Eavesdropping (6 page)

We modern humans take our privacy very seriously, but once, when the ability to domicile oneself was still new, eavesdropping was amusing, and not as wrong as it seems today. In the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, there were at least ten bouts of eavesdropping per play. They added little or nothing to the dramaturgical action, suggesting that eavesdropping was inherently entertaining.
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These comedies make it clear that eavesdropping was ‘in” over two thousand years ago, and it has surely stayed in. In a French novel by Marivaux, published in about 1714, a young man eavesdrops on a conversation between his lover and a rival on four different occasions. In some of his plays, the eavesdropping is so pervasive that a literary scholar, William Trapnell, referred to it as “spontaneous compound eavesdropping.”
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In one play, a piece of information acquired though eavesdropping caused a poisoning, and another piece of information, similarly obtained, enabled administration of the appropriate antidote.

Trapnell expressed surprise that in Marivaux’s plays there is no hint of regret that the characters were ‘secretly intruding upon the intimacy of their victims. Does this intrusion,” he asked, ‘not amount to the theft of information belonging to others, a reprehensible act according to most systems and traditions of morality?” But of course, as Trapnell immediately conceded, in early
eighteenth-century France “close and frequent contact between individuals and classes precluded a high degree of privacy and imposed much tolerance of eavesdropping and hearsay.”

Today most eavesdropping is done artfully. In places where we find ourselves embedded with others, as in a restaurant or waiting room, we tend to take in visual information with a series of nonchalant glances. If the object of our curiosity suddenly looks up, we may attempt to disguise the invasion with a gracious transition to an adjacent area, as though a continuous sweep of the room was in progress when the “interruption” occurred; or by glancing just behind the prey, as though something there was the real object of attention. When it comes to listening, we can only be glad that human ears do not visibly swivel into position, as they do in dogs and some other animals. But we still must avoid inclining the head or eyes toward interesting conversations.

Embedded eavesdropping brings to mind anthropology’s “participant-observer” method of gathering information about individuals in groups. Participant-observers walk a fine line. If they remain aloof, they cannot see and hear what they must, but are able to retain their objectivity. Familiarity, on the other hand, gets them close to the subject matter, but threatens scientific impartiality. Sociologist Susan Murray has written about the dangers of emotional involvement faced by researchers working in the field. In her case, she became so involved with her subjects (labor union members) that she felt guilty when taking notes over the telephone. She was playing two roles but only one was fully understood by her subjects, who had become her colleagues.
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There is another problem with embedded eavesdropping. It produces information, but since the subject knows he is not alone, this information may not meet the highest standards. Merely by “being there” the observer alters the flow of behaviors from the actor. Something may be concealed. Best feet may be put forward. To the eavesdropper, embedded observation also may not produce the most interesting psychological experience. Lost will be the rush that comes from doing something naughty, but, more importantly, the thrill of seeing a psychologically naked human being in his pure, unadulterated, socially unprepared form—a person, possibly, with his worst foot forward. Perhaps the purest case of this rush may come from what might be called
Trojan horse eavesdropping
, in which the viewer is not
personally
visible, at least as the person that he is. One variant of this is depicted in an early nineteenth-century painting of a woman taking a bath, while her maid conceals a voyeur under her smock.

Exhibit 8 Trojan horse eavesdropping. Woman taking a bath while her maid secretly conceals a voyeur. Early nineteenth-century French painting

On one occasion, Benjamin Franklin committed a different kind of Trojan horse eavesdropping.
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Franklin had left his family home in Boston as a child. When he had a chance to visit his mother many years later, Benjamin—always the scientist—decided that he would withhold personal identification in order to see if some sort of maternal intuition would enable his mother to recognize him. He spent one night sleeping in her boarding house, and spent an evening observing her as a person who was presumptively not her son. It was in this sense that Benjamin Franklin watched his mother without her knowledge. She had no idea that the lad observing her was
Benjamin
.

Exhibit 9
L’Armoire
, etching by Jean-Honorè Fragonard, 1778

At some point in their life, most people also engage in
concealed eavesdropping
, observing from an obscure position. In childhood the tiny eavesdropper is able to peek at others from a hiding place—often under a staircase or piece of furniture—without being seen or suspected. In adulthood, the appetite is no less intense, and the means may be only slightly more sophisticated. The classic case is looking through a keyhole or listening through a wall. But one can also safely eavesdrop merely by turning out the lights and gazing out at an adjacent apartment building.

