Toni Morrison and the Living Language

It's tough to keep track of the news, for lots of reasons; however, the passing of Toni Morrison bears noting here, among all the others' passing that we pass over in silence.

Her Nobel Prize Lecture, her banquet speech, her books and essays, all bear reading and re-reading--words the quality of which most of us could only dream of leaving behind.

For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences. Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability, harmony among the public.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love. But she knows tongue-suicide is not only the choice of children. It is common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.

And her language goes on, wave after wave of this incredible wisdom, until the dialogue of the listening children picks back up:

“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.

“Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow."

It's astonishing to think that I was growing up in a world where there was still a writer of this imaginative stature, this noble mien. Her novel Beloved is one of the first of the books I was assigned to read in school that really made me take notice of how far beyond the school these books might reach, how much more school could be. I've been writing about that in one way or another, inspired by that and similar moments, for a decade now, and still haven't quite recovered from the shock of those initial impressions.

Her essay Playing in the Dark, like much of the language in her Nobel speech, bears powerfully upon the discourse of video games and fantasy literature which I've been studying, and if I can get my act together I'll try to bring out some of these connections soon, and over the next few years.

Plato in the Summer, and Klein's Commentary

Having read or re-read most of Plato for a summer reading project, I also wanted to make some time to revisit Jacob Klein's Commentary on Meno. The writing of commentaries is something I've been very into lately, though mine are all about old video games and fantasy series, so it is gratifying to read one so masterful about so complex a subject. It's really the next best thing to discussing the book with someone else, which of course is in a sense the entire point of Plato's project. Klein makes this point in various ways, but also glosses many words and passages in Greek, engages with other scholars and translators, and draws connections to key arguments about knowledge and recollection which are widely scattered throughout Plato's dialogues, all of which is even more invaluable than your ordinary seminar, and well worth the difficulty of reading and re-reading.

Barfield and Tolkien, words and biographies

Though much lesser known than Tolkien, the importance of Owen Barfield's writing is powerfully attested to by Verlyn Flieger in her Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World. 

My review of a Mark Vernon's new book about Barfield, A Secret History of Christianity, is on A Pilgrim in Narnia. But I've been doing some background reading while I was working on that...

A number of people recommended that the place to start reading Barfield is with his History in English Words, so I duly read it after his Saving the Appearances, Poetic Diction, and lots of the essays available on the website dedicated to his work. History is a little more accessible--still forbiddingly erudite and fruitily British, a combination which won't be for everyone, but there is a wealth of interesting connections to marvel at if you can get into it. The foreword by Auden, which speaks of a "battle between civilization and barbarism," and the footnotes about the use of the term Aryan are still a little off-putting, and by the end of the book, I wasn't quite clear about what the ramifications of the study of philology were supposed to be. Is it for the benefit of the individual or the society to think a little harder about the language? I wasn't sure what I was being asked to do with all this, aside from taking Barfield up on his suggestions for further reading (OED, Max Muller, Pearsall Smith, Bradley, Weekly, Skeat).

As far as Tolkien scholarship, two of the most well-regarded books to come out in recent years are Tolkien and the Great War, by John Garth, and Tolkien, Race, and Cultural History, by Dimitra Fimi. The one is a biography, the other a survey of fairy-elements, and so while there is some overlap, they're really complementary, and well deserve their de facto status as required reading. Both highlight some of the lesser-known sources of Tolkien's inspiration: Chesterton, MacDonald, and Peter Pan, but also William Morris, whose romances were widely read at the front, and Francis Thomspon, about whom Tolkien said revealingly in an early essay:

one must begin with the elfin and delicate and progress to the profound: listen first to the violin and the flute, and then learn to hearken to the organ of being's harmony.

Both approach the topic of racial overtones with much more circumspection than Barfield. Fimi gives more attention to Tolkien's languages, though Garth does deal with them illustratively enough without digging in quite as much--in each, the integral role they play in Tolkien's thought comes through, and so it's clear how Barfield's musings would have been of significance to him. Still more with respect to Tolkien's own beliefs about what he was up to: recovering a lost truth through his stories. In Garth, copious research is brought forth to trace the role of WWI and his friendships with the members of the TCBS in developing Tolkien's philosophy, whereas Carpenter's earlier biographies understandably focused on the Inklings; in Fimi, a balanced background of myth, popular culture, linguistics, and sociology is fused in a compelling context for Tolkien's activity. Stirring stuff for the aspiring or amateur scholar, to be sure.