The Chronicle of Higher Education
In conversation, I am what is known as an interrupter.
I know it's an annoying habit; I also know it's one I share with a lot of academics. What I tell myself is that I interrupt people—friends, colleagues, students—when they are midthought, sometimes midsentence, because I am so excited by their ideas I cannot help but engage. It's because I adore lively dialogue, and like to prod and provoke ideas. I'm not good at waiting my turn.
I might attribute that to having spent formative years in Manhattan, where interrupting goes unnoticed in the hustle and flow of city life. Or perhaps it's part of my ethnic heritage, the turbulence of the Jewish dinner table. Or maybe my mother didn't want to constrain my creativity and allowed me to run roughshod over conversations. Regardless of its provenance, what I know is that interrupting people when they speak is just plain rude. I've tried to cure myself of the habit but, like everything, it takes work. And in the course of working to be better, I've begun to wonder about the root of the problem.
Sure, part of the reason we interrupt each other may be excitement, but most grown-ups learn to tether their enthusiasm to polite patience. I can go for a long time nodding and saying "uh-huh" when someone is telling me a story, recounting an event, narrating a trauma, or just unwinding the reel of her day. Story arcs are something I recognize and respect.
Thinking often calls for a more interactive approach. Asking Socratic questions is an obvious move, though I'm sure Socrates, old sweetie that he was, waited for his interlocutors to at least finish their sentences. Or maybe Plato cleaned up his manners while inscribing his prose.
Plenty of people, other than New York Jews, share the irritating habit of interrupting. The Supreme Court justices (eight of them, anyway) break into speeches that have been long prepared and rehearsed. They get to steer the argument in ways they choose, which is not always the direction the arguers would like. Sometimes a lawyer can barely get a sentence out before the questioners leave her in quivers. In polite company, you're supposed to wait until someone has made her case before you start picking away at it. But when you have a long docket of law-making cases—and are appointed to your job for life—I guess you don't need to make nice.
I am not, alas, a Supreme Court justice, and while that black-clad gang can afford to be disliked, most of us can't. And most people don't cotton to being interrupted midstream. I know I don't.
When someone interrupts me, it may mean all of the things I tell myself it means: He's excited, he's impatient, he was raised by wolves. But it may also imply that the interrupter thinks his commentary is more important than my material, that he knows a bunch of stuff I don't, that he needs to make arguments he thinks I'm not taking into account, go down paths I've neglected to follow. Often, with a chronic interrupter, I have to say, "Let me finish," because I have in fact done all of those things, just not in the order—or as fast—as he would have liked.
I've come to think of interrupting as a subtle way of saying "I'm smarter than you!" It's a way of trying to snag the conversational spotlight.
Many people, even the socially adept, interrupt to crack jokes. For years I've done long runs on the weekend with different bunches of people. Usually my fellow runners are clever if not intellectual, canny if not bookish. A Sunday-morning 18-miler can include a version of "doing the dozens"—a banter-fest in which each person tries to verbally outrun the others. Performance takes precedence over any real conversation. Sometimes it's great fun; other times it makes me ache for a discussion that is meaningful and connected—in which each person gets a chance to have his or her say.
I have a friend I used to accuse of "chronic incessant joking." Whenever we were talking about something I thought was serious and important, he would break in midsentence to utter some quip. To his credit, he is a funny man, and kind; his jokes are never at anyone's expense. He did it so often I wondered if he interrupted conversations when they caused him discomfort, when they moved into territory that made him twitchy. We all have such short attention spans that sometimes if you can get someone to leave a subject you might never have to return to it.
In our classrooms, many students realize that and seek to derail lesson plans, or at least reroute them, by leading the class on tangents. It can be a way of taking a breather from the hard work of doing work. Sometimes the interruption can be productive, sometimes it's disruptive and annoying.
There is a sheaf of scholarship on gender difference in conversational styles. To overgeneralize and simplify, I suspect that when men interrupt, it's because they think they know more or better, or want to seem superior. With women, it's often to share: I hear your story; it reminds me of my story. Women's conversations can be like playing a game of jacks. I take my turn, and then, after a while, when I'm finished, I hand the ball to you. With men, discussions are often more of a passing game. Men tend to call for the ball.
I'm interested in an insidious turn this takes in scholarly work. Think of the many book (and manuscript) reviews when instead of attending closely to the author's argument, reviewers interrupt it with one of their own. I like to tell my writing students that readers are always in it for themselves. They care less about your story than what your story tells them about their own. With academics, it's often the case that readers will care more about how your research or argument informs or contradicts their work and will let their thoughts go in those directions, even if that's not where you're heading.
A typical interruption of scholarly thought is the "You didn't cite Jones" type. Sometimes, sure, you missed something big. But other times—and when I was a book editor I saw this in more readers' reports than I care to remember—the Jones in question is the reviewer. Or the reviewer's friend. Or someone in the reviewer's intellectual fraternity.
A similar phenomenon is at work when a reviewer makes an argument that is, at best, tangential to what the project is trying to accomplish. That is often the case when reviewers attack an author for not writing the article or book they think the author should have written. These cranks break into a book's argument with their own agenda, steering the material toward places the author never intended to go.
Sometimes, as a writer, you do this to yourself. (I am prone to interrupting my own prose with parenthetical remarks; it seems I can't even be patient with myself.)
It's hard to create something—an idea, a sentence, a book. It's easier to pick away at the edges. It's hard to listen, to put aside one's own thoughts, to let the ego take a back seat to someone else's cleverness, observations, or argument. To interrupt is to show dominance and try to wrest control. To be on the receiving end can feel dismissive and disempowering. I've read studies that show doctors wait about 18 seconds before they interrupt their patients. No wonder we're so unhappy with our health care: Attending physicians have stopped attending to us.
Sometimes, though, when academics are being conversational ball hogs—a common tic among those whose job is to profess—interruption is the only way to engage. Or you can surrender to it. I remember hearing a story about a famous translator of an even-more-famous philosopher. The translator was, apparently, the world's biggest narcissist. His graduate students liked to indulge in a game of counting the conversational steps it would take for the translator to bring the subject back to himself. One would say, "Hey, I got a new car, a Peugeot." The translator would look thoughtful and say, "Peugeot, a French brand. The French love my work." Two short steps.
I have a friend who indulges in conversational filibusters, pausing to take breaths only in midthought, trailing off before the end of one idea and then building into another. Lately I've been wondering if that is a defensive tactic she employs when talking to me, heading off what she knows is my tendency to interrupt. Now aware of this, I've determined to try not to break in, but just to listen, to wait until she's finished having her say, and then try not to assault her with mine.
