Justin Erik Halldór Smith

A Note on G. E. Lessing on Animal Tales

G. E. Lessing, the great critic and philosopher of the German Enlightenment, noted in his 1759 essay ‘On the Use of Animals in Fables’ that “the great majority of fables feature animals, and still lesser creatures, as acting persons.”[1] Lessing wanted to know what we could learn from this. My own view is that his conclusions are dead wrong, but that the question itself is one that it took a certain kind of genius to ask in the first place, and one that remains as urgent as ever to answer, not just for the sake of literary theory, but above all for the sake of our understanding of what animals are, and of the way our moral commitments to them flow from this understanding.

Lessing gives two primary reasons for the replacement of human beings by animals in fables. The first is that we all tend to recognize more readily the sort of character represented by an animal species than by a particular human being.  If one were to relate the historical tale of Nero and Britannicus, for example, it was already quite likely in the 18^th century --and is all the more so today-- that most listeners will have no idea what these characters are meant to represent. But if a fable has as its primary function the imparting of some moral principle or other, as Lessing supposes, it is far better to replace Nero with a wolf, and Britannicus with a lamb. Everyone, we might suppose, down to the most ignorant yokel, knows what these creatures represent, and how they stand in relation to one another. If the purpose is to communicate a moral principle rather than a history lesson, why let background knowledge of individual human actors stand as a prerequisite? It is the wolf and the lamb that require the least in the way of shared background knowledge, and thus that serve most directly the fable’s function of universal moral edification. 

Lessing adds another reason for the casting of animals in fables, one that he claims derives from his ‘sensibility’ --a common trope of the distinctly German reception of Enlightenment values-- rather than from logical conclusions. He maintains that nothing gets in the way of the teaching of a moral lesson moreso than the passions. He brings up the example of the avaricious priest in 2 Samuel 12, who wishes to take away a poor man’s only lamb. Lessing maintains that in this tale our passion of sympathy for the poor man is great, as is our passion of hatred for the priest. But if we substitute animals for the relevant actors, then, in so far as these creatures are ‘lesser’ than we are, the arousal of the passions in reading about them is thereby reduced, and we are better able to focus on the moral lesson at hand. “We sympathize with the lamb,” Lessing writes, “but this sympathy is so weak that it has no noticeable impact upon our intuitive knowledge of the moral principle.”[2] 

I find the first argument interesting, and the second one deplorable. I also find that Lessing’s engagement with the topic leaves a great many considerations completely unexplored.

The second argument seems to me patently false: even though we have strong species-based loyalties in our reasoned moral commitments, these loyalties are most likely to be suspended when, as in a fable, an anthropomorphized animal occupies a role that in another genre of story-telling would be held by a human being. The substitutability of an animal for a human in a fable brings with it, I think, the transferability of sympathy, as well as the other passions that some people, including Lessing, might ordinarily reserve, at least in their strongest form, for members of their own species.

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[1] G. E. Lessing, “Von dem Gebrauche der Thiere in der Fabel,” in Literaturtheoretische und ästhetische Schiften, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1996, pp. 43-47, p. 43.

[2] Ibid., p. 47.

Sjón, From the Mouth of the Whale

This novel is an important contribution to Icelandic literature. It channels the past millennium's experience of nature and history in that peculiar place, but does not aspire to mere peculiarity. For this reason, it is a great shame that the book has been packaged for foreigners as a sort of offshoot of Björkian quirkiness.

Sjón has long been part of the creative circle that includes Iceland's most marketable pop icon, as are many of the currently dominant generation of Iceland's cultural, and even political, elite. I had thought, when I bought the novel on may way out of Reykjavik yesterday, that I would be mildly amused by the literary effort of a graduate of the '80s punk scene. I also worried that it might not be worth my trouble at all, that this would be another case, comparable to Sven Regener's forgettable novels, which he started writing when the physiognomy of middle age set in and he could no longer front the Berlin band Element of Crime with any dignity. But this is not one of those cases. Sjón is a writer of literature, who happens to have been present at some Sugarcubes shows (and, perhaps revealingly, joined them on stage to play, of all things, the air guitar).

