A question is a small architecture. It opens a door, sets a sill, marks a threshold across which a particular kind of speech becomes possible. The asker has chosen the door, framed the sill, said in effect: walk through here, and what you say from the other side will count. The refusal of a question is not a refusal to speak; it is a refusal to walk through the door someone else has built.1
It is harder than it looks. The first instinct, when a question is asked of us in earnest, is to answer it. We are formed by the years of asking and being asked: the teacher who calls our name, the friend who needs a yes, the doctor who needs a number, the official whose form will not move until we put something in the blank. To refuse a question is to break the most ordinary contract a conversation can hold. It is to insist on a different shape of speech.2
And yet some questions are not the openings they pretend to be. Some are foreclosures dressed as inquiries. The question that begins so what you are saying is, the question that follows a long preamble and demands a yes or no, the question that splits the room into two and asks you to choose a side, the question whose terms were settled before you were called to answer it. To answer such a question on its own terms is to ratify the terms. The refusal is the only honest move. But it is hard to refuse, because the refusal looks like evasion, and we are practised at evasion's appearance.3
The refuser is not the one who would not engage; the refuser is the one who engaged with the question carefully enough to see that it was the wrong one, and who said so.
There is a literary tradition of refusal that runs from the older essayists into the present. Petrarch refused the laurel from one city to accept it from another and wrote at length about the refusal. Augustine refused his mother's question by walking out of the room and into a garden, and a different question found him there. Closer to our own century, a number of writers I will not name here have made an art of declining the interview's premise while still talking, an art of taking the door someone else built and quietly remaking its hinges before walking through.
The refusal does not have to be loud. The most considered refusals I have read are quiet ones. They begin with the words you have asked the wrong question, or with the words let me restate this, or with a long pause that the questioner reads as the start of an answer and that turns out to be the start of something else. The refusal does its work by widening the frame of the question until the question's original shape becomes visible as a choice rather than a given. Once the questioner can see the shape they chose, they can choose differently.
What the refusal is not is contempt. The questioner asked in earnest. The terms they offered were the terms they had. To refuse the question is to honour the question's seriousness by taking the trouble to redraw it. The contemptuous answer is the easy answer: yes, no, who cares. The honest refusal is the harder one: you have asked me to choose between two shapes, and I cannot choose between them in good faith, so let me describe the third shape I see and ask whether we can talk about that instead.
I have been the one refusing and I have been the one whose question was refused. Both positions teach the same lesson, from opposite sides. When my question is refused, my first response is irritation: the work I did to frame the question feels dismissed. The second response, if I wait through the first, is a kind of relief: I had asked the question I knew to ask, not the question I wanted to ask, and the refusal has given me a chance to ask the better one.
It is possible to ask a question that cannot be refused well, and it is possible to refuse a question in a way that cannot be honoured well. The two failures meet in the middle of most public conversations of our moment. A questioner who insists on the question's terms turns the refusal into a wedge; a refuser who insists too quickly turns the question into an offence. The art is in waiting longer than either party wants to wait, listening for the question under the question, and then choosing whether the door someone built is the door you want to walk through or whether you have a different door to propose.
I do not have a procedure to recommend. The literary tradition does not have one either. What it has is a long demonstration that the refusal is a legitimate form of speech and that the act of refusing is itself a kind of attention. The refuser is not the one who would not engage; the refuser is the one who engaged with the question carefully enough to see that it was the wrong one, and who said so. To do that, in the moment, is hard. To learn to do it takes a life. Some questions deserve our refusal; some refusals deserve our questions back. The work of this issue is to look at a few of each.
Notes
- 1.I am thinking here of the older essayists in the tradition Michel de Montaigne began, where the essay form itself was a refusal of the scholastic question.
- 2.A more recent example, on the political register, can be found in writings on conscientious objection in the long twentieth century.
- 3.The honest refusal is rarer than its impersonator, the strategic non-answer; we have grown skilled at the impersonator and lost some practice with the original.