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Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry

“To what extend the dialogue as an exchange of speech acts truly represents
a meaningful practice in our daily interactions?”
A critical approach to the spirit of the event.


©By Erminia Passannanti

 “The knowledge we have of, at least, one language”, says Chomsky, “is
partly innate and partly learned.” When we acquired our own languages, we
were put in the condition to enter, in a non-conscious way, the intricate
network of our cultural background, indispensable to grow to be meaningful
speakers. By entering the richness of our civilizations through the use of
language, we are also induced (and forced) to contribute to it by means of
our factual need to communicate thoughts, plans, tastes, judgements and
feelings to others. Thus, we experience dialogue as a functional social
habit, as suggested by the Greek diálogos, which etymologically refers to a
sheer verbal exchanges of speech acts: “speech (logos) among (diá) people”.
We might also add that the mental attitude we adopt depends greatly upon
the quality of the effort we make to interact with the others, in our
endless hunt for satisfaction.
However, given all the difficulties we experience in living our lives, the
task of achieving a sincere style of dialoguing may sound quite optimistic
and unrealistic. Fated to wear a “mask” - Pirandello noticed in his play 6
Characters in Search of an author - we end by becoming mediocre performers
of a set of formulaic acts of speech. Pirandello shows what the world of
our day-to-day relationships becomes, when deprived of order, freedom and
creativeness. The “six characters”, while accusing Pirandello himself for
having written a pedestrian script and looking, on a meta-theatrical level,
for better roles, on a human level, are simply searching for authenticity.
They wish to be freed from their masks which make them interact with each
other in a false and insincere manner, like marionettes. This is because,
they stress, the author has exceedingly informed the play with his
ideology, annihilating individual psychological and linguistic traits,
relegating them to a condition of incommunicability and isolation. The “six
characters” claim that they would be more capable of convincingly
representing their roles if set free by the stage director who acts as a
sort of medium between the author, his text and the actors. Moved to
compassion, the director does grant them permission to offer their personal
interpretation of Pirandello’s play. But when the “six characters” perform
on the stage the new version of the drama, it proves to be equally a
failure, because of the vanity, inexperience and conflicting fashion of the
actors’ individual behaviour. Pirandello’s pessimistic idea is that, no
matter how we struggles in defence of our real “essence”, the mask imposed
on us by society and the mechanical language we are given become our real
self, behind which we find a tabula rasa, rather than the active mind
imbued with such innate acumen as conceived by Chomsky. In Pirandello’s
modernist poetics, men are condemned to misinterpret each other, deviate
the message they receive and be themselves inadequate producers of
significant communicative outputs. But is his message a purely pessimistic
one? Obviously, he is putting on trial the idea of the “dialogue” itself,
undermining the very core of its possibility and worth. It comes as no
surprise that in his theatre, communication, as a concept, is
systematically ridiculed. Yet, people start sensing its need and feeling
uncomfortable with its deficiency, as they are made bitterly to laugh at
the pathetic attempts at dialogue of the “six characters”, fatally
entrapped in their fixed roles, warped by their pride and antagonism. Such
a typically pirandellian sardonic gloom cast on men’s nonsensical and
solipsistic nature does not, in fact, undermine the importance of the
search for authenticity. It serves, indeed, both as a reductio ad absurdum
of the view that we simply speak a private language which is hardly
communicable and a way to reflect upon the actual possibilities to achieve
a truly dialogic civilization.
Even more significant, under a critical point of view,” are Ionesco’s meta-
linguistic plays such as Amédée , The Bald Primadonna or Frenzy for Two and
Beckett’s Krapp’s last Tape and Endgame, which all address the absurdity of
some acts of speech when uttered in the form of a conversation emptied of
the will to communicate. In Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna , the scene is
set in a typical old-fashioned English living room in a London suburb where
the two dialoguing characters, Mrs and Mrs Smith, are having their friends
Mr and Mrs Martin at home for a typically English social evening. It is
worth noticing the vertiginously uncommunicative quality of their
paradoxical discussion. And, in fact, seated around a table to play a game
of whist, the four characters talk to each other in a entirely formulaic
fashion:
Mrs Martin: I can buy a pocketknife for my brother, but you could not buy
Ireland for your grandfather.
Mr Smith: One walks on one’s feet, but one keeps warm with the aid of coal
and electricity.
Mr Martin: Sell a pig today, eat an egg tomorrow.
Mrs Smith: In life you’ve got to look out of the window.
Mrs Martin: You may sit down on the chair, when the chair hasn’t any.
Mr Smith: One can always be in two places at once.
Mr Martin: The floor is below us and the ceiling is above.
Mrs Smith: When I say “yes”, it is only a manner of speaking.
Mrs Martin: We all have our cross to bear.
Mr Smith: Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.
The play comes to an end with a sequence of meaningless sentences that are
utterly lifted from a typical English language textbook for foreign
learners.
In Endgame, Beckett too poses the problem of unmasking the futile practice
of our everyday verbal exchanges, with the chess play being symbolic of a
mute form of dialogue. Indeed, for the author , “it is the shape what
matters” (Beckett is quoting from Saint Augustine), therefore, what matters
are the forms that life and art encounter (no matter how absurd and
paradoxical), which are created out of the need of establishing a
meaningful world with its own laws and demands, as when Hamm, the main
character in Endgame, plays his role in front of an imaginary audience and
delivers it in a theatrical fashion, mocking the non authentic conduct of
people in their communicative endeavours. The need for dialogue is sensed
even more dramatically in Beckett ‘s Krapp’s Last Tape, where dialogue is
achieved out of a series of recorded monologues, with the same actor
playing both roles of old Krapp and young Krapp in the attempt of taking
control over the “machine” and over his own memory, with the use of a tape-
recorder. The spoken action is all condensed in the bizarrely “dialogic”
