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Home , Linguistic relativity

Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

Part I THE LINGUISTIC AND THE POETIC TEXT

3 9 The Linguistic Worldview , , and Culture

4 0 Edited by: Adam Głaz, David S. Danaher, Przemysław Łozowski

Chapter 2 The Linguistic Worldview and Literature

Anna Pajdzińska UMCS, Lublin, Poland

1. The origin of the linguistic worldview idea

Language is usually viewed as a social tool, a means of expressing thoughts and emotions, a system used for communicating with and influencing others. But it can also be viewed as a “symbolic guide to culture” (Sapir, 1961 [1929], p. 70). The cultural aspect of was already recognized by the Ancient Greeks. Two major debates, referred to as the phýsei vs. thései debate and the analogists vs. anomalists debate, involved nearly all distinguished Greek philosophers, later also philologists and grammarians, and centered around the language-world relationship: is it natural or conventional? Can language, as a tool for naming things and phenomena, provide us with a knowledge of reality and if so, to what extent? Do words derive from the nature of objects or are they conventionally assigned labels? Is there a proportionality (analogy) or a mere anomaly between language and reality? The debates were continued in the Middle Ages as a controversy involving universals: what corresponds to words denoting general ? According to realists, elements of reality do, whereas according to nominalists, nothing really does, general concepts being merely products of the human mind. In the 15th and 16th centuries, as more and more were studied, it became progressively clearer that there is no strict correspondence between them (cf. Martin Luther’s 1530 Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen). In subsequent centuries, interest in languages on the part of philosophers increased again. Until the end of the 19th century, attempts to find or construct a universal language were repeatedly made, and many remarks found in philosophical treatises continue to arouse interest up to this day. For example, Francis Bacon claimed that the structure and characteristic properties of languages, as tools constructed and used by language communities, indirectly testify to the spiritual and psychological qualities of these communities. John Locke, in turn, noticed that each language contains several words without equivalents in other languages. They express, claimed Locke, complex ideas as derivatives of the customs and lifestyle of a given nation. Also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz treated languages as a source of knowledge about their users, as the best reflection of human minds.

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The 18th and 19th-century German philosophers and , as well as before them, underscored a bidirectional influence between language and its users: language is a manifestation of the psychic life of a given community (the nation’s spirit), i.e. a form of consciousness. The community leaves its mark on the language it is using and can also be recognized through it. But language, says Humboldt, does not only reflect human consciousness: it also shapes it. Between the intellectually active speaker and the outside world intervenes that speaker’s mother tongue with its specific and characteristic interpretation of reality – thus, how the world is experienced depends on language. However, there is no here: even though one’s native language puts a magic ring around its users’ cognition, every creative speech event is to a certain degree an attempt to move beyond that ring, in the same way that is involved in learning a foreign language with its distinct conceptual network and worldview. For Humboldt, a complete understanding of objective reality is not possible – but that is not a cause for concern. On the contrary, thanks to this aprioristic imperfection, the processes of cognitive and epistemological enrichment and thinking in language are in fact unbounded.

2. Two Sources of the Linguistic Worldview Theory

Humboldt’s ideas found fertile ground in the thinking of 20th-century German linguists gathered around the figure of , i.e. the Neo-Humboldtians. Their major goal was to uncover the cognitive content entrenched in one’s mother tongue (Muttersprache) and transmitted from one generation to another (hence a different name for the approach: inhaltbezogene Grammatik, the grammar of content). They mainly analyzed the structuring of the lexicon into semantic fields; this they deemed to be the best method of identifying the fragments of the world made salient through a given language, as well as those that the language fails to “notice.” The linguists argued that

we need not only see language as a means of communication but as a creative strength of the spirit. The fact that a language has a certain body of lexis and a certain syntax means that it contains a segmentation of the world which is not inherent in things but precisely in language. Every language is a means of accessing the world; every language community is constituted by a common worldview contained in its mother tongue. (Christmann, 1967, p. 442)

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Beisdes the term sprachliches Weltbild, which replaced Humboldt’s Weltansicht,1 another important term for Neo-Humboldtians was sprachliche Zwischenwelt. This intermediary linguistic world they took to be the result of transforming, by a given speech community, the perceived (material, substantial, physical) world into the world of consciousness, i.e. the intellectual and conceptual world. It is an intermediary being, situated between the speaker and the outside world, and influencing the speaker’s view of that world. There is also a striking similarity, which suggests an inspiration and influence, between the views of German idealists and those of American ethnolinguists. Research on Native American communities led to the conclusion that language depends on culture and so it is legitimate to treat it as a testimony to culture. and ,2 in their descriptions of Native American languages and comparisons thereof with English, discovered several deeply rooted differences on the level of lexis and grammar. They also noticed a correlation between linguistic forms and human behavior, which led them to a view of the language-culture interface as bidirectional influence. However, the so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” or the linguistic relativity/determinism hypothesis is a double misnomer: (i) it is an in-line juxtaposition of apparently equipollent terms whose import as to the role of language is in fact different, and (ii) it suggests that Sapir professed linguistic relativity, whereas his disciple had more radical views. In fact, the works of both scholars contain statements that modulate the “hypothesis” in numerous ways. Linguistic relativity assumes that there are differences between the perception of the world entrenched in languages from different cultures (as well as conceptual differences within the same national language), whereas determinists would have us believe that a national language actually conditions human cognition: as a result, people who speak different languages live, in a sense, in different worlds.

1 For a discussion of these and other terms, their connotations and (mis)interpretations, cf. Underhill (2009) and (2011). 2 Whorf even uses the notion of world view and attributes it to the working of a language or languages, cf. for example: The participants in a given world view are not aware of the idiomatic nature of the channels in which their talking and thinking run, and are perfectly satisfied with them, regarding them as logical inevitables. But take an outsider, a person accustomed to widely different language and culture, or even a scientist of a later era using somewhat different language of the same basic type, and not all that seems logical and inevitable to the participants in the given world view seems so to him. (Whorf, 1956 [1940], p. 222) The most succinct formulation of the idea, however, seems to come from Stuart Chase, the author of the Foreword to Whorf’s Language, Thought, and Reality, who finds in the latter linguist’s unpublished monograph the idea that “[r]esearch is needed to discover the world view of many unexplored languages, some now in danger of extinction” (Chase, 1956, p. x).

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3. Language as an Interpretation of the World

No convincing arguments have been adduced so far to accept or reject the deterministic view. Relativity, on the other hand, is well-documented: for several decades evidence has been accumulating that every language is an interpretation, not a reflection of the world in the sense of a one-to-one mapping between them. Differences between languages lie deep: they are not merely formal or superficial. A language consolidates the cognitive experience of the community it serves, or more precisely, of the various generations and groups within the community, each of which may approach the same fragment of reality form a different viewpoint, following its own sentiments and needs. In consequence, the linguistic worldview that results is complex, multi-layered, heterogenic, and dynamic: it derives from continually occurring cognitive acts, whose effects accumulate, coexist, change, supplant, or are superimposed upon one another. Thus, although the linguistic worldview is in a sense conservative or anachronistic, as linguistic change is slower than social or cultural change, the dynamism of change is incessant: language on the one hand imposes a certain conceptualization of reality upon its users, on the other hand it allows speakers to overcome the limitations of that conceptualization, to move beyond its boundaries. Every language models the world in a way that makes it possible for members of the relevant speech community to function in it properly. The modeling is composed of several interlinked operations: • segmentation of the world, i.e. identification of things and phenomena important for the speech community concerned; • interpretation of these things and phenomena, ascription of features to them; the feature that is the most conspicuous from the point of view of a given community usually becomes the name-providing distinguishing mark; • ordering of things and phenomena, delineating the relationships between them; • a multi-aspectual valuation of things and states of affairs, in which an especially prominent role is played by conceptual categories that organize a given worldview: anthropocentrism and the “us–them” opposition. In the processes of modeling the world, the latter is constantly being adjusted to human cognitive capacities: its complexity is reduced, its changeability and flow of events are weakened, and experiential chaos is transformed into an order. An interpretation of the world characteristic of a given language can be expressed with diverse means: the semantic structures of lexemes, the number of items in a given lexico-semantic domain (the more important the domain, the more items it usually contains), etymology, word-formational and semantic motivation of lexemes, acts of naming, and the process of metaphorization. However, a view of the world is entrenched not only in the lexicon but also in

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morphological and syntactic structures, as well as in a language’s grammatical categories. The grammar of each language encodes a certain body of meanings, expressed in an often mandatory and automatized manner. Speakers are usually not aware of their existence, let alone of their interpretive nature. Almost any information can be conveyed in any language but its lexical or grammatical modulation may differ, and its expression in one language may be easier than in others, with aspects of being more or less obligatory. What view of the world is entrenched in a language obviously depends on the natural living conditions of its community, i.e. the topography, climate, etc., but to the same extent – if not more so – on its culture.

