The Art of Listening

R. S. White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317367185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1986. This collection of essays is unified by one leading idea: that the active and creative abilities of listeners and readers deserve as much attention as the skills of speakers and writers. It is shown that hearers, far from being passive recipients in the communicative process, are in fact active in selecting, interpreting and creating from the disparate signals they receive. Equally, readers are involved in creating individual patterns of significance from a text. In presenting this argument, some essays deal with the importance of gender considerations, some with special modes of writing such as the private diary and literary translations, and others with the more familiar fields of poetry and drama. In the sphere of popular music, distinctions such as 'folk' and 'pop' indicate special problems in assessing the 'authenticity' of a listener's response. By concentrating on active listening, the collection develops and illustrates the conviction that there are fundamental premises underlying the various disciplines under review, the analysis of which makes for a fuller understanding of communication in all its forms.

Eight
Shakespeare and the Listener

R.S.White

Conversations are events which we would all, presumably, say we have been involved in from time to time. Therefore, they have the rare merits of not only being suitable subjects for close, even analytical inspection, but also democratically open in the sense that anybody can offer an opinion which will be as valid as the next person's. It can also be presumed that those who choose to read this essay will have had at some time the experience of watching or reading the dialogues in Shakespeare's plays, as a set of created or artificial (in the most precise sense) conversations intended to be enacted by. living people on the stage, who will seek to convince us that their roles and discussions are as real', if only observed and overheard, as those we become engaged in outside the theatre in our own unscripted language. The consequence of these two presumptions is a third. A close inspection of what goes on in Shakespeare's dialogues, informed by a commonsense reference to our own individual understandings of conversation can reflect analytically upon what we do in our own social interactions, while at the same time lighting up sane of the recognisably 'human' qualities of Shakespeare's texts.

In order to create a context for discussion, I ask for a greeting of the spirit' (Keats's phrase) in asking a naive question of myself and offering as honest an answer as I can manage. When I say 'I had a good conversation with X today', what do I mean? Obviously not a single thing, nor even necessarily a similar thing whenever I say it, but some essentials can probably be abstracted. I would almost certainly mean that I became aware of X's presence through his/her responses, and felt reasonably confident that X was aware of my presence through my responses. This would account for the words 'conversation with' as distinct from 'diatribe to' or 'sermon from'. There was mutual awareness and a belief that we were listening to each other, although the only source for such a belief is an observed responsiveness to each other. What about a good conversation? Here I could mean a range of things. We seemed to be understanding each other throughout, we seemed to reach agreement after sane false starts or misunderstandings, individual ly we seemed to became spurred by what the other was saying into an excited responsiveness, we seemed to be discovering some thing together in a train of logic or association which was helped along by the guestions/staternents/answers offered by the other. I may have seen or understood something I had never before realized, or reached an idea or feeling which I would probably not have formulated in such a way without somebody helping me. Or X expressed a change of opinion precipitated or influenced by what I had said in answer to his/her ideas ... and so on. What gathers all these feelings together (whether X shared them or not) is a personal experience of the unexpected outcome from what might have started as a bored, apparently predictable, even ritualistic exchange. If we did not so readily ignore or take for granted the mystery of the commonplace (what Dickens calls 'the romance of the familiar'), we should describe this whole process as a miracle. But the main point I wish to make is that the process itself, at every step as we are forced to explain it, depends on notions of responsiveness, listening, interacting and interpreting - and not primarily on speaking, saying, uttering. What we hear is what enables us to speak, and what we say is what enables the other to hear and speak, and so on. It is the listening function which is, far from being passive, of prime creative importance in determining the direction and future course of a conversational interaction. If either party neglects the speaking function (by a nod or a wink) he is still involved in a conversation; but if either party abdicates listening and responding, the conversation is over. A conversation is defined by responsive hearers, not by eloquent speakers, and it is the function of 'active listening' which dictates the direction in which speakers proceed.

You, the reader, may have found already so much to disagree with, qualify, or reflect upon in what I have already 'uttered' that you may wish to stop reading, discuss the issues with somebody else ('talk about it'), debate them inwardly, think about the substance, ask for clarification, or move onto the next section of the essay, or simply put it aside in boredom. In every case, your reaction is confirming my analysis, for it is your response that determines our next step. It is your choice of a level of interest and hearing which leads into the future, and what I have written for you is merely an occasion or a context for your ideas, a basis for your creation of 'a text' from 'the writing'. On the other hand, since I am engaged in writing rather than speaking, my listener (reader) is either imputed or nobody but myself. Therefore, I can impose choices about the direction of the argument. For example, what I do not choose to develop in this essay (although the subject is important and implicit) is the nature of the response of a reader or an audience to Shakespeare's plays, the sort of problems raised in so-called Reception Theory or Reader-Response Criticism. Instead, I shall be examining the ways in which Shakespeare constructs and conducts conversations between his fictional characters, and later the ways in which listening can be seen as a central concern at the 'thematic' level of his plays. Furthermore, in the discussion that follows I do not expect to prove the proposition that listeners determine the direction of conversations in Shakespeare, but instead to shew that it is a proposition which is not contradicted by the evidence, can be amply illustrated, and, satisfying Popper's criterion, that it is useful in providing analytical insights into the phenomenon of Shakespearean conversation.

Shakespeare's Conversations

Literary critics, while tacitly acknowledging what every audience knows, that characters in Shakespeare's plays hold responsive conversations' with each other, have never investigated the matter with anything like the rigour they apply to other subjects (character, imagery, ideas, etc.). And yet surely if we want criticism to follow questions genuinely raised in the theatrical experience, or in the experience of reading, the topic should be somewhere at the top of our agenda.

