On a hot evening in August, I found myself pacing my small kitchen with my roommate and her brother, yelling and brooding and gesticulating like the politicians at Bretton Woods deciding the new postwar world order. In a moment of spontaneous curiosity, my roommate had picked a lemon out of the fruit bowl and asked the gallery of two: “If a lemon had a soul, where would it be?”
Our answers came more quickly and vehemently than one might anticipate, considering the subject.
Her brother sided immediately with the seed, which he said held the divine power of the lemon’s immortality (eye rolls in the stands). My roommate countered that, for God’s sake, the soul isn’t reproductive—it dies with the person (sorry—the lemon) and is pervasive, like the juice. I interjected on behalf of zest—that mystical ingredient of which a teaspoon makes a blueberry scone into a magical scone. That magic, I argued, is what makes a soul a soul—lemon or otherwise. My roommate’s brother, hung up on the juice argument, claimed that the juice was the blood rather than the soul, triggering our indignation over his brash equation of a lemon with human bodily fluids.
“The soul can’t be isolated and picked out like we’re goddamn heart surgeons,” my roommate said.
And so on…
Thus, by interrogating—with whimsy and a little absurdity—a lemon, we had brought to the surface the most fundamental of human questions, and with it, the beautiful enthusiasm with which we defended our own conceptions, and deeply held convictions, of its answer.
Conversation is a uniquely human medium through which we relate to one another. It is a petri dish wherein social norms are constructed, and where these norms can either be upheld, challenged, or reconstructed.
Erving Goffman, a prominent 20th-century social interactionist, claimed that when an individual “is in the immediate presence of others, his activity will have a ‘promissory’ character.” This promise is a silent agreement between both parties in an interaction, each of whom is “expected to suppress his immediate heartfelt feelings” as a means of maintaining what Goffman describes as the “smooth working of society.” In other words, according to Goffman, our conversations must be palatable, avoiding the discomfort and conflict that would threaten society’s continuity.
Where has this “smooth working of society” gotten us? With strangers, we take pride in our ability to entertain empty conversations. Over lunch with an acquaintance, we ask after aunts and work and pets, furrowing our brows and following up thoughtfully about mortgages and dog fleas: “Lyme’s Disease is no joke, you know, my aunt got it once.” Sometimes, it takes years before we ask and answer questions freely with even our best friends. In fact, as we become ever more interconnected thanks to the conquest of digitalization, the loneliness epidemic is reaching unprecedented heights.
“Maybe the reason we make conversation the way we make it is because of the fear of the Other,” said Paul Yachnin, Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill, in a conversation about conversation with The Tribune. “So much of the conversation we regularly do is to save us from actually seeing the other person.”
This fear is evidenced in our shameless avoidance of divorce, income, trauma, aging, or the absurdity of modern western society in a conventional dinner setting. It is further evidenced by our acute discomfort when Goffman’s promissory agreement to preserve repression and politeness is breached—whether by childhood innocence or mental illness.
“In Shakespeare’s time, […] people were thought to be mad, but they were also thought to have something to say that other people wouldn’t grasp,” Yachnin said. “[Now,] as soon as someone is diagnosed with psychosis, we stop listening to the words coming out of their mouth.”
Though mental illness cannot be reduced to social nonconformity, the intensity with which we ignore or reduce the thoughts that it brings to the conversational surface exposes the depth of our fear of coming face to face with the arbitrarity, sadness, and vulnerability of real human life.
While palatable complicity is easier than confrontation under North American norms of nicety, it vilifies the delight of learning truly about one another, learning from one another, and connecting as the complicated and idiosyncratic individuals that we are. Kristine Nørgaard-Nielsen, in a wonderful article titled “The Paradox of American Friendliness,” describes Americans as peaches in their interactions—with soft, friendly outsides hiding an uncrackable pit.
Such compliance runs rampant even in our closest circles, where our habitual rhythms—while informed by a deeper understanding of personhood and history—still do not give space to lemons with souls, or for questions like what would you write your manifesto about? But doesn’t the zest of humanity lie in the wonderful hidden seeds of our unwritten manifestos?
How can we counter this avoidance? When conversational conformity runs so deep, what can we do to reinvigorate and expand our relationship to conversation with courage, authenticity, and play?
Embracing playful conversation opens the door to a kind of unconditional authenticity that taps into our shared human experience.
“[Playful conversation] is just playing around, hitting the ball, back and forth, laughing—just delighting in each other, rather than this dry information exchange,” said Mikayla Lynch, U3 Science, in an interview with The Tribune.
While engaging in this play is hard when you’re trained to habitually avoid it, you can begin to take bricks out of the wall of rote conversation through spontaneous, hypothetical interrogation.
The beauty of these questions is their universality: They work just as well on strangers as your closest friends. The lemon question, for example, could be posed as fruitfully to a stranger as to your own parents, who both, by virtue of being human, will offer an intriguing answer. In fact, the stranger might raise a more compelling point than your own mother.
While it might feel necessary to save our playfulness for only our innermost circles, it isn’t. Reflecting on the beauty of playful interaction in close friendship, Lynch poked at its potential to exist with strangers as well.