monologue of the main character, who has constructed a complicated
architecture of verbal fragments (recorded and/or in progress) to establish
a communication between his past and his dismembered present. As in this
case, soliloquy might subsist, as a choice or a constriction, when a person
occasionally (or pathologically) refuses to exchange his views or emotions
with others, (the speaking to oneself, which has great impact on the
audience when the actor on the stage performs an a parte), but, indeed, it
is critical discussion which makes real confrontation probable.
As for poetry, one can acknowledge the fact that its manifest task is not
always communication. It is intimate, at times opaque, highly selective and
often synthetic, in the sense of artificial, up to the point that it risks
becoming impenetrable. And yet, we might agree, here as in Krapp’s last
tape, in describing the lyric poet’s soliloquy as a disguised form of
dialogue, the dialogue of the Self with the soul, the dialogue of the soul
with its many doubles. There are poetry traditions that confirm this, like
the XXth Century Italian “ermetismo” or the poetics behind Joyce’s use of
stream of consciousness, which prove poetry and modernist narratives to be
willingly rather incommunicative, and yet betraying an inescapable dialogic
element. This may have been a overly extended diversion just to point out
the centrality of dialogue in both artistic matters and in real life. But
let’s concentrate on what poetry can grant us with, in terms of human
exchanges. Here we may turn to the imminent “Dialogue Among Civilizations
through Poetry” international event.
The importance of the Internet to facilitate encounters is well known.
Surprisingly enough, according to the Lycos search engine, poetry is the
eighth most popular subject on the Internet. And poetry is, in fact,
benefiting as much as any other subject of such a vast archipelagos of
possible contacts and proposals. Indeed, on the occasion of the 31st
Poetry International Festival series of seminars on the relationship
between poetry and the cyber culture, (“TOWARDS A WORLD POETRY MAGAZINE ON
THE WEB”) the importance of the Poetry International Foundation’s program
to set out an international poetry magazine on the World Wide Web was
underlined: this would present contributions from as many countries as
possible, in the language of those countries and in English.
Ram Devineni, editor of Rattapallax, and organizer of the program “Dialogue
among Civilizations through Poetry”, accomplished on the Internet with the
help of poetry net-works, is making a high-quality profit of the mega-
structure of the Internet to provide poetry and poets with the most
accessible way of achieving closeness and communication. Providing space
for the contributors from many different countries, the program
of “Dialogue Among Civilizations through Poetry” has created a sort of
central agorà, an ideal meeting point for the editors and visitors to get
to know each other and work in partnership. Presently, there are 230,000
poetry sites on the web. The Academy of American Poets' site receives 4
million hits a month, which equals 2 million different individuals a year.
Bearing these subtle and fascinating realities in mind, the organizers
of “Dialogue Among Civilizations” have assembled events worldwide to create
a series of poetry readings on the theme of the dialogue, to be understood
as an attempt to foster meaningful and fruitful “exchange of ideas”. The
various local organizers disseminated all over the world, who are at work
under the umbrella of the major event and whose work is still in progress
through an intense network of daily interactions through web sites and
literary magazines, are increasingly becoming the objects of enthusiastic
international attention. The last week of March 2001 will be focused on
live readings. The major reading will be held in the United Nations
building in New York City. Poetry International-Rotterdam, Rattapallax
Press & UNSRC Society of Writers have organized the program in symbiosis.
On the 24th of March, Australian poet John Kinsella, editor of Stand and
Salt, will host the literary conference at the United Nations, with the co-
presence of featured literary journals from all over the world. On March
29, distinguished poet Yusef Komunyakaa, writers Joyce Carol Oates and
James Ragan will read their poems at the United Nations headquarters, in
New York City. During the same week, 200 poetry readings will take place in
over 100 cities worldwide. The event I have organized in Oxford will
feature the acclaimed Irish poets Tom Paulin and Bernard O’Donoghue, the
Welsh poet Andrew McNeillie, the new French poetess Lucile Desligneres,
Peter Dale, myself and the English philosopher Brian R. Clack, author of
important critical studies on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, who
will speak to reflect on the spirit of the event.
 http://uk.geocities.com/erminia_passannanti/Dialoguepoetry.html
The criteria for setting an event imply no limit to the number of readings
and cities that are willing to participate. The focus is on the over-all
theme of dialogue. Organizers have been conferred full control and
responsibility for their local happenings. The following is the various
offerings at the main site www.poetrydialogue.org where it is possible to
find information about the mentioned cross-national poetry events and
directory of featured poets involved in the program. While having
intensified a number of the existing features of the present post-modern
cyber culture, such as unity of intent, web-based enactment of non-
hierarchical simultaneity of action, (cyber-conference), Ram Devineni and
his partners have developed some even more innovative ideas to bring
together the best poetry of the world and help expand the relationship
among different literary traditions. In cooperation with Rattapallax Press
and the “United Nations Society of Writers”, Fictionopolis will publish an
anthology e-book of poetry and prose. "The spirit of the project is very
much in keeping with our vision of the e-book as a powerful tool for
increasing global literacy," says Fictionopolis founder, Adrian Taylor. The
free anthology, "Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry" will be
available from the Fictionopolis website in a variety of popular formats.
©Erminia Passannanti
Note on the contributor:
Erminia Passannanti is an Italian poet, translator and essayist. She read
Modern Languages at The Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Salerno
University (Italy). She is completing a doctorate at the UCL (London
University College) on the poetry of Franco Fortini. Erminia Passannanti
will be hosting a remarkable group of European poets in the occasion of the
United Nations celebration of The Year of Dialogue among Civilizations
through Poetry. She teaches Italian Literature at the St Clare’s College of
Oxford.
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