Word: gossip
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Spacks, a professor of English literature at Yale, builds a beguiling case. Gossip is "idle talk about other persons not present." In a word, backbiting. In two words, incessant backbiting. And yet as a form of communication, gossip is older than writing, more popular than television and more powerful than politics. Throughout the world, citizens have always , murmured about their legislators, children about their elders, employees about their bosses, women about men and men about women. It remains the world's cheapest form of compensation...
Most people feel gossip's special fascination "as horror or as attraction," observes the author. "Gossip, even when it avoids the sexual, bears about it a faint flavor of the erotic . . . Surely everyone feels -- although some suppress -- the same prurient interest in others' privacies, what goes on behind closed doors." Novelist Margaret Drabble is brought on to elevate the tone: "Much fiction operates in the spirit of inspired gossip. It speculates on little evidence, inventing elaborate and artistic explanations of little incidents and overheard remarks that often leave the evidence far behind." In that observation lies the key to this...
...prologue clucks hypocritically about rumormongering: "Caus'd by a dearth of scandal, should the vapours/ Distress our fair ones -- let 'em read the papers." That advice is still being followed at supermarket check-out counters. In Jane Austen's Persuasion, a shut-in hears neighborhood news: "Call it gossip if you will; but when nurse Rooke has half an hour's leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable, something that makes one know one's species better." What the invalid learns is that "it is selfishness and impatience rather...
...late 19th century, Henry James no longer needs to cloak the intent of gossip. In What Maisie Knew he reports, "Everybody was always assuring everybody of something very shocking, and nobody would have been jolly if nobody had been outrageous." The Great Gatsby offers a classic instance of jazz-age chatter: " 'He's a bootlegger,' said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. 'One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to Von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last...
Unaccountably, Spacks' catalog of great gossips omits Marcel Proust, the greatest eavesdropper and scandalmonger of them all, as well as James Joyce, who, like so many of his fellow Dubliners, regarded rumor and innuendo as meat and drink. Still, her thesis holds. No one, from the whisperers about Socrates in ancient Athens to the viewers of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, could ever resist burbling about persons not present. If the rumors are written down, they are called gossip. If they are written up, they are called literature...