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Part I
THE LINGUISTIC WORLDVIEW
AND THE POETIC TEXT
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Chapter 2
Anna Pajdziska
UMCS, Lublin, Poland
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1 For a discussion of these and other terms, their connotations and (mis)interpretations, cf.
Underhill (2009) and (2011).
2 Whorf even uses the notion of world view and attributes it to the working of a language
or languages, cf. for example:
The participants in a given world view are not aware of the idiomatic nature of the
channels in which their talking and thinking run, and are perfectly satisfied with them,
regarding them as logical inevitables. But take an outsider, a person accustomed to
widely different language and culture, or even a scientist of a later era using somewhat
different language of the same basic type, and not all that seems logical and inevitable
to the participants in the given world view seems so to him. (Whorf, 1956 [1940], p. 222)
The most succinct formulation of the idea, however, seems to come from Stuart Chase,
the author of the Foreword to Whorfs Language, Thought, and Reality, who finds in the
latter linguists unpublished monograph the idea that [r]esearch is needed to discover
the world view of many unexplored languages, some now in danger of extinction (Chase,
1956, p. x).
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It took a long time for scholars to realize the consequences of the fact that
literature builds on language as its raw material. Principles of ancient provenance
a good genological pattern, its application in a specific situation, a clear theme
and its rhetorical elaboration in accordance with the norms of a given genre
were still in operation in the Enlightenment. Apart from formal requirements,
the poetic value of ones work depended on whether and how the content was
idealized or sublimated. It was only in late 18th century that universal rules,
applied for the work of art to have an esthetic value, were counterbalanced by
that work as an expression of a nations spirit. The idea of poetry as a national
artifact appeared in opposition to the universalism of the classic model,3
and the idea of the significance of folk literature emerged as a counterpoint
to the theorys elitism. By underscoring national aspects and conditioning of
poetry, national languages became the center of attention in a natural way.
Admittedly, Georg Hegel, while discussing various types of artistic activity in
his Vorlesungen ber die sthetik, attributed a greater role to the content of a
literary work of art than to its linguistic matter. He explained it in the following
way: although content in literature is realized through language, something else
emerges between the linguistic sign (which he considered a means of spiritual
expression rather than an end in itself, Hegel 1886, no page) and what the sign
refers to namely, an internal view, image, or representation, which becomes
the center for cognizing. The arbitrary nature of the sign makes it so that its
3 I.e., the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman patterns, with attention being paid to
universal, timeless ideals rather than those related to national or more local contexts.
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role in poetic expression is decidedly smaller than the role of raw material in
painting or sculpture. However, the already mentioned Johann Gottfried Herder,
over a quarter of a century before Hegel, viewed the role of language in poetry
somewhat differently. He wrote: The spirit of the language ... is also the spirit of
the nations literature... It is therefore impossible to comprehend the literature
of a nation without knowing its language; it is only through language that you
can come to knowledge of the literature (Fragmente ber die neuere deutsche
Literatur. Erste Sammlung von Fragmenten, translated from Skwarczyska,
1965, p. 64). One can also deduce that for Herder, poets build their works from
the material of the very grammatical structure of language. For example, he
considered how much content can be extracted from the allegedly redundant
according to Cartesians gender distinctions of inanimate nouns, found only in
some languages and even there realized differently from language to language.
The most forceful view on the relatedness of poetry and language was
expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt at the very end of the 18th century when
he wrote that poetry is art practiced through language. In his view, poetry must
work language through and through (because language transforms everything
into general concepts) in order to activate its potential to move from the
general to the specific, from the abstract to the concrete. In her interpretation
of Humboldts work, Zdzisawa Kopczyska (1976, p. 189) writes: In the two
directions of poetic endeavor that he mentions, language is the main element: it
does not only define each of the two directions but is in fact decisive in shaping
their diversity. One extreme is the use of language as a means or an instrument
in poetry as art, i.e. for the shaping ... of the poetic work by making use of those
aspects of the language potential that render it effective as a tool. A radically
different situation is when language itself, as it were, decides the nature of
the poetic work. Here poetry does not so much utilize the defining properties
of language but absorbs them, acquiring in the process a significant degree of
autonomy as a form of artistic expression.
For Wilhelm Scherer, writing in the second half of the 19th century, it is no
longer the psychology or the history of a nation that constitutes the essence of
historical and literary inquiry. It was clear to him that poetry is a kind of attitude
to language and [that it] operates within language use; it is an art of speech,
and an artistic employment of language (Scherer, 1977 [1888], p. 9).
Polish authors also contributed to the discussion on the mutual relationship
between the national language and the language of poetry, on the role of
poetry in the development of the national language, and the poetic potential
of language. Kazimierz Brodziski (1964 [1818]), for example, took note of the
properties of national languages. He viewed the Romantic spirit of the Germans
as appropriate and understandable, since it was motivated by the German
tradition and the German language. In Poland, however, the tradition is closer
to the classical aura. It is matched by a language that does not easily fit in with
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the Romantic spirit due to its ancient classical structure,4 freedom, frankness
and conciseness, an almost inexhaustible potential for semantic shading, a
striking logic, and a natural clarity and common sense. An interdependence
of national characteristics and language was also assumed by Leon Borowski
(1820), whose research on poetry and elocution rested on the idea that the
spirit of nations and the spirit of their speech are such close companions that
one always speaks through the other (in Kopczyska, 1976, p. 88). Contrary to
Brodziski, Borowski did not have a high opinion of the Polish literary tradition
and criticized it for blindly following foreign patterns, without a clear national
taste. He did believe, however, that the Polish language, which had preserved its
power and valor, can facilitate an outstanding development of Polish poetry.
In the debate on the linguistic raw material of literature, a momentous
role was played by the phenomenological theory of a literary work of art.
According to Roman Ingarden, all extralinguistic artistically relevant elements
of the work ultimately derive from linguistic creations in that work and from
their properties. Some esthetically significant qualities directly depend on the
shape of those creations or derive from the complexity and expressiveness of
syntactic structure. Linguistic creations in a literary work of art play, therefore,
a double role: first, they determine all other elements of the work, and second,
they function themselves as the works elements. It is thanks to their presence
and meaning that specific esthetic qualities are realized.
Thanks to the structuralist approach it became obvious that an artistic text,
especially poetry, is a unique arrangement of elements in which everything has
semantic value. Even before it enters the work, the raw material of literature
is meaningful and structured this is not the case in other kinds of artistic
endeavor. Limitations imposed on a material of this kind help reveal novel
semantic qualities and a new sequence of meanings is superimposed over
the sequence of linguistic meanings. Textual meanings are also hidden in
the very structure of linguistic signs and their larger complexes, in linguistic
arrangements and configurations. All components are interlinked and constitute
a functional whole, irreducible to any of them individually. That whole, in turn,
is not meaningful in itself but in relation to higher-order structures: it is usually
interpreted against the backdrop of the language system and literary tradition,
but its relativized value in terms of the linguistic worldview also seems relevant.
This idea appeared already in the work of the Tartu semiotic school, in which
every national language was treated as a primary modeling system. For example,
Yuri Lotman frequently underscored the fact that linguistic structure systematizes
the signs of the code, turning them into tools for transmission of information and
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at the same time reflecting peoples views of reality. Since linguistic structure
preserves human cognitive acts, the writer works with the material that contains,
in a condensed form, the centuries-old activity of a given speech community
whose members have made an effort to know the world. This reflection, however,
was all too weakly shared, if indeed shared at all, by literary scholars.
An obvious, not to say a banal view in contemporary humanities is that living
with others in a community is impossible without assuming a certain common
worldview, a kind of frame of reference for all the endeavors of the communitys
members. It appears, however, that this idea is still insufficiently appreciated, or
else accepted without due reflection on the fact that a common worldview is to
a large extent shaped by a common language.
If language is an interpretation of reality or a way of seeing the world, the
categories and values cherished by a linguistic community should also be taken
into account in interpretations of literary texts. Even if one assumes that literary
texts are radically different from other kinds of text in their very essence, their
intentions and execution, even if the author in his or her desire to enrich and
extend the knowledge of people and the world, to express the inexpressible, to
access a mystery, etc. continually strives to go beyond the limits of language in
its communicative function, everything that a work contains ... must go through
the medium of language (Mukaovsk, 1970, p. 169). This, says Mukaovsk,
at the same time refers to an internal connection of a work ... with the society
achieved precisely through language. A similar thought had been formulated
even more emphatically by Edward Sapir: The understanding of a simple
poem, for instance, involves not merely an understanding of the single words
in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the
community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their overtones
(Sapir, 1961 [1929], p. 69).
5. Poetic Exemplification
In order to realize how important it is to take note of the linguistic worldview in
an analysis of a literary text, let us consider a few examples. They all come from
the work of the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Wisawa Szymborska. In her
poem Conversation with a Stone,5 a person is talking to an unusual interlocutor. Is
it, however, a coincidental interlocutor? Perhaps not: other objects are mentioned
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in the poem a leaf, a drop of water, a hair but these remain backgrounded. By
choosing a stone out of many possible elements of nature, the poet was probably
guided by the suggestiveness of its image in the Polish language. For a speaker of
Polish, kamie stone is not only a piece of rock, usually hard, compact and heavy
(a dictionary definition) but has numerous semantic connotations, e.g. the fact that
it is inanimate motivates the feature immobile (cf. skamienie turn into stone,
fossilize, petrify, siedzie kamieniem sit still, or bodajby si w kamie zamieni may
he turn into stone), while the prototypical hardness is metaphorically extended
to yield the meaning of insensitive, unaffected, strict, unemotional, unfeeling,
ruthless (cf. kto jest (twardy) jak kamie someone is hard as a rock, kamie nie
czowiek hes a stone, not a human being, kamie by si poruszy this would move
a stone, kto jest z kamienia someone is made of stone, kamienne serce a heart of
stone, kamienna twarz a stone face). This characterization is evoked in the poem
when the stone responds to the human speakers words My mortality should
touch you with Im made of stone ... and therefore must keep a straight face.
In making such ample use of the linguistic view of kamie, Szymborska by
choosing a stone for the interlocutor rejects an important feature that results
from the objects inanimateness, namely its inability to speak. The expressions
milcze jak kamie to be silent as a grave (lit. as a stone), kamienna cisza/
kamienne milczenie dead (lit. stony) silence show that for Polish speakers
stones belong to the realm of the silent and are unassociated with sounds, let
alone with speech.6 In the poem, the stone is not only endowed with the ability
to speak, but its conversational function is actually stronger than that of the
human speaker. The latters request repeatedly meets with the stones rejection.
The stones unquestionable dominance is surprising because it contradicts our
conviction, which derives from our use of language, that humans are the most
important components of the world, and as such they occupy the highest
position in the earthly hierarchy of beings.
Why have these requests been rejected? What do they concern? At the very
beginning of the conversation, one reads:
6 Connections of stones with speech can be found in broader culture. For example, in the
biblical Book of Habakkuk (2, 6-11) the stone in the house built on bloodshed and evil gain
will cry out against the oppressor. In Lukes Gospel (19, 40), in turn, Jesus says that even if
the crowd in Jerusalem keep silent, the stones will cry out. These, however, are exceptional
and hypothetical situations: peoples behavior is so outrageous that it provokes verbal
reaction from otherwise mute stones.
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In order to interpret this, we must again make recourse to the linguistic worldview
idea. These poetic contexts rather clearly imply certain properties of a stone that may
be absent from its linguistic portrayal but that derive from that portrayal. Hardness
motivates durability and permanence, and these turn a stone into a symbol of
longevity or even of existence. From this, there is only a stones throw from viewing
it as a source of life.7 It is precisely this characteristic that is indirectly expressed
through breathe my fill of you. In Polish, the linguistic metaphors motivated by one
of the most fundamental human experiences, i.e. breathing, express the notion
of being alive: kto jeszcze oddycha someone is still alive (lit. is still breathing),
do ostatniego tchu/tchnienia to the last breath, kto ledwo/ledwie dyszy/dycha
someone is barely alive (lit. can hardly breathe), kto odda/wyda ostanie tchnienie
someone breathed their last, kto/co jest dla kogo jak powietrze someone/
something is indispensable to someone else to live (lit. like the air).8
The human subject in Szymborskas poem does not fully realize his or her
own fault in the failed conversation. A human perspective, a human ordering
and evaluation of the world, is never cast away: the stone is approached like an
artifact, the speaker knocks at the stones front door and says:
7 Certain cultural facts show that a stones hardness and immobility are no obstacles to
treating it as a living creature or even a life-giver. In Europe, until the end of the 17th century
it was assumed that stones are conceived, grow and mature in the depths of the Earth...
