On Conversation and the Cracks

Holden Caulfield fantasizes about going off to live in a cabin in the West and marrying a deaf-mute girl. “I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody.” Holden says that if then anybody wanted to communicate with him, they would have to write what they wanted to say down on a piece of paper and soon they would get bored of doing that and “then I’d be through having conversations for the rest of my life.” Well, I guess that is one answer. Conversation is always problematic. Engaged in talk one carefully negotiates through the levels of intimacy choosing often for the least revelatory. Perhaps it need not even be a conscious negotiation, but it serves as one nonetheless. Over the years I’ve returned often to Gregory Bateson’s idea that most conversation is an attempt to avoid an argument. That careful negotiation attempts to avoid anything too personal and/or opinioned; nothing that would upset the even balance of the relationship and the dull serenity of the scene. Nothing would be ventured; nothing to be gained might be the rule in conversation. The narrator of James’s The Golden Bowl says that for Fanny Assingham, “Discussion had of itself, to her sense, become danger—such light as from open crevices, it let in . . .” Statements, Fanny says, are too much like theories in which one lost one’s way.” Questions, I think, are too often judgments best not posed. And though throughout the novel the characters converse, they rarely speak the truth. Fanny admits that she knew what was at the bottom of Amerigo’s thought, but also “what would have sounded out more or less if he had not happily saved himself from words.” There is danger in conversation that too much conversation obscures. Holden had believed that most conversation is carried on by “phonies” and isn’t meant to communicate very much. Holden’s fantasy to become a deaf mute would make most conversation impossible. But Charlotte Stant, again in The Golden Bowl, recognizes how conversation reveals the crack that would let the light in and that participants work energetically to avoid the light. She wonders to Amerigo, “Don’t you think too much of ‘cracks’, and aren’t you afraid of them?” Of course, it is through the cracks that the light gets in. Fanny and Amerigo are frightened by the cracks, but Charlotte exclaims, “I risk the cracks . . .” I suspect that a relationship to the cracks and to the light that it invites in might to a great degree define an individual’s character. Maggie Verver learns to accept the cracks and the light it allowed in: “So again, she saw the other light, the light touched into a glow both in Portland Place and in Easton Square, as soon as she had betrayed that she wanted no harm . . .” Though her suspicions concerning the relationship between Amerigo and Charlotte are yet unproved, the light reveals her doubts.
            The bonfire held annually on Guy Fawkes Day had frightened the boy. Richard Wollheim writes in his memoir Germs “As always at home, I said nothing of what was on my mind, and I knew that to grow up, really to grow up, was not to do all the manly things I so much dreaded: it was to be able to break silence.” For Wollheim maturity realized the capacity to allow conversation to acknowledge the cracks and the light that broke through as a result.  I think for Wollheim conversation would not be about avoiding an argument but about experiencing empathy—the ability to be interested and inquiring: to listen and be heard. To be empathetic would be to acknowledge that conversation revealed the cracks that would allow others to see. To break the silence—to allow in the light through the cracks would be the mark of growing up, to become not an adult but a free mind and body.
            I think it is rather easy to find those who like Fanny are afraid of the cracks that let in the light, but as painful sometimes as the conversation might hint to proceed, I like to think that I seek out those like Charlotte who would be willing to risk the cracks. I know that there are times when I deny the cracks and the light that might emanate through them, but I most delight in the conversations that risk the cracks. These are moments that I feel most alive and most grown up.