Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (review)

Stephen Miller's Conversation: A History of a Declining Art runs through literary treatments of conversation from the Book of Job and Plato (chapter 2) through eighteenth-century England (chapters 4–6), and nineteenth- and twentieth-century England and the United States (chapters 6–7). The final three sections (chapters 8–10) ponder the causes for the decline of conversation in contemporary society, although both the rise and fall of conversation are also traced across the eighteenth century, and used as a contrast between chatty Bloomsbury (the rise) and laconic America (the fall). For the current period, instead of citing literary examples and memoirs, Miller bases his theories on his own dinner conversations, chats overheard at coffee shops, movies, rap lyrics, television talk shows, and salons or book groups.

Miller mourns the constriction of the "conversible world," but he really seems to be describing the conversable world, one of polite, if raillery-filled, repartee among people in different disciplines on interesting but not especially controversial subjects. "Conversible" primarily means "capable of being converted or transposed" (OED and Webster's Unabridged use this same wording). Miller might agree that being conversible in this sense is important to being conversable in the other sense—people can't listen unless they can be changed, and vice versa—but he wrongly limits conversation to decorous upper-crust chat that is unlikely ever to convert underlying assumptions and social conditions.

That people talk to each other, and how they talk to each other, is crucial for a healthy society. Speakers must talk freely, experimentally, and thoughtfully. Whether initially sympathetic or combative, listeners must hear attentively enough that they can help speakers develop their thoughts. Conversation can model democracy or dictatorship. It can help with important group decisions, and it can—at the very least—unite a heterogeneous society through pleasant chit-chat. In short, everyday conversation is influenced by, but can also influence, the political and social conditions in which it occurs. So Miller's worry about the future of our society is rightly connected to his lament about our modes of conversation.

But if you are trying to follow Miller's "history" of this "declining art," then you will be frustrated. His paragraphs are short and scattered, filled with quotations that are explained either too obviously or not at all. His elliptical style would be usefully provocative in conversation, but it leaves a reader wondering where Miller is going with each idea and what comparison he really means to be making. Tracing causes for the decline of conversation, Miller's villains are too predictably (and sometimes illogically) the promiscuous counterculture, solipsistic technology-hounds, radically rude political junkies, and criminally angry rappers. He misses the important component of multiculturalism and globalization (raillery doesn't always translate across cultures very well). And contrasting Samuel Johnson's conversations with that overheard at Starbucks isn't quite fair, either.

It is always a pleasure to hear from Samuel Johnson and Addison and Steele's Spectator, but Miller's sketchy depiction of the feud between Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu certainly does not support his assumption that Montagu's retreat from society was an unexplainable mystery. Miller is unable to credit Montagu's complaints that educated women were treated badly, and his chapter title, "Conversation Lost," with its placement at the crux of the book (between the rise and the fall) implies that Montagu's retreat from society ruined conversation for everyone, as if she were a spoiled child who took her toys with her when she left (or a naughty Eve). Similarly, reading his straightforward interpretation of Melville's very complex The Confidence Man is too much like watching a bulldozer clear a dance floor. Yes, "Conversation is often a con game" (215), but the deeper identity-related and epistemological questions of Melville's novel may undermine even that simple assertion. Pointing out that "would you please please please please please please please stop talking?" in Hemingway's "Hills...