Hence there originates a connection, frequent in various cultures, between stones and the
earths symbolism of fertility: fertility is drawn from the earth via stones. A second source
of stones symbolism of fertility is the belief that they are inhabited by the spirits of ones
ancestors and mediate in the transmission of fertility from them (Brzozowska, 1996, p. 349).
8 More on linguistic and artistic metaphors with the source domain of breathing can be found
in Pajdziska (1999). Incidentally, similar metaphorical processes can also be found in English,
cf. with ones last/dying breath, to be the breath of life to somebody or to breathe ones last.
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The stone is thus not viewed as a part of nature but as an architectonic form,
an expression of a human creative attitude to the worlds primeval shape. This is
the sin of pride: the world is portrayed only from the human perspective, and if
there is no human viewer, then beauty is in vain.
The poem thus makes ample use of one of the most important categories
that organize the worldviews entrenched in natural languages (and not only in
Polish), namely anthropocentrism.9 The anthropocentric perspective, however,
is questioned on two levels: on the level of creative action (by instituting
an asymmetry between the interlocutors) and on the level of the human
speakers linguistic behavior. The conversation is based on two categories of
speech acts: request and refusal. The requester is by definition lower than his/
her interlocutor in the conversational hierarchy, since it is the addressee that
decides about whether to agree or not. In Szymborskas poem, perhaps contrary
to the readers expectations, the balance tilts to the stones side. The human
interlocutors weaker position symbolizes peoples general existential situation:
alienation, loneliness, and fear of death. To enter matter (the stones insides)
would be to return to the state of primeval unity, escape from the price one
pays for functioning in culture and away from nature, that is, from the feeling
of lonesomeness and from the awareness of ineluctable death. But it turns out
that nature and culture are mutually impenetrable. Indeed, a life embedded in
culture, deemed as superior to nature, precludes one from a familiarity with the
latter. The senses, which condition human cognitive interaction with the world,
are brushed aside by the stone as poor. The human speaker is said to lack the
sense of taking part, and no other sense can make up for your missing sense
of taking part. It is people themselves who, by severing links with nature and
occupying a more lofty position, have triggered their own alienation.
Let us now consider a fragment from another poem by Szymborska, Birthday
(Urodziny), in which the speaker describes what falls to ones lot on the day one
is born: one is presented with an unusual gift, the world, with all its richness,
complexity and changeability, its uniqueness and inimitability. The worlds
ontic nature is such that a human being can never and nowhere absorb it in its
fullness. The speaking egos monolog ends with:
9 This category is a natural consequence of the fact that language is a human creation:
it presents the world as it is seen through human eyes for the benefit of humans.
Anthropocentrism is manifested both at the level of grammar (cf. the natural hierarchy of
arguments implied by the predicate, in which the highest rank is reserved for those with
the selectional restriction human) and lexical (the human point of view is reflected in
the quantitative structure of the lexicon, in the meanings of lexical items; it can motivate
regularities of metaphorical processes or restrictions in lexico-semantic valence).
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The speaker will not succeed in trying to plumb what the voids inner
sense is the void that one faces at birth and will face at the end of ones
life journey.11 The unusual nature of all existence is symbolized by the
Polish bratek pansy. The choice of this minute fragment of reality is far from
haphazard: its very name, derived from brat brother, underscores brotherhood
and common fate. Similarly to a human being, bratek is an individual and
a particular entity. The speaker extends that similarity, attributing to the
flower certain characteristics typically reserved to humans: in order to look
a certain way, the plant spends effort, perfects its petals, its precision aloof
and fragility proud. At the same time, the expressions od nigdy since never,
na olep blindly (in the English translation rendered as which is all theyre
allowed) signal a fundamental difference between humans and the pansy
(which, incidentally, represents other entities through synecdoche). The
unusual syntagm od nigdy, which consists of the preposition od since, from,
marking the beginning of some state, and the adverb nigdy never, at no point
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in time, suggests that although time is a parameter for every being, not all
beings are aware of the fact. The other expression, na olep blindly, without
thinking or paying attention to the surroundings, stresses the unreflective
nature of purely biological existence.
Therefore, paradoxically, all elements in a persons surroundings, even the
most minute, as well as that person him- or herself, contribute with their being
hic et nunc to the continuous presence and omnipresence of the world. But it
is only to a human being that this omnipresence comes forth as fundamental
and captivating. The human speaker in the poem has no illusions: only a tiny
fragment of the abundance can be enjoyed and absorbed.
Finally, we will look at the poem View with a Grain of Sand, which forcefully
makes the reader reflect on the relationship between language and the world.
Average speakers do not usually treat language as a complex cognitive system
that facilitates mentally locating oneself in the world or as an interpretive
network superimposed on reality; rather, they are prone to consider the analysis
of the world suggested by their mother tongue as undisputable and natural.
However, an awareness of the fact that every language captures reality in a
symbolic manner, i.e. has a formative and a limiting role in relation to thinking,
permeating even peoples direct experience, is frequently present in poetry. In
Szymborskas View with a Grain Sand it is mainly through language that people
and the world are juxtaposed:
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In a poetic shortcut, the poem shows that people interact with the world
through language. Distinguishing things from the environment or isolating an
event from a situation is possible (or at least, easier) because it is named (cf.
a grain of sand, windowsill, falling). Linguistic categories [including] number,
gender, case, tense, mode, voice, aspect, and a host of others ... are not so much
discovered in experience as imposed upon it. In Sapirs words, we have to take
note of our unconscious projection of [the languages] implicit expectations
into the field of experience (Sapir, 1931, p. 578). Every event, including those
portrayed in poetry, must be captured with the use of grammatical categories
inherent in a specific language. Speakers of Polish have to view it as either
past (spado it fell), present (spada it is falling) or future, as completed or
continuing. They have to decide whether the agent or experiencer in that event
is/was singular or plural, as well as whether his/her/its gender is masculine,
feminine, or neuter. English speakers also have to choose between singularity
and plurality and additionally between definiteness and indefiniteness;
they also have to characterize the event temporally, by choosing one of the
numerous constructions referring to the past, present, or future. The Kwakiutl
from the Canadian British Columbia do not attend to the time of the event
or the number of participants in it, but to whether it was, at the moment of
utterance, visible to the speaker or not. Also, they necessarily specify who the
event was closest to: the speaker, the hearer, or a third party. In the language of
the Nootka, the Kwakiutls neighbors, the event described by Szymborska has
to be verbalized in a totally different manner. The utterance will not contain
a nominal element but a verbal construction, consisting of two major parts.
The first expresses motion or location of a given class of objects (the objects
status is implied in this way), the other expresses the downward direction of
the movement.
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A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But theyre three seconds only for us.
13 The attributive epithet relating to the cloud in the poem (bezwiedna, Eng. translation:
unminding) is worthy of a separate comment. We are dealing here with a violation of the rules
of lexico-semantic collocability, for bezwiedny means occurring or made subconsciously,
instinctive, automatic, unintentional, unwitting and is usually used to refer to actions,
emotional reactions, peoples behavior etc., e.g. bezwiedny ruch unintentional movement,
bezwiedny umiech unwitting smile, czu bezwiedn niech/bezwiedne zaufanie to feel
an instinctive dislike/trust. Once these selectional restrictions are violated, the cloud has
received a complex characterization: beside the standard meaning of bezwiedny, the older
meaning of ignorant, unknowing is activated.
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6. A Final Word
The examples above hopefully show that for a reliable account of poetic
creation and the individual worldview of an author, an analyst must consider
as one frame of reference apart from linguistic or literary conventions the
worldview entrenched in the language itself. However, the relationship between
the linguistic worldview and literature is bidirectional. On the one hand, the
worldview characteristic of a given speech community leaves its mark on literary
texts, but on the other, the latter can also have a bearing on language-entrenched
conceptualizations. Moreover, they can be useful in actual reconstructions of the
linguistic worldview: they can facilitate verification procedures for hypotheses
proposed on the basis of systemic data or by revealing aspects of language
use that would remain otherwise unidentified. This question, however, merits a
separate treatment.
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References
Borowski, Leon. (1820). Uwagi nad poezj i wymow pod wzgldem ich
podobiestwa i rnicy, z wiczeniami w niektrych gatunkach stylu. Wilno.
Christmann, Hans Helmut. (1967). Beitrge zur Geschichte der These vom Weltbild
der Sprache. Wiesbaden: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur.
Luther, Martin. (1530). Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen. [in English: An Open Letter on
Translating. Transl. Gary Mann, revised and annotated by Michael D. Marlowe. 2003.
www.bible-researcher.com/luther01.html; accessed Dec 7, 2012]
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Scherer, Wilhelm. (1977 [1888]). Poetik. Ed. Gnter Reiss. Tbingen: Niemeyer.
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Chapter 3
Agnieszka Gicala
Pedagogical University, Krakw, Poland
1. Introduction
The present chapter aims to apply the notion of the linguistic worldview
of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics and Gilles Fauconniers theory of
Mental Spaces, together with his view of discourse as a mental-space lattice,
to an analysis of a text and its translation. The common denominator of all
these concepts is the fact that they deal with human cognition, albeit from
different angles, and that they involve the concept of viewpoint. I argue that
these are complementary and that, as such, they can be successfully used
to analyze and assess translation equivalence from a cognitive perspective.
These tasks will be exemplified through analysis of a poem by the Polish
Nobel Prize winner Wisawa Szymborska (1923-2012) and its translation by
Clare Cavanagh, the winner of the Found in Translation Award in 2011 for
translating Szymborskas volume Tutaj/Here (2009, in partial collaboration
with Stanisaw Baraczak).
Szymborska often writes poems, like miniature pictures, that present
unique descriptions of reality with a particular focus on details. It is through
these details that Szymborska indirectly, and often ironically, expresses her
view of the world. Her collection entitled Tutaj/Here (2009) contains a poem
called Identyfikacja (Identification), in which the construction of the scene being
presented is effected through unusual linguistic means. The disintegration of a
persons worldview following the tragic death of a beloved person is enacted
through disintegration of language.
I will argue that a given discourse, described by Fauconnier as a mental-
space lattice constructed in relation to a particular viewpoint, may yield
a specific linguistic worldview and that a poem may be seen as a non-
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Bartmiski, however, only mentions this distinction once and in the work
quoted above where he applies the concept to a Polish Christmas carol. He does
not seem either to elaborate on it further or to clearly propose that texts may be
treated as standard or non-standard linguistic worldviews.
The distinction between stereotyped and non-standard worldviews remains
in accordance with the cognitivist view of the scalar nature of cognitive and
linguistic phenomena, which derives from an encyclopedic approach to
semantics:
Given the scalar nature of language and the lack of clear-cut boundaries,
linguistic worldview may encompass not only the most entrenched linguistic
data but also those less established. It is thus important that the linguistic
worldview is an interpretation rather than a reflection of the world (Bartmiski,
2009/2012, pp. 76, 77), i.e. linguistic expression depends on the creativity of
speakers. Therefore, one is justified in including poetic vision in the scope of
the term. I propose to extend the concept of non-standard linguistic worldview
to embrace what is created by individual speakers, i.e. particular texts, including
poetic ones. I believe that it is possible to talk about a text as a non-standard
linguistic worldview or the non-standard linguistic worldview of a given author.1
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The fact that within the term in question there is also room for poetry is
also stressed by Bock (1992, p. 250), who points to convergences between
the concept of worldview and language as brought out in the context of
proposals within cognitive linguistics like Lakoff and Johnsons Conceptual
Metaphor Theory or Langackers Cognitive Grammar. To further support his
view, Bock also quotes Friedrichs statement about the poetic character of
language:
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The accessibility of Szymborskas poetry stems from the fact that the
pressing questions she keeps asking are, at least at first sight, as
naive as those of the man in the street. The brilliance of her poetry
lies in pushing the enquiry much farther than the man in the street
ever would. Many of her poems start provocatively, with a question,
observation or statement that seems downright trite, only to surprise
us with its unexpected yet logical continuation. (Baraczak in
Szymborska, 1997, p. 391)
These words are a reflection on the poem entitled Nic dwa razy (Nothing Twice);
however, Baraczaks remarks may be understood to apply more generally when
he writes that Szymborska offer[s] a startling view of human existence and the
meaning of human history or perhaps the senslessness of it (in Szymborska,
1997, p. 391).
