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March 9, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 5
art 1
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Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Language Is Metaphor
Styles: You mentioned something earlier about metaphor in language, and getting back to Emerson. I recall an essay, I think it's in the language section of Nature, he says that all language in its infancy is poetry, and that what we have with us nowadays are a bunch of dead metaphors in our language.
And it occurs to me that the joy you speak of, somehow or other, has to do with putting the two together. Saying that love is a rose, or a car is a lemon, and that somehow or other if we only could recapture the spirit of poetry in language, the metaphorical quality of language, we would recover some of the joy in reading and writing.
Richard: Yes, especially in writing. I would think that students must find writing tedious; I know students find writing very tedious, and I think one of the reasons they find it tedious is that as soon as they sit down to a page of blank paper, they put upon themselves this requirement.
They say, "Oh, I am expected now to sound like writing. Oh yeah, I sort of know what writing sounds like. I've read some, and it had that sound." And it does ordinarily have that sound, and it's not the sound of speech, and it shouldn't be. And so they say, "I will now try to sound like writing," which is what gives us the horrors they perpetrate. And they do sound like writing, but, you know, writing like baboons or some such things.
The vivacity, the life of the language is all gone out of it, and indeed, vivacity seems often to be gone out of their speech as well. You know, everything is either "cool" or "a bummer," and there are no gradations between "cool" and "bummer," one being "good," the other "bad," but I'm not sure which.
The importance of metaphor?well, I've put that in the wrong way?it isn't just that metaphor is important in language, language is metaphor; it is entirely metaphor.
That is, the basis of language is this: that I can make a certain kind of sound and it will stand for something else in the world. And then I go the next step and say, "I can also make other sounds which don't even stand for something in the world."
Language is bigger--far, far, bigger--than the world, and we create a world of language which has no existence. If human beings were obliterated, as they very well may be, a massive universe disappears with them; the whole universe of discourse and idea that we have elaborated for all of our history, so that when language is either lacking in metaphor, or when the metaphors have ceased to have any influence or effect on us any more, then it does become a drab sterile exercise.
I think a lot of writing is taught that way.
I can remember that one of the traditional assignments in a writing course was The Description. Another was The Reportorial Account of an Event, and so forth. Notice what's being done here, really, language is being assumed as a form of communication, and you don't know what a framus looks like, and I do know what a framus looks like. And then, what is the point of this, that you will then know what a framus looks like?
In fact, if I wanted you to know what a framus looks like, I would take pains to find you one and show it to you and not bother describing it. But the burden of that sort of assignment on the student comes from the fact that students know it must be metaphor without ever having said this to themselves.
This is an awful restraint. This is a terrible artificiality in this sort of thing.
Styles: True, but that's what we are; we live in language constantly, and the metaphors that we produce in poetry?
Richard: Well, yes?
Styles: ?the words that we live by would stand for something out there in the real world to which we could point. I could bring you a framus , whatever a framus is?
Richard: I don't know either.
Styles: ?you could bring me one, show me what it is and say, that's it. But still, we've used this?
Richard: No. But you see, that's not what language is for. I've made the point somewhere, in one of these books or something, that after all language is what we use for talking about the invisible world; that we really need very little language to talk about the visible world; that, indeed, I can't show you a framus .
Should a lion attack us in this room, you do not need to be informed of that. What I need language for is to warn you, see, that there was a lion come through here yesterday, and this is about the same time that he might come through. Now notice, this is the invisible world, the world of the past; the worlds of the future are at issue here; these worlds are not accessible to experience.
Styles: But they are accessible through language, through memory for the past, and through imagination of the future.
Richard: But you see it is for those things that we need language. We don't need language to define this world as it is now. We also, of course, can define and do regularly define, through language, another world, a world which has never had and never will have any real existence.
The world of ideas, the world of possibilities, the world of values and judgments; these things don't have any practical existence. We can never show them to one another; we can never encounter them, but it is a very, very real world that we have made.
Styles: But there are real worlds that we encounter through language, and it's precisely in mastering language itself, or having it master us, that somehow, we become aware of these. We give account of ourselves that way.
Richard: Well, yes, if language masters us, it defines our world for us; if we can master language, then we can create a world.
Styles: And only by creating a world, not merely living and responding to one already created by other people?
Richard: I wonder if it is a genuine form of creativity. I?no, it's probably not. That is a badly overused word, and I guess, technically, it means "to create," "to make out of nothing at all." And we make things out of other things, so that we're not really creative in that sense.
But we certainly do make worlds that never would have been if it hadn't been for our power of language. And those worlds are very real and very powerful., even if we stopped with the worlds of fiction.
Certainly the worlds of fiction are stronger than the worlds that we live in. Lust, greater passions, they inspire us more deeply; they depress us even more deeply, if they want to. There is a strength in the world of fiction that?it's just not in our world. This [world] is random and disordered, and in which there is no feeling of tying together. Who would say that that is not reality?
Styles: I think it's Robert Frost, who says somewhere, that poetry is what he used as a momentary stay against confusion?
Richard: Oh, I didn't know he said that, but that sounds like a nice thing to do.
Styles: ?and what we're doing constantly, when we use language, is to create this little ordered world in which we can live, perhaps, to protect ourselves from the disorder of the real world in which we find ourselves, day in and day out. And only by having that ordered world, only by having poetry to remember--Robert Frost to remember, Emerson to remember, or those authors that we're living with right now--science fiction is an example, many people live, I think, in science fiction worlds constantly?
Richard: ?that is true, yes?
Styles: ?and sometimes in ways that show the power of language to distort what we would call reality, as well as to illuminate and define.
Richard: Oh yes. Well, the power of language is, of course, not confined to literature. After all, every war that has been fought has been caused by language, has been caused by a series of statements.
There is nothing else at the root of human behavior than the statements that we make about ourselves, and what statements we make determine our destinies in some way.
If we live by the statements made for us by others, then we have a certain kind of destiny; if we live by the statements that we ourselves can generate, we may have a different kind of destiny, except that we almost die, I suppose.
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 6
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Posted by witnit at March 9, 2005 2:40 PM
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