But to get the benefit of a magical view of language, we don't have to go overboard. Let's be reasonably magical. I'm admitting, that is, that of course language usually functions just as the rationalists say it does. Of course a word doesn't have any of the thing's juice in it; it's just an arbitrary sign. We could just as well hang the sign D O G around the neck of cats. A dog is no more like D O G than a cat is. I am Peter but they could have named me Bill and I'd still be me. It's an irrational fidget to think of me as "Peter-like" and my brother as "Bill-like."
But to get the benefit of a magical view of language, we don't have to go overboard. Let's be reasonably magical. I'm admitting, that is, that of course language usually functions just as the rationalists say it does. Of course a word doesn't have any of the thing's juice in it; it's just an arbitrary sign. We could just as well hang the sign D O G around the neck of cats. A dog is no more like D O G than a cat is. I am Peter but they could have named me Bill and I'd still be me. It's an irrational fidget to think of me as "Peter-like" and my brother as "Bill-like." So much for most language. But I insist on exceptions. A few parents on a few occasions manage to name their children right so that the name really does make a difference. Some writers on some occasions really do restore magic to language. They somehow put juice into words and thereby cast a long-distance spell over readers. When readers cast their eyes on these rare magical marks they are made happy, they are galvanized into action, they are turned to stone or madness. And so here is the first dividend of adopting my reasonably magical view of language: it lets me state the writer's goal with utter simplicity, namely, the ability to write "flat tire" in such a way that air whooshes out of the left front U. S. Royal and the steering wheel tugs in the driver's hands. For the magic used to be there. It was there for earlier societies and for each of us as children. Words were once connected in a more primary way with experience or things. That's why primitive people make mistakes in logic. Even Socrates, smarter than most Of us, can make a silly mistake that we wouldn't make and base an argument, for example, on the idea that the shorter man has more shortness in him that the taller man. Logic had to be gradually developed and honed out of language. It took a ceaseless using and overusing of words -- words rubbing and rubbing against each other till they gradually get rounded and smoothed and unhooked from things and experience. That's why numbers and algebriac symbols are better for doing logic than words are. Words have to become less loaded, less magical, mere instruments of pragmatic use before people stop being fooled by them. Magic came first, logic later. Poetry came first, prose was a late development. Metaphor came first, literal language had to be invented. Scholars and rationalists like to tell the history of language as a story of things we gained that our forebears lacked -- in terms of the stupid mistakes the ancients made. But how about what we lack and what they had? They had power in language that's hard to capture now. In Homer and so-called primitive poetry and chants, we see how people in a pre-literature society seemed to have an easier time making good poetry out of simple and straightforward words. It's as though they had the knack of getting more juice into a set of utterly unprepossessing pragmatic words than we can do now even if we utter the same words -- or at least only the greatest writer can now do it. So, too, with children. They make mistakes because they use language magically. They say that dogs are called dog because they have dogness in them or look like dog, or because dog sounds like a dog. But children have more real voice. They talk poetically more easily than adults do. Yet what they make poetical -- when you stop and look at it -- often seems merely simple and straightforward. I'm not talking about the child's utterance that is clever 11 considering he's only a child" -- which of course is charming in its own way. * I'm thinking about the child's words that are utterly simple. Children have available the gift of wholeheartedness, complete intentionality. That, perhaps, is one definition of innocence: meaning 100 percent what you say, not holding back, not leaking attention off to the side. As a child sitting in your lap will reach up and grab your chin and pull it around to make you pay attention to her when you are trying to talk to someone else, so the child has the gift of uttering words which force you with an equally graphic forcefulness to pay attention, the gift of writing words which force you as you read them to say them with full meaning and attention. ____________________ | * | Shakespeare loved this charm and often put witty clever words into the mouths of little children in his plays. But, interestingly, little children are among the least powerful of his characters in the impact of their language. |