Identyfikacja/Identification is an account of a meeting between two women
after the husband of one of them has died in a plane crash. As made clear by
Szymborska herself, the poetic meeting is based on a real event:
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Once, many years ago, I had the sad opportunity to see a person in
trauma following the loss of someone close to her in a plane crash. It
is only now that I have described that situation, changing the details
a little... (Szymborska in Bikont & Szczsna, 2012, p. 197; trans. A.G.)
The poem is written in the form of a monologue by the widow, which is addressed
to her visitor and tells her about the plane crash. The woman is trying to argue that
the body she had been asked to identify was not her husbands and that he must be
alive. A closer look at the argumentations clever logic reveals Szymborskas unique
gift of poetic understatement and seemingly unemotional observation of the world
the characteristics of her poetry that have won her international recognition. I
believe that Fauconniers theory of Mental Spaces is an ideal tool to analyze and
reveal the mechanisms of emotional and logical manipulation employed in this
poem: they lead the reader to the emotional and startling discovery of the truth at
its end the truth that the reader is allowed to decipher via indirect linguistic hints.
As has already been mentioned, Fauconnier views discourse as a network
of interrrelated mental spaces, which he calls the mental-space lattice. The
poem in question involves different mental spaces connected not only linearly
(appearing as the monologue develops) but also reappearing in different
perspectives.
For the purpose of the present analysis, I would like to propose a division of
the poem into various mental spaces where each space will receive the symbol
S and a consecutive number: 1, 2, 3, etc. This part of the analysis deals with the
poem in Polish; each quotation in Polish will be accompanied by the corresponding
part of Cavanaghs translation (in brackets) or, in some cases, by literal translation
into English. I will proceed to an analysis of the translation in section 4. It is best,
therefore, to juxtapose the original and the translation for ease of comparison:
mental
space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh
no.
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mental
space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh
no.
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podobno (direct translation: supposedly; here translated as The story is), which
signals its epistemic distance from the speaker and from the first space. This new
space has the status of a hypothesis. Moreover, it is also distant in time (which is
signaled by the use of the past tense) and in space (przyjechali po mnie literally
they came to fetch me). However, the next line (space S4) is a contradiction of
the hypothesis that the husband died, introduced by the phrase No i co z tego
(So what), denying the validity of the previous space and opening a different
past possibility (cf. the word moe in moe si rozmyli he may have changed
his mind). The use of moe (may) gives this new space a modal character, i.e. the
status of an opposing hypothesis.
The next space (S5) is a factual report on the proceedings of identification
of the body that was shown to the woman, and is interrupted with the negative
nie wiem kogo (I dont know who) (space S6). The list of details (shirt, watch, etc.)
is followed by a counterfactual space S7, an emotional judgment on why the
body was not her husbands that derives from the married couples relationship
(nie zrobiby mi tego he wouldnt do that to me). S8 then contains a seemingly
objective qualification of the shirt, watch, names on the wedding ring as very
common, popular items.
At this point, the monologue returns to the base space (S1): it is a repetition
of Dobrze, e przysza Its good you came. It develops into deontic space S9,
the speakers wish for her friend to sit close (Usid tu koo mnie Sit here beside
me). Next, the same line of argumentation starts again: the speaker refers to a
past fact only to deny its validity. The woman confirms the day of her husbands
arrival (czwartek Thursday, which constitutes epistemic space S10), but then
resorts to a rather unlikely argument that the man was not necessarily coming
back last Thursday (S11, introduced by the space builder ale but). The next
space (S12) contains future constructions (Ill); it refers to routine activities and
contains the verb zbudzi si wake up through which the tragedy is assessed as
something unreal, something that did not happen.
The monologue then returns to the base space S1 again. It is connected
with the next space (S13, containing the past tense: tam byo zimno it was
cold there) through the conjunction bo since. The conjunction is normally used
to express cause and effect so its use in S13 is illogical: there seems to be no
direct relation between the other womans present visit and the cold during the
identification a few days before or the fact that the body was placed only in
a thin rubber bag. Then space S13 seems to continue the factual description
of details during the identification. However, the use of the pronoun on him
and the reference to the rubber bag (a sleeping bag) betrays the fact that the
woman did in fact recognize her husband. She tries to hide it by saying that it
was just ten tamten nieszczliwy czowiek that unlucky man. The last space
in the poem, S14, established via the use of a future construction, refers again
to the same routine activities as in S12 but here the woman confuses them:
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wrong collocations (nastawi czwartek, umyj herbat put the Thursday on, wash
the tea) and a wrong cause-effect relation while pointing to the names on the
wedding ring. Therefore, S14 may also be treated as S12`.
Let us now concentrate on those elements of the poem that build and
reinforce its final effect. Its poetic power lies in the womans apparently
unemotional attempts to deny her husbands death. The failure of her attempts
to not break down psychologically is conveyed through linguistic means: the
breakdown is merely suggested, expressed indirectly. However, the choice of
linguistic measures used for this purpose is guided by metalinguistic factors: the
viewpoint and the viewpoint mental space. It is the viewpoint that determines
what kind of linguistic worldview the discourse reveals.
According to Libura (2010, p. 27), when discourse begins, it is the base space
that constitutes the viewpoint, thus allowing for the appearance of the next
space. In Szymborskas poem, the base (S1) is the beginning of the monologue
(followed by an establishment of its topic in S2). It constitutes the viewpoint for
most other spaces in that the woman tells her friend about what happened from
her present perspective: the conversation takes place a few days after the crash,
she is at home, busy with her guest and with daily routines.
Let us look closer at the linguistic markers of this viewpoint in the whole
mental-space lattice. First, the viewpoint marker podobno (the story is), which
expresses the womans disbelief in and distance from the tragedy, shows that
mental space S3 is built from the viewpoint of S1. Another tool of this kind (in S5
and S6) is the speakers reference to the dead husband as if it was not him but an
unknown person: Potem mi pokazali kogo, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed
me someone, I dont know who) and ten tamten nieszczliwy czowiek in S12 (lit.
this that unlucky man). Moreover, her use of repetition in these places (kogo, nie
wiem kogo and ten tamten) seems to have an iconic function: the more words,
the larger her distance from the tragedy which, as she wants to prove, does not
concern her personally. Third, some spaces are introduced as contradictions of
certain past facts. Space S4 starts with the marker No i co z tego (So what); S8 with
its viewpoint marker, the conjunction a (translatable here as because or after all),
repeated three times for greater emphasis; S11 is introduced by the conjunction
ale (but) and its content is reinforced by its form as a rhetorical question.
The viewpoint of a woman whom the plane crash apparently does not concern
(let us mark it as VP1) is, however, not the only one in the poem. Skillfully
smuggled into that scene is the viewpoint of a woman who knows that the body
that she has been asked to identify was her husbands (VP2). This contrasting
viewpoint guides a different interpretation of certain of the poems mental spaces.
Juxtaposed and intertwined with VP1, VP2 creates a linguistic picture (an
idiosyncratic worldview) of a woman whose world is disintegrating despite
her attempts to deny it to herself and to her visitor. VP2 does not seem to
arise from one particular mental space, since, as was shown above, the whole
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Clare Cavanaghs translation is very exact, almost word for word, which is
what the poem demands of its translator due to the simplicity of its language.
The English rendering does, therefore, retain most of the elements that convey
the original linguistic worldview. For example, in mental space S2 Podobno is
translated as The story is, both of which distance the speaker from the event she
is talking about.
Indeed, certain grammatical properties of the English language even
strengthen the effect in question, i.e. the womans apparent denial of the tragedy.
In the translation, the womans point of view becomes enhanced by the use of
the indefinite article in spaces S2 (a plane crashed on Thursday) and S5 (a scrap
of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring). In S2, the indefinite article stresses the fact that
the woman seemingly does not attach much importance to the plane crash as if
it did not concern her; in S5 the indefinite article qualifies the objects mentioned
as unknown: the woman apparently does not recognize them as her husbands.
However, the translation also reveals some subtle divergences from the
VP1 as constructed in the original. It does not contain the repetition in mental
spaces S5 and S6 that proves to be iconically important. The fragment Potem
mi pokazali kogo, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed me someone, I dont
know who) is rendered more fluently as Then they showed me I dont know
who. A similar loss occurs in mental space S12, where the phrase ten tamten
nieszczliwy czowiek (lit. this that unlucky man) is translated more smoothly
as that unlucky man. Moreover, the Polish conjunction a, repeated three times
in S8, is not rendered at all, as a result of which the desperately argumentative
character of the womans words in this mental space becomes less felt. The
rhetorical question in S11 is translated as a statement, which weakens the
effect.
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The opposing VP2, i.e. that of the woman who admits that the tragedy does
concern her, becomes blurred in three places in the translation. One instance
can be found in S8, where the original viewpoint marker (the possessive
adjective jego in jego obrczce his wedding ring, which may indicate the
husband) is rendered as the demonstrative adjective that, which points to the
ring itself rather than to its owner. Secondly, repetition, and hence the effect of
the womans effort to gather her thoughts, becomes lost in mental space S11: a
potem, co potem is shortened to then what. The last, crucial instance comes in the
final line where the disintegrated collocations find their absolutely illogical
justification: bo te nasze imiona przecie pospolite translated as since our names
are completely ordinary. The key word, apart from the conjunction bo (since), is
przecie, which implies that what is said is an argument against an earlier view
or an explanation of something that should be obvious. The translation renders
przecie as completely, and thus weakens the argumentative force here.
5. Conclusions
While the English version of Szymborskas poem Identyfikacja has the advantage
of stressing the womans reasonable viewpoint (VP1) by using linguistic means
unavailable in Polish, it also somewhat weakens her other, more dramatic
viewpoint (VP2). In the translation, the womans judgments, the proportions
of the reasonable and the tragic elements of her view of reality as expressed
in the monologue, shift slightly away from the dramatic. In English, linguistic
means that prove more fluent, less stammering, and less argumentative create
a linguistic worldview that is less overtly tragic and reveals subtler signs of
disintegration.
As a general conclusion, it is worth recalling Bartmiskis definition of the
linguistic worldview as the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language,
which can be captured in the form of judgments about the world (Bartmiski,
2009/2012, p. 76) as well as the distinction he makes between the standard
and the non-standard linguistic worldview. The extension of the latter proposed
here allows treatment of a poetic text as a non-standard linguistic worldview. A
comparison of non-standard linguistic worldviews in the Polish original and the
English translation, coupled with an examination of the linguistic markers of the
two clashing viewpoints (VP1 and VP2) intertwined in the mental-space lattice
that constitutes the womans monologue, allow for an assessment of translation
equivalence.
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References
Bartmiski, Jerzy. (2007). Jzykowe podstawy obrazu wiata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo
UMCS.
Bikont, Anna, & Szczsna, Joanna. (2012). Pamitkowe rupiecie. Biografia Wisawy
Szymborskiej. Krakw: Znak.
Fauconnier, Gilles, & Turner, Mark. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending
and the Minds Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
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Friedrich, Paul. (1986). The Language Parallax: Linguistic Parallellism and Poetic
Indeterminacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. (2002). Ed. Della Summers.
Harlow: Longman.
Szymborska, Wisawa. (2007). Nic dwa razy: wybr wierszy/Nothing Twice: Selected
Poems. Krakw: Wydawnictwo Literackie.
