Interrupting People

From my own perspective at least, I never interrupt people. It is always they who won't let me get a word in edgeways. Haven't you noticed? In a room full of adults my senior, I will observe the word-swarm of the conversation gather like a cloud of flies around a given topic. I will sit in my perch, waiting for an opening, sharpening the barb of my witty and profound contribution. My arm pulls back. I see a slight part in the cloud. I am ready for the throw.

But just as I am about to release, the cloud moves on. I missed my chance! We are now discussing a wholly different topic. I have only a few options left to me. I can give up in defeat and alienation, sinking back into my chair. I can drag the rest of the swarm back to the festering corpse of the topic they just abandoned, and compel them to regard it again (which they are never pleased to do).

Or I can hope that, in the mysterious ebb and flow of time, we will all somehow come back around to the original subject of our own accord. In which case I will have a harpoon ready-made. "Ah, I'm glad you brought up that point about finances," I will say, on day three of a retreat, "I've been reflecting further on that since it was mentioned at our earlier meeting."

Why couldn't I have simply thrown the harpoon in the original conversation, the first time the topic came around? I have asked myself this many times. All I can tell you is that it is not so simple as that. It may be that my mind - nimble when it is pacing in solitude - slows to a crawl when it is forced to take unknowable social factors into account. In that case, I just can't come up with what I want to say fast enough.

But what about those times when I really do have the harpoon ready to throw, and just can't find an opening? How are all those other people constantly seeing and acting upon their openings, moment by moment -- so frequently, in fact, that they are blocking every apparent entrée for me in the conversation? What mysterious power do they hold that allows them to just immediately start talking, as soon as they can, without figuring out first what they are going to say?

Sometimes, I decide that I am just going to have to force myself to do as they do. I think - it is just my infernal shyness and awkwardness making this seem harder than it is. I just have to jump in. So again, I ready my assegai. I pull back my arm. I see the flash of an opening. A slim band of savannah is visible for an instant between the flanks of the herd. I let go.

But no! I miscalculated! Someone else began speaking at the very instant I did. I was a millisecond too late. "It's interesting you mention that, because..." I say. The small voice in which I began dwindles still further as I perceive that someone else has already started in with more confidence. "Oh sorry, go ahead," I finish in a mumble. The javelin was deflected. It bounces off some rock in the far distance, unnoticed by all.

I then have to swallow what I was going to say. The unuttered and unheard thought is now trapped within me like a bubble of gas. The knowledge that it will have to stay there -- at least until the conversation miraculously recycles back to the given topic -- leads to a sense of loss amounting almost to physical pain. I see the opportunity receding into the distance. I am like the minister in George Eliot's Felix Holt: "I would fain... [...] I would fain have had a further opportunity of considering that question of the ballot with you," he says sadly, realizing a longed-for conversation is eluding his grasp.

But why would this happen to me? After all, it is a commonplace of contemporary social observation -- and no doubt a true one -- that men -- particularly white men (of which I am one) -- are not usually the people in our society who have to worry about their chance to be heard slipping by. Due to a combination of unjust factors political, historical and social in nature, this group of people is far more likely to fill the role of the confident interrupters than of the interruptees -- the people stepping in to have their say, rather than the people forced to swallow their contributions.

For this reason, 'manterruptions' have been added to the list -- alongside mansplaining and manspreading -- of the venial sins of progressive social discourse - the small ways in which the will to power asserts itself, even among people theoretically committed to egalitarianism.

There are several possible explanations for why my perceived experience runs counter to type. It may be due to my relative youth, at least in many of the professional settings in which I find myself. It may be because I'm the younger sibling in my family.

Or, it may be that I have seen the interrupter, and he is me. Perhaps, that is to say, what I am describing is simply the subjective experience of all interrupters. They are all convinced that it is everyone else who is constantly interrupting them, and they are forever blurting things out because they live in mortal fear that they will barely get the chance to complete their thought. On other words, maybe every interruption begins its life as a hunt for an opening in the cloud -- a spear-throw into hoped-for attention.

There is some evidence for this theory. Listen, if you will, to a podcast with three hosts, two of whom are women, one of whom is a man. Notice, while the two female co-hosts are speaking, if it it does not suddenly seem as if there is some strange third presence in the room with them. Do you not perhaps hear, at intervals, odd inhuman splutterings and blurtings? There's a squeak. A honk. Eventually you come to realize that these noises are shaping themselves into barely-recognizable words. Like "well" and "yeah."

