Читать книгу Medieval Nonsense - Jordan Kirk - Страница 11

In 1916, Walter Benjamin sent an unfinished essay to Gershom Scholem under the title “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” In it, the young philosopher set out to expose the “invalidity and emptiness” of what he called “the bourgeois conception of language.” According to such a conception—whose putative self-evidence shows no sign, a century on, of having diminished—language would be a tool by which “man is communicating factual subject matter to other men … through the word by which he denotes a thing.”²⁷ A signifying system, it would be made up of words that are, by their very nature, carriers of meaning. In order for a word to count as a word, it would have to signify something to someone, and only when such a signification is present could there be language at all. In the absence of signification, there might be raw noise, random marks, unmotivated gestures; there might be human beings relating to one another, dumbly, in passion, aggression, or indifference; there might be various sorts of things existing in the world—but there would not be language.

As Benjamin saw it, this bourgeois conception of language is “intrinsically false.”²⁸ However much human beings might indeed seem to speak to one another in order to communicate, the true nature of language must be sought elsewhere. Benjamin is not of course suggesting that language is simply random noise. He is rather pointing toward an ultimate linguistic dimension where meaning is held in suspension: a pure language (reine Sprache) that communicates nothing at all and to no one. This dimension is the bare possibility of signification, sheltered within meaningful speech but not itself meaningful. To be in language is sooner or later to encounter this dimension, where pure communicability will bring about the undoing of all communication. For, as he will write five years later, in the celebrated essay on “The Task of the Translator”: “In this pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless [ausdruckslos] and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages—all information, all sense, and all intention finally encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished.”²⁹

But in neither of these essays, which have been central to the continental philosophy of language of the last one hundred years, does Benjamin give an example of such a word. Indeed, he appears to leave unspecified when, exactly, this extinguishing of sense is meant to take place—in what circumstances we could expect to come up against the “expressionless and creative word” itself. It might well be imagined that this word will arrive only in some endlessly deferred future, a time always still to come when all the various languages will be rapt into the final pleroma. Or that what he is talking about belongs exclusively to the past, an Adamic utterance long since forgotten and without the possibility of recovery. Or again, that the expressionlessness of the word is something that obtains now, at this very moment, but merely as a kind of “permanent disjunction which inhabits all languages as such.”³⁰ Whatever their differences, each of these possibilities amounts to the same thing: the expressionless word, whether relegated to the future, to the past, or to the shadow of the present, would be something of which there could never be found a proper instance, here and now.

But there is another possibility. For Benjamin did not neglect, after all, to provide an example of the expressionless word. In the “protocol” or report of a hashish experiment from 1930, he notes that his trance—apparently, in this respect, unlike certain others—was “not very rich” in what he calls großen Prägungen (great coinages).³¹ Only one such coinage is he able to retrieve from it: Haupelzwerg, a made-up word in which (it would seem) an invented prefix has been attached to a root that means dwarf. Benjamin has very little to say about this invention, only that he “tried”—that is, was unable—“to explain it to the others.” Nonetheless, its characteristics can be discerned without difficulty: a coinage, it is “creative”; unfamiliar and inexplicable, it is “expressionless”; but, appearing as it does in the protocol, it is also just another word among the thousands of others recorded there. It can be written, evidently; nothing would stop a person from speaking it aloud; although it will not be found in any Wörterbuch, it is nonetheless unmistakably a word in German (and not, say, Russian or Japanese); as such, it gives every indication that it is susceptible of grammatical analysis, insofar as any speaker of that language could identify it as belonging to a particular part of speech; neither would anything prevent its being included in a line of verse, where one might consider it in the light, for example, of its syllabic quantity or of its capacities for assonance or rhyme; and so forth.