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Chapter 4
Irena Vakov
Charles University, Prague, The Czech Republic
The ground of our human relationship to reality is, from the perspective of
phenomenology, the natural world (Patoka, 1992 [1936]). This philosophical
point of departure is in obvious agreement with the concept of the linguistic
worldview from Polish cognitive ethnolinguistics (Bartmiski, 2009/2012) as
well as with the naive worldview from Russian linguistics (Apresyan, 1995).
A correlate of Patokas natural world is a semantic structure that represents
the linguistic worldview in its foundational situation: language having a
commonplace connection to reality and language used in everyday, subjectively
grounded communication (cf. styl potoczny colloquial style as described
in Bartmiski, 2001). This type of language is usually opposed to scientific
language. Scientific language is marked for objectivity and abstraction, a
correlation with intellectual reflection rather than experience, and also the use
of terms that are, in contrast with everyday words, technically precise and
devoid of connotation. The language of science corresponds with a theoretical
world that obviously represents a non-primary or secondary way of relating
to our reality. Objectivizing abstraction removes from things their fundamental
human meaningfulness the very ways in which they figure in our lives and
thereby co-create the natural world in which we live.2
In this regard, it is instructive to consider the dictionary definitions of a
number of Czech words: slza tear is defined as a secretion of the ocular glands,
vrska wrinkle as a line in the skin caused by shrinkage, dbn jug as an
1 For his encouragement, valued suggestions, and translating patience, the author extends
her thanks to David Danaher.
2 Cf. Bartmiski this volume.
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oblong, convex container with a handle, sestra sister as a female sibling. True:
as many cognitively-oriented linguists have been noting for over thirty years,
even traditional linguistics (in this case, lexicography) is not often willing to take
into account the basic, pre-reflective horizon of our natural world. Language is
unrivalled as form of testimony to our experience of the natural world. What is it
that we signify by the words tear, wrinkle, jug, sister? What do these phenomena
represent for a human being, and what do they mean to us in the context of a
specific language, culture, or human community?
The phenomenological argument in favor of a return to things can be
understood as a challenge similar to the one issued by proponents of cognitive
linguistics and ethnolinguistics in the sense both of a turning away from
impersonal theoretical constructions and moving back to reflecting on the
primary and natural human relationship to the world, as well as of profiling
the ways in which human conceptualizing and understanding (and pre-
understanding) are manifested in the context of a cultural community. With
differences in emphasis, this approach has been advocated by, among many
others, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980), Anna Wierzbicka (1996), and
Jerzy Bartmiski (2009/2012). All of these scholars stress the primacy of human
experience in its relational or relative aspects: in relation to either a general
human (anthropocentric) perspective or the perspective of one linguistically
and culturally bound ethnos.
We investigate, then, both how people actually are and also how things are
manifested (as a philosopher might say) to us as human beings and as speakers
of a given language. According to phenomenologists, this process takes places
through the mediation of our body and senses, as a result of our relationships
with other people (in a community), and naturally also through language; to
this can be added that it takes place also through our continual contact with the
whole of the world, which serves as our absolute or ultimate horizon. Jan Patoka
wrote that we are anchored in existence in just these four ways: through body,
community, language, world (Patoka, 1995). Cognitive linguistics, although it
draws from other sources and is associated with other contexts, is nonetheless
aware, in one way or another, of this phenomenological truth, which means that
when we investigate the semantic structures of language with cognitive and
ethnolinguistic tools, we are also contributing, as linguists, to phenomenological
discovery of the natural world.
2. Things
Things enter into obviousness, and therefore they are. To be means to be
manifested. We comprehend things through our senses (and not merely through
our sense of sight, even though sight is probably the most prominent and
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prototypical of human senses). In a poem entitled The Pink Shrub by the Austrian
poet Karel Lubomirski, we read (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 141):
Smell is also one of the ways that things manifest themselves to us. In another
poem, the same Austrian poet asks (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 99):
Is beauty Je krsa
the love of things? lskou vc?
From ancient times, beauty has tended to be associated with liking by means
of sensory experiences: the name for the study of beauty, aesthetics, derives
from the Greek expression aisthtiks that which is perceivable.
According to Eugen Fink, our relationship to things in the world is
dependent upon the ways in which those things meet us (Fink, 1996 [1958], p.
118), and precisely this is the ground of intentionality. The fact that things are
sensually perceivable allows us, who are sense-equipped, to also meet them
halfway. Perception is, as a result, a two-way relationship between perceiver and
perceived, and things exist only in their relation to us.
Things Vci
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Heidegger writes that science destroyed things as such and has thereby forced
us to distance ourselves from the jug filled with wine and put in its place a hollow
space used to hold fluid matter (1993, p. 15).3 Phenomenologists urge a return to
the roots of things, that is, to our experience of them. We need to remember how
a given thing manifests itself to us in its materiality or its thing-ness.
Objects are indifferent, and objects come into being through the reduction
of things: we abstract away from those very qualities that constitute the
essence of them. When we incorporate them into a scientific framework, we
render them descriptively exact, measurable. We designate water as H2O, and
in doing so water loses its original nature. Or we derive the characteristics of
water from its categorial association with fluid matter. But when we need to
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put out a fire, we will not be looking for either H2O or the abstraction that is
fluid matter.
The thing-ness of a thing (how water differs from the abstraction that is fluid
matter) carries over also to the word that names it. A word is correlative with the
thing it names, and at the same time it has the ability, through connotation, to
evoke it, to call it to mind. This is true even more so when we share the word with
others, given that language belongs not to me but rather to us (Gadamer,
1999, p. 27).
Every thing carries with it traces of its naturalness, its origin, its
situatedness. Put figuratively, every thing has a belly-button Every
thing always has its belly-button or something analogically similar;
something that points not only to its inception in the sense of its
generative emergence, but also to the manner in which this thing is
separated off from the background of all Being, a kind of constitutive
contrast in relation to its bedrock or surroundings. (Kratochvl, 1994,
p. 44)
It can be added that we could consider every word associated with a thing
also to be its belly-button. We have separated off from the background
of all Being the concept as logos, and the thing begins to exist in a human
context thanks to its being a word-concept. The word itself then testifies to
this in that it also can serve as a trace in a search for a things naturalness,
origin, and situatedness. (By thing is not of course meant only something
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quite catch, something that has not yet been given conceptual form (Patoka,
1995, p. 11).
Once again the question of the relationship between thing and word arises: this
time, however, more specifically between the thing called dbn jug and the
word dbn.
Let us consider again a childs perspective. The world appears richer in
meanings to children than it does to adults: children do not yet have extensive
experience of life and they direct considerably more attention to the obvious.
A childs world is a natural world a primary, pre-reflective world. The following
poem in prose, entitled The Jug, credibly stylizes a childs perspective; in its
formal contours it likewise represents a so-called poetic definition, which
offers up for our consideration a concrete conceptual explication:
The jug is a big glass bird with a bulbous belly. It has a beak and an
enormous ear. It floats in a well and it sinks. I have to immerse my
hand deep under the water to pull it out. I scoop up water and the jug
breaks out in sweat. The water is so heavy. And so cold. My hands, in
which I am clutching it, get suddenly bigger. When I put the jug down
on the ground, my hands are little again. Its too bad that one day the
jug will break! (Nezval, 1956, p. 12)
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day the glass jug will break. These details represent the basic elements of
the childs experience with the jug: a summary of how the jug-as-thing looks
(how it manifests itself and comes across to the child), what it is used for, the
context in which we encounter it, the place it occupies in our world.
The word dbn evokes an encounter with a real jug by, in Heideggers
words, calling it out so that it emerges from unbeing into being. If we
want to capture the meaning of the word dbn, then we cannot reduce
it to a definition consisting of a superordinate concept along with a few
differentiating features. That kind of definition is precisely what Heidegger
warns us against: it distances us from the jug filled with wine (or cold water
from the well) and replaces it with an abstracted container, the interior space
of which is used to hold fluid matter.
Thanks to the word (the verbal sign), a thing is evoked. The nature of
meaning thus conceived points to the unity of cognition and language, to
the essential role played by bodily and sensory experience in conceptual
formation, to the naturalness of metaphoric and metonymic conceptualization,
and also to the narrativity of meaning as well as the fact that human
thinking is, when all is said and done, literary (Turner, 1996). Things have a
deep involvement in stories, scripts, and narrative structures.4
According to Heidegger, language speaks that is, words speak. If human beings
also speak, we do so only secondarily in answer to the speech of speech and
thanks to the fact that we have listened intently to what words have had to say.
Heidegger often added to this that the heart of speaking speech the essence
of what words communicate is revealed most authentically in poetry.
Victor Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to give back to us the ability to
experience life, to make us once again able to truly perceive things: to make the
stone stony (see Mukaovsk, 1971). What makes the stone stony? The stony-
ness of the stone is evidently a matter of the semantic connotations that are
bound up with the linguistic utterance. The word stone does not simply designate
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a piece of rock: it does not function merely to denote the thing. According to
Heidegger, the word serves to call the thing out from a state of unpresent non-
existence to a state of present existence, and this occurs in all of its associated
sensory and contextual richness.
In the Czech linguistic worldview, and undoubtedly in many other linguistic
worldviews as well, a stone is associated with the image of something hard,
sharp, immobile, heavy, and cold; a stone is, from a human perspective, a tool,
and usually a tool used to injure or do harm. These characteristics of a stone can
be (at least in Czech) backed up with connotational evidence, and we have found
linguistically systemic data that verifies them (cf. Bartmiski & Panasiuk, 2001):
consider, for example, the derivational adjective kamenn stony that occurs
in collocations like kamenn tv stone face and kamenn srdce stony heart
(in the sense of hard heart) and that confirms the connotations of immobility,
if not also insensitivity; one verbal derivation kamenovat to stone with its
connotations of harm, sanction, enmity, unfriendliness; another verbal derivation
zkament to turn to stone with connotations of stiffness that are associated with
a strongly felt experience of fear or fright. Verificational evidence is also found
in phraseological expressions: spadl mi kmen ze srdce a stone [weight] fell from
my heart and odvalit nkomu z cesty kad kmen to roll away every stone from
someones path in the sense of paving the way for someone. Also, of course, in
phraseological analogies: bt chladn/studen jako kmen to be cold as stone,
bt tvrd jako kmen to be hard as a rock, bt tk jako kmen to be heavy as a
stone, jt ke dnu jako kmen to drop [to the bottom] like a rock.
In addition to these strong systemic connotations, there are also so-called
weak connotations that are not confirmed in the language system as a whole
but can be conveyed and understood textually. We encounter these most
often in poetry or in creative texts of all kinds, and usually in contexts that
substantiate their communicativity (Pajdziska & Tokarski, 2010; Tokarski, 2007).
The word kmen stone appears in poetic texts as a prototypically concrete
object, as a basic element found in the world, but also sometimes as an entity
endowed with a certain sensitivity to the world or its own inner life that people
cannot comprehend. A stone (kmen) can even have its own language and
spirituality: Vladimr Holan once wrote a poem called Modlitwa kamene (The
Stones Prayer) that is written entirely in stone language.5 These kinds of cases
represent implicit polemics with the stones linguistically systemic connotations
of inanimacy and insensitivity (cf. Vakov, 2010). In a similar way, the poet Jan
5 Cf. Pajdziska this volume for Wisawa Szymborskas poetic elaboration of the
characteristics of the stone in Polish linguistic worldview. Special attention is paid to the
way the poet contradicts the stones feature of muteness.
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and you who dont wish to cast stones a ty jen neche kamenovat
be like a stone in your heart bu jako kmen v srdci svm
so merciful no stone has yet tak milosrdn jet nikdy
cast the first stone nehodil kmen kmenem
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References
Apresyan, Yuriy D. (1995). Obraz cheloveka po dannym yazyka: popytka
sistemnogo opisaniya. Voprosy yazykoznaniya, 1, 37-67.
Fink, Eugen. (1996 [1958]). Byt, pravda, svt. Pedbn otzky kpojmu fenomn.