“When you get closer with a friend, you don’t need to have those conversations that are so worldly,” Lynch said. “You’re completely present, because you’re comfortable with this person, and they're also comfortable with you [….] You get into a sort of flow with them, where you can just be and enjoy with each other. That, I think, is something that would be so interesting and beautiful to access with someone that you don't know.”
To approach conversation in this way is to indulge in the uniquely human capacity to imagine. It is only in a hypothetical world that our hopes and convictions can roam free of the pressure of direct experience and personal attachment. To ask where the human soul is located may still make for intriguing conversation, but one which is too immediately literal to liberate the mind from entrenched opinions and defensiveness. The question of a lemon’s soul is different: The fundamentally hypothetical nature of the question allows for free-roaming, prodding discussion of souls, then applicable, of course, to our own, non-lemon lives.
Thus, the benefits of playing with hypotheticals are twofold. They can be entertained universally, with strangers or with one’s closest friend, by tapping into an authenticity whose value does not rely on one’s knowledge of the other person but is rather fed by the delight of shared human experience.
Conversational trepidation dilutes the human experience. It is through unabashedness that the rich centre of conversation can be enjoyed.
We must practice cutting to the pit of the peach, playfully, earnestly, and with respectful boldness. Instead of asking a colleague about her vacation, ask her what vegetable she would befriend if all vegetables were personified. Tell her why Carrot would be your confidant while Asparagus wreaks havoc on your self-esteem. Throw her the ball and see if she catches it.
I recently posed this question to my grandparents over dinner. During my previous visit, I had asked them what name they’d choose in another life, which ended in my being told that “Lulu” is a stripper name and that I’ll have better career prospects with the “Louisa” on my birth certificate. Good one, I chuckled, then sobered to see the conviction in their eyes. For round two, I felt that vegetables would be less intimately political—and I was right.
My grandmother said she would befriend Cabbage because Cabbage ages well and is versatile and unpretentious. The next morning over breakfast she was eager to tell me that if she could observe any moment in history, it would be the assassination of Julius Caesar. It was the first time in my life I had thought about stab wounds before noon, and I couldn’t have been happier—my grandmother had caught the ball and was throwing it back. I instinctively said Simon and Garfunkel's Central Park concert, then felt childish. My grandfather said the Immaculate Conception—he wanted to find out if the Christians were telling the truth.
Personified vegetables are the grassroots of a necessary watershed in our approach to conversation. They become an invitation to unfold, allowing a previously neglected seed of one’s consciousness to bloom—or at least sprout. Unearthing personified carrots, conscious lemons, and unwritten manifestos is a way of saying, as Lynch remarked, “Let me show you that I’m comfortable breaking this script.”
Conversation holds incredible power over the makeup and movement of society. In fact, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, “conversation” was explicitly equated with its capacity for change.
“Conversation is also conversion—a transformation of the person,” Yachnin said, referring to the now outdated definition.
This is a wonderful and terrifying thought. This amazing power of an earnest and judgement-free approach to digesting our human experience is at the center of the discipline of oral storytelling. Barbara Lorenzkowski, the lead co-director of the Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) in Montreal, explained the importance of mutual openness and respect in the practice of authentic oral storytelling.
“What we’re doing is learning with rather than learning about,” Lorenzkowski said in an interview with The Tribune. “And that’s an interesting stance, I think, to bring to interactions.”
A society that entertains authenticity, unabashedness, and humanity in its conversation has an infinitely greater capacity for change than one whose conversation is only palatable. Being restricted to palatability propagates passivity, polarization, and violence, while insulating us from the wonderful challenges and joys of our coexistence. Fearful of the Other—constructed and fed by trepidation and any number of isms—we stew in separation and disconnection, wondering why polarization and loneliness continue to plague our public and personal lives.
Alessandro Portelli, an Italian historian, understood well the power of conversation in driving macro-scale change. He addressed in particular the importance of engaging with one another across lines of perspective and identity. Though sometimes difficult to contend with, Portelli believed that encountering difference was at the heart of productive interactions. He describes these encounters of difference as “talking across the line.”
Lorenzkowski referenced Portelli’s approach when spotlighting the crucial role of conversations across differences.
“It’s also so important to have conversations across the line because these are the most difficult conversations,” Lorenzkowski said.
While disconnection and palatability in dialogue serve to intensify social fragmentation, there is a hopeful side to the same coin.
“I see storytelling as this kind of force for inter-generation,” Lorenzkowski went on, “but also storytelling as something that can connect different groups.”
Allyship, global citizenship, empathy, and altruism are ideals whose realization can begin with simple but transgressive acts of connection—like asking another person to locate the soul of a lemon. That lemon is the playground where we learn how to relate to one another on our most organic level and embody a new conception of relation and solidarity with which we move forward.
And to answer my own question: If I could write a manifesto, it would be about conversation—about reinvigorating it. I’m throwing the ball to you—catch it, tell me something that matters to you, then throw it to whoever is sitting next to you in the kitchen, or waiting beside you for the elevator.
