In Defence of Language; If It Needs It

JOHN FRASER In Defence of Language; If It Needs It Side 0 also instead of from outside half ... Craunch along to stanchion 14 at the mashing together plate ... Farb now the glimrod. (Instructions in Shoe for assembling a sleigh kit, 19 December 1982) In the Penguin Modernism, that fat and intimidating exercise in apologetics , there is a passage that has stayed in my mind and gone on nagging at me. It occurs in the article 'The Crisis of Language,' and goes as follows: That which links thought witI:t language, language with the external world, and man with man has disappeared. Like the mock tennis game at the end of Antonioni's Blow-up, all language games are felt to have become absurd because the ball, that which guarantees communication between subject and object, is lost.1 The passage doesn't simply spring out of nowhere and bite you. As with some of the more scandalous pronouncements of Paul de Man, the writer is describing the attitudes of others, among them Kafka (of whom the statement is surely untrue) and the fictional Chandos of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Letter of Lord Chandos.' But that, in a way, makes it all . the more disturbing. As Borges knew ('I remember,' observes his best-known fictional narrator, 'that Menard used to declare that censuring and praising were sentimental operations which had nothing to do with criticism'),2 the reported opinions or discoveries of others can leave one peculiarly a-jangle. And when assertions are absolute enough, one has the queasy feeling that one may have been missing something - that one may have been skating unawares on some very thin ice over some very cold deep waters. To allay my own anxieties, I propose to look in a common-sense way at the question of communication and meaning losses. I am aware that it is precisely common sense - what we assume we know, in contrast to how things 'really' are - that is being called into question. B\lt I like Yvor Winters's remark about a poem by J.V. Cunningham that 'I confess that I retain a kind of bucolic distrust of all theories which seem to be in conflict with the facts oflife.'3 And we are sometimes too modest about testing out assertions, especially ones with an air of profundity, against the world as UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 59, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1989190 270 JOHN FRASER we ourselves experience it. Obviously that world is a made as well as a given one, and some of it can be unmade. Butit is partly a given one. And to talk about language, as is sometimes done, as if an all-seeing sage or all-promising parent had turned out to be, not simply human and humanly imperfect, but a humbug and charlatan whose every move is suspect involves much too crude a dichotomizing. I Non-communication, or insufficient communication, indeed occurs. People lie or misdirect, like lago - lie so skilfully at times that when in a trial there is a total conflict in testimony, we may be at a loss as to whom to believe. And, even when we have no reason to suspect lying, when two people offer different accounts of what happened when only the two of them were present, there is no way of being certain about what in fact occurred. Any more than Borges's obsessed searchers in the Library of Babel can know which of the volumes contains the key to all the rest. People can falsify in subtler ways, too, such as in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground: 'Water ... Give me some water, please. It's over there!' I murmured in a weak voice, realising very well at the same time that I could have managed without a drink of water and without murmuring in a weak voice. But I was, what is called, play-acting to save appearances, though my fit was real enough.4 They can be baffled by someone else's moves, like Fielding trying to cope with Professor Godbole in A Passage to India, or Alice passim. They can have trouble 'expressing' themselves. In Camus's The Plague, we read how, once...