DON'T QUOTE ME ON THAT!

“The problem with quotes on blogs

is that it is hard to verify their authenticity.” 

(William Shakespeare)

Milton Erickson ends his preface to the book “Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.” (Meta Publications, 1975), by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, with these words: 

“It has been a pleasure and privilege to write the Preface to this book. I say this, not because it centers around my hypnotic techniques, but because long overdue is the fulfillment of the need to recognize that meaningful communication should replace repetitious verbigerations, direct suggestions, and authoritarian commands.”

I also remember an excellent NLP trainer explaining that when you ask somebody to do something directly often the person may offer a certain resistance to the request, while Milton Erickson understood that by using indirect ways of communicating he was able to bypass this resistance. Quotes are one of these ways: you don't give a suggestion, you have somebody else giving it for you.

So, those who have learned this pattern of the Milton Model may start a sentence in this way: “the other day I met a friend that was going through a difficult time and when I asked him how he felt he answered: “You know, I understood that you can feel good inside every time you want, whatever is happening to you on the outside, it's only up to you”, and I'm often reminded how true this statement is, especially when I feel overwhelmed by too many problems.”
  
In this way we are able to suggest some possibilities to the other person (feel good inside) maintaining rapport with her thanks to the smoothness of indirect communication. 

Famous writers are using similar techniques. like ad example Vladimir Nabokov who in “Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle” (1969) starts with:

“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).

Vera and Vladimir Nabokov playing chess.

In this way Nabokov can suggest to the reader to think about how unhappy families are, in such a way that the reader accepts more easily the statement since it comes from another book (Leo Tolstoy's  Anna Karenina) and it's not necessarily Nabokov's opinion.   

Another examples can be found in The Crossroads (Come Dio Comanda, Translation by Jonathan Hunt) - which received the Premio Strega in 2007) by Ammaniti - where at a certain point he writes:

The plan was quite simple
“Simplicity is the basis of every well-done thing,” his father used to tell him.

Nicolò Ammaniti

 Notice how the readers are induced to consider more easily the sentence in brackets (in this case a Belief), without opposing any resistance because Ammaniti doesn't shoot it at us directly but he has it said by a character, and moreover the character quotes his dad: 

Doubly in-directive, doubly effective. 
 
 

J. K. ROWLING in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, chooses none other than Dumbledore to say:

“There are all kinds of courage,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

Dumbledore

Another form of indirect communication very close to quotes and often used by writer is the literary device of the  “rediscovered manuscript”. 

Don Quixote by 

Honoré Daumier (1868)

For example Manuel Cervantes in Don Quixote conjures up the historian Cide Hamete Benengeli of whom Cervantes states to have found in the Toledo marketplace an Arabic manuscript where the episodes of don Quixote are told. By using this stratagem, the novelist assert not to be the author of the story, but to have found it in the text of another writer and so to just "quote" it, indeed.

Also Walter Scott uses the manuscript device in Ivanhoe, pretending that he stumbled upon an ancient Scottish documents and that he is merely retelling the story.

Manzoni's funeral procession in Milan

And the Italian Alessandro Manzoni resorted himself to the rediscovered manuscript writing in the introduction to “The Bethroted” that he found the story of the “promised couple” in a note book (“scartafaccio”, more of a scrap book actually) of a seventeenth century reporter. The novel is considered to be the most famous and widely read novel written in the Italian language.

In more recent times Umberto Eco starts in this way his most famous novel: “The Name of the Rose” (as translated from the Italian by William Weaver)

NATURALLY, A MANUSCRIPT

ON AUGUST 16, 1968, I WAS HANDED A BOOK WRITTEN by a certain Abbé Vallet, Le Manuscrit de Dom Adson de Melk, traduit en français d’après l’édition de Dom J. Mabillon (Aux Presses de l’Abbaye de la Source, Paris, 1842). Supplemented by historical information that was actually quite scant, the book claimed to reproduce faithfully a fourteenth-century manuscript that, in its turn, had been found in the monastery of Melk by the great eighteenth-century man of learning, to whom we owe so much information about the history of the Benedictine order.

The key of the examples above it's not the stratagem or the literary device. It's rather the effort of the writer to find a way to be able to communicate indirectly because indirect communication proves to be more effective. Quotes are just one example of this principle.

And in movies?

Close up on Heather, one of the lost students

The Blair Witch Project relates the story of three student who disappeared in a forest while filming a documentary about a legend: the Blair Witch. The viewers are told that although the three were never seen or heard from again, their video footage was discovered a year later by the police department and that this “recovered footage” is the film the viewer is watching. Pure fiction, but you can see for yourself how effectively it works. 

Or Cloverfield that, I'm quoting Wikipedia, was “presented as found footage from a personal video camera recovered by the United States Department of Defense. A disclaimer text states that the footage is of a case designated “Cloverfield” and was found in the area “formerly known as Central Park”. 

We are now willing to know more. 

In both cases the manuscript is substituted by a recovered footage thus reaffirming the same basic principle with a different mean.

We can also notice a further sophistication, the mean which the author chooses to quote, mirrors the mean used to communicate: if I'm talking to somebody I may quote what somebody else said, if I'm writing a book then I quote a manuscript, a letter or another book, if I'm filming a movie I can show the footage of a luckily found camera. Very interesting. Many example of cross-mirroring can be found as well.

The next step will be a blogger that will write about having discovered a fantastic blog where wonderful stories have being told about how effective indirect communication is. :-)

driadema@gmail.com


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