“I’ll bet you,” the film director Alfred Hitchcock said in an interview, that “nine out of ten people, if they see a woman cross the courtyard undressing for bed, or even a man puttering around in his room, will stay and look; no one turns away and says, ‘It’s none of my business.’ They could pull down their blinds,” said Hitchcock, “but they never do; they stand there and look out.”
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Even if a person
never
eavesdrops, he cannot claim to have played
no part in the process
. He would frequently have participated as
a victim
, and he may have attempted to prevent interception by whispering or pulling the shades. Kafka complained that a man named Harras, in the next apartment, “has pushed his sofa against the wall and listens; while I on the other hand must run to the telephone when it rings, take note of my customers’ requirements, reach decisions of great consequence, carry out grand exercises in persuasion, and above all, during the whole operation, give an involuntary report to Harras through the wall.”

Harras was engaged in what might be thought of as “recreational eavesdropping,” a way to while away the hours. This was especially popular before the spread of mass media, and it is a role that the media have come to play in modern life. Thanks to reality TV shows, we can eavesdrop on people we will never encounter in real life, people whose lives will never intertwine with our own. With function out of the picture, what can explain such “couch potato” eavesdropping? Is it purely the evolved appetite at work?

Perhaps the explanation lies in what the experience does to the spectator. After sampling the intimate experience of another, the eavesdropper may be unable simply to withdraw as though nothing had happened. “Once we eavesdrop,” wrote Ann Gaylin, “we are implicated in the story we have acquired. Once it becomes part of our repertory of stories, it also becomes part of ourselves.”
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Everything else the eavesdropper knows and feels relocates itself in internal space. Should she do something with the new
experience? Should she talk about what she knows? What if she encounters the people she has observed socially? They don’t know what she knows, and would be shocked if they knew how she found it out. Can life go on much as it was before?

It couldn’t for a New York journalist when she found herself on the telephone with a woman who, much to her surprise, happened to live on the same floor in the adjacent apartment building. Mischievously, the two neighbors waved to each other. “From the moment of that wave, life was different,” the journalist wrote. Over the previous decade, neither had been particularly concerned about privacy—they were two anonymous beings—but after the meeting, the other woman began to keep her shades down, and when her shades were up, the journalist wrote, “I felt awkward about looking out the window, an act that used to be innocent but now felt uncomfortably like peeping. If I did catch a glimpse of her, I’d look away quickly, wondering if she’d seen me.”
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When Alain-René Le Sage led his readers across the rooftops of Madrid three centuries ago he was on to something. We humans do have a strong and continuing desire to expose and experience private moments in the lives of others. When perceptual access to other people became more difficult to achieve, our ancestors became more strategic, and more stealthy, but they did not give up. For, if anything, walls only whetted the Asmodean appetite, intensified the allure of the closed door, the enigmatic smile, the inaudible whisper. How did other people’s business become our own?

No man in the tribe can keep his social place unless the other members are able to foresee how he will act under any given set of circumstances. This is the necessary basis of all gregarious existence, even that of animals.                  E. L. Godkin

I
N
the previous chapter we saw that a number of diverse cultures have a word for “eavesdropping.” By itself, this could mean that the disposition to invade other lives evolved once, and subsequently was maintained wherever people distributed themselves around the globe; or that this tendency emerged independently in a wide range of human societies. Either way, the hand of biology would seem to be at work, directing the perceptual invasions of our socially curious species. But the naturalness of eavesdropping is also implied by another fact—it cuts across species. Long before men and women began standing “under the eaves” in order to hear domestic conversations, lizards, blackbirds, and chipmunks—not to mention quail, iguanas, dik-diks, and baboons—were already tuned in to their neighbors “under the leaves.” When we see what this does for animals, and what it does to them, we develop some fresh insights about how eavesdropping might work in our own species.

We begin with the fact that all animals have to
do things
if they are to acquire food, build nests, and fulfill their other biological commitments, and this puts them in the public eye. They also have to send signals if they are to maintain contact with group members and warn them of imminent threats. Calls are naturally audible to conspecifics, members of their own species, for it is these individuals that signaling systems evolved to reach. But they also inevitably come to the attention of other species, including predators and prey. According to cybernetics expert Lawrence Frank, “everything that exists and happens in the world, every object and event, every plant and animal organism, almost continuously emits its characteristic identifying signal.” This world of signals, he wrote, resembles “a myriad of To Whom It May Concern messages.”
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This universe of signals was dramatized in 1934, when a physiologist at the University of Hamburg, Jacob von Uexküll, published “A stroll through the worlds of animals and men.” In this quaintly titled essay, readers were invited on an imaginary stroll through a meadow that is strewn with flowers and alive with the sounds of insects and butterflies. Left to their own devices, readers would naturally enjoy their own impressions of these things, but von Uexküll suggested an alternative. The strollers, he said, could bask in the same sights, sounds, and smells as the meadow dwellers themselves if they would “blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows.” If we then magically stepped into these bubbles, as von Uexküll urged his readers to do, a whole new world would appear. “Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the butterfly, or of the field mouse,” he wrote, “the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us.” Von Uexküll referred to the unique perceptual world of individual animals as an
Umwelt
.
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