Praha: Oikoymenh.
Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, George, & Turner, Mark. (1989). More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to
Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lubomirski, Karl. (2003). Ptk nad hocm lesem. Trans. R. Mal. Praha: BB Art.
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Nezval, Vtzslav. (1956). Vci, kvtiny, zvtka a lid pro dti. Praha: Albatros.
Pajdziska, Anna, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (2010). Jazykov obraz svta a kreativn
text. Slovo a slovesnost, 71, 288-297.
Patoka, Jan. (1992 [1936]). Pirozen svt jako filosofick problm. Praha:
eskoslovensk spisovatel.
Skcel, Jan. (1996). Nadje s bukovmi kdky. In Jan Skcel, Bsn II. Brno: Blok.
SS. (1994). Slovnk spisovn etiny pro kolu a veejnost. Praha: Academia.
Turner, Mark. (1996). The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vakov, Irena. (2004). O vci a slov. Snad jsme tu jen, abychom ekli In
Jaroslava Pekov, Miloslav Prka, & Irena Vakov (Eds.), Hledn souadnic
spolenho svta. Filosofie pro kad den (pp. 377-412). Praha: Eurolex
Bohemia.
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Wolker, Ji. (1958). Host do domu (1921). In Dlo Jiho Wolkra. Praha: SNKLHU.
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Chapter 5
David S. Danaher
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
1. Introduction
Of the many paradoxes associated with Vclav Havel is one that renders his
writing an ideal candidate for comparative ethnolinguistic analysis: Havel is a
Czech writer who has achieved world renown primarily through translations of his
texts into English. The implications of this paradox for reading Havel have yet to
be acknowledged in existing scholarship on Havel. Indeed, many commentators
on Havel in the English-speaking world are themselves not proficient in Czech
and have operated under the assumption that the translated versions of his
texts are canonical. This unconscious assumption fails to raise a question that
follows logically from Havels paradox: how do the English translations differ
from the original texts in Czech and how might these differences influence our
1 This citation is taken from an interview in the magazine Kavrna. Havels speeches
and other texts as president are available online, indexed by year, at http://old.hrad.cz/
president/Havel/speeches/index.html. Translations from Czech to English are mine (D.D.)
unless otherwise cited.
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reading and interpretation of them? Answering this question seems like a proper
task for a kind of literary criticism that is grounded in ethnolinguistic analysis.
The question has particular relevance with regard to key concepts or key
words in the texts words that represent core vocabulary in Havels thinking.
While Wierzbicka (1997) uses the term key word in application to a language
or culture,2 it would also seem productive to apply the same strategy to
literature: that is, to search for and analyze words that occupy a key position in
a work or even the entire oeuvre of a given author because they exhibit a
special organizational and semantic potential for that work or for that particular
authors whole system of thought. Given Havels paradox, a focus on Havelian
key words begs the question of the extent to which the meanings of their English
translations are, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, indeed equivalent to the
meanings of the Czech originals.
To be clear, I do not intend to suggest that this is a question of the translations
themselves, and I am certainly not casting doubt on the skills of Paul Wilson,
Havels main English translator, whose work is exemplary. Indeed, as we will see, the
Havelian key word under consideration here Czech svdom has an absolutely
stable translation equivalent into English conscience that the translator is
necessarily obliged to use. Rather, the nature of the question is ethnolinguistic in
Bartmiskis sense of the term in that ethnolinguistics is a discipline that:
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surrounding both the texts and their author. This is quite a different approach
from using works of literature as resources in ethnolinguistic analysis proper,
a valuable methodology in its own right. In the sense, however, that I am
advocating it here, the application of ethnolinguistic analysis to literature may be
considered a hybrid discipline in which a literary figure is investigated with help
from an ethnolinguistic ground (see Danaher, 2007; Gross, 1997; and Vakov,
2005). Ethnolinguistics is, then, a methodological tool that can contribute to the
ongoing literary-critical dialogue.
The result of such an investigation will ideally represent a contribution
to both ethnolinguistics proper as well as literary criticism. Ethnolinguistic
grounding can open up our reading of a text by developing an understanding of
the meaning and semantic potential of key words in it, which has implications
for criticism at the textual level (the aesthetic organization of the text) as
well as at the personal level (the readers response to it).4 Put another way: if
defamiliarization is one of the main functions of literature, then it is helpful to
know the starting point of that process or the familiar meaning that the work
of literature seeks to reshape and reframe; such an awareness helps us arrive at
an appreciation of the literariness of the authors project and allows us to better
visualize our personal relationship to that project. The literary-critical discussion
may benefit from an ethnolinguistic approach because familiarity which comes
into being through the interplay of language and culture is the very thing that
ethnolinguistics seeks to uncover and describe. More specifically and in the
context of the present contribution, I will show that the status of svdom as a
key word in Vclav Havels writing and thinking is essentially a response to the
ethnolinguistic claim that cultural concepts have cognitive reality (Bartmiski,
2009/2012, p. 13).
Key words in Havels writings and thinking are not difficult to identify,5 and
they tend to be key in the broader sense of extending across a range of texts and
time periods. They are words that Havel continually returns to because they act as
metaphysical touchstones in his thinking. Svdom, especially in its relationship
to a kind of responsibility (odpovdnost) that lies at the core of human identity,
is one of those words.6 It is a key word in Havels pre-1989 so-called dissident
essays and forms the central motif of his 1984 essay entitled Politika a svdom
(Politics and Conscience). It is one of a handful of words that comprise the core
vocabulary in his philosophical letters from prison (Letters to Olga) written in
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the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although not represented verbally, conscience
as Havel understands it is arguably a major theme of his plays, which often
prefigure the more rationalized explications of the same themes that we find in
the essays. Finally, conscience is also a touchstone concept in Havels post-1989
presidential speeches and other texts (1989-2003), which Havel conceived of
as a coherent collection with later speeches building upon earlier ones (and,
we might add, the post-1989 texts as a whole building upon Havels pre-1989
writings).
In analyzing Havels reframing of the meaning of svdom and its relationship
to, on the one hand, the conventional Czech understanding of svdom and,
on the other, English conscience, I will first trace the development of Havels
thought and only then provide a comparative ethnolinguistic account to ground
it. Havels approach to svdom will be captured in a sampling of key contexts
from his pre-1989 essays, in the relationship between the voice of Being (hlas
byt) and svdom as developed in Letters to Olga, and in contexts from his post-
1989 texts that reinforce and extend these considerations. In the comparative
ethnolinguistic analysis, I will focus on the etymologies of svdom and
conscience and the bearing that they have on the contemporary semantic value
of each word in Czech and English respectively, on one common metaphorical
conceptualization associated with both words, and finally on scholarly as well
as naive evidence that speaks to each words meaning.
In his 1984 essay Politika a svdom (Politics and conscience), Havel problematizes
the contemporary meaning of the word by arguing that modern man has
privatized conscience by locking it up in our bathrooms and thereby cutting it
off from engagement with the world. Conscience and the responsibility that
ought to come naturally with it is reduced to a personal matter or what Havel
calls a phantom of subjectivity [peluda subjektivity] (1991, p. 255; 1999, 4, p.
425). An echo of the conscience-in-the-bathroom image appears in the essay
Thriller, written about the same time, where Havel imagines modern demons
in business attire who inflict moral ruin on the world as the gods sequester
themselves in the refuge of individual conscience: Dmoni si prost dlaj,
co chtj, zatmco bohov se plae skrvaj v poslednm tulku, kter jim byl
vykzn a kter se nazv lidsk svdom [The demons simply do what they
want while the gods take diffident refuge in the final asylum to which they
have been driven, called human conscience] (1991, p. 288; 1999, 4, p. 510).
A privatized and personalized understanding of conscience a conscience
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seeking refuge from the world is decidedly not what Havel intends to invoke
when he writes dramatically of the need to awaken our human conscience in
the citation that serves as epigraph to this chapter.
Havel is not the only modern intellectual to have raised the question of the
privatization or individualization of conscience. Jedediah Purdy, for example,
has noted that in the American cultural tradition, free conscience came to be
understood as being true to oneself, which risks both failing to look beyond
oneself and thereby falling into a solipsism that is often as banal and derivative
as it is self-impressed (2010, p. 21). In more hard-hitting terms than Havel, Purdy
wonders whether the spirit of conscience that Burke called the dissidence of
dissent has arrived at the end of history as full-blown narcissism (p. 22).
In Politics and Conscience, Havel places the phrase lidsk svdom human
conscience at the very end of the essay as the culminating term in a rhetorical
question that he leaves for the reader to ponder: does not hope for a better
future, Havel asks, lie in making a real political force out of a phenomenon so
ridiculed by the technicians of power the phenomenon of human conscience?
(1991, p. 271; 1999, 4, p. 445). The essay as a whole defamiliarizes our
conventional understanding of conscience and specifically its relationship to
politics. By liberating conscience from the confines of the individual mind by
freeing it from Purdys narcissism Havel presents a possible way out of the
existential crisis that engulfs the modern world.
The groundwork for Havels reframing of conscience in the essays of the mid-
1980s was laid in his 1979-1983 philosophical letters from prison, published in
1983 as Dopisy Olze (Letters to Olga), in which ruminations on svdom comprise a
central theme. Foreshadowing the bathroom image, Havel notes that conscience
as an active force in the world is but a shadow of what it ought to be: it has
become perfunctory, ritualized, a mere formality. The crisis of the modern world
is a crisis of human identity and human responsibility, but Havel insists that an
orientation toward Being which conscience somehow embodies has not
disappeared. After all, who would dare to deny that they have a conscience?
(letter 142). The voice of Being has not died out: we know it summons us [e
ns vol], and as human beings, we cannot pretend not to know what it is calling
us to [k emu ns vol] (letter 142). We have many ways in the modern world of
drowning out that voice ([i]t is just that these days, it is easier to cheat, silence
or lie to that voice [letter 142]), but no matter how badly we behave, there is
always a voice in some corner of our spirit saying that we ought not to have
done so.
Indeed, throughout the letters Havel emphasizes the dialogic nature of
conscience and its inherent relationship to what he terms the voice of Being
[hlas byt]. This frees conscience from its cage of narcissism as conscience is
understood to be not so much an inner, personal voice but rather an internalized
manifestation of the voice of Being itself. In letter 139, Havel claims that while
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the hlas byt informs the voice of conscience, it is greater than that personal
voice. At the same time, the personal voice of conscience manifests the
interconnectedness of two worlds, the world of man (the concrete human here
and now) and the world of the transcendental (of God, of the absolute). These
worlds are one and the same, but our access to Being is necessarily grounded in
the former: Being is one, it is everywhere and behind everything; it is the Being
of everything and the only way to it is the one that leads through this world
of mine and through this I of mine (letter 139). Conscience is internal to the
individual only in the sense that its personalized voice represents a concrete
realization of the transcendent voice of Being: rather than saying that conscience
(Being) is in us, it would be more true to say, in Havels interpretation, that we are
in conscience (Being).
Havels focus on the voice of Being in its relation to conscience is not
surprising given Heideggers influence largely via Jan Patoka, Charter 77s
philosophical godfather on Czechoslovak dissident intellectuals. According
to Hannah Arendt, Heideggers later writings are unusual in the Western
philosophical tradition for Heideggers emphasis on hearing over seeing as a
primary metaphor for thinking: Metaphors drawn from hearing are very rare in
the history of philosophy, the most notable modern exception being the late
writings of Heidegger, where the thinking ego hears the call of Being (Arendt,
1978, p. 111).7 Havel seems to have borrowed Heideggers metaphor of the
soundless voice of Being and elaborated it in his treatment of conscience.