4. Language as the Raw Material of Literature: Implications

It took a long time for scholars to realize the consequences of the fact that literature builds on language as its raw material. Principles of ancient provenance – a good genological pattern, its application in a specific situation, a clear theme and its rhetorical elaboration in accordance with the norms of a given genre – were still in operation in the Enlightenment. Apart from formal requirements, the poetic value of one’s work depended on whether and how the content was idealized or sublimated. It was only in late 18th century that universal rules, applied for the work of art to have an esthetic value, were counterbalanced by that work as an expression of a nation’s spirit. The idea of poetry as a national artifact appeared in opposition to the of the classic model,3 and the idea of the significance of folk literature emerged as a counterpoint to the theory’s elitism. By underscoring national aspects and conditioning of poetry, national languages became the center of attention in a natural way. Admittedly, Georg Hegel, while discussing various types of artistic activity in his Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, attributed a greater role to the content of a literary work of art than to its linguistic matter. He explained it in the following way: although content in literature is realized through language, something else emerges between the linguistic sign (which he considered a “means of spiritual expression” rather than “an end in itself”, Hegel 1886, no page) and what the sign refers to – namely, an internal view, image, or representation, which becomes the center for cognizing. The arbitrary nature of the sign makes it so that its

3 I.e., the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman patterns, with attention being paid to universal, timeless ideals rather than those related to national or more local contexts.

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role in poetic expression is decidedly smaller than the role of raw material in painting or sculpture. However, the already mentioned Johann Gottfried Herder, over a quarter of a century before Hegel, viewed the role of language in poetry somewhat differently. He wrote: “The spirit of the language ... is also the spirit of the nation’s literature... It is therefore impossible to comprehend the literature of a nation without knowing its language; it is only through language that you can come to knowledge of the literature” (Fragmente über die neuere deutsche Literatur. Erste Sammlung von Fragmenten, translated from Skwarczyńska, 1965, p. 64). One can also deduce that for Herder, poets build their works from the material of the very grammatical structure of language. For example, he considered how much content can be extracted from the allegedly redundant – according to Cartesians – gender distinctions of inanimate nouns, found only in some languages and even there realized differently from language to language. The most forceful view on the relatedness of poetry and language was expressed by Wilhelm von Humboldt at the very end of the 18th century when he wrote that poetry is art practiced through language. In his view, poetry must “work language through and through” (because language transforms everything into general concepts) in order to activate its potential to move from the general to the specific, from the abstract to the concrete. In her interpretation of Humboldt’s work, Zdzisława Kopczyńska (1976, p. 189) writes: “In the two directions of poetic endeavor that he mentions, language is the main element: it does not only define each of the two directions but is in fact decisive in shaping their diversity.” One extreme is “the use of language as a means or an instrument in poetry as art, i.e. for the shaping ... of the poetic work by making use of those aspects of the language potential that render it effective as a tool.” A radically different situation is when “language itself, as it were, decides the nature of the poetic work. Here poetry does not so much utilize the defining properties of language but absorbs them, acquiring in the process a significant degree of autonomy as a form of artistic expression.” For Wilhelm Scherer, writing in the second half of the 19th century, it is no longer the or the history of a nation that constitutes the essence of historical and literary inquiry. It was clear to him that poetry is “a kind of attitude to language and [that it] operates within language use”; it is “an art of speech,” and an “artistic employment of language” (Scherer, 1977 [1888], p. 9). Polish authors also contributed to the discussion on the mutual relationship between the national language and the language of poetry, on the role of poetry in the development of the national language, and the poetic potential of language. Kazimierz Brodziński (1964 [1818]), for example, took note of the properties of national languages. He viewed the Romantic spirit of the Germans as appropriate and understandable, since it was motivated by the German tradition and the German language. In Poland, however, the tradition is closer to the classical aura. It is matched by a language that does not easily fit in with

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the Romantic spirit due to its “ancient classical structure,”4 “freedom, frankness and conciseness,” “an almost inexhaustible potential for semantic shading,” “a striking logic,” and “a natural clarity and common sense.” An interdependence of national characteristics and language was also assumed by Leon Borowski (1820), whose research on poetry and elocution rested on the idea that “the spirit of nations and the spirit of their speech are such close companions that one always speaks through the other” (in Kopczyńska, 1976, p. 88). Contrary to Brodziński, Borowski did not have a high opinion of the Polish literary tradition and criticized it for blindly following foreign patterns, without a “clear national taste.” He did believe, however, that the Polish language, which had preserved its “power and valor,” can facilitate an outstanding development of Polish poetry. In the debate on the linguistic raw material of literature, a momentous role was played by the phenomenological theory of a literary work of art. According to Roman Ingarden, all extralinguistic artistically relevant elements of the work ultimately derive from linguistic creations in that work and from their properties. Some esthetically significant qualities directly depend on the shape of those creations or derive from the complexity and expressiveness of syntactic structure. Linguistic creations in a literary work of art play, therefore, a double role: first, they determine all other elements of the work, and second, they function themselves as the work’s elements. It is thanks to their presence and meaning that specific esthetic qualities are realized. Thanks to the structuralist approach it became obvious that an artistic text, especially poetry, is a unique arrangement of elements in which everything has semantic value. Even before it enters the work, the raw material of literature is meaningful and structured – this is not the case in other kinds of artistic endeavor. Limitations imposed on a material of this kind help reveal novel semantic qualities and a new sequence of meanings is superimposed over the sequence of linguistic meanings. Textual meanings are also hidden in the very structure of linguistic and their larger complexes, in linguistic arrangements and configurations. All components are interlinked and constitute a functional whole, irreducible to any of them individually. That whole, in turn, is not meaningful in itself but in relation to higher-order structures: it is usually interpreted against the backdrop of the language system and literary tradition, but its relativized value in terms of the linguistic worldview also seems relevant. This idea appeared already in the work of the Tartu semiotic school, in which every national language was treated as a primary modeling system. For example, Yuri Lotman frequently underscored the fact that linguistic structure systematizes the signs of the code, turning them into tools for transmission of information and

4 The relatedness of Polish and Latin was for Brodziński unquestionable.

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at the same time reflecting people’s views of reality. Since linguistic structure preserves human cognitive acts, the writer works with the material that contains, in a condensed form, the centuries-old activity of a given speech community whose members have made an effort to know the world. This reflection, however, was all too weakly shared, if indeed shared at all, by literary scholars. An obvious, not to say a banal view in contemporary humanities is that living with others in a community is impossible without assuming a certain common worldview, a kind of frame of reference for all the endeavors of the community’s members. It appears, however, that this idea is still insufficiently appreciated, or else accepted without due reflection on the fact that a common worldview is to a large extent shaped by a common language. If language is an interpretation of reality or a way of seeing the world, the categories and values cherished by a linguistic community should also be taken into account in interpretations of literary texts. Even if one assumes that literary texts are radically different from other kinds of text in their very essence, their intentions and execution, even if the author – in his or her desire to enrich and extend the knowledge of people and the world, to express the inexpressible, to access a mystery, etc. – continually strives to go beyond the limits of language in its communicative function, “everything that a work contains ... must go through the medium of language” (Mukařovský, 1970, p. 169). This, says Mukařovský, “at the same time refers to an internal connection of a work ... with the society achieved precisely through language.” A similar thought had been formulated even more emphatically by Edward Sapir: “The understanding of a simple poem, for instance, involves not merely an understanding of the single words in their average significance, but a full comprehension of the whole life of the community as it is mirrored in the words, or as it is suggested by their overtones” (Sapir, 1961 [1929], p. 69).