Benjamin has nothing more to say about Haupelzwerg, in the hashish protocol, than the few sentences just cited. But he knew well that a detailed description of just such a word—of its nature, status, and effects—had been made some decades before, in Knut Hamsun’s Hunger. I am referring to that passage in the novel that Roman Jakobson, praising the precision and comprehensiveness of its linguistic insight, would later use to develop an account of what he calls “signans with a zero signatum”—the same passage that Viktor Shklovsky had already appropriated in 1916 for his programmatic essay on Zaum or transsense language.³² The protagonist of Hamsun’s novel reports the following:

I imagined I had discovered a new word. I rise up in bed and say, “It is not in the language; I have discovered it. ‘Kuboa.’ It has letters as a word has. By the benign God, man, you have discovered a word! … ‘Kuboa’ … a word of profound import.” … With the most singular jerks in my chain of ideas I seek to explain the meaning of my new word. There was no occasion for it to mean either God or the Tivoli; and who said that it was to signify cattle show? … No; on second thoughts, it was not absolutely necessary that it should mean padlock, or sunrise. It was not difficult to find a meaning for such a word as this. I would wait and see…. Some minutes pass over, and I wax nervous; this new word torments me unceasingly, returns again and again, takes up my thoughts, and makes me serious. I had fully formed an opinion as to what it should not signify, but had come to no conclusion as to what it should signify…. “No! It is just this, it is impossible to let it signify emigration or tobacco factory.³³

Here is the “expressionless and creative word”: something neither irrecoverably lost nor permanently postponed, nor simply diffused throughout language as a whole, but just a word, transmissible from past to future and enunciable in the present. The encounter with such a word—belonging to a given language but not included in its lexicon, allowing no particular meaning to attach to itself and (not least) afflicting anyone who discovers it with unceasing torment—is the encounter with language as such.

Modernist literature is of course full of such meaningless words. It is not only Hamsun and the Zaum poets who “discover” them, but also Lewis Carroll (“Jabberwocky”), Christian Morgenstern (“Das grosse Lalula”), Hugo Ball (“Karawane”), James Joyce (Finnegans Wake), and Virginia Woolf (The Years) among many others.³⁴ Indeed, what Gertrude Stein called “in between no sense” is to a great extent the very matter of modernist letters.³⁵ Just as painting does, literature seems to become preoccupied toward the end of the nineteenth century with its own materiality, abandoning the task of representation and giving rise to abstraction: in its case, linguistic abstraction, what Stéphane Mallarmé (and André Gide after him) calls inanité sonore.³⁶ Samuel Beckett’s Molloy would speak for a whole era—the era of the death of God, of the splitting of the atom, of the “transitory, the fugitive, the contingent”³⁷—when he declares: “Yes, the words I heard, and heard distinctly, having quite a sensitive ear, were heard a first time, then a second, and often even a third, as pure sounds, free of all meaning, and this is probably one of the reasons why conversation was unspeakably painful to me. And the words I uttered myself, and which must nearly always have gone with an effort of the intelligence, were often to me as the buzzing of an insect.”³⁸

The literary critics and philosophers of modernity, at least on the continent, also turn their attention to this question, that of what Mladen Dolar calls, in his monograph of the same title, “a voice and nothing more.” Such a voice, whose importance within twentieth-century thought he demonstrates conclusively, Dolar defines as “what does not contribute to making sense,” that is, “the material element recalcitrant to meaning,” so that “if we speak in order to say something, then the voice is precisely what cannot be said … it is the non-linguistic, the extralinguistic element which enables speech phenomena.”³⁹ So much would be at stake, for instance, when Roland Barthes defines literature as an “intentional cacography” and points to the “rustle of language” as a “utopic state” in which “language would be enlarged, I should even say denatured to the point of forming a vast auditory fabric in which the semantic apparatus would be made unreal; the phonic, metric, vocal signifier would be deployed in all its sumptuosity, without a sign ever becoming detached from it.”⁴⁰ Or in Jacques Lacan’s dictum that “Lalangue is the precondition of meaning”; or Julia Kristeva’s identification of a “heterogeneousness to meaning and signification” within poetic language; or Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that “the search for the voice within language is thought itself.”⁴¹ It is unmistakable, in short, that linguistic nonsignification is a preoccupation of the modern era. The point goes practically without saying, in fact, though Friedrich Kittler, for one, has made it explicit: “our epoch,” he writes, is “the epoch of nonsense.”⁴²

