2023-11-30 07:16:56
An article about language implicitly assumes our wandering outside safe spaces, since Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and more precisely since Satan chose to settle in the mouth of the serpent, and the question of language seeks to heal the rift caused by disobedience.
Nowadays, the question opens up to the hypotheses of Roland Barthes, who once wondered: If language has a sound and a hiss, trying to search for this sound around us, given that the word “D” resides at the end.
If, in the opinion of many, it is a means of communication and enrichment, others must follow the Deleuzian understanding (relative to Gilles Deleuze) in its focus on the violent aspect of it, as it is either a carrier of truth or falsehood. Here a question arises regarding its ability to change, the role it plays, and the boundaries between language and the reality it expresses.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: It is not necessary to invent an “ideal language” in order to depict reality… Our ordinary language is a logical picture, and it is enough only to know the way in which each word denotes… But is knowledge of signs and sounds sufficient for our language to be open to everything? Its potential?
In this regard, a distinction can be made between a language that operates from within the cultural context, which the reader intuits easily and conveniently, and which can be described as a text that is devoid of anxiety. A reassuring text that wants to permanently establish or defend something, a text that lives and grows within the authoritarian cognitive system. Perhaps the crisis of the writer’s ego that produces it is represented by this tranquility that reflects this vision of writing as tending to crystallize things. Although writing, like time, should not crystallize anything; Indeed, even if she had the desire to break through the forbidden, she would do what Handke feared one day, that she would “concern herself and forget the event from which she started.”
Instead of penetrating the narrated reality and its layers, it remains like Jacques Lucercle’s dead fish, content and final, complete and certain, floating on the calm surface of existence or what it describes. Here the reader has the right to ask: Which is more useful, for language to be like the pegs that secure the corners of a tent or like the wind that tampers with its edges?
This is a question that the world of linguistics or linguistics cannot answer. Rather, it is the Arab writer, novelist, and storyteller thrown outside the field of gravity, like an astronaut who escaped from his shuttle in orbit, and who sees literature as nothing more than a story. In his creative text, he is obsessed with events, techniques, plot, and narrative thread. It is as if he did not hear the chatter of Voltaire’s teeth when he wrote: “I scrub my language until I bleed it.”
Where does the phrase of the critic Bassem Ahmed Al-Qasim – who believes that the Arab writer lives the illusion of modernity – lead us to: “We, according to his expression, must imagine the language,” and this is what has not been achieved in the Arabic narrative text in general. The creator may contribute – consciously or not – to perpetuating the prevailing through certain or preachy language. The most dangerous use that contributes to the consolidation of what is supposed to be resisted is a language that belongs to what Ihab Hassan calls jingooriism or rhetoric. “It consists of misleading words that reconstruct reality in a strange way that is sometimes laughable.” “Sometimes.”
But amidst this, there is reason for optimism: every text produced by the dominant culture contains at its heart another text that undermines it, and here language works from outside the fence. By going towards these shifts to dismantle the relationship between the narrative and the realistic universe, we will live with the intensity of language anxiety!
In Jerzy Koczynski’s The Motley Sparrow, “Polish children catch the sparrows, color their feathers, and then let them go. When the birds return to their freedom, they join their flock, and the other birds do not recognize them, so they attack and kill them.” This implicitly calls for the story of many birds killed by the penetration of the cultural system.
What if Kafka’s language was not, as Ronald Gray described it, crystal? Would we engage in his world as if it were our own?
Don’t Luis Borges’ stories play with our assumptions through language alone and in this writing that challenges, as David Hollander described: our assumptions about what literature is and can be?
Could Carlos Lescano have explained the absolute anxiety within the absence of movement and the impossibility of writing, if he had not violated its system in a white language that destroys the meaning that we understand of existence?
Through the violence inherent in the monotonous tone of hypnosis, George Orwell, in the novel 1984, was able to show the nightmarish world of Big Brother. He realized the danger of linguistic atrophy and therefore worked from under its very wall. Through the paradoxical image and the monotonous words that some described as verbosity and boring repetition, Orwell showed the shallowness of the linguistic world that makes up Winston’s world. Big Brother deletes synonyms to ensure the confiscation of awareness. Because limited words limit people’s ability to think.
For Michela Marzano, the only way to confront culture “is to dismantle this text by producing another text from it.” She raises the issue of language with strength and depth, proposing a new language that stems from the freedom of the creator who “will not be like the farmer who plows a linguistic field, following the lines of the plow of theory, for the path he will follow in his progress outside the plowed land.
Words are shaping and creating the future by disrupting and dismantling this present. When novel and short story writing views itself as more than just a story; Then we can talk about a language outside the walls. Being aware of artistic forms and inventing new ways of expression is no less important than paying attention to the bricks from which the house is built.
The question is: Is literature merely a story to establish a value or to return it to its original position? Isn’t the first value the human being, not the judgments?
This is not a moral judgment as much as it is an aesthetic one. According to Orwell, “if all records tell the same story, then the lie enters history and becomes truth, through language.”
In the story of the Motley Sparrow by Jerzy Koczynski, “Polish children catch birds, color their feathers, and then release them. When the birds return to freedom, they join their flock, and the other birds do not recognize them, so they attack and kill them.” This implicitly calls for the story of many birds killed by the penetration of the cultural system (the tragedy of Al-Hallaj, the scalping of Imad al-Din Nasimi, the ordeal of Ibn Rushd).
If language is the daughter of culture, originates in its home, feeds on its provisions, and acts as its nation in eras of decadence, then how does it penetrate the latter or turn the tables on it? This is a question that writing poses to itself, and here it comes down to the question of whether the relationship between the writer and it is one of marital love or anxiety and continuous dialogue!
When language loses this anxiety and this dialogue, speech prevails, and this is similar to Heidegger’s chatter, that is, falling into illusions, constructive traps, and empty gibberish.
This makes the question raised by some legitimate: whether culture speaks through us or whether we follow the paths it opens for us to penetrate the mainstream and question it. “We should not speak a new language in old terms,” Bachelard once wrote.
Writing, as a search for freedom, liberation from restrictions, and doubt about certainties, enters into a dialogue with language to redefine it in every new narrative, so that “we do not reduce the role of the creator to the status of a storyteller, so we equate literature with lies.”
The reader who is familiar with Arabic novel and short story writing now feels more than ever that the novel needs to engage in this dialogue. By glancing at the narrative texts, we see that the language, although it moved far from the house of obedience, nevertheless kept returning to it.
*Syrian writer.
Referrals:
– Gamal, Hammoud, The Philosophy of Language according to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
– Hassan, Ihab, Transformations of Postmodern Critical Discourse, Dar Shahryar, Iraq, 2018.
– Jacques, Lucercle, Language Violence, Arab Organization for Translation, Beirut, 2005.
– Alberto, Manguel, City of Words, Dar Al-Saqi, Beirut, 2016, p. 17.
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#Concerns #language #anxiety