The novel is called Rökkurbýsnir or 'Marvels of Twilight' in the original Icelandic, has for no apparent good reason (other than a disconnected if intriguing flourish in the final few paragraphs) been called The Mouth of the Whale in English. This too must have something to do with marketing. The perennial appeal of Moby-Dick maybe? Of course it is an admirable thing to produce even a faint echo of Melville, but that is not at all what Sjón aims to do. His is prose that frequently lapses into poetry as if by inward inclination. The mood of it is rapturous, at times almost reminiscent of Saint John the Divine's coda to the New Testament.

It tells us the story of a certain Jónas Palmasson 'the Learned', an early-17th-century Icelandic natural philosopher, runic scholar, and healer. He is self-taught, and syncretistic in his commitment to Christian faith and to Icelandic folk-beliefs. He is a devout follower of Paracelsus, and is something like what the Swiss physician and occultist might have ended up being if he had been born, liks Jónas, into what was essentially an Iron Age society, with few books and only a fairly barren natural landscape from which to learn.

Part of the narrative (though this is not a very narrative novel) concerns Jónas's voyage to Copenhagen, at the request of Ole Worm, the actually existing historical character who founded the Museum Wormianum, one of the largest cabinets of curiosities in early modern Europe. Worm has heard of Jónas's learnedness, and hopes that he can help him to decipher runic writing, something Worm in fact attempted in his Runir, seu Danica literatura antiquissima [Runes, Or, the Most Ancient Danish Literature] of 1638. Jónas is hesitant to aid Worm, since he has been persecuted in his home country for sorcery, and is in Denmark in part to clear his name. But he is happy to clarify for Worm the true origin of a purported unicorn skull. It comes from a narwhal: Icelandic traders had for centuries been duping Europeans who were willing to pay enormous sums of money for remedies made from a powder of the marine mammal's tusk, on the presumption that this came from the mythical terrestrial mammal. The build-up to the revelation of the skull's true origin is somewhat tedious for those of us who have read the 1628 treatise De Unicornu by Caspar Bartholin (Worm's brother-in-law), and it all starts to feel a bit too Eco-esque. Not surprisingly, this sequence is the one that is marketed most aggressively in the publisher's packaging of the novel. (Unicorns appeal, I gather, in roughly the same way Björk does.)

When I say that this is an important contribution to Icelandic literature I mean in part that the author channels a tradition that stretches back to a time when literature was meant to do something other than what it has been doing since the 19th century or so. Jónas has few books to read, does not know Latin, but is loyal to the idea that nature can be read, and that books, ideally, are epitomes of nature. Nature in turn is Divine Creation, and learning is the project of mastering the order behind this creation. One of the most touching sequences concerns Jónas's recollection of his first encounters with his future wife, Sigga:

Our courtship was one uninterrupted conversation about the origin of the stars, the nature of land and sea, the behaviour of beasts great and small, and although it was not conducted in Hebrew or in the angleic tongue as it was with Adam and Eve, it was nevertheless our hymn to Creation. We sat together into the early hours, investigating the delightful puzzles of light and shadow, such as what happens to the shadow of your hand when the shadow of mine falls upon it? Have they become one? Or has yours disappeared temporarily? And if so, where to?

In her youth Sigga correctly predicted an eclipse through astronomical calculation. Her kinfolk ran around like it was the end of the world, but she was calm. She and Jónas both embody an approach to learning that is 'scientific', in that it seeks to get things right, but also one step away from sorcery, in that it probes where one really isn't supposed to go (as a boy Jónas specializes in laying his hands upon the bellies of old crones, and diagnosing their 'female illnesses'). This shared disposition unites Jónas and Sigga erotically: science as a hymn to creation, as the basis of erotic love, and finally as a highly charged danger zone that borders on the magical. Sjón reconstructs with sympathy the world in which this all made sense.

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Zora Neale Hurston and Counter-Enlightenment

Besides Their Eyes Were Watching God, the 1937 novel for which she is certainly best known, Zora Neale Hurston made a tremendous contribution to the ethnography of the American South and the Caribbean. Her 1935 collection, Mules and Men, written in the problematic but captivating genre of literary anthropology, recounts the folktales she heard during her extensive fieldwork in the South.

Her insights are astounding, and her willingness to throw herself into the game of participant-observation is both courageous and, at times, morally dubious. I was horrified by her account of throwing a screeching black cat into a boiling cauldron as part of her initiation into the practice of hoodoo. She was made by the high priest to shut the lid, wait until the cat had been boiled down to mere bones, and then to pass each of the bones through her mouth; the one that had a bitter taste was to be carried as a talisman. I found myself hoping this was the literary-embellishment part.