Which would seem to suggest that the epoch before this one was, quite simply, not. In this regard it is worth recalling a perhaps surprising fact. Scholars of the Middle Ages have been bringing to collective attention in the last decade that some of the most influential twentieth-century thinkers took a serious formative interest in the Middle Ages, and developed their most characteristic ideas on the basis of this interest.⁴³ As it happens, the thinkers in question are exactly those just mentioned. Benjamin undertook his dismantling of the “bourgeois conception of language” only a few months after he had composed the fragment “On the Middle Ages”; Lacan’s most important discussion of lalangue is in Seminar XX, built around an account of courtly love; Barthes’s bruissement de la langue is manifestly indebted to medieval models (and he even belonged to a group named after Rutebeuf’s Miracle de Theophile, a play that includes lines of gibberish that I will discuss momentarily); Kristeva’s close study of medieval texts, much in evidence in her later works, is already apparent in her earliest publications; Jakobson was an eminent medievalist; as is, of course, Agamben, whose whole theory of vox is indeed explicitly grounded in medieval auctoritates.⁴⁴

As with the theorists, so with the poets and novelists. Hamsun’s protagonist in Hunger, the discoverer of the word kuboa, will turn out to be working on a play about the Middle Ages; Mallarmé was fascinated with manuscript culture and with medieval English alliterative poetry; Morgenstern was reading Meister Eckhart during the period when he wrote “Das grosse Lalula”; Ball, that “alchemist of the word,” took an interest in the lingua ignota of Hildegard of Bingen, recited Mechthild of Magdeburg at the fourth Dada soirée, and would go on to devote himself to the study of patristics (notably Pseudo-Dionysius); Woolf, whom we have already seen pointing to Chaucer as the “great originator,” turned her attention to the Middle Ages in both novels and essays; Joyce was quite learned in medieval thought, as evidenced in Finnegans Wake in particular; Beckett was as well; and what is Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” itself if not some “stanzas of Anglo-Saxon poetry”?⁴⁵ As for Stein, who referred often to Chaucer and copied lines from his “Merciles Beaute” into a notebook, she gives an account of that poet’s work in the lecture “What Is English Literature” whose hermeneutic insight has never been surpassed:

You do remember Chaucer, even if you have not read him you do remember not how it looks but how it sounds, how simply it sounds as it sounds. That is as I say because the words were there. They had not yet to be chosen, they had only as yet to be there just there. That makes a sound that gently sings that gently sounds but sounds as sounds. It sounds as sounds of course as words but it sounds as sounds. It sounds as sounds that is to say as birds as well as words. And that is because the words are there, they are not chosen as words, they are already there. That is the way Chaucer sounds.⁴⁶

It is possible that chance alone suffices to explain the fact that the very writers, thanks to whom nonsignification came to seem a characteristically modern preoccupation, also happen to have spent careful time in the study of medieval texts. But if nonsignification was already a preoccupation of medieval writers, as it has been shown to be (and as Stein confirms) at very least in the particular case of Chaucer, another possibility comes into view: that modernist nonsense might in fact be the afterlife or recrudescence of a specifically medieval theory and practice of nonsignification. At least two things would follow if this turned out to be true: first, modernist nonsense would demand to be restored to its place in a history much longer than has been widely suspected; second—and more importantly for the purposes of this book—medieval literature would demand to be read according to the protocols of the modernist avant-garde.⁴⁷ For it is in the experiments of the latter-day alchemists of the word that the most perceptive, faithful, and thus exemplary readings of medieval letters would turn out to have been undertaken. But if this possibility is to be seriously entertained, it will first be necessary to determine whether nonsignification was, in fact, a matter of importance not just for Chaucer but for medieval writers more generally.