Allegorising gossip
By
Nigel Ryan
A line from a song popular in Britain in the 1920s: "I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales." It could, of course, be extended forever. You might have danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with a man who danced with a girl... and on and on ad infinitum. You might even have danced with a man who danced with a man who danced with a man who danced with a man who danced with the Prince of Wales though this latter formulation, even now, might be sufficiently unorthodox to provoke a constitutional crisis. Whatever, a spurious connection will have been made and you too will have danced with the Prince of Wales, if only by proxy, if only in your own imagination, though quite why anyone should want to be led around the dance floor by the heir to the British throne is beyond me. But there you go. There is no accounting for taste. And if the song is silly it does at least tell you something about the kind of telescoping that I suspect goes on in a great many people's minds. I know him and he knows her and she knows him and he knows him and therefore I know him and can pronounce with authority on someone I have never met or spoken with and probably never will. It is the source of a great deal of gossip, particularly that brand of gossip that tends, in the end, to be no more than a kind of perverse wish-fulfillment on the part of its purveyors.
Gossip, like much else that is spoken -- though mercifully not all -- tells rather more about the speaker than about its purported subjects. And because this is true it is perfectly valid to approach it as a kind of cut-price allegory, as the only form of allegorisation available to the inarticulate. And perhaps it is kindest to nuance it as such. Otherwise, should you find yourself the subject of rumour, there is a danger that you might become angry. There is a danger that you might lose your temper and that, invariably, is too dignifying a response.
In environments that are non-literary it is inevitable that people should talk, talk, talk. It is equally inevitable, and for the same reason, that the majority of people who do the talking will do so about things exterior to them. For those who have no interior life but are possessed by the determination to appear interesting there are surprisingly few options. The easiest is to talk about others.
While at the same time adopting a kinder nuancing, then, it is perfectly possible to feed the ego: malice may be a more debased form of flattery than imitation but it is flattery nonetheless. (Wilde, who knew a thing or two about these things, was not being wholly tongue in cheek when he noted that the one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.)
What applies in a non-literary -- and this should not be confused with non-literate -- environment does not apply in situations in which the printed word assumes a disproportionate significance. And here is an irony, for the written word has a tendency to assume a significance it does not deserve in precisely those places where illiteracy is the norm and literacy a purported goal. In such places it is all too easy to fall into the trap of assuming that because you can write you have something to say, and it is a trap into which a great many people fall. The knot is compounded -- indeed, it reaches its most Gordian -- among those who have easy access to print in those places where literacy is the goal.
Working for a newspaper in Egypt I mean this to be self- deprecating for if a decade of such work has taught me anything it is that the majority of what is written is not worth the paper on which it is printed. In the absence of investigation, in the absence of any conception of what might constitute the public interest, in the absence of any perceived need to check facts before rushing into print, the only possible justification for cutting down trees to make newsprint has everything to do with the vanity of those who can have their words published in newspapers -- for no other reason than that they have more or less mastered the correct sequencing of letters and because they are part and parcel of the establishment -- and absolutely nothing to do with anything else.
So strong is that vanity, so impregnable the positions of the vain that the win-win situation in which the verbally maligned find themselves is automatically reversed when what is no more than gossip appears, as it frequently does, in the national press. There is no smoke without fire tut those who really should know better. But there is a great deal of smoke without fire. Indeed most smoke lacks a single, justifying flame. Other agendas are at work and the fact that they require a related, though slightly different, form of deallegorising makes them no less dangerous.
I have a house guest at the moment who was once the subject of a brief that appeared on the pages of the national press. He was described as an English archaeologist. He is not an English archaeologist. He was accused of smuggling half a million pounds worth of antiquities out of Egypt. The allegations were absurd. Yet such is the importance of the "national" press, or rather the self-importance of many of those who write therein, that these ridiculous allegations, lacking any basis in fact, dogged him for years. Such, I'm afraid, is the extent of the sense of responsibility some journalists assume.
There is a price to be paid when gossip is dressed up as news and it is not paid by the literate. They are the ones who do the dressing. And there is no denting the self-esteem that comes with the ability to string a sentence together on paper, however inane its content, and then to have that sentence printed. There are none so vain as the writers of such fictions and they are, if anything, even more perverse in their wish-fulfillment, and far more dangerous, than the run-of-the-mill rumour- mongerer.
