Rebecca West? Apocryphal?
Dear Quote Investigator: The notable British author Rebecca West once wrote a brilliant comment about people talking without communicating. Her words have been included in several important reference compilations of quotations, but the situation is confusing because there are two different versions of her statement that differ by a single word. Boldface has been added to excerpts:
1) There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
2) There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are interesting monologues, that is all.
Would you please determine which of these is accurate?
Quote Investigator: This cogent remark was included in a short story by Rebecca West titled “There Is No Conversation”, and the earliest appearance of this work located by QI was in “The Saturday Evening Post” in 1928. The quotation employed the word “interesting”, but QI conjectures that West’s auctorial intention was to use the word “intersecting”. The story began with the following passage:
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are interesting monologues, that is all. We speak; we spread round us with sounds, with words, an emanation from ourselves. Sometimes they overlap the circles that others are spreading round themselves. Then they are affected by these other circles, to be sure, but not because of any real communication that has taken place—merely as a scarf of blue chiffon lying on a woman’s dressing table will change color if she casts down on it a scarf of red chiffon.
In 1935 the work “There Is No Conversation” was reprinted by West in her collection called “The Harsh Voice: Four Short Novels”. The beginning segment matched the one above except the word “interesting” was changed to “intersecting”:
There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.
Which word should appear within the quotation? Both were published under the name of Rebecca West, but QI believes that the surrounding text makes the best choice quite clear. West employed the figurative language of colored scarves to beautifully illustrate and reinforce the meaning of the phrase “intersecting monologues”.
The phrase “interesting monologues” was published first, but its denotation did not conform closely to the neighboring text. QI conjectures that the mistake was introduced during the editorial or typesetting process. A known class of errors replaces a less common word such as “intersecting” with a typographically-similar word such as “interesting” that occurs more frequently.
Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Continue reading There Is No Such Thing as Conversation. It Is an Illusion. There Are Intersecting Monologues, That Is All