Her teacher back at Barnard was Franz Boas, and while he did not have her killing cats he did encourage her Southern expeditions, and had this to say, in a short preface to Mules and Men, about her particular talent for portraying a cultural world from the inside: "She has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life." If this sounds essentializing, and thus, on today's reasoning, oppressive, it is partly because it supposes that the African-American has a particular sort of inner life, one that truly belongs to him, and that any one may stand in for any other as an embodiment of this form of life. This is both a presumption to which Hurston herself would likely not object, as well as a presumption that places Boas in a long tradition of thinking about culture that has not always been, or not always only been, oppressive.

I was struck by one small fragment of one of the many stories, the "big ole lies," that Hurston relates:

Jim Allen commented: "Well, you know what they say-- a man can cackerlate his life till he git mixed up wid a woman or git straddle of a cow."
Big Sweet turned visiously upon the old man. "Who you callin' a cow, fool? Ah know you ain't namin' my mama's daughter no cow."
"Now y'all heard what Ah said. Ah ain't called nobody no cow," Jim defended himself. "Dat's just an old time by-word 'bout no man kin tell what's gointer happen when he gits mixed up wid a woman or set straddle of a cow."
"I done heard my gran'paw say dem very words many and many a time," chimed in Larkins. "They's a whole heap of them kinda by-words. Like for instance: 'Ole coon for cunnin', young coon for runnin',' and 'Ah can't dance, but Ah know good moves.' They all got a hidden meanin', jus' like de Bible (124-5).

This reminded me not only of certain brilliant stand-up comedy routines that marked my childhood, but also of a passage from Leibniz's Nouveaux essais of 1704, where he, like Larkins, suggests that it is language that is the true repository of human knowledge, and thus that it stands equal to the sacred texts of antiquity:

And if there were no longer an ancient book to examine, languages would take the place of books, and they are the most ancient monuments of mankind. In all the languages of the world will be recorded and and placed in dictionaries and grammars, and compared together (Nouveaux Essais, Bk. III, ch. 9. G V 318).

Lest we suppose that Leibniz is not interested here in the sort of dialectal, everyday, popular language that Hurston sought to record, it's worth considering one of his many more particular ethnographic sketches (or better, perhaps, research proposals). In a 1697 letter "On the Origins of the Nations of Transylvania," Leibniz devotes particular attention to the ethnic German minority of that region, whose exact origins in the region were unknown and who spoke a dialect of German that was very different from any of the standard variants spoken in what are today Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Leibniz writes:

We understand the German language [of the Transylvanian Germans] poorly; ... many French, Italian, Spanish, English, Turkish, and Tartar words have been noted in their speech. [Thus] it would be most desirable to have a little dictionary of the language of the common people of German Transylvania, and to request that other examples as well be added, which would be genuine, rather than made to fit our own way of speaking (Dutens, Opera omnia, Tom. IV, Pars II, 206-8).

I take it that it is this pair of insights --that language is as valuable as texts as a bearer and mirror of culture, and that the way to understand a culture's language is to get inside it, rather than to make it fit our own-- would be two of the central commitments of Herder's 'soft' or 'organic' nationalism, which in large part may be traced back to Leibniz. And it was surely the Herderian tradition, through intermediaries such as Leopold von Ranke, that guided Boas's own anthropological method.

Hurston's unapologetic use of dialect, and the ambiguity of her stance towards the traditions and beliefs that could not but come across as irrational and backwards to educated Northerners, made her an embarrassment to other African-American writers such as Richard Wright. Her insistence on drudging up all the swampy stuff of culture appears to have been the principal cause of her eventual marginalization at the dawn of the Civil Rights era. She spent the last years of her life working as a maid.

I take Hurston to be a Herderian, while the values of the writers associated with the Civil Rights movement were squarely those of the Enlightenment with which Herder could not be at ease. I think it is this Herderianism that caused Hurston to denounce the desegregation of schools after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and shortly before her death. John McWhorter calls her a 'Black conservative' (thus claiming her as a forebear), but I don't think that properly captures the spirit of Herderian counter-Enlightenment.