In Letters to Olga, Havel hangs his philosophical argument concerning
conscience on one concrete and rather trivial experience: you are in an empty
night tram and have to decide whether or not to pay the fare for the ride. Your
voice of conscience is activated, and Havel insists that the resulting inner
dialogue takes the form of an exchange between your ego and a partner that
is outside of your ego and therefore not identical with it:
This partner, however, is not standing beside me; I cant see it, nor
can I quit its sight: its eyes and its voice follow me everywhere; I can
neither escape it nor outwit it: it knows everything. Is it my so-called
inner voice, my superego, my conscience? Certainly, if I hear it
calling me to responsibility [slym-li jeho voln k odpovdnosti], I
hear this call within me [slym toto voln v sob], in my mind and my
7 In this connection, Arendt notes the Jewish tradition of a God who is heard but not
seen and compares Hebrew truth, which is heard, versus the Greek vision of the true
(1978, p. 111). Some implications of Arendts statement with regard to the ethnolinguistics
of the senses are discussed in Vakov 2007 (pp. 176ff) and Vakov et al. 2005 (pp. 98,
109, 132).
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One thing seems clear to Havel: that our I, if it has not completely suppressed
its orientation toward Being, has a sense of responsibility purely and simply
because it relates intrinsically to Being as that in which it feels the only coherence,
meaning and the somehow inevitable clarification of everything that exists
because it hears within and around itself the voice in which this Being addresses
and calls out to it [kterm ho toto byt oslovuje a vol] (letter 137).8
Commenting on Havels understanding of the relation between conscience
and responsibility, Radim Palou has written that Havelian responsibility exerts
an ever-present claim upon us and that this claim may be expressed as the
mere voice of conscience (Palou, 1997, p. 171). Havel insists that we rely
on this voice as a moral instinct. It represents something simultaneously inside
and outside of us: Indeed, it is through conscience that a demand to be in
harmony with the worlds moral order is exerted upon us (Palou, 1997, p. 171).
Conscience initiates a dialogue with Being.
Havels reframing suggests a latent dramatic potential in the voice of
conscience and its relation to the voice of Being. The absolute horizon of
meaning the voice of Being that calls out [vol] to us is present in us
not only as an assumption, but also as a source of humanity [zdroj lidskosti]
and a challenge [apel] (letter 95). Conscience is a uniquely human experience
that serves as a challenge or appeal [apel], and this is a characterization that
explicitly references Havels dramatic style, which is associated with the
theater of the appeal [divadlo apelu].9 (This leads us into another argument
that Havel is primarily a playwright because theater of the appeal is the genre
that best expresses his approach to meaning and the key role that conscience
plays in it but one that would be more profitably undertaken in another
venue.)
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By the time Havel becomes president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the
Czech Republic, his conceptual reframing of svdom has been established. The
presidential speeches and other published texts from this time reinforce and
extend this reframing, continuing to insist on the importance of conscience (as
Havel describes it) for confronting the existential and moral crisis that defines
the modern world. A non-exhaustive list of post-1989 contexts that reinforce
and extend his reframing would include the following:
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(4) A final theme reinforced in the post-1989 texts is that conscience is the
hope for the future, a sleeping force whose potential has yet to be tapped:
A conscience slumbers in every human being, something divine. And that
is what we have to put our trust in (Harvard University 1995).
(5) Havel extends his pre-1989 account by granting conscience a key role in
bringing down the socialist regimes in Central Europe (Davos 1992) with
the corollary that an understanding of politics as moral conscience was
what the post-1989 East could offer the West (Warsaw 1999). For Havel,
this was, in fact, the true meaning and lesson of the dissident movement
in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere: Our fundamental experience
has taught us very clearly that only politics that is preceded by conscience
really has any meaning11 (Warsaw 1999).
(7) Havels final post-1989 extension is his suggestion that conscience plays the same
key role in shaping modern democratic political communities that it played in the
dissident era under socialism. Democracy is defined as an unending journey
and a constant appeal [trval vzva] to the human spirit and human conscience
(Prague, 12 March 1996). The task of Europe the meaning of which ought not
11 The English version of this speech online has a serious mistranslation, rendering the
original Czech politika, kter pedchz svdom as politics that precede conscience,
which is the exact opposite of the intended meaning.
12 For a discussion of the dichotomy between explaining and understanding that underlies
much of Havels thinking, see Danaher (2007).
13 A translation of this speech is not available.
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14 Indeed, the adjective lidsk (along with the derived word lidskost) represents another
key word in Havel, especially in his post-1989 texts: in the presidential speeches, Havel
uses this adjective in combination with over one hundred different nouns. Translating
lidsk into English is not as straightfoward as it might seem since its meaning can subtly
blend the meaning of the two separate (although obviously related) English words human
and humane. See Danaher (2010a).
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In comparing Czech svdom with English conscience, we first note that they
are, etymologically speaking, parallel: each has a prefix meaning with (s- and
con- respectively) attached to a suffixed root with the original meaning of
knowledge (-vdom and -science).15 The origin of both words implies a form of
mental deliberation that comes with knowledge of the world, and this brings
them close to Havels extended definition: conscience establishes a relationship
between ourselves (our inner voice) and events in the world at large (the voice of
Being). In other words, conscience responds to questions that are raised by our
experience in and knowledge of the world: what we know should therefore be
closely related to what we do and how we act (Saul, 1997, p. 181).
The etymological identity already exposes, however, a crucial difference
in how the words resonate in each language: the Czech root for knowing
(-vd-) is more etymologically and semantically transparent in a host of other
common words related to knowledge, consciousness, and awareness than the
comparable English root (-sci-), which, if anything, might tend to associate
English conscience with a particular scientific kind of knowledge. A partial list
of Czech words where -vd- is immediately perceivable and where a connection
between svdom and knowing or awareness is therefore strongly felt include
the following: vdt to know (Polish wiedzie), vda scholarship, science (Pol.
wiedza), vdom consciousness (Pol. wiadomo), povdom awareness (Pol.
wiadomo), and uvdomit si to realize, become aware of (Pol. uwiadomi
sobie). By comparison, the -sci- in conscience is conceptually opaque: even the
connection between conscience and consciousness is, at best, only tenuously
felt. Whereas Czech has one root that serves as a semantic locus for many
experiences of knowing, the multiplicity of English roots for knowing fails to
activate a connection between conscience and Being that Havel privileges and
extends in his interpretation.
A crucial concept in the Czech vdom-svdom nexus proves to be the Czech
terms for witnessing: svdek witness (Pol. wiadek) and svdectv testimony (Pol.
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[H]e does not usually do or say much, but his presence on stage and
his being what he is make his environment expose itself in one way
or another He is, then, a kind of key, opening certain always
different vistas onto the world a kind of catalyst, a gleam if you
will, in whose light we view a landscape. And although without it we
should scarcely be able to see anything at all, it is not the gleam that
matters, but the landscape. (quoted in Rocamora, 2004, p. 381)
16 Cf. also the situation in English. The ModE witness comes from OldE witnes knowledge,
and wit can be linked with the Latin videre see or Sanskrit vidati (he) knows, which
contains the same root as the Polish widzie see or wiedzie know.
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run parallel with the narrowing of the meaning of English conscious as outlined
in Humphrey (1999, pp. 117ff). Humphrey notes the etymological structure of
the word and states that the original meaning of the Latin verb conscire (from
which the adjective conscius is derived) was to share knowledge widely. As
time passed, the usage changed, and it shifted to mean sharing knowledge with
some people but not others, sharing it within a small circle and thus being
privy to a secret (p. 118). This knowledge circle narrowed even further until
eventually it included just a single person, the subject who was conscious (p.
118). Humphrey sums up:
Thus, as the English language has evolved (and perhaps as the users
of the language have become more self-concerned and introspective),
the meaning of the word conscious has not only become narrower and
narrower, it has in effect turned around. Rather like the word window,
which has changed in meaning from a hole where the wind come in
to a hole where the wind does not come in, conscious has changed
from having shared knowledge to having intimate knowledge not
shared with anyone except oneself. (p. 119)
The parallel with a privatized conscience (or one that is locked up in the
bathroom) is rather striking.
At the very least, the narrowing of the dialogic aspects of English
conscious its journey from sharing to not sharing is similar to the way in
which the voice of conscience has come to be internalized. Both svdom
and conscience share a conventional metaphorical association with a voice
(Ulin, 1999), but the schema suggested by the voice metaphor is open
to a variety of elaborations. Is it a voice entirely inside ones head an
inner dialogue with oneself or, as Havel advocates, an inner voice that
instantiates a connection with the very voice of Being? In other words, we
conventionally understand conscience as something internal to each of us,
whereas Havel instead argues that we are participants in a dialogue with
Being that is activated by conscience.
This distinction evokes Erich Fromms writing on modern identity and
specifically the opposition that he details between, on the one hand, having or
using and, on the other, being. Fromm wrote: Man became a collector and a user.
More and more, the central experience of his life became I have and I use, and
less and less I am. The means namely, material welfare, production, and the
production of goods thereby became the ends (2005, p. 21). In Fromms terms,
then, a privatized conscience is one that we have and that we use. Opposed to
this is Havels understanding of conscience an understanding grounded in the
knowing-witnessing nexus that is much less a matter of practical utility and
much more a matter of who we fundamentally are.
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17 Both Wierzbickas focus on a rational ethics and the notion that English conscience
in opposition to Czech svdom might be understood more as a mechanism or ability
raise the question of whether reason itself is also a mechanism or ability. It can be and, of
course, has been (or conventionally is?) construed as such, but this may very well also be
a culturally grounded understanding. For a persuasive counter-argument in the cognitive-
linguistics tradition, see Johnson 2007.
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just this sort of evidence and confirms the analysis that has been offered here.18
The English page from the outset defines conscience as an aptitude, faculty,
intuition, or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong;
dialogic aspects of the term are downplayed while its potential link to reason
is highlighted (if questioned). A possible feature of the nave semantics of
conscience that has not been considered here but perhaps ought to be looked
at in the future is its close association to religious or spiritual traditions:
this association is given a special status in the English but not the Czech
Wikipedia entry.
In contrast, the Czech page does not mention right or wrong, and the
focus from the outset is on the dialogic aspects of svdom, which is defined
as vnitn instance, mlenliv voln, kter vede soudy lovka o tom, co sm
zpsobil nebo co se chyst zpsobit [an inner authority, a silent calling that
guides a persons judgments about what he or she has done or intends to do].
Beyond the dialogic aspects, there is an emphasis on svdom as a primarily
procedural ability (schopnost) as sebereflexe, tj. schopnost uvaovat o sob
samm, podvat se na sebe jinma oima ne je pohled vlastnho zjmu a
prosazovn [self-reflection, ie, the ability to contemplate ones own self, to look
at oneself through eyes other than ones concerned with ones own interests
and with self-promotion] and this is not privileged in the English entry. In
the procedural part of the definition we also find a suggestion that svdom
inherently involves transcending self-interest whereas in the English entry on
conscience, this semantic aspect is not foregrounded in any way other than
stating that conscience is associated with moral evaluations (of right and
wrong).
The Czech page also has a section devoted to an etymological breakdown
of the word svdom and in which the vdom svdom relationship is made
explicit. This relationship is further underlined by the mention of fixed phrases
in Czech that contain both words: for example, the oath uttered when assuming
an important office that states that the person promises to carry out the duties
podle nejlepho vdom a svdom (literally, according to the best of ones
consciousness and conscience). English does not have an equivalent.
The Wikipedia comparison serves to highlight the semantic differences between
svdom and conscience that we have previously noted. Some of these differences
are stark while others are more a matter of nuance or emphasis. Considered
together, they demonstrate that the conventional meaning of svdom which is
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Havels conceptual ground, his starting point already contains the seeds that will
grow into Havels defamiliarizing semantic extension: conscience as, potentially,
a moral and political force to be reckoned with in the modern world.19 In contrast
to the meaning of svdom, the entrenched meaning of English conscience is
decidedly less amenable to the kind of aesthetic extension that Havel has in
mind: the conventional understanding of conscience is, in fact, much closer to the
privatized, mechanistic conceptualization that Havel sets out to undermine.
4. Conclusion
In other words, the semantics of svdom provides more fertile ground for Havels
argument than does the semantics of conscience: the English reader of Havel is
obliged to make a greater leap of faith in following the line of Havels thinking
because conscience is not, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, a semantic
equivalent for svdom. There is a hint of a transcendent breeze in svdom that
conscience lacks, and this seems to be true for a range of Havelian key words in
comparison with their translations into English (Danaher, 2010b). Havels paradox
that he is a Czech writer who has gained world-wide influence as an intellectual
through translations of his texts is a phenomenon that warrants consideration,
and ethnolinguistics can provide a methodology to ground the investigation.