5. Poetic Exemplification

In order to realize how important it is to take note of the linguistic worldview in an analysis of a literary text, let us consider a few examples. They all come from the work of the Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Wisława Szymborska. In her poem Conversation with a Stone,5 a person is talking to an unusual interlocutor. Is it, however, a coincidental interlocutor? Perhaps not: other objects are mentioned

5 The English translations of Szymborska’s poems, by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, come from Szymborska (2001). For a discussion of the linguistic view of Czech kámen ‘stone’ and some examples of its poetic elaboration, cf. Vaňková this volume.

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in the poem – a leaf, a drop of water, a hair – but these remain backgrounded. By choosing a stone out of many possible elements of nature, the poet was probably guided by the suggestiveness of its image in the Polish language. For a speaker of Polish, kamień ‘stone’ is not only “a piece of rock, usually hard, compact and heavy” (a dictionary definition) but has numerous semantic connotations, e.g. the fact that it is inanimate motivates the feature ‘immobile’ (cf. skamienieć ‘turn into stone, fossilize, petrify,’ siedzieć kamieniem ‘sit still,’ or bodajby się w kamień zamienił ‘may he turn into stone’), while the prototypical hardness is metaphorically extended to yield the meaning of ‘insensitive, unaffected, strict, unemotional, unfeeling, ruthless’ (cf. ktoś jest (twardy) jak kamień ‘someone is hard as a rock,’ kamień nie człowiek ‘he’s a stone, not a human being,’ kamień by się poruszył ‘this would move a stone,’ ktoś jest z kamienia ‘someone is made of stone,’ kamienne serce ‘a heart of stone,’ kamienna twarz ‘a stone face’). This characterization is evoked in the poem when the stone responds to the human speaker’s words “My mortality should touch you” with “I’m made of stone ... and therefore must keep a straight face.” In making such ample use of the linguistic view of kamień, Szymborska – by choosing a stone for the interlocutor – rejects an important feature that results from the object’s inanimateness, namely its inability to speak. The expressions milczeć jak kamień ‘to be silent as a grave’ (lit. ‘as a stone’), kamienna cisza/ kamienne milczenie ‘dead (lit. stony) silence’ show that for Polish speakers stones belong to the realm of the silent and are unassociated with sounds, let alone with speech.6 In the poem, the stone is not only endowed with the ability to speak, but its conversational function is actually stronger than that of the human speaker. The latter’s request repeatedly meets with the stone’s rejection. The stone’s unquestionable dominance is surprising because it contradicts our conviction, which derives from our use of language, that humans are the most important “components” of the world, and as such they occupy the highest position in the earthly hierarchy of beings. Why have these requests been rejected? What do they concern? At the very beginning of the conversation, one reads:

I want to enter your insides, have a look around, breathe my fill of you.

6 Connections of stones with speech can be found in broader culture. For example, in the biblical Book of Habakkuk (2, 6-11) the stone in the house built on bloodshed and evil gain will cry out against the oppressor. In Luke’s Gospel (19, 40), in turn, Jesus says that even if the crowd in Jerusalem keep silent, the stones will cry out. These, however, are exceptional and hypothetical situations: people’s behavior is so outrageous that it provokes verbal reaction from otherwise mute stones.

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At the end of it, in turn, the human interlocutor asks:

It’s only me, let me come in. I haven’t got two thousand centuries, so let me come under your roof.

In order to interpret this, we must again make recourse to the linguistic worldview idea. These poetic contexts rather clearly imply certain properties of a stone that may be absent from its linguistic portrayal but that derive from that portrayal. ‘Hardness’ motivates ‘durability’ and ‘permanence,’ and these turn a stone into a of longevity or even of existence. From this, there is only a stone’s throw from viewing it as a source of life.7 It is precisely this characteristic that is indirectly expressed through breathe my fill of you. In Polish, the linguistic motivated by one of the most fundamental human experiences, i.e. breathing, express the notion of being alive: ktoś jeszcze oddycha ‘someone is still alive’ (lit. ‘is still breathing’), do ostatniego tchu/tchnienia ‘to the last breath,’ ktoś ledwo/ledwie dyszy/dycha ‘someone is barely alive’ (lit. ‘can hardly breathe’), ktoś oddał/wydał ostanie tchnienie ‘someone breathed their last,’ ktoś/coś jest dla kogoś jak powietrze ‘someone/ something is indispensable to someone else to live’ (lit. ‘like the air’).8 The human subject in Szymborska’s poem does not fully realize his or her own fault in the failed conversation. A human perspective, a human ordering and evaluation of the world, is never cast away: the stone is approached like an artifact, the speaker knocks at the stone’s front door and says:

I want to enter your insides, […] I mean to stroll through your palace, […] I hear you have great empty halls inside you, unseen, their beauty in vain, soundless, not echoing anyone’s steps.

7 Certain cultural facts show that a stone’s hardness and immobility are no obstacles to treating it as a living creature or even a life-giver. In Europe, until the end of the 17th century it was assumed that “stones are conceived, grow and mature in the depths of the Earth... Hence there originates a connection, frequent in various cultures, between stones and the earth’s symbolism of fertility: fertility is drawn from the earth via stones. A second source of stone’s symbolism of fertility is the belief that they are inhabited by the spirits of one’s ancestors and mediate in the transmission of fertility from them” (Brzozowska, 1996, p. 349). 8 More on linguistic and artistic metaphors with the source domain of breathing can be found in Pajdzińska (1999). Incidentally, similar metaphorical processes can also be found in English, cf. with one’s last/dying breath, to be the breath of life to somebody or to breathe one’s last.

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The stone is thus not viewed as a part of nature but as an architectonic form, an expression of a human creative attitude to the world’s primeval shape. This is the sin of pride: the world is portrayed only from the human perspective, and if there is no human viewer, then beauty is “in vain.” The poem thus makes ample use of one of the most important categories that organize the entrenched in natural languages (and not only in Polish), namely anthropocentrism.9 The anthropocentric perspective, however, is questioned on two levels: on the level of creative action (by instituting an asymmetry between the interlocutors) and on the level of the human speaker’s linguistic behavior. The conversation is based on two categories of speech acts: request and refusal. The requester is by definition lower than his/ her interlocutor in the conversational hierarchy, since it is the addressee that decides about whether to agree or not. In Szymborska’s poem, perhaps contrary to the reader’s expectations, the balance tilts to the stone’s side. The human interlocutor’s weaker position symbolizes people’s general existential situation: alienation, loneliness, and fear of death. To enter matter (the stone’s insides) would be to return to the state of primeval unity, escape from the price one pays for functioning in culture and away from nature, that is, from the feeling of lonesomeness and from the awareness of ineluctable death. But it turns out that nature and culture are mutually impenetrable. Indeed, a life embedded in culture, deemed as superior to nature, precludes one from a familiarity with the latter. The senses, which condition human cognitive interaction with the world, are brushed aside by the stone as “poor.” The human speaker is said to lack “the sense of taking part,” and “no other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.” It is people themselves who, by severing links with nature and occupying a more lofty position, have triggered their own alienation. Let us now consider a fragment from another poem by Szymborska, Birthday (Urodziny), in which the speaker describes what falls to one’s lot on the day one is born: one is presented with an unusual gift, the world, with all its richness, complexity and changeability, its uniqueness and inimitability. The world’s ontic nature is such that a human being can never and nowhere absorb it in its fullness. The speaking ego’s monolog ends with:

9 This category is a natural consequence of the fact that language is a human creation: it presents the world as it is seen through human eyes for the benefit of humans. Anthropocentrism is manifested both at the level of grammar (cf. the natural hierarchy of arguments implied by the predicate, in which the highest rank is reserved for those with the selectional restriction ‘human’) and lexical (the human point of view is reflected in the quantitative structure of the lexicon, in the meanings of lexical items; it can motivate regularities of metaphorical processes or restrictions in lexico-semantic valence).