I also think she is a deeply compelling writer, disclosing a world I wasn't supposed to see, whereas I could never get through more than a few pages of Native Son, which only reminds me of a world I already know is supposed to be.

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Mushrooms and Literature

Surely the single largest category of folk names for mushrooms is the one having to do with evil and death, and with the beings who bode and bring these: Witch's Hat, Death Cap, Destroying Angel, Poison Pie, Lead Poisoner, Corpse Finder, Witches' Butter, Devil's Urn, Goat's Foot, Dead Man's Fingers.

Other names are identifications, by appeal to some other thing in nature or artifice, that the mushroom supposedly resembles (though for the most part does so only remotely): Chicken Mushroom, Fried-Chicken Mushroom, Rooting Cauliflower Mushroom, Black Jelly Roll, Moose Ears, Old Man of the Woods, Pig's Ear Gomphus, Pretzel Slime, Scrambled Egg Slime, Blue Cheese Polypore.

Still other names involve incongruous juxtapositions (which include more or less all the 'tooth' mushrooms): Shaggy Parasol, Imperial Cat, Big Laughing Gym, Northern Tooth, Spongy-Footed Tooth, Bearded Tooth, Spreading Yellow Tooth, Hairy Parchment. Many names call the very thing they are naming into question: Deceptive Milky, Fuzzy False Truffle, Questionable Stropharia. Many attach a derogatory English epithet to a proper Latin taxon: Fetid Marasmius, Dung-Loving Psilocybe, Hated Amanita. Yet others appear as plays on words even though they are not, e.g., Dirty Trich. Some names are just revolting: Insect-Egg Slime, Tapioca Slime, Many-Headed Slime, Red Tree Brain; while many are simply and inexplicably delightful: Peppery Milky, Dirty Milky, Buff Fishy Milky, Fuzzy Foot, Carbon Cushion, Elegant Stinkhorn, Stinky Squid.

These are all just folk terms, and so, since the beginning of the 18th century anyway, are not the real names of anything. Or at least that's what we're supposed to believe. But classification is just one of the things we do with language; evocation, or conjuring, is another.

Other vulgates are just as rich as English in their myconymical creations. Thus German: Hahnenkamm, Dickfuß, Hexenpilz, Satanspilz (one possible etymology for the English 'toadstool' is Todesstuhl, which is to say 'death's stool').  Many folk associations are lost as we move from one language to another, thus the Dirty Trich (Tricholoma pardinum) evokes the tiger in its German and Latvian names (Tigerritterling, Tīģeru pūkaine), and the panther in Swedish (Pantermusseron). The Poison Pie (Hebeloma crustuliniforme), also known as a Weeping Fairy Cake, becomes the ciuperca plângătoare ('drooping mushroom') in Romanian, and the parastā bārkstmale in Latvian, which means (I think) 'tattered parasol'. A Swedish cognitive scientist has in fact drawn our attention to the significance of myconymy on the example of this very species; see Gunnar Persson's nicely titled "Fränskivling eller poison pie: kognitiva aspekter på namngivning av svamp i olika språk" ("Fränskivling or Poison Pie: Cognitive Aspects of the Naming of Mushrooms in Different Languages").

What the Germans call the Hexenei or 'witch's egg' is known in English as the 'universal shell', an oviform envelope that surrounds the young mushroom before it takes on its familiar stalk-and-cap shape. The German Stinkmorchel or stinking morel is born from a witch's egg but grows to resemble a phallus, so much so that Linnaeus could not refrain from classifying it as the Phallus impudicus. It is the mushroom that is impudent enough to demand that it be called after the thing no one can deny it resembles. No, that's not quite right. It doesn't resemble the phallus; it duplicates the phallus fungally. It is impossible to come across a Phallus impudicus and not find oneself transported back into that prescientific world-view on which affinities abounded between different categories of natural beings that share no ancestral relation.

It is also hard not to be transported back to a time when the names of things were held to bear some sort of essential relationship to the things themselves. And here (other than in a few cases where the Latin follows the folk, as with the impudent phallus, along with the Lactarius mucidus or Slimy Milky, the Tricholoma saponaceum or Soapy Trich, etc., all of which are only as foreign to our inmost sense of the names of things as is Latin itself): here it is the folk names, and not the Latin binomial nomenclature, that preserves the bond of being between word and thing.

