The Cratylus, The Birthday Party, and the language of Adam

Let me begin this very scattered (apologies!) post, on the Pinter I saw last night, the Plato I read last month, and the Adamic discourse that is everywhere in the seventeenth century, by quickly summarizing the Cratylus.

The dialogue begins with Socrates intervening in an argument between Hermogenes and Cratylus about whether names are conventional (Hermogenes' position) or natural (Cratylus' position). In response, Socrates puts forth a theory of words as tools, used to differentiate things in the world according to forms. He concludes that there must have been, in some distant era, original craftsmen who made words, and traces of that origin can still be seen, although language has been corrupted over time. Words, according to Socrates, are meant to be descriptive of their nature, of the things they refer to, and are therefore made from smaller words, which are themselves made from mimetic phonemes. In examining these phonemes, it becomes clear to the participants in the dialogue that the original namers favored a theory of the world as flux, not form, and associated positive qualities with motion. The first namers, then, were basically mistaken in their theory of reality (accd. to Plato). So: language is a coherent system, instituted by some original makers but substantially corrupted, mimetic down to the level of phonemes, only--wrong. I summarize at such length because it 1. is awesome and 2. offers an interesting analog to the theory of Adamic speech as it appears in the English seventeeth century.

There is a great deal of variation in what is meant by the language of Adam in the seventeenth century, but I think that it typically posits, like Plato, a humanly instituted, mimetic but corrupted (Babel, gentiles) language. The difference, of course, is that Adam's basic perception of reality was correct, unlike that of Plato's original makers. And unlike Plato's makers, Adam is a single individual--an important fact for seventeenth century radical protestants, since for them this theory is, I would argue, conceived against the role of religious institutions as legitimating meaning--primarily Catholicism, but also, most distantly, Judaism. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Thomas More had argued, in his debates with the Protestant St. German and Tyndale, that the church necessarily preceded the Bible, since the Bible could only have been sanctioned as the word of God by an already existing institution. This is precisely the difficulty that the idea of Adamic speech avoids by tracing meaning, finally, to an individual namer, and locating his authority in the perfection of his reason.

To come, now, to Pinter, who is after all the catalyst of this discussion: last night I saw, for the first time, The Birthday Party. It is a remarkable play, brilliant in a number of ways, but it left me extremely uneasy--and not merely because it was trying to do so. If you haven't seen this play, it takes place in a decaying seaside boarding house somewhere in England, run by a middle-aged woman of questionable sanity and her husband. They have one guest, who has been staying for a year, a helpless, depressive, relatively young man. We learn early on that two men have been inquiring about staying for the night; when they do eventually arrive, it is clear that they have come for some sinister purpose relating to the boarding house's sole guest. It is all terrifying language games and the decay of meaning from here on out, leading to a final contest between the guest and the men, under the thinnest tissue of English joviality. What these men are manipulating is, I think, Britishness and a system of meaning peculiarly associated with it, only its original significance is lost, and the element of force undergirding any system of meaning is laid bare. So far, all right--the play has often been compared to The Trial, not ineptly, and Pinter, in his later statements about it, says vague things about the role of the individual in resisting conformity or something like that. But! I have omitted, dear readers, a most striking fact: the two men are an Irish Catholic--McCann--and a Jew--Goldberg, and they frequently use terms and phrases associated with their respective religions. That, I'm sure you'll agree, changes everything--in fact, it brings us right back to the Catholic Menace and the seventeenth century, the fear that the closed conspiratorial, systems of Judaism and the Catholic Church inevitably make meaning an echo chamber for their own orthodoxies, inevitably impose it by means of a threat. Given the simple Englishness of the rest of the characters in the play, when McCann and Goldberg--really, primarily Goldberg--recycle anglicisms, it comes across as part frightening appropriation, part cruel parody. This, I would argue, is precisely the submerged thesis of the English adherents of Adamic speech; it is a startlingly regressive position for a play written in the 50s. This is not, so far as I am aware, the typical interpretation of this play. Yet it seemed to me quite necessary, and so I would be very curious to know, if you have seen or read it, what you think. It is probably not the best idea to trust a single viewing, since every performance is an interpretation, and possibly an idiosyncratic one.

Read This and Help Me Find Out!

Warning: The following post contains a confession of naive sentiments and deep ignorance.  For those of you with real appreciation and a critical eye for poetry, prepare to be horrified.

