John Daniel: When Words Fail

WHEN WORDS FAIL: Writers and the Clearing of Cuttlefish Ink
by John Daniel
Orion (2002)

Take care for the spiritual quality, the holy
quality, the serious quality of language.

-- Barry Lopez

It is always the task of the artist to imagine experience, meaning not to blur it or make it up but to bring it into fresh focus. Good art, wrote Ezra Pound, is "art that bears true witness, the art that is the most precise." For the writer this entails a special responsibility. His medium is the ordinary one by which we address each other, by which news is known and history is recorded, by which a culture understands and misunderstands itself. Language is the medium of politics, and as such it is subject to debasement by those in government who shape interpretations of their acts and policies for public consumption.

Writers, then, perhaps uniquely among artists, must work against the corruption of their medium, and that responsibility, like it or not, has a political dimension. It is about preserving the health of public discourse in our culture, and ultimately it is about the health of our own art. George Orwell wrote, in his great essay, Politics and the English Language: "A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Orwell argues that the telltale sign of corrupt political language is the continual repetition of prefabricated phrases put forth reflexively in lieu of thought:

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy... The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying... And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.

But not all spokespersons are robotic dummies. Some official language is uttered or written quite consciously to obscure real facts. Orwell again: "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink." Orwell published his essay 56 years ago, but it could just as aptly have been written yesterday. Only the phrases have changed.

Here is some of the ink squirted out since September 11, 2001, and one writer's view of what it obscures.

It became voguish among certain academics and think-tankers soon after the attacks to characterize our situation as "a clash of civilizations." This is language not of history or political science but of science fiction. It assumes that a civilization is a uniform, intransigent, monolithic entity -- or that Islamic civilization is, because we don't view our own that way. All the phrase really accomplishes is to stipulate ignorance, because it subsumes under one homogenizing rubric the vast diversity and varied texture of the Muslim world. It says that we are incompetent or unwilling to distinguish Sunnis from Shi'ites, Farsi from Arabic, extreme fundamentalist Wahhabis from progressive, pious, and peace-loving mainstream Muslims. It sounds awfully like an intellectual euphemism for a low-life belief that all those serious brown faces with head-wraps look the same and we can't trust any of them.

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