Thrashing about

This post is not about stories except in the most rudimentary way. Maybe "foundational" would be a better word. This post is about language and the way it colors or distorts the world, that is, our view of the world. >sigh!< How can we talk about language when language itself is so divisive, disjointing, and unlike the physical/real/objective world? The problem with language is that one word at a time can never capture the full range of being. One may say, "The ball on the table," but to identify which ball on the table, one might be required to say, "The red ball on the table," or "The second red ball on the table," or "The second red ball to the right of the blue ball on the table." How do I know where to stop in order to communicate? And how do I know I'm not stopping too soon to get the point across? When can I be sure/really know that my audience actually understands which ball I mean? Is that what novels do? Take all that time/space/energy/pages/words to make sure the reader knows what the author intended? One test of the ball issue is to have the other person pick up the ball. If he/she picks up the second red ball to the right of the blue ball, then communication/understanding has been established/achieved. Or at least a functional communication/understanding. However, if "The ball on the table" means/points to the same thing as "The second red ball to the right of the blue ball on the table," does a novel tell a different story than a short story tells? Aren't they both telling one story? Does it just take more words to get a clearer picture across?

According to some sources, there are thousands of languages in use around the world today. Many people speak multiple languages. However, it might be possible/useful to look at the phenomena of language not as a collection of different languages/dialects/methods of communication, but as a pool/body/resource from which meaning can be drawn/extracted/ladled. In which case, all languages would ultimately be the same language, just different dialects/vocabularies/grammars. Just as it's merely arbitrary to say this is where Lake Michigan ends and Lake Superior begins, it might be just as arbitrary to say this is English and that is Russian. Just because English uses the word "cat" and Spanish "gato" to designate a feline (Latin feles) from a canine (Latin canis) doesn't mean that the cat they both point to is a different creature depending on how it's named/referred to/identified.

If, dear reader, I'm not making myself plain, and you would benefit from an example, look at Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel, Ceremony. In that book, the author makes extensive use of actual tales of  the Kawiak ("Laguna Pueblo" to Euro-Americans) people. Interwoven in the story of the main character Tayo are numerous passages (in English) of tribal knowledge which exemplify/expand on/explain what the character is going through/experiencing. However, that does not mean the reader is actually utilizing/understanding the Kawaik references. Silko is, after all, still using English. She is translating/rendering the thoughts/actions/language into something her audience can understand/grasp/utilize. Which means she is writing for English-speakers, not Kawiak-speakers. If she were writing for Kawiak-speakers, she would have to present the entire book in Kawiak, interspersed with Kawiak tales, the novel then being an amplification of the tales, not the other way around. The point of this post is, of course, that Kawiak and English are merely different dialects of the same language. Some people have a very limited knowledge of English vocabulary, so word usage/messages to them have to be rendered/tailored very carefully. To a third-grade student, Ceremony would most likely make little sense, because the third-grade child would have little use/knowledge of/familiarity with the vocabulary/words of the novel. In like manner, in this case, the author uses different aspects of the same language/dialect/vocabulary to tell the whole/much more detailed/richer story of what it means to be Tayo. And presumably, to be Tayo is to be human, and to be human means to speak the same language, just using different words.

(On a totally different track, although the interview with Silko accessed by the link in the paragraph above is in general an insightful question-and-answer session, at one point the interviewer asks if Silko is the first Native American woman novelist, and she replies, "The reason I hesitate in my answer is that we in the United States have so much ignorance about our own history. There might have been some Native American woman long ago that we don't know about. But I suppose no, I am the first." In point of fact, in 1927 an Interior Salish woman named Christine Quintasket -- who wrote under the pen name "Mourning Dove" --published the novel Cogewea.)

Dissecting Fiction

A friend of mine freely bandies around the distinction between art as presented by media such as television and movies, and art as presented by the written word. In movies, this person argues, one can only watch the actions of the characters; just as in real life, one can never know what they're thinking--one can only surmise.

In writing, on the other hand, the reader may be told what the character is thinking. In Flannery O'Connor's story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the first sentence states flatly, "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida." No guesswork for the reader there; no assumption about the grandmother's feelings need be drawn from her behavior.

For another example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, This Side of Paradise, Amory is talking to his best friend, Tom, about the girl he loves:

          "She's life and hope and happiness, my whole world now."
          He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.
          "Oh, Golly, Tom!"

The first sentence tells us nothing we can believe; it's simply Amory's report about his feelings, and we can only accept it until provided with evidence one way or the other. The difference between belief and acceptance is subtle, but important.

The author's report that Amory 'felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid' gives us a report about the world, not about the character, odd as that may seem. The 'He felt' is a mere statement of fact. However, in choosing the noun 'quiver' to describe the tear, the author ascribes a certain response to the character: he doesn't have just a tear on his eyelid--he feels the quiver of that tear. In this case, I would submit that the author's word choice impels an emotional interpretation, not just of, but about the character, which in turns provokes a sympathetic response from the readers. We feel for the character because we feel what he feels. Whereas in the O'Connor example, the author blatantly tells us the grandmother didn't want to go to Florida, Fitzgerald leaves us to discover for ourselves Amory's feelings, which seems to me to make the experience much more personal.

Which brings us back to the difference between being shown feelings and being told about them. In the last sentence of the example from Fitzgerald, the author himself italicizes the second word, giving it much more emotional weight than the other words of the sentence, and follows the sentence by an exclamation point, giving the whole sentence much more emotional weight than the sentences preceding it. It says nothing about Amory's emotional state--but it leads us to infer much. In the same way, it seems to me that when we're presented with a scene from either the big screen or the small, we have to make an empathic leap of faith as to what the character is feeling, just as we must in life. The question is which method gives us a better understanding of the human condition.

However, the drawback to being shown emotional states instead of experiencing them is that human beings are so complicated that we can be in multiple states of emotions at one and the same time. Conflicting emotions happen often: I want that second piece of pie, but I want to lose another pound. A scene must show us a character not eating a piece of pie, but it must also make sure we know the reasons why.

(A final thought on subtlety: in O'Connor's story, the grandmother is never named, and so could be anyone's grandmother; in Fitzgerald's story, the main character is named for the Latin word for 'love.' Which is the more evocative?)