So you know that I've always resented the theory-literature and novel-poetics divide that refuses to die, despite efforts to kill it off dating back to Marx-Shakespeare-Freud-The Bible. But as I make my way through my Generals lists, every time I get to a collection of poetry, I become overwhelmed with a distinct feeling of helplessness.  I turn through the pages, most often thinking something along the lines of "Oh, that's beautiful/unusual/obscure/interesting." But the minute I try to think beyond my initial impressions, the poetry seems to turn to sand and runs through my fingers.  How can I make the poetry cohere with the vast majority of my list, which is composed of novels and theory? Since I tend to move between these two categories with some ease and fluidity, what is it about poetry that might make such an exchange more difficult?  Am I just too novice, or too resistant?

Almost one year ago, Evan posted that Stevens' "poetry is invulnerable to theory.  If he decides to hit one of his concepts on the head with an anvil, it gets right back up again, unhurt." Since I've just finished reading Harmonium, this statement caught my attention.  I'd like to think that Stevens' eye for a certain, rough-hewn America and his collections of jangling nouns that comprise a quirky sensuousness have definite bearing on my interests, but I remain unsure how to proceed.

So there it is: the crudest of questions. Can you enlighten me, dear bloggers? 

More on Mimicry

I’m back to reading novels (after, as Greg said, acting out my own marriage plot), so I’m finally going to respond to Sarah’s post on mimicry and add a bit on the two Naipaul novels I’ve just finished. Sarah, you’ll be delighted to hear that according to Simon there’s not one, not two, but at least three slipping definitions of mimicry in Bhabha’s essay. I think he includes mimicry in fact (the mimic man himself, Macaulay’s brown Englishman, black skins, white masks, etc.), as well as mimicry in discourse. In discourse, I think mimicry is both a strategy and a desire, a strategy for colonial power and knowledge that has buried within it a desire for the “not quite” Other. The mimic man is produced not by the strategy of colonial power but by the ambivalent limit desire places upon that strategy. And then when the mimic man returns the gaze, his mimicry reveals the desire buried within the strategy, and that’s when it becomes a menace or a threat. I’m not sure the colonized is a resisting agent observing the colonizer so much as his observation reveals the ambivalence of the colonizing discourse—the menace or threat is also part of the game of strategy and desire. As always with Bhabha, I could be making all this up.

Also in Simon’s class we read what he calls Bhabha’s Lost Essay (lost, perhaps, because it was written without recourse to mr-fancy-pants word play, punning, or punctuation). It’s called “Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism,” and while mimeticism gets pulled down, the word “mimicry” isn’t yet in use to replace it. Bhabha’s example is Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. The typical view of Biswas is that the metaphor of the house bridges the void between the descriptive, realist, somewhat exotic colonial content and the literary value of the text, the transcendent bits, the universal appeal. In this way the book can enter the canon and be read by a class of preppy 10th graders in Buffalo. He doesn’t seem to be complaining that the colonial content is read as merely the background for universal appeal, but also that the colonial content becomes, in some way, a metaphor for universality, and thus disappears.

Bhabha thinks it would make a lot more sense to read the colonial novel in terms of metonymy rather than metaphor. He’d also like to replace realism’s irony with the colonial uncanny. His argument about Biswas rests on the bleak moments of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy, sometimes written down, sometimes published in the local paper, acted out only in Mr. Biswas’s mental breakdown halfway through the novel. (I bought some of this, though Simon thinks Naipaul is not the example Bhabha needs, because while Mr. Biswas is a comic figure, or seemed so in 10th grade, this time around the novel seemed unrelentingly grim). In Bhabha’s essay, colonial fantasy quickly calls authority and intention into question, shatters the mirror of representation, breaks apart Western identifications with Mr. Biswas as a character or Trinidad as a place, and “sets itself up as an uncanny double.” Quick alignment of Mr. Biswas’s colonial fantasy to “The horror! The horror!” and “Ou-boum” in the Marabar Caves, and the essay ends. It’s awkward and abrupt, but it seems that metonymy was the way Bhabha got from mimesis to mimicry.

I’m wondering if the “metonymies of presence” in the mimicry essay can connect to Mr. Biswas, to Ralph Singh in The Mimic Men and to Sarah’s question about essences. These two characters have no essence that isn’t inflected by mimicry, yet they fill their novels entirely, there’s no clear essence or wholeness of Englishness that is also in the novels and is clearly being mimicked. If in metonymy the object refers to a whole, then what is the whole in this case? I think it’s not England, or Englishness, or the colonizer. The mimic man wasn’t created by the colonizer but by the colonizer’s discourse, the mix of ideology and desire, and that is the whole to which Bhabha’s metonymies of presence refer. As in camouflage, it’s not a matter of mimicking the whole owl or the whole forest, it is, in the Lacan epigraph, “against a mottled background…becoming mottled.” Or becoming a soda machine, whatever.