Children can command us. (People wouldn't have to resort to beating children if there weren't this awesome power in them.) For adults in a modern literate sophisticated culture, words are cheap. Images, too. It used to be that a printed word compelled belief and an image gave experience. To be able to show the word or image in a book constituted proof. Words used to be expensive, images precious. Now they are often tiresome noise. Must we then choose? Power Or rational intelligence? Must we give up one or the other? It can seem that way. One thinks about modern academics, especially philosophers and sociologists. Their language is often voiceless and without power because it is so utterly cut off from experience and things. There is no sense of words carrying experiences, only of reflecting relationships between other words or between "concepts." There is no sense of an actual self seeing a thing or having an experience. Of course all language is just categories, strictly speaking, but this magical train of thought helps you realize that some language is more secondhand or thrice-percolated than other language. Sociology -- by its very nature? -- seems to be an enterprise whose practitioners cut themselves off from experience and things and deal entirely with categories about categories. As a result sociologists, more even than writers in other disciplines, often write language which has utterly died. But of course there are academics, philosophers -- even sociologists-who can write with real power. We can be sophisticated and still get magic into language. But the suspicion lingers that perhaps it is harder, it involves swimming against the tide. This magical view of language explains an otherwise odd phenomenon in writing. You can tell immediately when a wrong name is used in a story by someone who is not a good writer. " Harry stood on one leg trying to get the chewing gum off his shoe." Perhaps everything so far has been skilled and compelling, but when you read "Harry" you know that the writer stopped and made up a false name. She was too timid to use her own name or whatever the real name was. It wasn't Harry. Everything else you believe, but "Harry" you don't believe. Why should this be? It's mysterious. And not just for less common names like Harry or out of the way names like Trevor. Even if she had used Bob instead of the real name, it would still feel wrong -- unless she had the truly good writer's trick of somehow in- vesting Bob with juice. But then she could have called him Egbert. The same thing happens with swear words. "'Damn!' he muttered when a piece of bubble gum got stuck under his fingernail." You know he didn't say "damn." And it's not just because it's too mild a curse. Sometimes the inexperienced writer uses the naughtiest swear he knows but that too fails when it is invented rather than heard. There seems to be a bit of room for error when it comes to everything else in writing. You can get the color of the pond slightly wrong or the angle of the hair on her forehead. But names and swear words have to be just right or they light up and say tilt. Really good writers, of course, can use made-up names and make them ring true, but unless you are terrific, you better have the courage to use your own name if you are talking about yourself in your story, or get your roommate's or your mother's permission. Or skip their permission. Otherwise, the wrong name will let the air out of your whole story. You can't make magic yet, so you better settle for the truth. Or rather you can get magic only through truth. Eventually, you will be able to get magic into lies. This is a curious business, but it helps me notice that there are still traces of magic left in language. It gives a glimpse of what it might have been like when there was magic in all language -- when we used gold rather than "legal tender." For names and curses are two cul-de-sacs of language. While most language has been grinding away for centuries into smooth, round, pragmatic symbols, semiotic chips, like pebbles being worn smooth by the sea, names and curses still have juice -- they don't feel like purely arbitrary signs like red and green for stop and go, like . . .--- . . . for SOS. Yes, they might have named me Bill instead of , but once I'm for a while, hooks seem to sprout between that name and the real me. We see it with national flags: the flag burner demonstrates her faith in juice as much as does the outraged onlooker. What if someone took your name and wrote it on a piece of lovely white paper, spit on it, crumpled it up, put it in the toilet, peed on it, and then flushed it down? Names and curses, then, remind us of what was there and what can be put back if we write well. It is interesting that among modern theories of language, the one that fits best with this magical view is the most mechanical, scientific, prosaic, and least romantic: the behaviorist or stimulusresponse theory of language. It tells us that we learn to talk the way that Pavlov's dog learned to drool when the bell rang. That is, after Pavlov rang the bell to announce dinner, day after day, the response to dinner gradually began to generalize and become, in addition, the response to the bell. In the end, the bell alone was enough to elicit the saliva. So, too, this theory says, when it happens enough that the child sees the ball and simultaneously hears people say ball, the response to the real ball slops over onto the sound, and gradually the sound ball, by itself elicits . . . what? a seeing? a sensing? a thinking about? an impulse to pick up and bounce? For here is where the critics of the theory pounce: "How absurd! Your theory says that I will behave in the presence of that mere sound ball just as I behave in the presence of the real red round bouncing thing itself." Which of course no one does. But the sophisticates of the stimulus-response school have an answer. They reply that the response to the meat or to the ball is not so entirely generalized that we actually mistake the bell or the word ball for the real thing. They point out that not even Pavlov's dog mistakes a bell for dinner. He doesn't chew and swallow or try to eat the bell, he just drools. It's only a small portion of the response to the thing that slops over onto the sign of the thing. In fact, as we use a word more and more, as we become more knowledgeable ourselves in our use of language, a smaller and smaller trace of the response to the original object gets elicited by the word. Presumably a child just learning language is likely actually to see movies of a ball in her mind's eye when she hears the word ball or someone says "Where's your ball?"