And what you slowly discover is that these sounds are being emitted by the male co-host. What you are hearing are the minor gaseous eruptions resulting from the pressure of the unexpressed thought. They are what George Eliot describes, writing of the minister again, as "low guttural interjections under the pressure of clauses and sentences which he longed to utter aloud." The interrupter must have his say.

You will observe that the sensation of pressure is wholly unrelated to whether or not the interrupter has actually had a chance to talk or not, in the conversation so far. The interrupter may have said 75% of the words in the podcast episode already, and still feel that he can barely sit through a handful of sentences offered by other people. George Eliot's minister, after all, does an awful lot of talking. It is just never enough.

Virginia Woolf of course noticed this human trait, as she did every other subtle way in which people struggle to assert power and dominance within the confines of apparently staid Edwardian social intercourse. In To the Lighthouse she describes the objectionably rough and awkward Charles Tansley as sitting in mutinous silence through a polite dinner in which he has not yet found his opportunity to expostulate upon some topic or other.

Seated opposite him, Lily Briscoe can perceive at once from looking at him, "as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire to impress himself [...] that thin mist which convention has laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation." Lily senses, here as elsewhere, that she is vaguely expected to invite him to say something -- to create the opening for him to make the contribution boiling inside him.

Here as elsewhere in the novel, Woolf was a keen observer of what would now be described as "emotional labor" - the work of sympathetic pep-talking and propping upon which entire familial and social systems depend, but which is largely taken for granted and entirely uncompensated -- and which women within the family unit were then and in many ways still are expected to take on.

As Woolf describes the way in which the children cluster around Mrs. Ramsay early in the novel, constantly pressing upon her their various needs, she notes: "They came to her naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that," such that Mrs. Ramsay "often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions."

Lily's reasonable hope is that she might trade in these mammoth unsought responsibilities of Victorian/Edwardian ideal womanhood for those of individual artistic expression. She recognizes that the cost in exchange will be to take on the stigmatized social status of an "old maid," and she is prepared to pay it, if it will mean her freedom as a result.

Nevertheless, the men around her -- Mr. Ramsay at least (partly modeled on Woolf's father) -- still will not allow her to make the exchange. They insist that she must listen to them, that she must sympathize with them, must find comforting things to say to them and let them rush in to fill the gaps in every conversation, simply because she is a woman.

In one glorious scene late in the book, Mr. Ramsay is particularly intent upon extracting from her some words of compassion for his sorrows. Lily can't do it. It is not that she does not feel for him, or is unwilling to provide him succor. She just honestly cannot come up with anything to say. At long last, she hits upon a solution. She compliments his boots, and this sets him off on a wholly new and sunnier tack, as he proceeds to describe to her everything that goes into distinguishing a really fine boot.

Mr. Ramsay in the novel is both endearing and detestable in a way that conveys the author's direct experience with -- and strong feelings about -- his sort of man. Lily Briscoe and her creator experience an intensity of hatred and discomfort in his presence that can only ever come from being mixed up with feelings of profound familial affection and love.

Mr. Ramsay is both awful and lovable because he genuinely believes that his pain is greater and more pressing and important than that of other people. He expects the women of his world to shape themselves around him to fulfill his needs. And he does it all without the least malice or ill-will. It is simply the everyday unthinking narcissism of the Victorian paterfamilias.

Interrupters, by and large, share this narcissism. It is the belief that their thoughts are better, shapelier, more interesting, and ultimately more important than other people's that leads them to feel wholly within their rights to immediately begin giving them expression, in all circumstances, regardless of whether the people around them have finished.

And because their own thoughts are so wise and so important, the wisdom of others is revealed -- in the interrupters' view -- not in their having something equally compelling to say. That will never happen anyway, of course. Rather, it is displayed in their rapt and silent attentiveness to the speaker. As the great Quentin Crisp once noted, in his memoir The Naked Civil Servant, "a reputation for wit is earned not by making jokes, but by laughing at the pleasantries of others." So too, to impress an interrupter with one's own depth and sense of judgment, one should simply nod and agree with everything they say.