Often, in fact, the Linnean name for a thing picks out features of it in a seemingly arbitrary way, features that seem to have little to do with what we associate with a given creature. In this respect it is often better not to know Greek or Latin, if one wants the name of the being to resonate. To move away from mycology for a moment and into Pleistocene mammalian paleontology, I recall being deeply disappointed when my Greek became good enough to notice that glyptodont means nothing more than 'carved tooth'. As if the shape of that giant, lumbering armadillo's teeth had anything to do with its essence! Much better to just hear the sound, glyptodont, and to picture the beast, as it is not hard for the un-Hellenized to do, as a being that naturally embodies that sound.

Folk names work differently. They do not pick out some arbitrary and contingent feature of a being (I contend that a glyptodont would still be the being it is even if its teeth were otherwise than they are), but instead zero in on the most salient properties of a being, the properties that could not be subtracted without annihilation of the being itself, the properties that the philosophical tradition has associated with essence. That this essence is plainly related to human concerns (Dead Man's Fingers, Scrambled Egg Slime, etc.) does not compromise its status as essence, since the folk see the world anthropocentrically, as thrown up around them for their own purposes, edification, and temptation. In this respect, mushrooms have only being-for-us.

Nabokov famously told the story of the Cornell student who beseeched him to divulge the secret of great writing. 'Learn the names of plants', Nabokov is said to have said. He surely did not mean the Linnean names (though those can help to add an extra flair of erudition); he meant the Russian-English-French names that turn the things into repositories of human lore and values and fears.

I've always found plants boring and have not managed to learn the names of more than a handful of them. I raced through Aristotle's five books on animals, but could not bring myself to read his disciple Theophrastus's Enquiry into Plants or On the Causes of Plants, which were supposed to complete the Aristotelian project of investigating the living world. Animals jump out at me, sometimes literally; they are phenomenally salient, as the cognitive scientists say, whereas plants just fade into the background. We might suppose it shows Nabokov's great subtlety of mind that he picked them out for attention anyway (though we should follow up with the point that his greatest interest among living beings was for that most sensationally salient of creatures, the butterfly). Still, the advice is excellent, perhaps the best ever given in the history of literary instruction. Nabokov's novels themselves (especially Ada) are vividly botanico-entomological, or, better, they are showcases for a sort of phyto-entomonymical mastery. Nabokov understood how to draw essences out of names; he understood that what makes literature live is precisely the theory of nomenclature, the philosophy of language, that had to be repudiated with the rise of modern science, one of the great achievements of which was the arbitrary naming scheme of the System of Nature of 1735.

Genetically and evolutionally, fungus is closer among biota to the animalia than it is to plantae. It doesn't have locomotion, and it doesn't do photosynthesis either. In high school I learned that its natural function (as if anything had such a thing) was that of 'decomposer', in contrast with the 'producer' plants and the 'consumer' animals. This triad is calling out for allegorical interpretation, but I won't offer it. I want only to say here that, whatever is actually going on in nature, mushrooms can't but come across to us as liminal, as a higher-order instance of being neither fish nor flesh.

Liminal entities, as Mary Douglas has shown us, frequently offer a good point of access for unraveling the knots of cultures. Yet ethnomycology, particularly in the wake of R. Gordon Wasson's work, has for the most part been largely preoccupied with hallucinogens and with new-age forms of 'mind-expansion'. I've been doing my best to avoid association with that approach here. Not all mushrooms are psilocybes, and the strange position of fungi in human cognition of the natural environment would be no less strange even without the hallucinogenic species. It is more likely the toxicity of some, rather than the psychedelicness of others, that charges mushrooms with such folkloric force.

But beyond this it is their indissociability from decay and death that, I think, gives them the particular cultural role that they have at least across the Indo-European world. Wasson and his Russian wife, Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, argued in their monumental Mushrooms, Russia, and History of 1957 that the Indo-Europeans can be further subdivided into mycophilic and mycophobic cultures, with the Slavs standing as the clearest example of the former, and the Anglo-Saxons of the latter. One wonders how deep this phobia runs, however, and whether there might not be something in particular about the rise of modern science and rationality (a phenomenon centered in Northwestern, Protestant Europe, relative to which the Orthodox, Slavic world has been on the distant periphery) that required a repudiation of these queer beings, of these living lumps so deeply associated with ghosts and witches and fairies, with beings the existence of which could no longer be defended --in English, anyway-- much after the 17th century.

