Clashing monologues

A local phenomenon of Mahurangi is a weekly walking group of women.  Twenty or more of them meet at the specified time and place and then set forth at a brisk pace.  At the end of their walk they treat themselves to coffee and muffins in one of the local cafes.  It is a good idea not to be in that café when they arrive and take over. 

But to get to my point…  If you are hanging around, one might say contemplatively, at a spot being approached by this group in their orbit of the vicinity, you hear them before you see them.  Strangers and others without local knowledge tend to think there is suddenly some looming threat, a plague of locusts perhaps, or an Aussie secret surveillance drone.  It is simply that the women are all talking simultaneously.  It is an extraordinary sound, made even more so by the doppler effect as they pass.  No one of them is listening, or at any rate hearing, any other, much as they may think they are.   Each of them is telling her monologue.  At best, there is a process in which one of them is silent while the next one speaks – but she then responds with her narrative and how she felt. 

In the Guardian Weekly recently, Charlie Brooker identified that 99% of all human discourse is little more than a series of clashing monologues.  We need to be seen and heard to be present and existing, the more so as others are proclaiming their existence to us.  In what is normally called dialogue, Person A speaks part of his narrative, and Person B responds with his story.  I am thinking of people I know who, whatever you say to them, will respond with something about themselves, replete with First Person pronouns. 

The opposite of this is listening, hearing, understanding, not feeling under any obligation to respond unless it is about the speaker’s subject or issue.  This can’t be done by anyone who constantly needs their own presence to be validated and affirmed.  Neither is it done by those who all their lives have assumed, been formed and trained, that all you have to do in conversation is say something about yourself.   An exception maybe is Sybil Fawlty, who actually did listen to her callers and customers, not responding about herself, but intoning, I know… I know…

Not only the walking group – and I do admit it’s difficult to have meaningful dialogue while briskly walking – they could simply shut up -- but cocktail parties also, many social things I have given up attending, church “study” groups, telephone conversations, are really a series of clashing monologues. 

The Guardian writer cites also what happens with cellphone texting, Facebook, Twitter and the like.   We’ve already boiled communication down to acronyms, emoticons and shrtnd sntnces, all of which are simply more efficient ways of transmitting the PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE signal from the fragile core of our souls out into the wider world.  Whenever it’s possible our youth reach for their cellphones and text:  I’m here.  Where are you?  I’m bored.  Any suggestions?   There may also be photos, a real reinforcement of existence. 

I am indebted to Charlie Brooker however for a valuable insight into TV soaps.  For years it has puzzled me why I immediately get impatient with the script writing and dialogue on Coronation Street.  It is unreal in some way.  It is often too quick-witted, fluent and clever to be credible.  And I get very weary of the relentless antagonism, the abuse accusation, vilification.  But the real problem is not that.  Brooker points out that the characters on Coronation Street and Eastenders actually listen to each other.  In real life, especially under stress but also in their relaxed moments, they would rarely do that.  It is unreal because it is not the way discourse is done in such a suburb of Manchester, or in most other places.  They react with such rage at times precisely because they have listened and heard.  Usually they have heard wrongly – but the point here is that the script writers are giving us dialogue instead of clashing monologues.