PART ONE
The principles of language in the human consciousness
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Literary language as the expression of national cultures |
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a) Semantics and psychology
The origin of nation states can be traced largely through the
consolidation of linguistic families having homogeneous characteristics,
along territorial and racial lines. The notions of "State" and
"Nation" are not interchangeable: the one is a political entity,
the other a cultural entity. A "culture" is defined linguistically
as an assemblage of religious, linguistic, mythological, sociological and
artistic codes coming together as parts of a "tradition",
knowledge of which is absorbed by the consciousness of the individual in the
process of growing up and being educated. Melanie Klein speaks of the
"introjection of models", underlining the mimetic nature of this
learning process. The "classics" are nothing other than the works
regarded commonly as paradigms of these models, and therefore imitated more
frequently.
Like temple ruins, artefacts and myths, words are no less
"historical monuments" of national cultures, given that they
preserve traces of vanished customs and traditions and ¾ more importantly ¾ through their shape and
semantics they reveal the psychology with which every culture, in its own
peculiar way, sees the outside world. In German, for example, words used to
indicate abstract concepts end in -heit and -keit,
the former relating to a collection of concrete objects, a
"category" of the material, and the latter to something
intangible, a "category" of the spiritual. In short, one of the
ways in which thought is articulated: Ewigkeit, for example, meaning
Eternity... The German language tends to conceive the world in
categories a priori; it is in Kant that one sees the culmination of
this, as it were, abstractive ascensional perspective, exploring and at the
same time reflecting on its own nature. In German, therefore, greater
attention is given to the position of the individual in space and time than
to bodily qualities, to attributes perceived through the senses. Colours in
German are perceived on the basis of their capacity to reflect light, and
not of mutual contrast as in French. The German blau is a deep and
transparent colour, not a nocturnal colour. Blue in English is
associated with the soul, a colour that can serve as the very symbol of
meditative and melancholic introspection. Indeed in English any abstract
category is the fruit of perception, and traceable back to an original
insight. If Kant is the "national" philosopher in the German
language, then Hume is his counterpart in English. It is no accident that
Poe, in The Raven, conveys the idea of eternity by conscious
repetition of the word Nevermore. In French, every character is seen
in relation to a different character. Everything is, so to speak,
d'après or selon. Subjectivity of interpretation is the
only perceptive category possible. When Proust begins his Recherche
- "longtemps je me suis couché de bonne
heure", what interests him is the level of attraction and
repulsion, semantically, between longtemps and de bonne heure:
a paradoxical combination which in the dialectical and "dramatic"
sense effectively precludes the possibility of slumber; and indeed the whole
idea of the Recherche is inextricably linked with this
insomnia.
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