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| In the Dining Room by Berthe Morisot |
This is one of my favorite Impressionist paintings. Impressionism cuts past all the shorthand--the stick with a lumpy circle on top to represent a tree, two dots and a crescent to represent a smile, etc--and tries to capture the way that we initially perceive things. Like artwork, language can be a form of shorthand. In Verbage for Poems, Jorge Luis Borges claims: "...we invent nouns to fit reality. We touch a sphere, see a small heap of dawn-colored light, our mouths enjoy a tingling sensation, and we lie to ourselves that those three disparate things are only one thing called an orange." Travel writing is powerful because the authors remove themselves as far as possible from their language, its pigeonholes, and the those things that fit inside.
They go where their old nouns can hardly be trusted,
where "cocoa" is no longer "brown, chocolate bean" but "white, fruity seed,"
or where things that have no name, like the way the light looks after it has passed through stained glass demand attention because they lack language. In such settings, "the inventive character of language" becomes clearer than ever, so that travel writers bear the challenge of constructing new language and new reality.
I'm pleased at you engaging this philosophy of language, and adding pictures to it which complement what you are saying. I'm not sure I agree with you that "Travel writing is powerful because the authors remove themselves as far as possible from their language, its pigeonholes..." I think I would have to hear more of what you mean. I don't see this as being particularly true of travelers or not true of those not writing of travel.
ReplyDeleteI guess I was trying to say that both travel writing and impressionism try to capture the first impression. Travel writers go to a place where the linguistic symbols that we take for granted no longer have the same utility, as in the examples that I used (even though my examples are kind of superficial). By making it obvious to us that those symbols are arbitrary, both writers and readers are no longer as trapped by them. So we have a one-of-a-kind opportunity to be inventive with language, just like impressionists were inventive with lines and colors.
DeleteBut yeah, probably the only argument that I successfully championed here was: nothing that you try to do will turn out good quality if you do it on a 9-hour overnight car ride across the boring Nevada desert.
This is a very interesting post! I really love how you say that writers need to find new language. I think that perhaps it is because these new experiences prompt them to explore different ways in which to convey them.
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