But literature isn't about what exists, and the non-existence of the beings wrapped up in the folk names of so many mushrooms only makes them that much richer, that much better suited to the sort of exercise Nabokov recommended. It would be nice to read some fungal literature: literature that grows out of years of apprenticeship in the art of myconymy and that is as evocative as the folk-names of mushrooms. This would be a different sort of novel than Nabokov's phyto-entomonymic masterpieces: there would be no flight, no sunlight. It would be a novel from the ground.

The myconymic apprenticeship would at the same time serve as a point of access to human existence --I would say 'being-in-the-world', but I'm already concerned about how Heideggerian I'm sounding-- through a concrete subdomain of language. On the surface this subdomain is concerned, like Linnean taxonomy, with the simple naming and distinguishing of entities in the natural world; but in fact it could not be more different from the concerns that motivated the System of Nature. Name-giving here is not classificatory, it is not 'the logic of the concrete' in Lévi-Strauss's sense. It is rather the accrual of cultural meaning through the things of nature in which this meaning is invested. The literary use of language on this understanding is the unraveling of this meaning through a mastery of the names of things: the real names.

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Photos taken in a protected woodland of central New Jersey, early June, 2011. I should add, perhaps, that I remain a perfect neophyte when it comes to attaching name to thing. I believe these are two varieties of agaricus, plus some variety of polypore, but as to anything more specific than that I am, as they say, at a loss for words.

Sandhi and Literacy

In a recent Vanity Fair article a certain influential rhetorician notes, in the course of treating an entirely different matter, that Henry James and Joseph Conrad dictated their later novels, rather than writing them out by hand, "which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time."

This would however put these two fine novelists ahead of the author(s) of the Odyssey and the Iliad, ahead of the comparably masterful raconteurs of Balkan, Caucasian, West African epic masterpieces which by chance never had their Homer to crystallize oral narrative tradition into a textual object. Much of what we think of as 'literature' in fact has its origins in 'vocal achievement'. In some cases, the transcription of the oral was seen as a compromise, a degradation, to the extent that true language is speech (or, perhaps more accurately, the breath that powers the speech), and the works that we think of as books were in fact, in their original, vital phase, recitations. The books that we have left over bear roughly the same relationship to the works themselves as video footage of a dance performance has to the performance itself.

Homer was crystallized in text fairly early, and for complicated reasons this transformation came to fit in the Hellenic world with a growing attribution of significance, and of priority, to the written form of language. This priority seems to have only been strengthened by the appearance of the Abrahamic faiths, which is to say by the various 'peoples of the Book' with their insistence on punctilious attention to every last diacritical mark supposedly dictated by God himself in the composition of scripture.

In trying to understand what it is that sets 'Eastern thought' apart from 'Western', we might do better, rather than looking at different temperaments, different rationalities, and so on, to look at differences in the way writing is taken up over the course of the past four millennia or so, and the way it is conceptualized in contrast with oral language. In the Indian tradition, writing was long seen as a sort of crutch, an aide-memoire for lesser minds that could not absorb the real work, the oral work, without the assistance of arbitrary signs. The great works of early Indian literature are not books at all, but only became books gradually, and perhaps regrettably. The 6th-century grammarian Pāṇini 'composed' the 3,959 sutras of his Aṣṭādhyāyī --the definitive work on Sanskrit grammar and phonetics, for which no equivalent exists in the Greek or Latin corpus-- by having various of his students memorize various chunks. Pāṇini is called the 'author' of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, though he would have thought of authorship in our sense as beneath him.

Accordingly, speech is often exalted as not just a handy skill, but as a cosmic principle, even tantamount to existence itself. My favorite passage from the Rig Veda illustrates this nicely (Doniger's translation):

I do not know just what it is that I am like. I wander about concealed and wrapped in thought. When the first-born of Order came to me, I won a share of this Speech (1.164, 37).

The primacy of speech over text seems to leave a trace in one of the most well-known, and, for the learner, challenging features of written Sanskrit: sandhi, the system of rules governing the spelling of word endings depending on the initial letter of the subsequent word (this is only 'external' sandhi; I'll perhaps treat internal sandhi another time).

