Jill Kitson: Blah blah. Da Da. Zaum. Welcome to Lingua Franca. This week:

Peter Conrad on the early 20th-century crisis of confidence in language.

In his book 'Modern Times Modern Places', on the revolutions in ideas and values that have characterised modernity, Peter Conrad has a chapter called 'Zaum' on the loss of meaning of words, the loss of faith in language that, even before the First World War, overtook many artists, writers and composers.

Zaum was a word the Russian Futurists made up in 1912, to stand for the arbitrary neologisms, unintelligible slogans and fragmented phonemes they liked to use. If it means anything at all, says Conrad, zaum means that words have no necessary, inherent meaning.

The Russian futurists' contempt for language was shared by the artists and
writers of the Dada movement in Paris, 'dada' being a baby babble sound
chosen, like 'zaum', for its absurdity.

Marcel Duchamp, a leading Dadaist, sought a 'stripping bare of language'; an even purer response, says Conrad, was to dispense with language altogether.

So what produced this early 20th-century assault on language? I asked Peter Conrad.

Peter Conrad: Well it's another consequence of the assassination of the
Christian God, because he's the one who, in the Scriptures, is referred to as  the Logos, he is the Word, the Word which appears in the Gospel of St John and is coterminous with God and with light and reason and so on in the universe. And the hierarchy of creation which the Christian God authorised decreed that men, for instance, were well above the animals because they could speak rationally, whereas the animals could just squawk or miaou or woof or bark or whatever animals do. I mean they were condemned to inarticulacy.

So our self-esteem, our self-congratulation as a species depends on our view that this language that's drivelling out of our mouths, that this gives us some special moral and spiritual credential. And it was an extraordinary thing for men suddenly to be told that they weren't defining themselves as rational creatures by speaking, because speech itself was completely irrational. It all starts very interestingly at the end of the 19th-century with nonsense verse, you know, the seditious experiments of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll in just making languages up, and making up words which mean nothing. For me, there's something absolutely mesmeric about this. I mean the beginning of the Jabberwocky poem of Lewis Carroll for instance:

          'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

          Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...

Now I mean, it's enchanting poetry, and yet it means nothing. And what in a way this did was to license people to speak irrationally and to be irrational. One of the defining sounds of modernity, for instance, is not the sound of someone talking rationally, but an inarticulate sound, a cry, or a scream. I mean one of the great defining moments in the history of modern art is that painting of Edvard Munch which is called 'The Scream', the scream is silent, which is probably a good thing, because it would be a terrifying sound. It's a scream emitted ...not only the figure of this man with his mouth open as he stands on a bridge, but the scream rounds through all of nature. I remember the livid sky and the turbulent water behind the bridge. And the sound... which we now think of as sort of primal scream, a scream which liberates instinct. You have a lot in modernism.

Antonin Artaud, who's the theorist of the Theatre of Cruelty in the 1920s, complained that French actors, with their classical training, were completely useless because their throats had been constricted by classical elocution and by learning speeches of Racine and Corneille and so on, and he said that what they should really learn to do was to open their throats and just emit a screech. And I suppose this all leads up to the terrifying noise which is emitted by our society; I mean the amplified screaming at pop concerts and so on.

Jill Kitson: But not just the scream were they talking about back at the
beginning of the century, I mean there were the Dada movement, which was the sound made by a baby as it's learning to speak. So not all of it is the release of the primitive, it's just simply nonsense, as you were saying with the --

Peter Conrad: Although for these people I suppose the child was a kind of
primitive who was no longer expected to grow up and mature and become
rational and become civilised. I mean the regressive argument was that this process of maturation and education and learning rational speech and so on was a series of losses, not a series of gains. And Joyce begins his 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' with a couple of pages of just, you know, gurgly, gooey baby talk, describing the world as seen by an infant from its crib, and there was of course Dada. I mean the interest was just in the noises that the body produces. Because after all, you know, the sounds that we make do not exclusively come out of the mouth, but in 'Ulysses' Joyce describes, or has Molly Bloom describe, a particular fart which she's emitted, which she's very proud of, because she, being Irish and being musical of course, as Joyce was, and she has a connoisseur's attitude to this, and she's very, very proud of this particular bit of broken wind because she says to herself that she controlled it and manipulated it exactly like an Italian singer controlling breath to produce a high note, or an aria. And there were Dadaists whose performance consisted of farting because they wanted to demonstrate that there were other apertures which produced noise.

Jill Kitson: Well then of course there was someone like Hemingway, who in 'A Farewell to Arms' reveals what must have been true for many people, and certainly true, say, in Czechoslovakia where someone like Havel said so many of the words that we use as propaganda to rouse people, either for the First World War, or under the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, had completely lost their meaning, and had to be actually just thrown out of the lexicon.