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Na chwilę tu jestem i tylko na chwilę: co dalsze, przeoczę, a resztę pomylę. Nie zdążę wszystkiego odróżnić od próżni. Pogubię te bratki w pośpiechu podróżnym. Już choćby najmniejszy – szalony wydatek: fatyga łodygi i listek, i płatek raz jeden w przestrzeni, od nigdy, na oślep, wzgardliwie dokładny i kruchy wyniośle.10

I am just passing through, it’s a five-minute stop. I won’t catch what is distant: what’s too close, I’ll mix up. While trying to plumb what the void’s inner sense is, I’m bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies. What a loss when you think how much effort was spent perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent for the one-time appearance, which is all they’re allowed, so aloofly precise and so fragilely proud.

The speaker will not succeed in “trying to plumb what the void’s inner sense is” – the void that one faces at birth and will face at the end of one’s life journey.11 The unusual nature of all existence is symbolized by the Polish bratek ‘pansy.’ The choice of this minute fragment of reality is far from haphazard: its very name, derived from brat ‘brother,’ underscores brotherhood and common fate. Similarly to a human being, bratek is an individual and a particular entity. The speaker extends that similarity, attributing to the flower certain characteristics typically reserved to humans: in order to look a certain way, the plant spends effort, perfects its petals, its precision aloof and fragility proud. At the same time, the expressions od nigdy ‘since never,’ na oślep ‘blindly’ (in the English translation rendered as which is all they’re allowed) signal a fundamental between humans and the pansy (which, incidentally, represents other entities through synecdoche). The unusual syntagm od nigdy, which consists of the preposition od ‘since, from,’ marking the beginning of some state, and the adverb nigdy ‘never, at no point

10 Quoted from Szymborska (1977, p. 172). 11 The conceptual LIFE IS A JOURNEY is evoked by the Polish w pośpiechu podróżnym ‘hastily when one is traveling,’ rendered here as “I’m bound to pass by.” This is a creative complementation of numerous linguistic metaphors in Polish, e.g. ktoś wybrał właściwą/niewłaściwą drogę ‘someone has chosen the right/wrong path,’ ktoś stoi na rozdrożu ‘someone is at a crossroads,’ ktoś jest na zakręcie ‘someone is at the crossroads’ (lit. ‘someone is taking a bend’), ktoś i ktoś idą wspólną drogą ‘someone is walking with someone else along the same road/path.’ It is also a frequent literary motif.

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in time,’ suggests that although time is a parameter for every being, not all beings are aware of the fact. The other expression, na oślep ‘blindly, without thinking or paying attention to the surroundings,’ stresses the unreflective nature of purely biological existence. Therefore, paradoxically, all elements in a person’s surroundings, even the most minute, as well as that person him- or herself, contribute with their being hic et nunc to the continuous presence and omnipresence of the world. But it is only to a human being that this omnipresence comes forth as fundamental and captivating. The human speaker in the poem has no illusions: only a tiny fragment of the abundance can be enjoyed and absorbed. Finally, we will look at the poem View with a Grain of Sand, which forcefully makes the reader reflect on the relationship between language and the world. Average speakers do not usually treat language as a complex cognitive system that facilitates mentally locating oneself in the world or as an interpretive network superimposed on reality; rather, they are prone to consider the analysis of the world suggested by their mother tongue as undisputable and natural. However, an awareness of the fact that every language captures reality in a symbolic manner, i.e. has a formative and a limiting role in relation to thinking, permeating even people’s direct experience, is frequently present in poetry. In Szymborska’s View with a Grain Sand it is mainly through language that people and the world are juxtaposed:

Zwiemy je ziarnkiem piasku. A ono siebie ani ziarnkiem, ani piasku. Obywa się bez nazwy ogólnej, szczególnej, przelotnej, trwałej, mylnej czy właściwej.

Na nic mu nasze spojrzenie, dotknięcie. Nie czuje się ujrzane i dotknięte. A to, że spadło na parapet okna, to tylko nasza, nie jego przygoda. Dla niego to to samo, co spaść na cokolwiek, bez pewności, czy spadło już, czy spada jeszcze.12

12 From Szymborska (1986, pp. 11-12).

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We call it a grain of sand, but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine, without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it. It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched. And that it fell on the windowsill is only our experience, not its. For it, it is not different from falling on anything else with no assurance that it has finished falling or that it is falling still.

In a poetic shortcut, the poem shows that people interact with the world through language. Distinguishing things from the environment or isolating an event from a situation is possible (or at least, easier) because it is named (cf. a grain of sand, windowsill, falling). Linguistic “categories [including] number, gender, case, tense, mode, voice, ‘aspect,’ and a host of others ... are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it.” In Sapir’s words, we have to take note of “our unconscious projection of [the language’s] implicit expectations into the field of experience” (Sapir, 1931, p. 578). Every event, including those portrayed in poetry, must be captured with the use of grammatical categories inherent in a specific language. Speakers of Polish have to view it as either past (spadło ‘it fell’), present (spada ‘it is falling’) or future, as completed or continuing. They have to decide whether the agent or experiencer in that event is/was singular or plural, as well as whether his/her/its gender is masculine, feminine, or neuter. English speakers also have to choose between singularity and plurality and additionally between definiteness and indefiniteness; they also have to characterize the event temporally, by choosing one of the numerous constructions referring to the past, present, or future. The Kwakiutl from the Canadian British Columbia do not attend to the time of the event or the number of participants in it, but to whether it was, at the moment of utterance, visible to the speaker or not. Also, they necessarily specify who the event was closest to: the speaker, the hearer, or a third party. In the language of the Nootka, the Kwakiutl’s neighbors, the event described by Szymborska has to be verbalized in a totally different manner. The utterance will not contain a nominal element but a verbal construction, consisting of two major parts. The first expresses motion or location of a given of objects (the object’s status is implied in this way), the other expresses the downward direction of the movement.

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Paradoxical phrasings from a later fragment of the poem – beneath a sky by nature skyless, the sun sets without setting at all, hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud – make the reader realize that language portrays the world not as it is but as it appears to people. After all, the sky does not exist: it is a virtual vault above the Earth, against which we see the Sun, the Moon, the stars, or sometimes the comets. By identifying portions of condensation of minute waterdrops, ice crystals, or their mixture, we also mentally “create” clouds.13 The changes in the position of the Sun, in turn, are described as if they were intentional: the Sun sets or hides behind something to avoid being seen. The poem’s ending even more explicitly points to the role of imagination in conceptualizing the world and the incommensurability of the world and language:

Mija jedna sekunda. Druga sekunda. Trzecia sekunda. Ale to tylko nasze trzy sekundy.

Czas przebiegł jak posłaniec z pilną wiadomością. Ale to tylko nasze porównanie. Zmyślona postać, wmówiony jej pośpiech, a wiadomość nieludzka.

A second passes. A second second. A third. But they’re three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news. But that’s just our simile. The character is inverted, his haste is make believe, his news inhuman.

13 The attributive epithet relating to the cloud in the poem (bezwiedna, Eng. translation: unminding) is worthy of a separate comment. We are dealing here with a violation of the rules of lexico-semantic collocability, for bezwiedny means ‘occurring or made subconsciously, instinctive, automatic, unintentional, unwitting’ and is usually used to refer to actions, emotional reactions, people’s behavior etc., e.g. bezwiedny ruch ‘unintentional movement,’ bezwiedny uśmiech ‘unwitting smile,’ czuć bezwiedną niechęć/bezwiedne zaufanie ‘to feel an instinctive dislike/trust.’ Once these selectional restrictions are violated, the cloud has received a complex characterization: beside the standard meaning of bezwiedny, the older meaning of ‘ignorant, unknowing’ is activated.