-and not just movies of any ball but the ball that she learned the word from. But as this child uses more words and more balls, the sound of the word ball elicits something more like what we would call an idea of balls in general rather than movies of her particular favorite old ball. (What you need to remember as a writer, though, is that there are movies of her deeply loved ball stored in her head and ready for screening any time, if only you can say the word ball right or say it in the right context.) There is no lack of scholarly objection to this behavioral view of language. It is not now fashionable. But it does have a charm when you are trying to figure out power in writing. It suggests the very historical and cultural process we have noted: a gradual separation of word from thing. As people use language more they learn to make fewer of those mistakes that come from confusing the word and the thing, yet they see fewer movies as they listen and read. In addition, the stimulus-response model of language fits nicely with the way people seem to respond to names and curses. In the case of names and curses -- the least frequently used words -- you see people going some distance toward actually mistaking the word for the thing. Perhaps the most extreme example is with the name of God. The Old Testament Jews were not to write or say His Name: that name itself contained part of God's holiness. And still, it is not uncommon for people to feel that by pronouncing the name of God or Jesus or Christ they make present a piece of God's holiness: an attitude of reverence is called for in the presence of the word, perhaps even a slight bow of the head. Certainly a capital letter in writing. And cursing with the name of God feels to them like an act of serious desecration. So, too, with excremental and copulatory words. The horror of some people at hearing or reading those words shows that the sign elicits in them a substantial portion of their response to the thing itself. Many people, of course, are not quite so horrified; a much more fractional portion of their response to the thing is elicited by those words, but they are made vaguely uncomfortable, nevertheless. These people are not chewing and swallowing at the sound of the bell, not even drooling, but they are getting a whiff. And finally there are those sophisticates who feel that excremental and copulatory words are no more "loaded" than any other words. But those enlightened souls can probably remember precisely the time and place in their lives -- often the army or camp or a boarding school -- when those words were used so much -- rolled around and bounced against each other and against the rest of language and experience so much-that they came to be "just like any other words." Fond memory: that wonderful first time in the linoleum floored hallway when you were able to say "shit" without the slightest internal quiver -- just like the big girls. Here then, we see a reenactment in later life of that progression in children from a fuller response to the word ball to a more fractional response. Names, too. The bit of God's essence in God's name is perhaps more obvious than the bit of me in my name, but we can feel it in certain circumstances, For example, if we are in a group from which one member is absent for some rather loaded reason-perhaps she has been expelled in an unpleasant way or she quit with great anger, or the group is meeting secretly to plot against her or she recently died -- the mere mention of her name is likely to carry enough juice to give those present a tiny shiver. Special circumstances make her absence so pervasive or deep that we can feel a trace of her presence in the sound of her name. We see the same thing when the lovesick girl or boy can't keep from repeating again and again the name of the beloved. I have learned -- for another example -- that people are more fully present in a group if they have introduced themselves by saying their name out loud. Once they have done so -- even though they know their names cannot yet actually be remembered along with all the other new names introduced -- they are more likely to feel part of the group and therefore to speak and respond to others or to feel that their absence will be noticed. If you want someone's full presence, it helps to ask for her name. When people only give their first name, as many young people now do, I believe they are really holding back just a little of their essence -- just in case. In our rational and sophisticated culture, then, names and swearing remind us that all language used to be loaded but now juice is in only a few corners. But the phenomenon of good writing -- the fact that a good writer can christen her character "Trevelyn," a huge trucker, and have Trevelyn say "Pshaw!" when he steps in a dog turd, and have it all feel real and give us movies in our head -- this reminds us that magic can be restored to words. You can learn to give to readers an experience equivalent to when the little old lady sees "****" in print. You can make your reader react to -- the word as though you had thrown the thing itself right there in her lap. |