'Sandhi' is now the accepted term in linguistics for this phenomenon as it occurs in any language, and not just Sanskrit. In English we have just a very little bit of vestigial sandhi, as for example when the indefinite article 'a' becomes 'an' in cases where it precedes a vowel-initial word. We could have taken it much further. For example, the possessive 's' suffix can be pronounced in vastly different ways depending on the word that follows it. If written English were more influenced by sandhi, we might have written of the eggs that come from hens as 'henzeggs', or of the collected works of a certain Renaissance French author as 'Rabelaizoeuvre'.

Now in Sanskrit such transformations in writing are all-pervasive. Thus, to take the simple sentence 'The king lived in a certain city', the proper translation, in Devanagari script, is:

कस्मिंश्चिन्नगरे ऽवसद्राजा ।

Prior to sandhi analysis, the transliteration of the Devanagari is:

kasmiṃścinnagare 'vasadrājā

After sandhi analysis --that is, after the individual words are separated out and their 'proper' spelling is restored--, we get:

kasmin cit nagare avasat rājā.
[(In) a certain city lived king.]

This is a very simple example, and perhaps not the most interesting one, but it gets the point across: in Sanskrit, writing bends itself to speech, rather than the other way around.

Ordinarily, in the modern West we tend to think of ourselves as 'literate' to the extent that we anchor our spoken language in some potential or imagined written version of it. I can see in my mind the strings of letters that form the sentences as I speak them. I can get off course, I can go argotic and start speaking in a way that would be difficult to transcribe, but I sense this is a deviation, and I know how to pull myself back to proper language, which is to say writable language, language anchored in writing. Chomsky or perhaps someone else said that a dialect is a language without an army, but one might more appropriately say that by our standards a dialect is a language without a regulatory body, without an OED or a Duden to settle the matter of whether one is using the language correctly or not. In spite of recent attempts to crystallize them, creoles remain for the most part pure speech, and are thus, literally (by which I mean literally literally), unanchored.

But what if the sense of propriety came from speech in the first place? What if we had a sense of the correctness of what we write in virtue of its fit with what we know, as if a priori and naturally, to be the proper way of speaking? That would be to conceptualize language very differently, and it could be at the root of a lot of what we take to be the Weltbild differences between 'East' and 'West'.

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Reading Ada, or Ardor

I am only now realizing the extent to which I was indirectly caused to buy into the party line as concerns Vladimir Nabokov. When I say 'party line' I mean nothing other than the Soviet Communist Party, which of course took his work to fall entirely outside of anything that might be considered a part of the history of Russian literature. He was a White Russian, an aesthete, and a bit of a pervert. What's more, he wrote mostly in English. And this was not as when, say, a grudgingly exiled Brodsky makes forays into English; this was a full métamorphose américaine, as he described it at some point. For Nabokov, English had the phonetics and the vocabulary to make it --again, in his words-- the most valuable linguistic treasure at his disposition.

So when I was a student of Russian literature Nabokov was certainly not on the list of required reading. They had us reading Sholokhov and Gorky and crap like that just because, at least at the time, the syllabi of American university courses on Russian literature continued to echo the Soviet conception of the canon. So we had the most dreary and predictable sotsrealizm, stuff that may be of interest to the political historian but with absolutely no value as literature, rather than the most talented Russian author of the 20th century, whose language of choice was only one, I think relatively minor, reason for his exclusion.

It strikes me now that in fact Nabokov was drawing more on the richness of the Russian language when he was writing in English than the party-sanctioned authors were when they were writing directly in Russian. Ada, or Ardor, in particular, is a trilingual novel (French being the third, and certainly lesser of the three components), and to say that it was written in English doesn't really do justice to Nabokov's project. It was written through English, mostly, but there would be nothing left of the endeavor if the Russian and French vocabulary, along with the interlinguistic jeux de mots that straddle more than one of the three languages, were to be eliminated. It is through English, but it is about the way different natural languages connect up or fail to connect up with one another. It is about the way language limits expression, and it is an attempt to push through those limits.

One thing Nabokov makes me think is this: it is ridiculous that I, myself, should continue to attempt to string words together at all. I can't even tell a story, but to write an entire novel in which every single word seems simultaneously to be playing the role of vehicle for moving the narrative along as well as being exquisitely selected for its poetic qualities and its multiple layers of signification: that's quite as far beyond my reach as advanced mathematics.