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The manifold metaphorical and metonymic processes in this fragment play an important cognitive role: they are tools that facilitate at least a partial understanding of what cannot be otherwise understood at all because it is too complex or inaccessible to direct (sensory-motor) experience. The metaphorically structured concepts include time, measured with increasingly greater precision (cf. the names of the time units, a second being the smallest unit used in everyday situations). Time can be modeled in a variety of ways, among others as a mobile object, cf. the conventionalized metaphors time flies, time is running short, the time will come, it seemed like the time stopped, in the course of time, the passage of time, race against time, spend time.14 Time can also be personified, e.g. the spirit of the time(s), time is pressing, time heals all wounds (some of the expressions in the previous list can also be seen as personifications). Szymborska underscores the metaphorical nature of conventionalized ways of referring to time by using the stock expression a second passes as a poetic manifestation of the same TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT. What is more, she twice uses the expression ale to tylko nasze trzy sekundy ‘but they are three seconds only for us,’ ale to tylko nasze porównanie ‘but that’s just our simile.’ The possessive adjective nasze ‘our,’ corresponding to the my ‘we,’ preceded by a limiting particle tylko ‘only,’ the contrast-introducing conjunction ale ‘but’ – these all emphasize the opposition between the world and the way it is conceptualized by people, or in consequence: between the world and people. In this context, the final adjective in the poem receives special salience. Contrary to its word-formational structure, the word nieludzki does not only have a purely relational meaning ‘not concerned with or belonging to people,’ but two evaluative meanings ‘not befitting a person or interpersonal relationships; cruel, merciless’ and ‘not designed for a human being; beyond any person’s abilities or strength’ (the English counterpart used, inhuman, displays a similar range of meanings). This kind of semantic development of the word doubtless points to its anthropocentric orientation. The evaluative function of the word is also realized in the poetic context: the news acquires the of being callous or insensitive. But because the adjective is used comparatively, it indirectly describes the working of time: both the evaluative and the structural meanings play a role here. Since it is, moreover, “just our simile,” it reveals our own human perspective for viewing and evaluation.

14 With very few differences, parallel metaphors can be found in Polish.

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6. A Final Word

The examples above hopefully show that for a reliable account of poetic creation and the individual worldview of an author, an analyst must consider – as one frame of reference apart from linguistic or literary conventions – the worldview entrenched in the language itself. However, the relationship between the linguistic worldview and literature is bidirectional. On the one hand, the worldview characteristic of a given speech community leaves its mark on literary texts, but on the other, the latter can also have a bearing on language-entrenched conceptualizations. Moreover, they can be useful in actual reconstructions of the linguistic worldview: they can facilitate verification procedures for hypotheses proposed on the basis of systemic data or by revealing aspects of language use that would remain otherwise unidentified. This question, however, merits a separate treatment.

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References

Borowski, Leon. (1820). Uwagi nad poezją i wymową pod względem ich podobieństwa i różnicy, z ćwiczeniami w niektórych gatunkach stylu. Wilno.

Brodziński, Kazimierz. (1964 [1818]). O klasyczności i romantyczności tudzież o duchu poezji polskiej. In Pisma estetyczno-krytyczne. Vol. 1. Wrocław: Ossolineum.

Brzozowska, Małgorzata. (1996). Kamień. In Słownik stereotypów i symboli ludowych. Vol. 1, 1. Ed. Jerzy Bartmiński & Stanisława Niebrzegowska. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Chase, Stuart. (1956). Foreword. In Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. v-x). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Christmann, Hans Helmut. (1967). Beiträge zur Geschichte der These vom Weltbild der Sprache. Wiesbaden: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (1886). Selections from Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. Bernard Bosanquet & W. M. Bryant. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Quoted from www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ae [last accessed Feb 19, 2013]

Kopczyńska, Zdzisława. (1976). Język a poezja. Studia z dziejów świadomości językowej i literackiej oświecenia i romantyzmu. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

Luther, Martin. (1530). Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen. [in English: An Open Letter on Translating. Transl. Gary Mann, revised and annotated by Michael D. Marlowe. 2003. www.bible-researcher.com/luther01.html; accessed Dec 7, 2012]

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Mukařovský, Jan. (1970). Wśród znaków i struktur. Wybór szkiców. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. [in English: 1978, Structure, Sign and Function – Selected Essays, New Haven: Yale University Press.]

Pajdzińska, Anna. (1999). Metafora pojęciowa w badaniach diachronicznych. In Anna Pajdzińska & Piotr Krzyżanowski (Eds.), Przeszłość w językowym obrazie świata (pp. 51-65). Lublin: Wydawnicwo UMCS.

Sapir, Edward. (1931). Conceptual categories in primitive languages. Science, 74, 578.

Sapir, Edward. (1961 [1929]). Status of as a science. In Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality. Selected Essays (pp. 65-77). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Scherer, Wilhelm. (1977 [1888]). Poetik. Ed. Günter Reiss. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Skwarczyńska, Stefania. (Ed.). 1965. Teoria badań literackich za granicą. Antologia. Vol. 1, part 1. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Szymborska, Wisława. (1977). Poezje. Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.

Szymborska, Wisława. (1986). Ludzie na moście. Warszawa: Czytelnik.

Szymborska, Wisława. (2001). Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997. Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak & Clare Cavanagh. Boston: Harcourt Trade Publishers.

Underhill, James W. (2009). Humboldt, Worldview and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Underhill, James W. (2011). Creating Worldviews. Metaphor, Ideology and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. (1956 [1940]). Linguistics as an exact science. In Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality. Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Ed. John B. Carroll (pp. 220-232). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Translated by Adam Głaz

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Chapter 3 The Linguistic Worldview and Conceptual Disintegration: Wisława Szymborska’s Poem Identyfikacja and its English Translation by Clare Cavanagh

Agnieszka Gicala Pedagogical University, Kraków, Poland

1. Introduction

The present chapter aims to apply the notion of the linguistic worldview of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics and Gilles Fauconnier’s theory of Mental Spaces, together with his view of discourse as a mental-space lattice, to an analysis of a text and its translation. The common denominator of all these concepts is the fact that they deal with human cognition, albeit from different angles, and that they involve the of viewpoint. I argue that these are complementary and that, as such, they can be successfully used to analyze and assess translation equivalence from a cognitive perspective. These tasks will be exemplified through analysis of a poem by the Polish Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012) and its translation by Clare Cavanagh, the winner of the Found in Translation Award in 2011 for translating Szymborska’s volume Tutaj/Here (2009, in partial collaboration with Stanisław Barańczak). Szymborska often writes poems, like miniature pictures, that present unique descriptions of reality with a particular focus on details. It is through these details that Szymborska indirectly, and often ironically, expresses her view of the world. Her collection entitled Tutaj/Here (2009) contains a poem called Identyfikacja (Identification), in which the construction of the scene being presented is effected through unusual linguistic means. The disintegration of a person’s worldview following the tragic death of a beloved person is enacted through disintegration of language. I will argue that a given discourse, described by Fauconnier as a mental- space lattice constructed in relation to a particular viewpoint, may yield a specific linguistic worldview – and that a poem may be seen as a non-

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standard, poetic worldview resulting from a particular arrangement of mental spaces governed by an individual viewpoint. In other words, a non-standard worldview is the linguistic record (e.g. in the form of a poem) of a certain conceptualization, i.e. a scene as construed via linguistic means. In proposing this, I extend Jerzy Bartmiński’s (2009/2012) idea of linguistic worldview by elaborating on his concept of non-standard linguistic worldview, cf. section 2 below. The remaining part of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of translation. By comparing the determinants of the non-standard worldview evident in the original with the reconstruction of this worldview in translation, I will draw conclusions concerning the equivalence, or the degree of successful rendering, of these two worldviews. Moreover, I will attempt to formulate a more general judgment of the applicability of the idea of linguistic worldview to assessment of translation equivalence.

