The word “distraction” has some etymological relation to “madness.” But distraction, the mental state in which information cannot be separated from noise, is hardly the same mechanism as psychic deafness and referential denial. Deafness and denial manifest themselves when we can’t stand to absorb what’s being said. Narcissism and egomania and psychic vulnerability are the three great pillars of the Tower of Voluntary Deafness. They are the silent markers of subtexts in all dialogue; contemporary dialogue is marked by all three of them, and they are the signs, in good writing, of what Gertrude Stein once called the excitement of our contemporaneousness. If you’re a good writer, these days, you pay attention to the way that people don’t pay attention.
A woman who once said to me, “I’m not listening to you. I just turned off my hearing aid,” had no hearing aid and was using a current expression of that particular year. The following year, the new expression was, “Talk to the hand.” But even here, the energy of denial has to be separated from the cooler, glassier shield that narcissism erects to guard against the pain of others.
These days, the best and most artful dialogue is marked by the inattentiveness of its characters.
*
In second-and third-stage narcissism, nothing gets through that does not directly address oneself, but the self can only be addressed in certain ways—through corrosive wit, for example, an endless deflection, by means of a distracting style, of a genuine subject. The true narcissist, it seems to me, feels the pain of a perpetual wound. The wound is both peripheral and somehow central. This pain makes him or her distractable. But the wound, having no clear definition, is largely indescribable. Yet it seems to demand description, even though words are inadequate to it. (In some versions of the myth of Narcissus, Narcissus’s scream is soundless.) Most of the narcissist’s conversations therefore have a lengthy, free-floating, and often witty complaint built into them. One of the only forms of conversation that flames the true narcissist into attentiveness has to do with reparations. The narcissist is always waiting, in one stance or another, for the world to offer its apologies. If there are no apologies, then admiration will do.
*
Self-dramatizers know that people are looking at them, but what they’re not good at is paying attention to others. They command your attention by speechifying and turning spotlights in their direction, but they rarely listen carefully; they’ve lost the gift for it. Their actions are densely rhetorical, done to practiced turns. Having lost a sense of what the other person is saying, they often don’t know what world they inhabit, which is why their emotions can explode unpredictably—this is what happens again and again to all four of the Tyrones. People like this are great characters to write about as long as the story or other characters notice how stagy they are.