has been a central ‘character’ in some plays and films. Then, there is email. An even more instant form of electronic communication is chat, which can be as addictive as watching television. And finally, though only for the present, is the ubiquitous SMS, organically linked to that indispensable ornament of the modern man and woman (and increasingly, also of the child), hammering the final nail on the ancient and once honoured art of conversation and correspondence.
What is in store next? None can tell. However, the legacy of mass-scale adoption of such systems of instantaneous communications may well be the emergence of a pair of modified thumbs, with skewed angles, in children born in the near future, who will thus be naturally ‘enabled’ to swiftly key in the letters of the alphabet to write text messages fast.
M.S. PRABHAKARA
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