David
I believe utterly in the real of language. Which doesn't also mean that
I don't believe in the unreal of it. Language is not the same as a
thing, or as a reality. I really don't believe the world is a text, and
I really don't believe reality is constructed out of language. It seems
a rather satisfiedly anthropocentric view of things.
>But also I know what killed six millions Jews - what did? - these, words.
No, what killed six million Jews (and the Romanies and the homosexuals
and the communists and the mentally disabled) was guns and gas ovens, and
those willing to use them. Which is not to be glib, although it might
sound like it. Really... And I don't think Sade had anything to do with
that. Which is not to say that he can't be dangerous, but I think it's
wrong (and surprising on this list) to dismiss him. If we are to
dismiss the trangressors in literature, then we have to face the fact
that "all forms of truth," as Sontag says, "are suspect and dangerous",
and perhaps should all be censored.
The place of language in the Holocaust is problematic, but (and here I am
being trepidatious, because I know this is highly arguable, and a much
more complex argument than I can make here) I don't think language was
the primary criminal. If so, the intellectuals in Germany might have had
some recourse when Hitler started clamping down in the 1930s and throwing
Jews out of the universities. Naked abuse of power isn't about language;
it's about its reverse. And the powerlessness of language in the face of
such things isn't easily dealt with, by writers or anyone else. Perhaps
especially by poets, who want to believe so utterly in the impossible:
that is, that language and reality (and forgive me for the coarseness of
my terms here, but I hope you know what I mean) might be able to meet and
perhaps become the same thing. But they don't: there is always the gap
between them, and in certain extremities, personal or social, the gap
widens to an untenable degree. How important was the denatured language
the Nazis used? They felt no need to justify what they did: the
justification was a given, the language just a secondary problem of
propoganda. How much the construction of the selves able to do this was
a question of language, and how much a question of other things, is
beyond my ability to judge: but if the Nazis had gone about their
business without the trappings of authority, in particular violent
authority, how much would they have been able to accomplish? And how
useful would their language have been, if Germany had not been so
brutally impoverished in the first place?
Sideways from this: just been discussing Edward Bond's War Plays. They
are as clumsy as I remembered: but in his essay after them, which is just
as tedious, he argues that a human becomes human through his (advisedly
using the pronoun) actions and technologies; so therefore a baby isn't
human. But I think a baby is profoundly human, although incapable of
speech or action; that is, even if its "me" is totally amorphous and
unformed, it pre-exists the formation of language.
Best
Alison
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