The truth about the fluency cult

I couldn’t be the only person who’s wondered why fluency should be confused with smartness and intelligence. We take the gift of the gab to be a natural consequence of a deep and robust interiority. The debater and raconteur do not need to prove their intelligence in the way a king didn’t need to prove his royalty until not very long ago.Compelled by my new tic of sneaking away to look at its origin, I discover that the word began its career with the sense of ‘flow’ coded in it. Words must flow with the ease of water – it’s a useful and enabling concept, whether to think of language or consciousness, as a stream.There’s a difference, though, between the stream of consciousness and the stream of fluency. Though both rely on language as a bridge between the outside and the inside, there is no grading of intelligence of any kind when it comes to consciousness (the reason, for instance, Faulkner uses the stream of consciousness technique for the intellectually divergent Benjy in his novel The Sound and the Fury). The fluency of words – ‘gor gor’, the onomatopoeic equivalent in Bangla, used for both words and water, for instance – is understood as evidence of a sharp mind. It’s the kind of fluency that Keats must have had in mind when he said if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.I cannot say why I’ve been suspicious of this equivalence between fluency and smartness. The smooth talker, the politician putting a spin on something, a diplomat hiding behind rhetoric – these cliches cause laughter as much as exasperation. But around us is a culture of veneration for gas and glib, done with the grace and efficiency of a salt and pepper shaker, so that one begins to doubt whether it’s ‘flow’ at all or something far more stagnant. It is easy to tickle the skin of a pond after all.That teachers must be fluent in their delivery seems to me to be a recent invention. It is hard to imagine the people in Plato’s Republic or his teacher Socrates, after whom one of the characters is named, speaking with the air-punching tone that is the expectation of the orator-teacher today. This expectation about fluency, that a teacher be a mix of the TED-talk speaker and a mathematician who can solve a problem with charisma and ease, often misleads students to equate the glamour of fluency with slick and sleek delivery. I’m relieved to discover that I’m not the only one who feels this way. The forgotten path to fluency: Why reading still builds better communicatorsIn an 1856 essay, George Eliot argued that an effortless ‘flow’ of words often hides an empty mind: ‘Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact’.Thinking is a complex circuit, not a neat slide show where arguments come ironed and arranged. To equate fluency with the thought-sifting process, as we’re conditioned to do, is to mislead students who, young and impressionable, are both in awe of and intimidated by speakers whose thoughts and opinions have lived on their tongue for years. Thinking is messy; sifting is messy; arranging is messy. When the Horatian dictum of concealing this labour is hidden in the fluency, one is left with the impression of thought being a lubricated thing that passes without blocks or bans.I feel a mix of nervousness and annoyance when I hear poets talk about the creative process as if it were as fluent as a waterfall. A waterfall, lest we forget, derives its beauty from the flow of water being obstructed by a rocky obstacle. Polish too – another category from creative practice – comes from constant friction.Presenting a well-oiled fluency as being similar to, say, a tap gushing with alliterations, as we often find in television sports commentary, is a kind of dishonesty. The poet, in such a model of fluency, is only a lip-sync artist.There’s also another kind of conditioning about fluency – that truth is more fluent than lies, that it has greater velocity, and therefore rushes to the tip of the tongue. And yet we know, from looking at the world we find ourselves in, that people are more fluent in lying than in its opposite. And hence the flow of glib and gab, even as we wonder, without being aware, whether death is more fluent than life.The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials. (Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)Write to us at: theprism@deccanherald.co.in

Source: Deccan Herald