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.
This is proved by the fact that children who have been abandoned or lived
isolated in infancy without the linguistic imaginative inputs of fables and
rhymes, never really develop their linguistic skills, proving the damage
caused by stimuli created too late. Therefore, since the time we entered,
through language, the richness of our civilizations, we participate to it
by means of communicating our thoughts, plans, tastes, judgements and
feelings. We daily experience dialogue. It safeguards our survival.
Soliloquy might subsist, as a choice, 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 the dialogue which
makes contacts probable. As for poetry, one can acknowledge the fact that
its manifest task is not always communication, or the public sphere. It is
intimate, at times opaque, highly selective and often synthetic, in the
sense of artificial, up to the point of risking to become impenetrable. And
yet, we might agree 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
what said, like the XXth Century Italian “ermetismo” or the poetics behind
Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness, which prove poetry to be willingly
rather incommunicative. But let’s concentrate on what poetry can grant us
with, in terms of human exchanges.
(EP)
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