But there might be a name.
For far too long I tried to fit my experience of the world into tales which were not mine. Tales I had learned to hold for the truth. Then, at the age of twenty-five, I read Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale.
"[...] any definition made about a word is doomed" Saussure tells us. "To start from words in order to define things is a bad method" (1)
These lines were a revelation. Because of the nature of language, stories were not true, stories could not be true. So I understood. Any story was a struggle to make sense of what was in front of the teller. But stories, I also understood, had to do with the very essence of human beings. They were told and written by us: they were made by us. They were not discovered. They were not unveiled. From their inception to their final word, they were brought to existence by whoever was telling them.
This, you might think, is a reality of the basic level. A story is a story is a story. It is not true, obviously it is not true. It is fiction. Yes. But.
To start with, I am a stupid person. I am credulous, slow to understand. I need to dig. I need to break apart. I work my way through the mysteries of life far less, I must say, like a gyrfalcon hunting a snow hare than like a worm hunting a grass root.
But this basic truth tells us more.
Language serves no practical purpose. If men needed a way to exchange warnings, the simple system of noises and body language common to most animals would have been enough. Words add very little to it. Language developed away because (if there is a cause) it was fulfilling a different function ; because it was providing an escape route to our desires and to our fears.
This is my explanation, my own story about language and stories. Stories explain the world. Stories are not true. Combining these two incompatible attributes can have dramatic consequences. Examples abound of people who, pushed by their belief in a story which was obviously not true, started changing the world.
Words may be powerless to account for the world, but they can change it. At least, they can change the world of human beings. I often hear about the importance of being precise when using the language. This refers to the language capability to categorise and describe things. But what is really at work in making stories is another ability: the power of the language to name things. In this movement the dictionary is of little use. A writer must rely on his own mind to call the things he summons on the paper by their appropriate name. Whether this name has been authorized by the dictionary is none of his concern. When telling a story, a writer has no other master than himself.
The urgency to write in English rose in me as I went to see Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool, many weeks ago. As we were walking on the beach, a gale storm burst out. We should have run away. Instead, I found myself obliged to stay at the same place and stand as still as possible while the wind, the sea, the sand, the clouds and the rain combined their efforts to destroy everything else around them. I felt that I had to witness this storm and later recall it, in the language of the people of Crosby. In English then. But this would be my own use of English, in all its awkwardness, all its métissage. That would be my story of the storm, made with words I would pick myself. There is no point in writing otherwise.
And here I am. A man standing on Crosby Beach, in winter, in a gale storm.
(1) Introduction III, par. 2, al. 19 : "C'est pourquoi toute définition faite à propos d'un mot est vaine ; c'est une mauvaise méthode que de partir des mots pour définir les choses."
Saussure never wrote the Cours de Linguistique Générale. He never even authorised it. His researches, he felt, were not complete. He was not ready to publish yet. Only after his death did two of his students gather their notes to build the text which changed the whole field of linguistics, and accidentally laid the ground for structuralism.
For far too long I tried to fit my experience of the world into tales which were not mine. Tales I had learned to hold for the truth. Then, at the age of twenty-five, I read Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale.
"[...] any definition made about a word is doomed" Saussure tells us. "To start from words in order to define things is a bad method" (1)
These lines were a revelation. Because of the nature of language, stories were not true, stories could not be true. So I understood. Any story was a struggle to make sense of what was in front of the teller. But stories, I also understood, had to do with the very essence of human beings. They were told and written by us: they were made by us. They were not discovered. They were not unveiled. From their inception to their final word, they were brought to existence by whoever was telling them.
This, you might think, is a reality of the basic level. A story is a story is a story. It is not true, obviously it is not true. It is fiction. Yes. But.
To start with, I am a stupid person. I am credulous, slow to understand. I need to dig. I need to break apart. I work my way through the mysteries of life far less, I must say, like a gyrfalcon hunting a snow hare than like a worm hunting a grass root.
But this basic truth tells us more.
Language serves no practical purpose. If men needed a way to exchange warnings, the simple system of noises and body language common to most animals would have been enough. Words add very little to it. Language developed away because (if there is a cause) it was fulfilling a different function ; because it was providing an escape route to our desires and to our fears.
This is my explanation, my own story about language and stories. Stories explain the world. Stories are not true. Combining these two incompatible attributes can have dramatic consequences. Examples abound of people who, pushed by their belief in a story which was obviously not true, started changing the world.
Words may be powerless to account for the world, but they can change it. At least, they can change the world of human beings. I often hear about the importance of being precise when using the language. This refers to the language capability to categorise and describe things. But what is really at work in making stories is another ability: the power of the language to name things. In this movement the dictionary is of little use. A writer must rely on his own mind to call the things he summons on the paper by their appropriate name. Whether this name has been authorized by the dictionary is none of his concern. When telling a story, a writer has no other master than himself.
The urgency to write in English rose in me as I went to see Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool, many weeks ago. As we were walking on the beach, a gale storm burst out. We should have run away. Instead, I found myself obliged to stay at the same place and stand as still as possible while the wind, the sea, the sand, the clouds and the rain combined their efforts to destroy everything else around them. I felt that I had to witness this storm and later recall it, in the language of the people of Crosby. In English then. But this would be my own use of English, in all its awkwardness, all its métissage. That would be my story of the storm, made with words I would pick myself. There is no point in writing otherwise.
And here I am. A man standing on Crosby Beach, in winter, in a gale storm.
(1) Introduction III, par. 2, al. 19 : "C'est pourquoi toute définition faite à propos d'un mot est vaine ; c'est une mauvaise méthode que de partir des mots pour définir les choses."
Saussure never wrote the Cours de Linguistique Générale. He never even authorised it. His researches, he felt, were not complete. He was not ready to publish yet. Only after his death did two of his students gather their notes to build the text which changed the whole field of linguistics, and accidentally laid the ground for structuralism.
