A language of paradise.
After calling Lamartine a stork and Jean-Jacques Rousseau a big soft-head, Lautréamont is no longer satisfied, like most respectable people in the last hundred years, to debate whether he will be classic or romantic. He tries frankly to see if one can speak:
Youth listens to the advice of old age. It has an unlimited confidence in itself.
If Cleopatra's morals had been less short, the face of the earth would be changed; her nose would not on that account have become longer.
Man is an oak. Nature has none sturdier. The universe should not arm to defend it. A drop of water does not suffice for its preservation.
And so on. This touching game is not new, nor is it inoffensive for that reason: it implies exactly those phrases, and especially the kind we call, strangely enough, thoughts -- are of the same mould as ideas, so that it suffices to turn the order of words around in order to have their meaning turned around. A new maxim gives a testimony that is different from the first, but which cannot fail to be just as pressing, just as pregnant -- since it is not different, but the same.
The question at stake in Poésies is that of a demonstration by the absurd. If language were what we think it is . . . .
and what Marcus Aurelius thinks. Or Victor Hugo, who calls the word: the verb. (If romanticism owes its image of the passions to Jean Jacques, its confusion of words with ideas comes all the more surely from Condillac). Let Lautréamont lay down his infernal machine. "There is nothing incomprehensible," he says. There follows almost certainly that we need no longer think, phrases suffice. A push of the thumb from time to time will vary them.
Reason of the rhyme.
After following the variations of a word since the Romans, Atys speaks proudly of its real meaning: religion, he says, is the link between citizens, since religio . . . (he hopes thus to know the thing, as well as the word, better).
What need is there to go back to Atys. Mire says: "People are right in calling them protestants, they protest all the time." And Béril: "Do you know why I cannot stand carpenters? It's because they carp at me." -- But isn't Béril joking? -- I am not quite sure either, that Atys is speaking seriously. And what right can all the science in the world establish here; if this or that word has changed its meaning, it was in order to escape its first error or confusion. (For example, we no longer commit our spirits into God's hands, but rather, crime, murder or adultery). In another case, it might be through a new confusion, a play on words: so that real etymology will give us less exact indications about its meaning than supposed etymology. (The French word legs, for instance, does not receive its significance from laisser, whence it stems, but from léguer, which it imitates).
There remains the fact that this etymology, when it employs old, exhausted words, runs the risk of being found wanting: none of these words, runs the risk of being found wanting: none of these words can be encountered again, a moment later, provided of these words can be encountered again, a moment later, provided with a too different meaning, (as is sometimes the case with the pun). But this already has to do with balance, with success: and precisely with the success of this conviction, of this wish -- to which belong also the analysis of the grammarians and the divine play on words of Pythia -- that thoughts and words are confounded to such an extent that there is no longer a fragment of a word which does not conserve, in every adventure, its own fragment of thought.
We speak freely of the charm of rhyme: because, perhaps, of a lack of reasons. It does not take us by surprise, it even enters into the exact line of our remarks that the task of this rhyme should be to found, for a moment, a pretention of adjacent sounds to adjacent thoughts -- and thus flatter our endeavor towards a perfect language. We would not reproach it, here and there, with being detrimental to the meaning, if we had not counted on its helping the meaning. If we have this disappointment, it is because we had had this hope.
Jacob Cow, the pirate.
MacOrlan used to tell how having fallen into the hands of Cow, with his sailors and negroes, the pirate made them stand in line on deck. Then he passed from one to the other:
-- What's your name?
-- Dick Smith, from Chicago.
-- Good. Throw him overboard.
They threw Dick Smith overboard. When it was MacOrlan's turn:
-- My name's Cow, he said.
Here, so great was the terror this name inspired, that Jacob Cow himself hastily made for his pirate ship, had his sails unfurled and vanished.
We use words as if Jacob Cow were to flee on each occasion. There are also prohibited words, those that refer to devils and dangerous animals: the French word for weasel (belette from beau) is now a compliment, the original word having become lost. When old maladies re-appear, it is under the guise of new words: some years ago the censorship forbade us to talk of the pest. And young girls with whom one speaks for the first time, refuse to reveal their names (fearing thus to give us some power over them). "I had never been in the doldrums, says Alcidius, before knowing the word." A strange demand, indeed, each moment maintained; we must believe we could no longer bear to speak, if words stoppped for an instant being signs for us, such perfect signs that we are bound to confuse them with the things themselves.
-- But in reality, Cow does not flee. Béril does not let himself be seduced by the rhyme, any more than by the sugar ad: "They are trying to bribe us," he thinks.
Without a doubt; and the reflection of Marcus Auerelius is not such as to allow us to easily refute it. The pun has little standing. By reason of which we would remark that the cases in which we thought we were going to take this confusion of words with things red-handed, were also undoubtedly those where the confusion already threatened ruin: as it its defect alone, and its cleavage, already held our attention.
Our demands, too, in proportion to this defect, will take on a new aspect.
Blandishments to language.
Simple Simon is talking, and keeps on talking. Without effort, he displaces and brings together or separates towns, gold, several days and nights. He becomes mixed in his language, however, and we ask: "Is it really that word he wanted to say?", or some listener complains. "We don't understand each other," replies Simple Simon, "you must understand my words better . . . ." At once the words show themselves, and as signs: this is where the meaning becomes threatened, ceases to play a role, falls from its heigh, so that we now distinguish the thought on the one hand and the inert word on the other. Just as a tennis-player who misses his serve, examines an arm with astonishment, or a racquet, both but shortly thrown out by him, and now grown strange to him, made of an inaccessible raw material.
The idea of the sign carries with it, beside this defeat and, as a matter of fact, on account of it, the mark of a confidence. It informs us that words, however things might seem, -- and that very word which has just disappointed us -- belong to thoughts, which they are about to remake into meaning. A practical defense idea, and not just the simple observation one might have thought; once more: each thought has its word, each word its thought. The man who is afraid says to himself: "How calm I am," and gives himself courage.
It is here that the facts, which at first we opposed, meet and agree. It is because they want to turn it into a sign, and win this victory over it, that Cilia and Atys -- beginning with the word, which leads them astray, imagine some thought or other, of which this word is no longer anything but the appearance. This is their defense against a dangerous or awkward language, at the point where it has to be recognized as such, to the extent that we might say people speak and express themselves against this language -- instead of with it.
This or that practical man believes that humanity, taken as a whole, is composed of scoundrels; he adds that each scoundrel is good for something, if you know how to take him. Now our idea of the sign proceeds from the same sort of wisdom. I want it to shield us from great disappointments: nevertheless, being too defiant, and always ready to imagine the worst, it neglects the first resource of words, which is their naive resource.
Here are two men who meet: "How are you! -- Ah! Sadoul has been condemned to death," or this young girl to her best beau: "What am I called? -- Georgette dear, golden Georgette -- Stingy. Is that all?" We must admire the reality which their language at once achieves. Or literary works, which should pretend to a similar reality, or one that is still more independent, and insinuate that it is the result of having too easily accepted as an ideal this state of language in which, every minute, every minute, words appear to fail us, it being the only one taken into account by the doctrines according to which the writer expresses things, or expresses himself -- sincerity is his prime virtue and emotion his state of grace, the intenser it is, and, as they say, the more personal, -- and others, still. It seems that having wanted to benefit by this strange event that words make sense, we have been condemned to seize it in its feeblest state, just as it begins to disintegrate. With a man from whom we want some service, we expect him to be sick or lacking in ideas. We make it a point of vanity then, to hold him. But there comes a fine day, when some phrase of his that is more vulgar or more difficult, gives us to understand that he is feeling better, and he escapes us.
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