Gass, Eco, Saramago, Oh My!

Posted on January 3, 2005 by Tito

Scott at Conversational Reading had this nugget in last week’s post regarding William Gass’ essay "The Medium of Fiction":

"Five" is no wider, older, or fatter than "four"; "apple" isn’t sweeter than "quince," rounder than "pear," smoother than "peach." To say, then, that literature is language is to say that literature is made of meanings, concepts, ideas, forms (please yourself with the term), and that these are so static and eternal as to shame the stars.

Literature consists of words (sounds) but exists in intangible concepts arbitrarily related to those sounds. In effect, Gass is telling us that literature is both mundane–a collection of sounds that are lifeless (as though "your wife were made of rubber")–yet also magical–concepts invested with feeling unique to each of us which invade and possess in ways a painting or sculpture cannot.

Then today, Mark at The Elegant Variation has this quote from a write up  of Umberto Eco’s new book:

Eco is a professor of semiotics, which means he is interested in language as a system of signs. Words always point to other words, just as books inevitably speak of other books, but there is no guarantee that their meanings are finally rooted in the solid world of objects and experience. Although browsing in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia will tell you a lot about how knowledge is organised and categorised, Eco points out that this is not the same thing as establishing the truth about the universe.

Both these brought to mind a passage from Jose Saramago’s The Double which I recently noted:

The wheel was invented and stayed invented forever and  ever, whereas words, those and all the others, came into the world with a vague, diffuse destiny, as highly provisional phonetic and morphological clusters, however much, thanks perhaps to the inherited glow of their glorious creation, they may insist on passing themselves off, not so much in their own right, but on behalf of the thing they variably mean and represent, as immortal undying, or eternal, depending on the taste of the person doing the classifying. The congenital tendency, which they proved unable to resist, became, over time, a gravef and possibly insoluble problem of communication, either in the collective or in the personals sense, getting their apples and their onions mixed up, their legacies with their legalese, the words usurping the place of the thing that, before, for better or worse, they had done their best to express, and out of which came, in the end, don’t let the mask fool you, the thunderous clatter of empty cans, the carnivalesque cortege of canisters with labels on the outside but nothing inside, or merely, fading fast, the evocative smell of the food for mind and body that they once contained and concerned.

I find this type of discussion fascinating. As I have the Gass essay on my desk, am halfway though The Double, and may add Eco to my growing TBR pile, this will add a few more thingsto float around in my head, at the least.

» Filed Under Books

Comments

Copyright © 2007 - Black Market Kidneys
PSimple Theme Powered By Wordpress, Created By Paggu
Login to BMK