Peter Conrad: Yes, you have to - there's a kind of linguistic hygiene, like
ethnic cleansing in a way, which works for ill and also for good. I mean Paul Celan, the poet who survived the death camps and then killed himself in Paris during the '60s or '70s, I don't remember when, thought it obscene even to refer to the Holocaust and could only speak of it as being 'that which happened', because any of the names that you applied to it, like for instance, the word 'holocaust', were obscene, because they were euphemistic. I mean a holocaust is a burnt offering, it's something in a religious ceremonial; were those corpses thrown on incinerator pyres in the death camps, were they burnt offerings? Who were they being offered to? I mean the metaphor in a way, stinks. One of the most interesting things about the Third Reich is these language rules, which the Nazis invented to make sure that they never actually spoke about what it was that they were doing. It was extremely difficult to convict any of them at the Nuremburg trials for complicity in the extermination program, because none of them ever said out loud, or even in a document that they were exterminating millions of Jews. I mean they had a series of elaborate euphemisms for this.

Jill Kitson: And of course the Americans developed similar euphemisms in
Vietnam.

Peter Conrad: Oh, of course, yes, yes.

Jill Kitson: But it's very interesting, because it does show that it is a way of
blocking even in your own mind, an understanding or a knowledge of what
you are doing.

Peter Conrad: Yes, and it teaches us a kind of atheism about words
themselves, because what we realise is that the purpose of a word is not to define a thing, or name a thing, or make a thing knowable, the purpose of  the word is actually to obscure the thing, to camouflage it or conceal it, or to tell a lie about it. Because this was the point that Saussure made in his
Course of General Linguistics, which was published by his students after his
death in the 1920s, and which eventually sponsored structuralism, and
deconscruction and all of these other dreadful academic diseases of the end of the 20th century. But forgetting that, the really important point that
Saussure made was that a word is just a sign, and the sign does not
correspond to the thing that it signifies.

The whole process of language learning involves departing from reality and choosing to replace the reality with a fiction. I well remember the sort of thing we had to do at primary school, where they first of all show you a picture of a cat and then they show you this hieroglyph next to it, with these three looped things, a C, an A, a T you're told that they are, and you have to make this enormous mental leap which is the beginning of mental maturation, from the thing, to the sign for the thing. And when you've managed to wean yourself from the cat itself, as a furry reality and replace it with the symbolic twiddles, you know, then you're set up in business as a rational being. But what? You can read books and stuff, but what Saussure is pointing out is that the animal, the cat, is not C-A-T, it's got nothing to do with C-A-T, so we've just agreed to believe in a lie.

Jill Kitson: And of course you show that Spengler, in 'The Decline of the West' made the same leap between paper money and its lack of value unless you just accept it, and language. So there was this notion of words as currency and paper money as currency...

Peter Conrad: And just as the currency during the German inflation was not worth the paper that it was printed on, and you needed a truckload of marks in order to buy a cup of coffee, but before you had finished drinking the coffee, you needed an extra truckload because the coffee had doubled in price just in the two minutes that it took you to drink it. The money was not worth the paper that it was printed on, but these people were saying that words in books were not worth the paper that they were printed on either. I mean it's a tremendous sign of the whole sort of treason of the clerks, which modernism is all about. Because it wasn't only the Nazis who burned books. I mean this lack of faith in language is one of the great modern epiphanies.

When (Hugo von) Hofmannstal wrote this extraordinary short essay, 'A Letter to Lord Chandos' - supposedly written by an Elizabethan nobleman who was writing to his Patron to explain why he had given up the composition of poetry, and this was obliquely autobiographical because Hofmanstal at the point that he wrote the 'Letter to Lord Chandos' had also given up the composition of poetry - and in it, Chandos says 'I'm sorry, I cannot go on writing poetry because my hand writes these words on the piece of paper and then I look at them, and I think "What is this? There is nothing there, I mean this is just a fly speck on a piece of paper". And it was a desolating agnostic or atheistic recognition, because what follows from it of course, is that if the words on the page are nothing, then the word on the page which names you, and which endows you with identity, is also nothing. So you are nothing.

So much of our concerns still at the end of the 20th century when we are besieged by this screaming, noisy, tabloid journalism, and by vulgarised language of all kinds, we are so desperate to try and cleans and redeem and salvage language, but it's almost as if it's too late. These people at the
beginning of the 20th century sold the pass on that one, and decided that we were better off without this language, which was the badge, supposedly, of our superiority to the other creatures.

Speaking of cats, there's a wonderful moment at the end of Tristes Tropiques, one of my favourite books of the 20th century, one of the great books of the century, an anthropological study by Claude Levi- Strauss, which is really about whether men do have any kind of superiority in nature, and he says at the end of this traversal of the earth (Gosh, I wish I could remember it well enough to quote it) that we are so burdened now with a sense of guilt about what we've done to nature, and how do we possibly discharge this, how can we make amends? And he says well, perhaps the best that you can do is to look for the glance of recognition .. heavy with mistrust, but also perhaps with commiseration .. which you might sometimes share when looking into the eyes of your cat. And it's really interesting, this is the last word of this great humanist book. I mean it's a shocking thing that the cat which for Levi Strauss now is the superior species, despite the fact that it can only miaou or purr, and can't produce literature or anything like that, I mean it's looking back at you, indifferently at best, or contemptuously at worst.

Jill Kitson: Peter Conrad. His book, 'Modern Times Modern Places' is     published by Thames & Hudson.

And that's all for this week's Lingua Franca.
 

© 1998 Australian Broadcasting Corporation