Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories

Language Saved

When I arrived in the city of Joyce for the first time, I went straight from the train station to the Fluntern cemetery. The streetcar was full to the last stop. Everyone got off at the cemetery and headed with me down the path between the gravestones in the direction indicated by the arrow: “To James Joyce.” I felt uneasy. The closer we got to Joyce’s grave, the more numerous the procession became. The burial site was surrounded by an already packed crowd—and on a work day, not an anniversary of any kind.

I had always assumed that the author of Ulysses was more respected in the West than in my homeland, but this…

Shaken, I looked for some catch, only to find it immediately, unfortunately. They were burying Elias Canetti, who had asked to be laid to rest alongside the great blind man.

Canetti begins Tongue Set Free (whose original title could also be rendered as “Language Saved”) with his first childhood memory. At two, someone frightened him (his nanny’s lover, as would become clear many years later), by rapping his penknife and joking villainously, “And now we’ll cut out his tongue!” The fear of being rendered tongueless would pursue the child, adolescent, youth, and writer for many years. His whole life.

I experienced something similar when I saw the generously daubed backdrop of the Alps. The fear of being left tongueless. Swiss German clanged all around me.

Later, everything fell into place.

Actually, it was quite simple: I had to set my own language free so that my language could save me. I began writing my novel all over again, but in a different way and about something else.

It had just become more obvious that I had to write purely and clearly.

One expects a highly inflected language such as Russian to come in twos, like livestock or people, and to count off: one-two, one-two; translate this, don’t translate that. Moreover, in translation, what can be translated doesn’t so much get translated as mutate.

Say any word, the most inoffensive, the most objective, for instance, “scholarship,” and misunderstanding immediately sets in. It is one thing for a scholar here to study agricultural relations in the fifteenth century in the Canton of Glarus, where five hundred years later the land still belongs to the same family. It is quite another to talk about private ownership of land there, where that kind of scholarship is fuel to the fire of a future civil war.

So it is for any word in the dictionary.

The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into noncommunicating vessels. The past that lives in words does not yield to translation, especially that Russian past which was never a fact but always an argument in the endless war the nation has waged against itself.

Each word individually and all words taken together only exacerbate the impossibility of interlingual understanding and horizontal communication. Ever since the Tower of Babel, the task of language has been to misunderstand.

The art of Russian speech has its own bottled up aroma, ingredients inherent only to the substance of Russian literature. The story of Bloom’s first and last day can be translated into Russian, but Joyce’s text rejects our national language’s substance. The words’ blood curdles. There can only be a “Russian Ulysses” with a “little man’s soul” à la Leskov.

The students in the Zurich Slavic seminar read Kharms (with a dictionary and delight), but it’s not the same Kharms. The Swiss Kharms is about something else. Ours is Platonov’s identical twin. Their words, their Russian substance, cast on the Alpine wind, are pure and clear.

The absurd of OBERIU—the Russian Futurists’ Association of Real Art—is an extension of Akaky Akakievich realism in a country where war and throwing old women out windows is simply a way of life. The most absurd and Kharmsian text cannot help but become the very megaphone through which old women squawk before slamming into the pavement.

This is a healthy disease; you can live with it until you die. Its causes rest partly in genetic predisposition, partly in birth trauma.

You have only to cast an eye over the stages in the great journey of our nation’s chicken-scratches. First came the epaulets, ribbons, and odes on ascension. After plodding along for not very long, Russian letters retired, basically. It read at its leisure and, when it had recovered its sight, it swelled from a sense of its own importance. And wrapped itself up toga-fashion in Gogol’s overcoat. Henceforth and ever after, Pushkin’s seraph from his famous poem “Prophet” would lie in wait in some vacant lot or on the Swallow Hills, where Herzen and Ogarev made their famous vow to each other, and crush the balls of anyone writing in Russian, twist his arms behind his back, rip out the fleshy organ that delivers food to the teeth, as Dal’s dictionary defines it, and whisper: Rise up, see, hear, and burn!

In line with his era’s tastes and the stench of circumstances, a prophet can reveal himself anywhere, even to hardened convicts stashing novels under plank beds, the way poets did trying to survive the Gulag. And this can in no way alter his status: what a seraph gives only a seraph can take away.

Not even the most vomitous language of the most vomitous era, even the most absurd method for describing reality, the most exquisite pen craft, can change anything in the relationship between someone writing in Russian and the six-winged, who themselves have been sent by someone.

One can think only of how words taste, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot violate the job description. Thus, nature has thought of everything: man thinks about the delightful rubbing of genitalia and the result is children. A prophet thinks about the delightful turning of the tongue and a seraph gives Cyrillic its essence, meaning, spirit, and depth. Kharms wrote about old women falling out of windows and the result was the end of the world and the sole possibility for salvation: to love and repent.

But horizontal communications are impossible even within a single language. Even speaking Russian, there is no understanding one another. Yurovsky reads out the sentence in the Ekaterinburg basement where the tsar’s family has been assembled, but Dr. Botkin doesn’t understand, just as Pasternak and Khrushchev misunderstood each other—or the person standing outside with a sign against the Chechen war and the general populace. And what about on a crowded bus? Or in a marital bed grown cold?

How does one give language the purity and clarity needed for understanding? This has nothing to do with being tongue-tied.

A tied tongue, starting with “she sells seashells,” proceeding through a lead article on enemies of the people, and moving on to Brodsky, is actually language’s sole possible form of existence. Refined literature is just another way to be tongue-tied.

One simply has to find a tongue tied in just the right way to explain something. To say something and be understood.

How correct the reception is depends on how correct the code. But everything in language is necessarily aimed at confusing the code and complicating understanding; from the beginning, language has put up an infinite number of boundaries and limitations and introduced utter mayhem.

The search for a code of understanding ties the tongue on a whole new level. Boundaries narrow and walls rise swiftly. The space for understanding collapses and leads to its logical conclusion.

For whom was Finnegan’s Wake actually written? Robert Walser spent his last writing decade on novel after novel, his handwriting tinier and tinier, as he and his letters moved off into infinity.

If the point of language is still communication, then communication between whom?

In what language did St. Francis and the birds communicate? Or rather, better to ask: with whom was the barefoot man from Assisi whistling back and forth?

Intel’s boss once said that he could never outdo the Creator and man would always be the universe’s best chip.

A processor is dead without animating code. A user has to have software to establish contact with the hardware.

A human being released into the world is given a tongue so that he can have vertical communication.

Something has to transform the burning thickets of thorns—every summer forests do burn—into a burning bush.

For mortals, language is the User’s sole form of existence. Thus, it represents both creature and Creator simultaneously.

Walser would have been surprised at the reproach over the indecipherability of the letters he wrote, letters which toward the end of his life shrank to the size of a period. Joyce had no doubt about the intelligibility of Finnegan’s Wake. Both said what they wanted to say purely and clearly, and they were understood.

“And then they did take the hermit priest, the monk ascetic, Epiphanius the elder, and did cut his tongue out whole; from his hand they did sever four fingers. And in the beginning he spoke in a nasal voice, and then he did pray to the Virgin Mother of God, and shown to him were both tongues, the one of Moscow and the one of these parts, in the air; and he, taking hold of one, put his own in his mouth and ever since began speaking purely and clearly, and his tongue took root in his mouth and lived.”