Are questions necessary
Or, interrogation without punctuation
What’s the point of punctuation. That was Christopher Walken’s staccato question in this recent New York Times Q&A, wherein the actor revealed that he often ignores all the marks when he reads a part.
Sometimes when I see a question mark in a script, I’ll deliberately make it a statement. Or if something has an exclamation point, I’ll make it a question just to see what will happen. Punctuation can be a stumbling block, so I take it out.
His interrogator, David Marchese, calls this the “master key” to Walken’s line readings, the thing that gives him a “natural kind of foreignness.” (As David Thomson writes in one of the 6 ½ reference books every library needs, “There is something a touch to chilly, or alien, about Walken to make a lead actor.”)
Who knew it was so easy to weird people out.
The limits of what questions can do are grazed in The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell’s 2009 novel composed entirely of queries. This clever little book could save you at a cocktail party, assist you with a bedside end-of-life interview, or simply entertain you for a tight two hours.
It confirms the first rule of questions, which is what Walken believes and what anyone who’s attended a public lecture with a Q&A knows: Most questions are really just statements. The questioner is using the false humility of asking your opinion to deliver theirs. Powell’s narrator asks:
Does any confusion arise if you see or hear pinecone and cornpone together?
Would you be interested in getting in a car with girls who are chewing gum and excited about going to the beach?
May I ask you to picture a garter snake eating a Christmas ornament and dying from it as a preliminary to subsequent questions I may or may not ask?
Would you be up for about a thousand more questions like that? That’s the real question in Powell’s book, subtitled “A Novel?” I would say yes, in part because I say yes to both halves of this one:
Are you comforted by the assertion that there are yet people on Earth who know what they are doing? Or, like me, do you subscribe to the notion that people who knew what they were doing began to die off about 1945 and are now on the brink of extinction? That they have been replaced by fakes and poseurs?
Key to the questioner’s art is the order of interrogation. Where’s he going with this, you ask. And that’s the second lesson of Powell’s book: We always expect a line of questions. Our minds want the dots to connect, even when confronted with:
Can you change a tire by yourself? Have you ever petted a vole or a shrew? Do you partake of syrups?
Being asked questions raises questions, be it in an interview or a conversation. And so when you follow the leading question that’s really a statement (Rule 1) with the curveball (Rule 2), you can really hit the mark.
Would you say that civilization is protocol, a set of protocols large and smaller nesting inside each other like those Russian dolls? And that as long as the smaller protocols are followed—the trees in the forest as it were—no one much minds that the large protocol, the forest as it were, might be going to hell? Have you ever been not disappointed by a banana split?
Don’t you think?
Quick quips; lightning
“To realize that the question does not matter is the first step towards answering it correctly.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling that every woman ought to know.”
— Mistinguett, French star of the vaudeville age
“The question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don’t we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”
— Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Speaking of...
“Sir, what has kept you alive for 2,000 years?”
“Have you come far?”
The answer, my friends, is GWQ No. 137. “Why is so little heard now of Tallulah Bankhead?” Powell asks, and I answered in GWQ No. 16. Christopher Walken’s greatest role was Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic: A man who knows the useless truths. Truths like this: Bananas just don’t go with ice cream. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting split the difference between utility and truth. Another of Powell’s statements: “Do you wish, as we all do, that you had a sunnier disposition?” Bring on the ☀️ via the ❤️ below.