Words Misunderstood

There is a moment in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being where the artist Sabina and her lover Franz are together, each certain they understand the other, each in fact constructing a private dictionary that the other cannot read. The words they use, home, fidelity, woman, cemetery, beauty, sound identical coming out of their mouths. But each word has travelled to them by a different route, picked up different baggage along the way, and arrives at the other person meaning something quite unlike what was sent. Finally, Franz in an intimate moment assumes that Sabina’s tears are those of happiness, whereas in fact they are her goodbye and he arrives later at her flat ready to start his new life with her only to find that she is gone. Kundera catalogues this as a kind of lexicon: the same term, two irreconcilable definitions, sitting side by side like false cognates in a foreign language. Neither Sabina nor Franz is lying exactly. Neither is being obtuse. They are simply two people who have lived different lives and have therefore, without meaning to, built two different languages out of the same words.  They transmit a message but it is received completely differently to the intention.

I think about this book more than is probably reasonable for a man who spends his working life trying to be precise about liquidity, transaction banking and counterparty risk. But this chapter, “Words Misunderstood”, names something I recognise, and that I suspect most people would recognise if they let themselves look at it directly: the strange, quiet tragedy that we are never actually sure the person in front of us heard or understands what we said as we meant it.   Our poverty of language gets in the way of what we are trying to communicate. We assume it, because the alternative is a kind of vertigo. But the assumption is doing a great deal of unexamined work.

The gap is not a flaw, it's the condition

It's tempting to treat miscommunication as a malfunction, a bad connection, a dropped signal, something that competent, careful people ought to be able to fix with enough clarity and goodwill. I don't think that's quite right, and I don't think Kundera thinks so either. The gap between what is said and what is heard isn't a defect in an otherwise transparent system. It is the system. Every word either of us uses arrives already loaded with a history that the other person didn't live through. When someone says "I need a break this weekend" they are speaking from inside their own accumulated associations, every previous weekend, every prior use of that phrase, every memory of what that break has meant to them. The person hearing it is doing the same thing, but with their own accumulated associations, which may overlap hardly at all. We are not two receivers tuned to the same frequency. We are two people who have each built our own frequency out of everything that has happened to us, and we are hoping, mostly without checking, that the overlap is close enough.

This is hard enough between strangers. It becomes considerably harder, and this is the part I find myself dwelling on, between people who have known each other a long time. You would think familiarity would close the gap. Often it does the opposite. Two people early in a relationship tend to interpret each other charitably, almost by default, because they don't yet have evidence to the contrary and because they are, frankly, still trying to make a good impression and be their best selves. But history is not neutral ground. It accumulates its own sediment. Once a disappointment has happened, once a betrayal, even a small one, even a forgiven one, has entered the record, every subsequent utterance gets read against that backdrop whether we intend it to or not. "I'll be late" no longer means simply I will arrive after the time we agreed. If it has meant, once before, I don't prioritise you, then some residue of that meaning is available to be activated again, and often is, silently, without either person quite noticing that the interpretation being made is of the past as much as the present.  This is the particular cruelty of long relationships: the very intimacy that ought to make understanding easier gives misunderstanding more material to work with, more history to get past. Strangers misread each other from ignorance. Old lovers and old friends misread each other from memory. And memory is a far more persuasive liar. This is a deeply muddied water that we often fail to escape.

Two ways of listening

There's a useful distinction, borrowed loosely from the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, between a hermeneutics (the art and science of interpretation) of suspicion and a hermeneutics of generosity, two different postures you can bring to interpreting anything, a text or a person. The hermeneutics of suspicion goes looking for the hidden motive, the thing behind the thing, the unflattering explanation that the speaker didn't intend to reveal but that a sufficiently sharp listener can extract anyway. You are looking for the negative and somehow you find it.  It is, not coincidentally, the posture that history teaches us. Once you've been disappointed by someone, suspicion starts to feel like wisdom. It feels like protection. It feels, above all, like accuracy, as though you have simply learned to see what's really there instead of being fooled by surfaces.

The trouble is that suspicion is not actually more accurate. It is just a different bias, one that happens to flatter itself as vigilance. A hermeneutics of generosity starts from a different assumption, not that the speaker is innocent, exactly, but that the most likely explanation for a confusing or hurtful remark is not malice. It is haste, or fatigue, or a busy mind, or an entirely different private dictionary at work, or simply the ordinary human failure to say the thing you meant in the way you meant it. Precise communication is hard and most of what wounds us in conversation is not cruelty. It is translation error.  Or a formulation error.   Either way, it can be an error in the transmit or the receive.

I don't say this to argue that we should be naive, or that every hurtful remark deserves the benefit of the doubt regardless of pattern or evidence. Suspicion sometimes is warranted; some patterns are real, and generosity misapplied becomes a way of letting people off the hook for things that need to be named. But I notice, watching myself as much as anyone, how much faster suspicion arrives than generosity, and how much more work generosity requires, deliberate, effortful, chosen. Suspicion is nearly automatic once the sediment has built up. Generosity, assuming goodwill or positive intent, has to be practised, like a muscle that atrophies from disuse and has to be worked back into strength.

Assuming the harder interpretation

What would it actually look like to practise it? I think it starts with a small and slightly humiliating admission: that when we are hurt by what someone said, our first read of their meaning is not a neutral report of the facts. It is already an interpretation, shaped by our own private dictionary, our own history, our own fatigue that day, our own preoccupations or even body chemistry. The work isn't to stop having a reaction. It's to hold the reaction a moment longer before treating it as the truth of what was meant, and to ask, really ask, not rhetorically, whether there's a more generous reading that fits the words at least as well as the uncharitable one does. To ask ourselves whether the other actually might mean well but is perhaps a little awkward, a little clumsy.

This is not naivety. Naivety assumes the best without checking. Generosity doesn't mean believing the nicest interpretation. It means refusing to assume the worst interpretation before you've tested it.  Generosity asks the question and remains willing to hear an answer that may or may not confirm the worst reading (I made a version of this case at greater length in an earlier piece, The Generous Heart). It simply refuses to skip the asking. And in practice this is almost always harder with the people we know best, precisely because we feel we have earned the right to skip it, we've heard this before, we tell ourselves, we know what they mean. Sometimes we do. Often, we are running an old video tape.

Sabina and Franz never manage it and live out a private tragedy. Kundera doesn't give them a way out of their separate dictionaries, and part of what makes the novel unsentimental is that it doesn't pretend understanding is simply a matter of trying harder, there is something genuinely intractable about the gap between two people's inner vocabularies. They don't merely fail to communicate; they fail to discover that they are using the same words differently. Perhaps the tragedy is not that the gap exists, but that neither of them realises the gap is there until it is too late.

But intractable is not the same as hopeless. We cannot fully close the gap between what we mean and what is heard. We can, however, choose what we do with the gap once we notice it: whether we treat it as evidence of the other person's failure, or as the ordinary condition of two separate minds trying, imperfectly, to reach each other, and decide, each time, to reach a little further.

This generosity may save us, before we rush to conclude that our friends, our lovers, our families didn't try to reach us at all.

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Steve Robson is an impossible romantic, lapsed French literature academic, and sometime transaction banker, who divides his time between a Liverpool Street tower, arthouse cinemas, second hand bookshops and French cafés. A true believer that the unexamined life is not worth living and living proof that there is never an angst too far, he somehow manages to believe in nothing aside from a Camus inspired philosophy of human salvation and love, his hero’s passion for the beauty of an indifferent earth and more personally the élan and elegance of the Roger Federer backhand. He is available to speak at weddings, funerals and birthday parties.