Some critics do at least recognise the centrality of conversation and interaction between characters:

...the manner of [As You Like It], when once it settles down in the forest, is to let two people drift together, talk a little, and part, to be followed by two more. Sometimes a pair will be watched by others, who will sometimes comment on what they see. Sometimes of course there is a larger group, once or twice even a crowded stage; but most often two at a time. When they part they may arrange to meet again, or they may not ... it is rare that anything happens in any particular encounter between these people of the sort that changes the course of their lives, anything, that is to say, that goes to make what is usually called a plot. Yet the meetings may properly be called 'encounters', because of the impact the contrasting characters make on one another and the sparkle of the wit they kindle in one another.

(Jenkins, 1955, p. 50).

The play, then, is centrally one of 'conversation' and we should expect that the task of criticism is not to presuppose this but to analyse it. On As You Li Ice It in particular, a start has been made by Joan Rees in her book Shakespeare and the Story: Aspects of Creation (Rees, 1978) in an elegant and sensitive chapter cal led Doing without Events; or the Art of Conversation' which extends commentary to Twelfth Night:

In a conversation scene', a scene in which Shakespeare 'does without events', the talk at once conceals and reveals a network of responses and reactions whose vibrations decisively affect the development of the play

(Rees, 1978, p. 90).

The writer effectively draws attention to the artistry of such scenes, but she by no means exhausts the rich vein she has opened in drawing attention away from large, abstract concerns and towards the minutiae of the dialogue. Another critic, equally helpful but equally limited in scope, in writing on Measure for Measure takes as his belief that 'it is precisely confrontation of characters, in specific predicaments, that I am trying to reinstate at the expense of thematic concerns' (Maxwell, 1974, p. 14). Even his tone indicates that our subject, 'the Art of Conversation', supremely important in the theatre and surely also to the reader, has been overthrown or neglected in the critical study of Shakespeare.

Why? The general answer seems to be that the tools for analysing verbal interaction are not so well developed as those used in discussing either the content of dialogue (at the expense of form) or, when matters of form are addressed, they are discussed only from the point of view of one function in conversing - speaking. We talk happily of puns and quibbles, wit, stichonythia and soliloquy, of rhyming and blank verse, of poetry and prose and of the tone in which something is said. But what have these matters, undoubtedly of academic interest, to tell us about 'the impact the contrasting characters make on each other...'? They give information about how something is said but not how it is received and therefore not how the conversation develops. They leave out the magical process whereby reception and response determine the next stage of the dialogue, the meaning which has been discovered or created by a listener from the words of a speaker.

For example, Love's labour's Lost is always seen as a play in which people have an effect on each other through discourse, and yet hew many of the following randomly collected comments tell us much about the interaction between people?

The dominant theme of this play ... is the overwhelming event of the English language and all that had been happening to it in the last twenty years or so

(Willcock, 1934, pp. 8-9).

Judging from such a statement the characters are defined solely by their individual accent, idiom and vocabulary, in short by how they say things.

Navarre has the tendency to want words to match his wishes. Words are his servants. There is a slight but unmistakeable, touch of oafishness about him; a favourite word of his is 'chat' ... 'chat' is the utterance of a man who does not understand words, and does not respect them

(Berry, 1969, p. 70).

More interesting this, because the critic hovers on the edge of saying that Navarre is a bad listener, but instead switches to concentrate upon 'utterance'. He ignores the context in which the King's statements are exposed as vacuous 'chat' even though it should be clear that the context must be central in forming this judgment. The context, as commonsense tells us, crucially involves hearers who respond to the King's statements, and our feeling about him cane largely from how he reacts or fails to react - the quality of his responsiveness. In one particular moment at the end of Love's Labour's Lost, for example, we are shown the insensitivity of a man who, after hearing news of the death of his beloved's father, having witnessed her grief-stricken state, merely returns to a proposal of marriage as if nothing has happened. We know of his tactlessness not primarily through the content of his statement (in another situation, indeed, it might have been sensitive), but through our awareness of the context as monitored by the Princess's reaction which starkly pinpoints the King's callous listening: 'I understand you not; my griefs are double' (V.ii.740). Are these things so obvious that they do not need stating, let alone analysing? Or has the critical procedure, by and large, given us conclusions as if they are premises, without revealing, investigating or even acknowledging the existence of the process which throws up the conclusion? I believe there is more evidence to support the latter than the former possibility, even though it leads us close to the position of virtually having to begin all over again in our analysis of Shakespearean conversation.

In order to explain more satisfactorily, and analyse more acutely, the ways in which Shakespearean dialogue appears to imitate the strategies of plausible conversations which in turn depend upon active listening, we must look at the context in which a statement is made rather than dwelling solely on the content of a series of utterances as if they are more or less isolated from what they grow out of an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• ONE Hearers' Intentions
• TWO Comprehension and Context: Successful Communication and Communicative Breakdown
• THREE Resolving Misunderstandings
• FOUR Listening Outside the Participation Framework
• FIVE Hearing You in my Own Voice: Woman as Listener and Reader
• SIX Analysing the Reader: A Critical Survey of Recent Psychoanalytical Theories of Reading
• SEVEN The Nature of Listening in Reading Poetry: A Conversation
• EIGHT Shakespeare and the Listener
• NINE Listening to Her Self; Women's Diaries
• TEN Listening to a Silent Presence: Notes on Collaborating Over a Translation
• ELEVEN Tom Stoppard and the Politics of Listening
• TWELVE The Dogma of Authenticity in the Experience of Popular Music