VIEWPOINT
Lifestyle English
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There is a need to move away from `survival' as the focus of learning in communicative English. We need to stitch together a more poetic register, says HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA.
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"AMONG the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten." This sentence in Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe's memorable novel about the colonisation of pre-modern Africa, points to the lack in today's profile on communication, bereft of art. Proverbs may no longer be the spontaneous stuff of modern life, in which speed and precision rule. That proverbial ease and finesse can, however, be achieved in our conversations by reaching away from the tools towards the art. In the particular context of communicative English this means a shift from "survival" to "lifestyle" English. What is needed is to stitch together a style from the available resources of high and mass culture in the spirit of a bricoleur rather than an engineer, tied to his specialised field.
Locking into a situation
My bricoleuring experiment began on the ides of November in the old millennium when I taught my first orientation class in English with the students of a professional course. I put down my habitual three-piece professorial suit in order that I might experience the "shirtsleeve" abandon of the Artful Dodger, the latter being my figure for the wily communicator who locks into his/her life situation.
On that crisp November day I found that I could draw more on my relatively small stock of popular books than on my rather larger stockpile of literary classics. A bestseller and a thriller I had read recently came in particularly handy. The novels are The Class by Eric Segal and The Overload by Arthur Hailey.
I found in them — and others will cite other such novels for sure — a perfect image of the kind of English that circulates across a very wide range of situations and jobs. There were in them those things that spice up speech: the earthy colloquialisms, the tasty idioms and the impish improvisations meant to cut corners in the teeming urban jungle of fast-paced communication. And I said to my students, emulating for the first time in my life the tone of voice of the Artful Dodger: "Get a load of this one." And they did pay attention.
Doing things with words
Likewise, a scene from The Class seemed to illustrate the meaning of effective communication. This was a scene involving a Russian diplomat who wanted to extract from the U.S. Deputy Secretary of State a certain classified information. The characteristic tack of the former was to tell the latter that his father was dying of cancer in his home country, Hungary, and then to offer to pay, in exchange of the said information, for the patient's treatment in the U.S. At this the Secretary reacted angrily with "So you want to push me." The diplomat's quiet and diplomatic reply was "No, only gently nudge." I can think of no better example of how to do things with words.
The feeling of being manipulated in the above episode does not erupt into uncontrollable anger. The communicative context allows one to close off the exchange with a firm but polite "Thanks, but no thanks." The same context also serves the manipulator: the verbal buffer of "nudge" takes the pressure off "push". It is here that I wish to move away from matters of survival to those of style.
Harnessing literature
It may be recalled that my move towards the Artful Dodger was a move towards the conversational end of the communication spectrum. But then I have plucked this figure from the realm of high literature I began by shutting out, which suggests, of course, a new lifestyle use of literature. Artful Dodger is a character in a famous novel by Dickens, Oliver Twist. An adept at the art of urban survival, he becomes little Oliver's map into the maze of London.
It means basically that harnessing the iconic properties of literature makes for an excellent conversationalist. The greater the permeation of the everyday currency by the proverbial palm oil of literature, the smoother the flow of communication. The difference between one who speaks English well and one who speaks English elegantly is not simply a matter of possessing an extra number of registers. It is a matter of style. What it means is that the other functions like the "expressive", the "conative", the "referential", the "metalingual" and the "phatic" have their uses, but the "poetic" function alone delivers the coup de grace. The best communicators the world over are turning now to literature. Ken Adelman, for instance, has founded a company called "Movers and Shakespeares" to teach the salutary uses of the "Bard" in the corporate boardrooms of the U.S. His high net worth job (Adelman is said to be charging corporate houses up to $10,000 a day) consists in adapting the whole system of civic and economical prudence enshrined in the works of the Master to the needs and demands of modern business.
A mix of two registers
My model of communication skills, therefore, is one which mixes the two registers, functional and literary, in roughly equal measure, making it possible thereby to customise communication. Although it sounds new-fangled, the theory is as old as Aristotle whose recommendation about the ideal poetic language was that it should be clear without being banal. Walking, where most communication teachers stop short, is not enough. We need to graduate to dancing, which is a walk constructed so as to be felt.
This is where the perspective from literature and art counts. The current theory of management, as posited in the well known book In Search of Excellence, echoes this: "Our current fascination for the tools of management should yield place to our appreciation of the `art'. Our tools are biased toward measurement and analysis. We need liberal arts literacy, perspective from literature and art." Psychologists mean as much when they talk of replacing I.Q. with "emotional intelligence" (Daniel Goleman) and "lateral thinking" (Edward de Bono). It is the same kind of shift from surviving to "lifestyling" that is needed in order for us to infuse new blood into our mundane activities of speaking, conferencing and writing.
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