In conducting comparative ethnolinguistic research, Bartmiski has noted that
comparing concepts related to spiritual culture presents the greatest challenge:
19 In light of Havels argument, should conscience be added to the list of value terms
that Bartmiski (2009/2012, p. 220) suggests be ethnolinguistically studied because they
have a direct bearing on sociopolitical and ethical questions? If Havel is to be taken at his
word, then discrepancies in how we understand the term and how it functions in both
our individual lives and the life of society may well lie at the heart of the success or
failure of politics in the modern world.
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20 Note the recent best-selling epic novel by Jonathan Franzen (2010) entitled Freedom:
the novel itself is a narrative reframing of the meaning of this key cultural term in the
American context.
21 For supporting my investigations of key words in Havels writings, I am grateful
to Christopher Ott, Irena Vakov, Daniel Vojtch, and to students in my monograph
course on Havel at the University of Wisconsin (http://web.mac.com/pes/havel/). Sincere
appreciation is extended to the Kruh ptel eskho jazyka affiliated with Charles
University in Prague for inviting me to present on svdom and other words in November
2010. Many thanks also to Adam Gaz, Megan Munroe, Ruth Ann Stodola, and Jos Vergara
for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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References
Arendt, Hannah. (1978). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Danaher, David S. (2002). The semantics of pity and alost in a literary context.
Glossos, 3. [http://seelrc.org/glossos/issues/3/; last accessed Feb 19, 2013]
Danaher, David S. (2003b.) Conceptual metaphors for the domains TRUTH and
FALSEHOOD in Russian and the Image of the Black Sack in Tolstois The Death of
Ivan Ilich. In Robert A. Maguire & Alan Timberlake (Eds.), American Contributions
to the 13th International Congress of Slavists (Volume 2: Literature) (pp. 61-75).
Bloomington: Slavica.
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Danaher, David S. (2010b). Translating Havel: three key words. Slovo a slovesnost,
71, 250-259.
Fish, Stanley. (2009). Conscience vs. conscience. New York Times, April 12, 2009.
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/conscience-vs-conscience/ [last
accessed Feb 17, 2013]
Franzen, Jonathan. (2010). Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Havel, Vclav. (1983b). Letters to Olga. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Henry Holt.
Havel, Vclav. (1991). Open Letters. Trans. Paul Wilson et al. New York: Knopf.
Humphrey, Nicholas. (1999). A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of
Consciousness. New York: Copernicus.
Kundera, Milan. (1988). The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove Press.
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Saul, John Ralston. (1997). The Unconscious Civilization. New York: The Free Press.
Rocamora, Carol. (2004). Acts of Courage: Vclav Havels Life in the Theater.
Hanover: Smith & Kraus.
Ulin, Oldich. (1999). Hlas svdom a mluvn akty. Prace filologiczne, 44, 529-
533.
Vakov, Irena. (2010). Bute v pohod! (Pohoda jako esk klov slovo). In
Irena Vakov & Jasa Pacovsk (Eds.), Obraz lovka vjazyce (pp. 31-57). Prague:
Charles University Philosophical Faculty.
Vakov, Irena, Nebesk, Iva, malov, Lucie Saicov, and ldrov, Jasa. 2005.
Co na srdci, to na jazyku. Praha: Karolinum.
Wierzbicka, Anna. (2006). English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
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Chapter 6
Jos Vergara
University of Madison-Wisconsin, USA
1. Introduction
As a master of the alogical and nonsensical, Daniil Kharms forces language into
the most unusual of combinations. From his nonsensical poetry and childrens
literature to the short Incidents and other prose, he intentionally brings together
situations, words, and meanings in odd compositional arrangements. Through
this deconstructive, seemingly anarchic method he activates certain linguistic
functions and allows his readers to see beyond the logical world and into what
he considered the world of true meanings (Kharms & Vvendensky, 1997, pp.
248-250) and the purity of order (Kharms, 2001, p. 79-80). The attainment
of this higher order comes from a radical rethinking of literature and language
as such. For Kharms writing is a performance and reading an event that actively
implicates his audience. If we typically use language to construct and to ground
ourselves within reality, then Kharms language attempts to reverse such a
process and reveal the inconsistencies of existence by releasing words from
their traditional meaning in this cognitive space. What we see, instead, are the
new and explosive meanings created by those juxtapositions. The reader is able
to experience the world anew due to Kharms awareness of cognitive play.
Adopting a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach can help elucidate exactly
how and why Kharms artistic methods manage to accomplish these goals.
Though the language of his Incidents cycle may be straightforward, the intricate
manner in which Kharms constructed the texts speaks to a desire to invert
expectations and experience on many levels. Neil Carrick has defined Kharms
prose as a collision with a familiar, hackneyed narrative sequence (Carrick,
1995, p. 708), that is archetypal narratives and literary utterances. Kharms relies
on this pre-text (a prototype), understood by the reader on some level, to invert
1 I would like to thank David Danaher, Karen Evans-Romaine, and Jenny Jalack for their
careful readings of this chapter in its various stage of development.
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the art of writing at large. I argue that his generic and stylistic parodies are in turn
supplemented by the parodic treatment of linguistic regularities. In short, an
awareness of the cognitive and linguistic tricks that Kharms uses will illuminate
the literariness of his prose. These techniques include blending concepts and
construals,2 reversing prototypical reading processes, and layering of metaphor
and metonymy. Such an analysis provides further insights into the nature of the
authors choices in language and how these impact readers intake of the text.
Jerzy Bartmiskis approach to ethnolinguistic analysis has been a vital catalyst
in the development of these ideas. Bartmiski has proposed that culture exists
in language and constitutes its inalienable component (Bartmiski, 2009/2012,
p. 11). The manner in which we comprehend both texts (cultural artifacts) and the
world is thus always linked to the language we use. Moreover, Bartmiski assigns
the following elements to the style of a text: the worldview projected in a given
style, the ontological status of that worldview, the rationality and communicative
intentions it assumes (p. 14). Each statement, whether written or spoken, then
presupposes a particular conceptualization of reality. Behind this outlook lie the
cognitive (or ethnolinguistic) values found inherently in the words one uses.
Using Blue Notebook 10 (Golubaya tetrad 10) as a primary case study,
I will explore the connections between Kharms prose and the cognitive and
ethnolinguistic processes at work in order to describe how Kharms manipulates
construals for precise aesthetic effect. The cognitive-semantic relationship
between the concepts BE and HAVE in Russian plays a most prominent role
throughout Kharms Incidents cycle, a collection of thirty texts with little in
common other than a predilection for senseless violence, unexpected turns of
action, and the disorientating jerk of an unresolved ending. As such, I will begin
with a short overview of the linguistic details concerning these two concepts
EXISTENCE (BEING) and POSSESSION (HAVING) in relation to Kharms text. My
focus will fall on apparently minute details when discussing this connection to
Kharms Blue Notebook 10 more closely, but linguistic analysis reveals exactly
why these elements make the text so particularly effective and rich in meaning.
After detailing Kharms use of BE/HAVE, I will consider additional related forms of
cognitive play in Blue Notebook 10: the scale of subject definiteness as well
as modes of sentence scanning. These considerations will lead naturally to a brief
examination of Kharms cognitive play in other stories from the same cycle. Finally,
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MAKE/DO
existence BE (UNMAKE)
BECOME
GIVE, TAKE TAKE, GIVE
possession HAVE
GET LOSE
These conceptual items, not always expressed by verbs, make up the notions
most likely to become new expressions of BE and HAVE, as well as the semantic ideas
most likely to be grammaticalized as auxiliary verbs (Clancy, 2001, p. 5). Kharms
manipulation of construals is rooted in these cognitive-semantic categories, and I
will show how his untraditional approach to writing partly gains its effect from an
awareness of cognitive linguistic play at the syntactic and lexical levels. Clancys
nexus will serve as the primary analytical tool toward this understanding.
Clancy demonstrates the correlation between the two concepts (see
Figure 6.1).3 Among the various Slavic languages, Russian features the most
3 Clancys model might benefit from reworking in terms of Fauconnier and Turners (2003)
theory of conceptual blending, but this falls outside the scope of the present contribution.
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location/ presence/
position absence location availability
A historical analysis of the shift from BE to HAVE for all languages shows that
the roots of this blended prototype model lie in metonymy and metaphor, the
former a particularly critical device in Kharms works. An expression for EXISTENCE
can appear by metonymy, reinterpreted as metaphor, from an expression for
RHEMATIC POSSESSION (Koch, 1999, p. 297). Kharms utilizes such a metonymic
and metaphoric link throughout Blue Notebook 10 with reference to body
parts and BEING; this cognitive play elevates, if subtly and at the level of the
individual words, the meaning of the whole text and endows it with greater
philosophical import. It moves POSSESSION into the sphere of EXISTENCE. These
are some of the linguistic nuances that Kharms Incidents frequently aestheticize.
4 A graphic representation of all possible meanings associated with a term or concept, e.g.
BE or HAVE.
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this well-known text in January 1937 as part of the Blue Notebook (Golubaya
tetrad) and later selected it for inclusion in the Incidents (Sluchai) cycle of 1939.
It should be noted that Kharms so-called mature works, as opposed to his
childrens literature, were for the most part not published in Russia until the
advent of glasnost. His drafts and notebooks, which were preserved by family
and friends after his arrest in 1941 remain in varying degrees of (dis)order,
but Kharms himself collated the thirty stories and drew up a title page for a
theoretical future publication.5 The two versions of the text differ in very few
ways, perhaps even by just two words. I will first discuss the general nature of
the cognitive play in Blue Notebook 10, then move on to the significance of
changes between the two versions of the text in conjunction with the BE/HAVE
nexus. Finally, I will take up the issue of other related forms of cognitive play
that Kharms deploys in his story, including shifts in definiteness and inverted
sentence scanning. All of this cognitive play, as will become evident, is linked to
the BE/HAVE nexus.
Only a few lines long, Blue Notebook 10 stands among the shortest and
certainly most famous of Kharms works:
, .
, .
, . .
. ,
, ,
. ! , .
. (Kharms, 1997, p. 330)
There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didnt have
hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily.
He couldnt talk because he had no mouth. He didnt have a nose either.
He didnt even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back,
no spine, and he didnt have any insides at all. There was nothing! So,
we dont even know who were talking about.
Wed better not talk about him anymore. (Kharms, 2007, p. 45)
It is a deceptively brief story in which a man exists, and then he does not.
When this Incident is examined in conjunction with Clancys BE/HAVE nexus,
5 Such an act, given the unlikelihood of Kharms ever being able to publish his stories
under the Stalin regime, signifies both his desire to have these stories read in a particular
order and the implicit existence of a certain unity to the cycle as a whole.
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however, key nuances can be observed. Kharms begins with the subject: the
redheaded man. At the opening of the text the man is complete. He exists, and
he possesses certain traits. Kharms has created life through writing. With a few
calculated words and several missing limbs, though, everything shifts. Kharms,
not without a certain subtle bravado, moves from Clancys BECOME to BE to
(UNMAKE) in a single sentence. Alternatively, because the BE/HAVE nexus links
together conflated concepts expressed by diverse constructions, one could read
this as CREATE-EXIST-DESTROY. The lexical expressions of these concepts are
limited within the text to the byl and the u nego constructions, but the progression
is clear. Kharms moves toward what Matvei Yankelevich calls annihilation and
oblivion (Yankelevich, 2009, p. 32). He seems to recognize the blend between BE
and HAVE and ingeniously uses it to his advantage. Most literally, the redheaded
mans body parts are not existing thus the metonymic line is drawn between
BE and HAVE. From a readers perspective, the two concepts begin to merge and
the absence of a body part slides from simple POSSESSION into the realm of
existentialism and the conceptualization of BE.