There is a well-known, perhaps apocryphal story of the advice given by Nabokov to a Cornell student who sought tips on how to become a good writer. Learn the names of trees, Nabokov said. This makes me think that Nabokov is writing through English, but that what he's really after is something like what in the early modern period was conceived as 'the Adamic language': the original, perfect system of words, words that zapped right into the essences of the things they named. The cross-linguistic play of a novel like Ada is a sort of exploration, to see which corrupted language brings us closer to the original Adamic one. If there is one thing that Nabokov loves more than language it's the world itself: the proliferation of instances of nature's infinite variety of kinds. As, for example, butterflies.

Working back to the world through the perfection of language: that's real realism for you, and I would be willing to impose it, if I could, as the party line for literature.

But of course in Nabokov there is also the famous work of synaesthesia, which doesn't seek the real names of things, but instead makes private connections between things, connections that we can't expect other people to see. We all do this, most of us more in childhood than later on (I still place Thursday, the color brown, and the state of Tennessee in the same private drawer), but Nabokov cultivated it and built complex worlds out of it throughout his life (coding colors with letters, for example). This seems impossible to square with the realism I just identified, but I think Nabokov may have believed that he, himself, was getting at the genuine correspondences between things, that his private synaesthesia was at the same time a recovery of the Adamic language. Again, the multilingualism of the project is just part of the method of recovering the 'right' word through cross-linguistic comparison. Repeatedly, Nabokov offers examples of the process of corruption in action, of the rate of drift from the Adamic essences of things as we move carelessly from one language to the other (rather than with care, as he moves). Thus for example he has Ada say:

--the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into 'the sky's bed' instead of 'bed ceiler.' But, to go back to our poor flower. The forged louis d'or in that collection of fouled French is the transformation of souci d'eau (our marsh marigold) into the asinine 'care of the water' -- although he had at his disposal dozens of synonyms, such as mollyblob, maybubble, and many other nicknames associated with fertility feasts, whatever those are.

I suppose that Nabokov saw Russian very differently than I do; for him, Russian, English, and French were familiar already in the crèche; for me, they are the impossible objects of an adult learner's struggling. They are too late. 

Cross-linguistic playfulness with Russian seems particularly difficult to me because Russian continues to appear as an entirely closed system. Even to see it transliterated into the Latin alphabet is to see something that ought not exist, an impossible adaptation. One of the jokes of Ada, which takes place in another possible world that is mostly like ours except with respect to certain of its geographical, chronological, and linguistic features, is that the Cyrillic alphabet was abandoned at some earlier point in history, and now Russian speakers are unable to so much as read old texts with the backwards 'R's and the letters that look like beetles, such as the one that begins the very word for beetle in Russian: Жук.

The transliteration scheme of this fictional Latinized Russian is based on English orthography; thus, я хочу comes out as 'ya hochu', rather than as 'ja hotschu', as it would be in a German-based system, or 'ia hotchou', as it would be if one's starting point were French (and there's no good way of handling the aspiration there, so for all intents and purposes one may as well write 'ia otchou').

Russian, I mean to say, cannot be transliterated, at least not without anchoring it to some other language that can have no claim to authority over an unrelated East Slavic tongue. But to the extent that it is not transliterated, it cannot really be made to play with English or French. Nabokov does his best, but I wonder if he had any sense of this barrier to cross-fertility, or whether it's just my own problem.

Perhaps my favorite Anglo-Russian play on words, as being the most successful, involves the name of the title character, which in the nominative case (Ada)  is identical to the genitive of the word, a masculine noun, for 'hell' (ad). One possibility that Nabokov declines to pursue here arises from the fact that ad also has an unusual ending in the prepositional case, an -u rather than the more usual -e. Thus 'in hell' is v adu, which as it happens is identical to the accusative construction v Adu, which is to say, 'into Ada'.

I don't know what work this might have done for Nabokov in the novel, but he could have made it work if he wanted to.

Let me finish with a long and stunning sentence that to my mind summarizes all of the points I've been making here. In it, Nabokov urges the return to nature's richness through the mastery of language, he moves through several languages, and the only moments at which this motion seems to stall are, I think, at those clunkily, Anglocentrically transliterated fragments of Russian:

The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact-- that among these billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperatorskaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, if the decade has a scorpion tail after all), the particularities of their love-making influence in a special way two long lives and a few readers, those pensive reeds, and their pens and mental paintbrushes.