CONVERSATION

Stephen Miller’s book Conversation: A history of a declining art contains one of the best descriptions of conversation I have ever read. He describes the conversations he sat in on in the mid-1960s between Jorge Luis Borges and two friends in Buenos Aires as being like “a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto”. He contrasts this way of talking with another kind which he listened to at the Café de Flore in Paris; the participants were Roland Barthes and friends. He claims that these, despite their brilliance, were not conversations but “intersecting monologues” (a phrase coined by Rebecca West). Unlike the talk in Buenos Aires, “here nothing mingled and became one”. Manguel concurs with Miller that the art of conversation is being lost. He claims that we have forgotten “how to weave our ideas into a common strand”. I disagree. As a sociolinguist, I have been recording the talk of single-sex friendship groups for over twenty years, and I have found evidence of both types of talk, the “improvised concerto” type and the “intersecting monologues” type.