As Clancy has claimed, the negation of fundamental BEING is simply not
expressed lexically and is not a part of our everyday experience of living and
interacting with the world (Clancy, 2001, p. 4). He recognizes that being unable
to fill the UNBECOMING category slot for existence feels rather comforting.
This in itself is a considerably telling comment, as what Kharms accomplishes
with his art can be, in fact, exhilaratingly terrifying. A cognitive approach to the
absurdist writer allows us to visualize the gap between the world of logic and
Kharms space of pure order wherein existence is nullified and logic fails to
cohere. Where most words fall short, Kharms finds a lexical and syntactic manner
in which to express this concept (UNMAKE) that Clancy finds difficult to name
precisely the seemingly contradictory opposite of BEING, of EXISTENCE, of is.
The careful reader witnesses the illusory and undefined presence of the mans
NON-EXISTENCE through Kharms artistic gesture.
The exact differences between the two versions of Blue Notebook 10
remain somewhat unclear due to the inconsistency of published collections.
Nonetheless, one thing is certain given the variants and their implications:
Kharms was acutely aware of the different construals offered by choices in
diction. What I propose below is based on the following distinction:
(1) There lived a redheaded man (1b) There was a readheaded man
(2) He didnt have anything. (2b) There was nothing!
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In regard to the original, the two major differences between Kharms drafts
illustrate the BE/HAVE blend as concerns the writers own intentions, as far as
one may say so, rather well. The change from (1) to (1b) or (2) to (2b) modifies the
cognitive representation drastically and reveals that cognitive blending was part
of Kharms plan in editing the text. Cognitive Grammar posits that profiling, the
process by which an expressions specific focus of attention is derived from
its base, is a part of our cognitive organizing of the world and, thus, the way we
express what we conceptualize and experience through language (Langacker,
2008, p. 66). Bartmiski likewise stresses the subjective nature of profiling: The
factors which drive profiling are connected with [] subject-oriented categories:
someones rationality, someones knowledge of the world, someones system
of values and point of view (Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 89). He goes on to say
that not only does a human organizing figure remain at the center of profiling,
but that an entire complex of culturally established elements takes part as
well. In other words, an author imbues a text with his or her own ideas while
simultaneously drawing upon the traditions (linguistic, cultural, syntactic even)
that exist in a language. This allows for further deconstruction of expectations,
as is the case in Kharms text.
When choosing this draft for the Incidents, Kharms placed the redheaded man
into a different participatory role a role in which he lacks any control whatsoever
and is subject to the gradual amputation of his body parts. The reader sees this
figure, but he is more the textual shell of a man. Craig Hamilton notes that as
writers we can vary the focus of our utterance by putting different participants
in different roles (Hamilton, 2003, p. 4). Precisely so, Peter Stockwell adds,
choosing a patient as the subject (such as in a passive) is a marked expression
that requires some special explanatory motivation: defamiliarisation, or evading
active responsibility, or encoding secrecy (Stockwell, 2002, p. 61). In the case of
Blue Notebook 10, defamiliarization is likely the aim. As a rule, the agent of
a standard statement or utterance performs the action, while the patient is the
receiver of said action. In the second version of Blue Notebook 10, the man
is no longer the agent, but the patient and, as such, events happen to him, rather
than because of him (Hamilton, 2003, p. 58). He exists in vague terms (There
was), rather than more concretely and actively (There lived). In this story and
other Incidents, these techniques a manipulation of the readers expectations
in regard to content, tone and form (Nakhimovsky, 1982, p. 70) defamiliarize
logical presumptions about language and the standard experience of reading.
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6 Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Russian are my own, J.V.
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the man disappears, and as Carrick suggests, the redheaded man is greater than
the sum and the separation of all his parts (Carrick, 1994, p. 642). By removing
the pieces from the entirety, Kharms stakes his claim in an absurd world, these
parts and individual fragments are what truly matter.7
The depth of readers construal of Kharms text will vary widely depending
on the sentence variant at hand. It appears that in preparing this Incident for
a theoretical publication, the author hoped to change the readers construal
into one that more fully acknowledges the existential nature of BE/HAVE,
a truly philosophical matter. This can be said with a high degree of certainty.
In the margins of the manuscript to Blue Notebook 10, Kharms scribbled
against Kant (1997, p. 474). Hilary Fink notes that Kharms, in line with the
general modernist spirit of anti-Kantianism, proclaimed that the true nature
of the wor(l)d may only be grasped through the breakdown of strictly rational
modes of apprehension, the abandonment of causality, the birth of the absurd
(Fink, 1998, p. 527). The latter version of Blue Notebook 10 is an enhanced
reflection of this deconstructionist approach to writing and points to this
polemic with its atypical form and absurdist content. Thanks to linguistic details,
Blue Notebook 10 takes on even more weighted meaning as Kharms makes
use of the blended BE/HAVE prototypes. Moreover, it is through such techniques
that, as Graham Roberts argues, Kharms forces us as readers to engage actively
with the text, and to re-examine the assumptions which we make in reading
(Roberts, 1997, p. 97). Roberts suggests that Kharms wrote texts that challenged
the conception of the writer as the authoritative figure of a text. In particular,
he ascribes to this the content and alogical nature of their writings. I would
add that central linguistic features, like those involving the BE/HAVE nexus that
implicates the reader and forces him/her to actively co-create the meaning of
the text, play a large role as well.
7 It is these parts that interested Kharms, who saw in the proposition of a world that is
whole, a denial of the essential role played by its parts (Fink, 1998, p. 530).
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8 The notions of sequential and summary scanning, as used by Stockwell, come from
Langackers model of Cognitive Grammar:
Sequential scanning is the mode of processing we employ when watching a motion
picture or observing a ball as it flies through the air. The successive states of the
conceived event are activated serially and more or less instantaneously, so that the
activation of one state begins to decline as that of its successor is initiated... On the
other hand, summary scanning is what we employ in mentally reconstructing the
trajectory a ball has followed... The component states are activated successively but
cumulatively (i.e. once activated they remain active throughout), so that eventually they
are all coactivated as a simultaneously accessible whole. (Langacker, 1991, p. 22)
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this single verb, Kharms makes a major cognitive move. The verb was serves
to accentuate the inverted nature of the scanning that takes place immediately
after when the mans body parts are gradually stripped away. It is once again
the connections between BE and HAVE in Kharms text that accentuate and even
allow for such a development.
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, , :
.
, , ,
(Kharms, 1997, pp. 332-333)
The action repeats itself several times before Semyon Semyonovich doesnt
want to believe in this appearance and considers it an optical illusion. Logically
it should be the case that the man in the tree either is there or is not. And
yet Kharms challenges this idea, much like he does in Blue Notebook 10.
Kobrinskii has described how Kharms breaks the law of the excluded middle
by introducing the new condition to be redheaded arbitrarily.9 Applying the
same sort of analysis to An Optical Illusion, we see that the construction is very
similar: the existence (is sitting) of the muzhik achieves a third option in which
a spectators choice controls reality.
Here, Kharms intuitively connects sits (sidit) and no one is sitting (nikto ne
sidit) to BE and, therefore, EXISTENCE. Sitting and not sitting become synonymous
with existence and non-existence. By considering the fist-waving muzhik an
optical illusion, Semyon Semyonovich disrupts a traditional understanding of
the world. The man in the tree occupies the same linguistic and metaphysical
space as the redheaded man. This, in fact, may be what Kharms himself called the
purity of order, a space devoid of logic.10 Again, the Russian language provides
him with the means at least in part to express this philosophical idea.
Examining the text more broadly, we see that Kharms grants Semyon
Semyonovich the power of the writer. In terms of participatory roles, the
protagonist becomes an agent in control of the patient (the muzhik) (Hamilton,
2003, p. 58). Hence, Kharms arrives at a meta-commentary on the nature of fiction
9 For example, in logic there exists the law of the excluded middle. Transferring over this
law to the situation depicted by Kharms in Blue Notebook 10, it can be said that there is
the state to be redheaded and there is the state to not be redheaded. Kharms transforms
the two-valued logic into three-valued, introducing the new state to be redheaded
arbitrarily [by convention]. (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 417)
10 Thus arises that which can be named in Kharms own words the purity of order
[chistota poryadka]. That is, order which does not depend on any outside conditions or
connections. (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 429)
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11 On a further level, we can read this text as commentary of the self-deceptive power
of logic and the universal human inability to completely comprehend ones own self and
motivations.
12 Kharms himself noted the ambiguity of his language on the manuscript (Kharms, 1997,
p. 480).
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The mans hands might be forced to move by life and not necessarily by an active
desire to live. Death, though, the narrator says, is naturallyvictorious as if it is
a forgone conclusion.
Such anthropomorphizing of LIFE and DEATH is not unique. In fact, it is
prototypical: LIFE and DEATH as two forces locked in relentless battle. Death
takes lives; life favors someone. The multiple cognitive layers Kharms develops
in The Trunk, however, are exceptional: BE/HAVE blending, container metaphor,
agent/patient roles. Kharms deftly places everything, from the existence of the
air the man breathes (or does not) to the metaphysical trunk, into question by
constantly shifting primary agency among the three parties involved. Moreover,
humans as agents typically control ideas, not the other way around. The man
only seems to understand what has occurred. This verb once again connects
with Clancys nexus as another expression of BE things seem to be, seem to
exist. The reality of what truly transpires within the trunk remains unknown
because there is no solid truth that one may grasp. The man possesses only
fallible understanding (kazhetsya), and the trunk creates another instance of the
break from the logical world, realized through Kharms curious language.
13 A Czech translation offers the same HAVE-oriented results: Byl jednou jeden zrzav
lovk, kter neml oi ani ui Neml prost vbec nic! (Charms, 1994, p. 9).
14 This problem is also rampant in Russian editions of the story, which tend to vary widely
regardless of which version (Golubaya tetrad or Sluchai) is intended for publication.
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title, Sluchai (), has been problematic; English renderings include: Events,
Incidences, Incidents, and Happenings. One can only imagine that Kharms would
have been pleased to see such a horde of meaning springing from a single word.
In the English translations there is a consistent preference for expressions of
HAVE (He had no X, he had no Y), and it seems fairly obvious that this would
be the case. English, unlike Russian, lacks a way to concisely state what the
latter suggests in a sentence such as, U nego nebylo ruk. The ambiguity and
complicated subtexts are quite literally lost in translation. The Russian can be
interpreted as the man possessed no hands, there were no hands existing (near
him), or even all at once. The task of the English translator, then, is to determine
which meaning and thus construal is most vital to preserving the intent of the
text, while maintaining the brevity and minimalism of Kharms language.
This highly complex linguistic task, of course, aligns with Bartmiskis
understanding of the linguistic worldview as a language-entrenched
interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements
about the world, people, things or events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection
(Bartmiski, 2009/2012, p. 23). The language Kharms uses in his texts, particularly
Blue Notebook 10, shows how both writer and reader conceptualize reality
through language. A single difference in diction can contribute to a major
semantic shift. In this way, Bartmiski notes how the subject acts as the
prime experiencing, conceptualising and coding authority (p. 222). Kharms
then pushes his reader in a certain direction with his linguistic choices, and the
cognitive processes at work help disclose the larger thematic issues he wishes
to explore. Using a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach allows us to see how
Kharms language in fact acts less like a mirror and proclaims its own system
of devices and referents. It brings together culturally relevant expectations
(literary, linguistic, and so on) precisely in order to disrupt and challenge them,
and it provides both writer and reader with the power of interpretation.
9. Conclusion
Vladimir Nabokov said that readers should feel good literature as an
indescribable tingle in the spine. He proposes reading as not entirely a cognitive
task based in brain function, but one that has a more physical, tangible effect
the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure
art (Nabokov, 1980, p. 65). But the good reader can also sense great literature
elsewhere. Kharms, I believe, is felt in the gut. His prose produces the same
feeling on the reader as the shift in inertia does on the rider of a roller coaster.
Bartmiski champions the subject, who is experienced empirically, as central
to cognitive ethnolinguistics and as long ignored by structural linguistics. This,
in fact, lies at the heart of the present analysis. Kharms language falls into a
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