2. Methodology and Definitions

The concept of the linguistic worldview is a major tenet of the Lublin School of Ethnolinguistics, whose main representative is Jerzy Bartmiński. Bartmiński defines the concept in the following way:

The “linguistic worldview” conception functions in two variants. These can be described in a somewhat simplistic manner as “subject related” and “object related” and assigned to the terms vision/view of the world and picture of the world (German das sprachliche Weltbilt), respectively. A vision is necessarily someone’s vision: it implies the act of looking and, by the same token, the existence of a perceiving subject. A picture, though also a result of someone’s perception of the world, does not imply the existence of the subject to the same extent: the focus is on the object, i.e. that which is contained in language itself. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 76)

Since my analysis here concerns poetry, which is at core an individual, idiosyncratic vision of the world, Bartmiński’s above distinction between the two variants is crucial for my argument. I will therefore adopt Bartmiński’s understanding of the “linguistic worldview” as “subject-related,” sharing his belief in the significance of the conceptualizing and speaking subject. Bartmiński’s definition coincides with the dictionary meanings of the words vision and view, presented below on the basis of the Longman Dictionary of and Culture (2002) (cf. Tabakowska in this volume for a more detailed discussion):

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The meanings of vision encompass not only the physical ability to see but also a metaphorical extension of this ability to the domains of understanding and mental experience: “wise understanding of how the future will be; foresight” and “a picture seen in the mind; idea,” as well as the metaphysical domain: “something that is without bodily reality, seen (as if) in a dream, when in a sleeplike state, or as a religious experience.”

The noun view has a very large number of metaphorical meanings apart from the physical ability to see. Even this first meaning differs from that of vision in that it means seeing something “from a particular place.” The meaning that is the most interesting for the present considerations is “an act or manner of seeing, considering, examining, etc.” There are also several phrases such as in view, in view of, or with a view to, all referring to intentional mental activity rather than a passive, physical act of seeing. For all of these reasons, the noun view seems to be the best term for describing a given interpretation of reality effected through specific linguistic means.

Bartmiński defines the linguistic worldview as “the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language, which can be captured in the form of judgements about the world. The judgements can be either entrenched in the language, its grammatical forms, lexicon and ‘frozen’ texts (e.g. proverbs) or implied by them” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 76). The linguistic worldview is mostly social and cultural, and therefore visible chiefly in entrenched linguistic forms, such as proverbs or folk songs; it designates the portion of language that is shared by a community of speakers. However, “[t]he definition of linguistic worldview is not fully agreed on” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 24); the scholar himself admits that, apart from “fossilized” forms, linguistic worldview can encompass what is dynamic in language:

My own definition of linguistic worldview as “a set of judgements” reveals its epistemological (interpretive) nature, does not limit it to what is “fossilized” or closed as a ‘structure”, makes room for the dynamic, open nature of the worldview, and does not favour abstract “regularity” in grammar and . [...]

It [linguistic worldview – A.G.] is also differentiated in other styles derived from colloquial style: official, journalistic or the most individualised and creative literary style. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 24) Given the fact that what is idiosyncratic in a text can only be perceived as such against the background of what is stereotyped in language, Bartmiński makes

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a distinction between the “standard linguistic worldview” and a “non-standard linguistic worldview.” He allows for interpretation of texts that make creative use of stereotypes by referring them to a non-standard linguistic worldview:

The existence of standard linguistic worldviews also implies the possibility of the existence of other worlds. [...] There are [...] texts that we want to regard as semantically coherent but that one should interpret by referring to a different, non-standard linguistic worldview. (Bartmiński, 2007, p. 70, trans. A.G.)

Bartmiński, however, only mentions this distinction once and in the work quoted above where he applies the concept to a Polish Christmas carol. He does not seem either to elaborate on it further or to clearly propose that texts may be treated as standard or non-standard linguistic worldviews. The distinction between stereotyped and non-standard worldviews remains in accordance with the cognitivist view of the scalar nature of cognitive and linguistic phenomena, which derives from an encyclopedic approach to :

CL views “experience” as a continuum, where idiosyncratic individual experience is situated at one end of the scale, and universal (basic, mainly bodily) experience at the other, with culture-specific experiences of different types filling up the middle part. The scale corresponds to that of conventionalization in language: the closer to the “universal pole” a given concept is situated, the better chances it stands of finding its place within the conceptual system of a given language, i.e. of becoming a part of its conventional imagery. (Tabakowska, 1993, p. 128)

Given the scalar nature of language and the lack of clear-cut boundaries, linguistic worldview may encompass not only the most entrenched linguistic data but also those less established. It is thus important that the linguistic worldview is an interpretation rather than a reflection of the world (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, pp. 76, 77), i.e. linguistic expression depends on the of speakers. Therefore, one is justified in including poetic vision in the scope of the term. I propose to extend the concept of non-standard linguistic worldview to embrace what is created by individual speakers, i.e. particular texts, including poetic ones. I believe that it is possible to talk about a text as a non-standard linguistic worldview or the non-standard linguistic worldview of a given author.1

1 A discussion of these issues can be found in Underhill 2011.

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The fact that within the term in question there is also room for poetry is also stressed by Bock (1992, p. 250), who points to convergences between the concept of worldview and language as brought out in the context of proposals within like Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory or Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar. To further support his view, Bock also quotes Friedrich’s about the poetic character of language:

For example, Friedrich (1986, p. 18) writes, “There is no meaning without the partly chaotic, imaginative individual”; however, the imagination is massively determined by the “poetic potential of language”. (Bock, 1992, p. 250)

Bock wrote the above contribution for the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics too early to include recent developments within cognitive linguistics such as Fauconnier’s (1994) mental spaces and Fauconnier and Turner’s (2002) theory of conceptual integration or blending, which is based on mental spaces.

Mental spaces are small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action... Mental spaces are connected to long-term schematic knowledge called “frames” ... and to long-term specific knowledge... (Fauconnier & Turner 2002, p. 40)

Coulson, another scholar who has contributed to blending theory, provides a clear explanation of mental spaces and frames:

Mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994) can be thought of as temporary containers for relevant information about a particular domain. A mental space contains a partial representation of the entities and relations of a particular scenario as construed by a speaker. Spaces are structured by elements which represent each of the discourse entities, and simple frames to represent the relationships that exist between them. Frames are hierarchically structured atttribute-value pairs that can either be integrated with perceptual information, or used to activate generic knowledge about people and objects assumed by default. (Coulson, n. d.)

According to Evans (2007, pp. 85-86), a frame is understood as a schematic conceptualization of knowledge or experience that is culturally or socially bound.

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Discourse is viewed by Fauconnier as “a mental-space lattice” and the development of discourse as the addition of new mental spaces to the lattice (cf. e.g. Evans, 2007; Fauconnier, 1997; Libura, 2010). In short, new mental spaces are signaled by the speaker and recognized by the listener or reader by so-called space builders, i.e. explicit mechanisms, such as time expressions, conjunctions, tenses, etc. The first space in a given discourse is called the base; it usually functions as the viewpoint for the next space or spaces, although the viewpoint may later shift to other spaces as well (the space that has the role of the viewpoint at a given stage of the discourse is called the viewpoint space). The notion of a mental-space lattice is invoked in the following section in an analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s poem Identyfikacja.