E.T.A. Hoffmann's sinister gothic tale, "The Sandman," offers an apt commentary upon this fact. As such, it stands out as a suprisingly proto-feminist gem amidst the great conservative rough of Romantic-era literature. In the story, the protagonist Nathanael falls in love with an automaton - a wooden doll crafted with enough verisimilitude to plant her squarely in the middle of the "uncanny valley" (much like the "Talking Turk," the subject of another Hoffman tale dealing with automata -- the theme is a recurring fixation of his).

For much of the story, Nathanael is convinced that his new love-object is infinitely superior in grace and intellect to his former partner Clara. She would get tired during his elaborate readings of his poetry and tales - even daring to yawn, to leave the room, or to knit without paying attention to the words he is uttering (thus violating the code of the Mr. Ramsays of the world, who expect that when they are speaking, others -- women especially -- will listen and give sympathy). By contrast, the automaton woman merely gazes adoringly at him and says "Ah," no matter how long he drones on.

In finding this clockwork woman, in short, Nathanael has met the interruptor's wet dream. There is no limit to how much he can say, there is no point at which she will intervene to reply, amplify, expand upon, or counter his claims. He is free! So what if others conclude from the woman's perpetual silence that there is something troublingly amiss about her? Nathanael is entirely persuaded that they - mundane souls - are simply incapable of appreciating the profundity of her wisdom.

In Hoffmann's skin-prickling tale, the interrupter in a sense gets his comeuppance. Nathanael  partially is able to fulfill his narcissistic fantasy. He has someone to whom he can talk and lecture without fear of contradiction. To attain this, however, he must employ the services of a mechanical device, rather than a human being. He literally might as well be talking to an inanimate object. The very fact that the automaton cannot talk back is what both fulfills and negates Nathanael's fantasy.

There is a roundabout defense to be made, here, however, of interruptions. If Nathanael is many ways the interrupter of the story, after all, we can at least say that the automaton ought to have done a bit more interrupting. This, to be sure, we can say for interruptions -- they at least mean that you are actually capable of hearing and understanding what other people are saying -- that you speak the same language and are both living beings with a pulse.

As Phoebe Hoban quotes an interviewee in a stray passage of her biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, there are cultures in which interrupting is perceived as a sign of respect rather than dismissal, "because it displays a certain level of attention." Silence, by contrast, reveals nothing of your inner state. As my example at the outset of the post shows, I may be quiet in a group setting. I may be searching for a way to interject. But that is not the same thing as listening.

It may rather mean that, like Charles Tansley, I am sitting there boiling over in silence. It may mean, like the podcast co-hosts, that I am emitting small wordless eruptions because I just cannot wait until it is my turn to speak. Whereas interrupting others shows you heard what they said. It indicates you are excited by their words and are craving to add your own to the stew.

Silence is not always golden. Indeed silence, as Marianne Moore's poem of that title conveys, can be rather de haut-en-bas. It can be a display of contempt. Interrupting, by contrast, is seldom that, whatever else it is may be. You may interrupt someone you disagree with. Even someone you hate. But you usually only interrupt someone you regard as an equal. Superiors are met with awed silence. Inferiors are allowed to "prattle away." An equal is the only person who you decide to argue with in mid-sentence.

Perhaps, then, interruptions should not be treated as expressions purely of privilege and dominance. Perhaps they are actually a sign of democracy. They are the form of expression natural to societies that become more genuinely egalitarian -- across gender lines as well as others.

Or perhaps this whole business of pitting interruptions against quietness is simply missing the point. Perhaps here as elsewhere, the use of etiquette as a shorthand for interpersonal morality is sending us down the wrong path.

In a highly punitive society like our own, we often hope to reduce all questions of ethics to a set of rules. This way we can know whether we have followed them or not, and thereby evaded punishment, loss of livelihood, social shaming -- whatever it is that we fear.

This approach to morality, however, is ultimately as narcissistic as the Mr. Ramsay approach to the world. It reflects fundamentally a concern with oneself, whereas the essence of moral behavior is the capacity to adopt another's perspective. There is no rule, then, as to whether and when we ought to feel entitled to interrupt. The question is really - in either case - whether we are respecting the other person. Whether we are listening to what they have to say.

If that can be achieved in this life - and in our society as a whole - all the rest will follow. In such a world, interruptions will not be anything to dread or to be silenced. They will be nothing other than the eruption, not of egotism, but of a frothing goodwill. And we will all go on interrupting one another as we please like so many warbling sparrows.