3. Wisława Szymborska’s Identyfikacja (Identification)

Stanisław Barańczak, one of the best-known translators of Wisława Szymborska’s poetry into English (he has transalted most of her poems in collaboration with Clare Cavanagh), perfectly captured the nature of her poems in the Afterword to the collection of Szymborska’s poetry entitled Nic dwa razy: wybór wierszy/ Nothing Twice: Selected Poems (1997):

The accessibility of Szymborska’s poetry stems from the fact that the “pressing questions” she keeps asking are, at least at first sight, as “naive” as those of the man in the street. The brilliance of her poetry lies in pushing the enquiry much farther than the man in the street ever would. Many of her poems start provocatively, with a question, observation or statement that seems downright trite, only to surprise us with its unexpected yet logical continuation. (Barańczak in Szymborska, 1997, p. 391)

These words are a reflection on the poem entitledNic dwa razy (Nothing Twice); however, Barańczak’s remarks may be understood to apply more generally when he writes that Szymborska “offer[s] a startling view of human existence” and “the meaning of human history – or perhaps the senslessness of it” (in Szymborska, 1997, p. 391). Identyfikacja/Identification is an account of a meeting between two women after the husband of one of them has died in a plane crash. As made clear by Szymborska herself, the poetic meeting is based on a real event:

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The description of at meeting has been waiting in my notebook for an equally long time [a few years].

Once, many years ago, I had the sad opportunity to see a person in trauma following the loss of someone close to her in a plane crash. It is only now that I have described that situation, changing the details a little... (Szymborska in Bikont & Szczęsna, 2012, p. 197; trans. A.G.)

The poem is written in the form of a monologue by the widow, which is addressed to her visitor and tells her about the plane crash. The woman is trying to argue that the body she had been asked to identify was not her husband’s and that he must be alive. A closer look at the argumentation’s clever logic reveals Szymborska’s unique gift of poetic understatement and seemingly unemotional observation of the world – the characteristics of her poetry that have won her international recognition. I believe that Fauconnier’s theory of Mental Spaces is an ideal tool to analyze and reveal the mechanisms of emotional and logical manipulation employed in this poem: they lead the reader to the emotional and startling discovery of the at its end – the truth that the reader is allowed to decipher via indirect linguistic hints. As has already been mentioned, Fauconnier views discourse as a network of interrrelated mental spaces, which he calls the mental-space lattice. The poem in question involves different mental spaces connected not only linearly (appearing as the monologue develops) but also reappearing in different perspectives. For the purpose of the present analysis, I would like to propose a division of the poem into various mental spaces where each space will receive the symbol “S” and a consecutive number: 1, 2, 3, etc. This part of the analysis deals with the poem in Polish; each quotation in Polish will be accompanied by the corresponding part of Cavanagh’s translation (in brackets) or, in some cases, by literal translation into English. I will proceed to an analysis of the translation in section 4. It is best, therefore, to juxtapose the original and the translation for ease of comparison:

Table 3.1 Szymborska’s Identyfikacja and its translation juxtaposed

mental space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh no.

S1 Dobrze, że przyszłaś – mówi. It’s good you came – she says. Słyszałaś, że we czwartek rozbił się You heard a plane crashed on Thursday? samolot? S2 Well so they came to see me No więc właśnie w tej sprawie about it. przyjechali po mnie. S3 Podobno był na liście pasażerów. The story is he was on the passenger list. S4 No i co z tego, może się rozmyślił. So what, he might have changed his mind.

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continuedTable 3.1 Szymborska’s Identyfikacja and its translation juxtaposed

mental space Identyfikacja Identification, trans. Clare Cavanagh no.

They gave me some pills so I wouldn’t Potem mi pokazali kogoś, [S6: nie wiem fall apart. kogo.] Then they showed me [S6: I don’t know Cały czarny, spalony oprócz jednej ręki. S5 who.] Strzępek koszuli, zegarek, obrączka. All black, burned except one hand. Wpadłam w gniew, bo to na pewno nie A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring. on. I got furious, that can’t be him. S7 Nie zrobiłby mi tego, żeby tak wyglądać. He wouldn’t do that to me, look like that. A takich koszul pełno jest po sklepach. The stores are bursting with those shirts. A ten zegarek to zwykły zegarek. The watch is just a regular old watch. S8 A te nasze imiona na jego obrączce And our names on that ring, to są imiona bardzo pospolite. they’re only the most ordinary names. S1` Dobrze, że przyszłaś. It’s good you came. S9 Usiądź tu koło mnie. Sit here beside me. On rzeczywiście miał wrócić we He really was supposed to get back S10 czwartek. Thursday. Ale ile tych czwartków mamy jeszcze But we’ve got so many Thursdays left S11 w roku. this year. Zaraz nastawię czajnik na herbatę. I’ll put the kettle on for tea. S12 Umyję głowę, a potem, co potem, I’ll wash my hair, then what, spróbuję zbudzić się z tego wszystkiego. try to wake up from all this. S1`` Dobrze, że przyszłaś, It’s good you came, bo tam było zimno, since it was cold there a on tylko w tym takim gumowym and him in just some rubber sleeping S13 śpiworze, bag, on, to znaczy ten tamten nieszczęśliwy him, I mean, you know, that unlucky człowiek. man. I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea, S14 = Zaraz nastawię czwartek, umyję herbatę, since our names are completely S12` bo te nasze imiona przecież pospolite – ordinary –

The base space (S1) is established by the woman’s greeting: Dobrze, że przyszłaś (It’s good you came). The base space contains the following elements: the two friends, the present time, the meeting with its elements of socializing such as the casual tone of the conversation. This space has the epistemic status of a present fact. Next, the bereaved wife begins her account of the indentification of the body, and, as her story unfolds, it becomes obvious that this is not a straighforward report of the event. The second mental space (S2) reports the plane crash as a fact, thus establishing the topic to be developed in the next spaces: Słyszałaś, że we czwartek rozbił się samolot? (You heard a plane crashed on Thursday?). The fragment Podobno był ma liście pasażerów (The story is he was on the passenger list) is a new mental space (S3), starting with the space builder

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podobno (direct translation: supposedly; here translated as The story is), which signals its epistemic distance from the speaker and from the first space. This new space has the status of a hypothesis. Moreover, it is also distant in time (which is signaled by the use of the past tense) and in space (przyjechali po mnie – literally they came to fetch me). However, the next line (space S4) is a contradiction of the hypothesis that the husband died, introduced by the phrase No i co z tego (So what), denying the validity of the previous space and opening a different past possibility (cf. the word może in może się rozmyślił – he may have changed his mind). The use of może (may) gives this new space a modal character, i.e. the status of an opposing hypothesis. The next space (S5) is a factual report on the proceedings of identification of the body that was shown to the woman, and is interrupted with the negative nie wiem kogo (I don’t know who) (space S6). The list of details (shirt, watch, etc.) is followed by a counterfactual space S7, an emotional judgment on why the body was not her husband’s that derives from the married couple’s relationship (nie zrobiłby mi tego – he wouldn’t do that to me). S8 then contains a seemingly objective qualification of the shirt, watch, names on the wedding ring as very common, popular items. At this point, the monologue returns to the base space (S1): it is a repetition of Dobrze, że przyszłaś – It’s good you came. It develops into deontic space S9, the speaker’s wish for her friend to sit close (Usiądź tu koło mnie – Sit here beside me). Next, the same line of argumentation starts again: the speaker refers to a past fact only to deny its validity. The woman confirms the day of her husband’s arrival (czwartek – Thursday, which constitutes epistemic space S10), but then resorts to a rather unlikely argument that the man was not necessarily coming back last Thursday (S11, introduced by the space builder ale – but). The next space (S12) contains future constructions (I’ll); it refers to routine activities and contains the verb zbudzić się – wake up through which the tragedy is assessed as something unreal, something that did not happen. The monologue then returns to the base space S1 again. It is connected with the next space (S13, containing the past tense: tam było zimno – it was cold there) through the conjunction bo – since. The conjunction is normally used to express cause and effect so its use in S13 is illogical: there seems to be no direct relation between the other woman’s present visit and the cold during the identification a few days before or the fact that the body was placed only in a thin rubber bag. Then space S13 seems to continue the factual description of details during the identification. However, the use of the pronoun on – him and the reference to the rubber bag (a sleeping bag) betrays the fact that the woman did in fact recognize her husband. She tries to hide it by saying that it was just ten tamten nieszczęśliwy człowiek – that unlucky man. The last space in the poem, S14, established via the use of a future construction, refers again to the same routine activities as in S12 but here the woman confuses them:

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wrong collocations (nastawię czwartek, umyję herbatę – put the Thursday on, wash the tea) and a wrong cause-effect relation while pointing to the names on the wedding ring. Therefore, S14 may also be treated as S12`. Let us now concentrate on those elements of the poem that build and reinforce its final effect. Its poetic power lies in the woman’s apparently unemotional attempts to deny her husband’s death. The failure of her attempts to not break down psychologically is conveyed through linguistic means: the breakdown is merely suggested, expressed indirectly. However, the choice of linguistic measures used for this purpose is guided by metalinguistic factors: the viewpoint and the viewpoint mental space. It is the viewpoint that determines what kind of linguistic worldview the discourse reveals. According to Libura (2010, p. 27), when discourse begins, it is the base space that constitutes the viewpoint, thus allowing for the appearance of the next space. In Szymborska’s poem, the base (S1) is the beginning of the monologue (followed by an establishment of its topic in S2). It constitutes the viewpoint for most other spaces in that the woman tells her friend about what happened from her present perspective: the conversation takes place a few days after the crash, she is at home, busy with her guest and with daily routines. Let us look closer at the linguistic markers of this viewpoint in the whole mental-space lattice. First, the viewpoint marker podobno (the story is), which expresses the woman’s disbelief in and distance from the tragedy, shows that mental space S3 is built from the viewpoint of S1. Another tool of this kind (in S5 and S6) is the speaker’s reference to the dead husband as if it was not him but an unknown person: Potem mi pokazali kogoś, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed me someone, I don’t know who) and ten tamten nieszczęśliwy człowiek in S12 (lit. this that unlucky man). Moreover, her use of repetition in these places (kogoś, nie wiem kogo and ten tamten) seems to have an iconic function: the more words, the larger her distance from the tragedy which, as she wants to prove, does not concern her personally. Third, some spaces are introduced as contradictions of certain past facts. Space S4 starts with the marker No i co z tego (So what); S8 with its viewpoint marker, the conjunction a (translatable here as because or after all), repeated three times for greater emphasis; S11 is introduced by the conjunction ale (but) and its content is reinforced by its form as a rhetorical question. The viewpoint of a woman whom the plane crash apparently does not concern (let us mark it as VP1) is, however, not the only one in the poem. Skillfully “smuggled” into that scene is the viewpoint of a woman who knows that the body that she has been asked to identify was her husband’s (VP2). This contrasting viewpoint guides a different interpretation of certain of the poem’s mental spaces. Juxtaposed and intertwined with VP1, VP2 creates a linguistic picture (an idiosyncratic worldview) of a woman whose world is disintegrating despite her attempts to deny it to herself and to her visitor. VP2 does not seem to arise from one particular mental space, since, as was shown above, the whole

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mental-space lattice appears to be a logical arrangement of arguments that deny the tragedy. Yet the title of the poem, Identyfikacja (Identification), prompts a double interpretation (either the formal procedure performed in such cases or the actual act of recognizing the victim), and this is how VP2 clandestinely finds its way into the scene. Following other scholars, Bartmiński (2009, pp. 212ff) notes that because the title always precedes the text, it plays a strategic role in relation to the text, names it and guides the reader’s expectations concerning the content to be read. The titles of literary texts are of special importance as they prompt the interpretation of the texts that they announce (Bartmiński, 2009, p. 216). In Szymborska’s Identyfikacja, the fact that the woman does know that her husband is dead is manifested in mental space S8, through the use of the possessive adjective nasze (our) in A te nasze imiona na jego obrączce (And our names on that ring). Her awareness of the fact is also betrayed by her confusion when she uses the personal pronoun on (him) in S13 and quickly explains that she only meant that unlucky man. What is more, her counterarguments in S7 and S11 are simply ridiculous in the context. The fact that she is losing ground when trying to be reasonable is shown by repetition in mental space S11: a potem, co potem (lit. and then, then what) articulates her struggle to gather her thoughts. Finally, at the end of the poem (in S14), the mistakes that she makes in the two collocations combined with illogical reasoning in the last line result in a nonsensical disintegration of linguistic meaning. This signals disintegration on the mental and existential levels. To sum up, the poem may be seen as a mental-space lattice strung between two opposing viewpoints. As such, the poem presents the linguistic view of a world that is falling apart along with the speaker’s common sense, logical thinking and language – a non-standard worldview built by carefully chosen linguistic means.

4. Analysis of the Translation

The concept of the standard vs. non-standard linguistic worldview, as contained in a given language or in a given text (cf. Section 2 for a discussion of this distinction), can be used as a tool to investigate translations (cf. Danaher in this volume). Translation equivalence is founded on the concept of the linguistic worldview in that to translate means to reconstruct the non-standard linguistic worldview of the original. This approach allows for embracing the various linguistic means relevant to the assessment of a translation. In my analysis of Cavanagh’s rendering of Szymborska’s poem, I will trace the markers of the speaker’s linguistic worldview, comparing those used in the translation with those in the original.

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Cavanagh is an expert on Szymborska’s poetry and on modern Polish poetry in general. Over a period of more than twenty years, she has translated, together with Stanisław Barańczak, most of the former; she has also translated Szymborska’s prose. Cavanagh has also rendered into English the poetry of another Polish Nobel laureate, Czesław Miłosz, as well as works by Adam Zagajewski, a modern Polish poet who has been mentioned as the a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Cavanagh was also Szymborska’s friend. In an interview at a poetry evening in Chicago organized to commemorate Szymborska’s poetry following her death, Cavanagh said:

Szymborska is absolutely unpretentious. Her poetry is a universal view of the world, but also a very precise one, a balance between precision and accessibility... (http://kultura.onet.pl/literatura/usa-pozegnaly-szymborska,1,5025176,artykul.html; last accessed Feb 19, 2013, trans. A.G.)

Clare Cavanagh’s translation is very exact, almost word for word, which is what the poem demands of its translator due to the simplicity of its language. The English rendering does, therefore, retain most of the elements that convey the original linguistic worldview. For example, in mental space S2 Podobno is translated as The story is, both of which distance the speaker from the event she is talking about. Indeed, certain grammatical properties of the English language even strengthen the effect in question, i.e. the woman’s apparent denial of the tragedy. In the translation, the woman’s point of view becomes enhanced by the use of the indefinite article in spaces S2 (a plane crashed on Thursday) and S5 (a scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring). In S2, the indefinite article stresses the fact that the woman seemingly does not attach much importance to the plane crash as if it did not concern her; in S5 the indefinite article qualifies the objects mentioned as unknown: the woman apparently does not recognize them as her husband’s. However, the translation also reveals some subtle divergences from the VP1 as constructed in the original. It does not contain the repetition in mental spaces S5 and S6 that proves to be iconically important. The fragment Potem mi pokazali kogoś, nie wiem kogo (lit. Then they showed me someone, I don’t know who) is rendered more fluently as Then they showed me I don’t know who. A similar loss occurs in mental space S12, where the phrase ten tamten nieszczęśliwy człowiek (lit. this that unlucky man) is translated more smoothly as that unlucky man. Moreover, the Polish conjunction a, repeated three times in S8, is not rendered at all, as a result of which the desperately argumentative character of the woman’s words in this mental space becomes less felt. The rhetorical question in S11 is translated as a statement, which weakens the effect.

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The opposing VP2, i.e. that of the woman who admits that the tragedy does concern her, becomes blurred in three places in the translation. One instance can be found in S8, where the original viewpoint marker (the possessive adjective jego in jego obrączce ‘his wedding ring,’ which may indicate the husband) is rendered as the demonstrative adjective that, which points to the ring itself rather than to its owner. Secondly, repetition, and hence the effect of the woman’s effort to gather her thoughts, becomes lost in mental space S11: a potem, co potem is shortened to then what. The last, crucial instance comes in the final line where the “disintegrated” collocations find their absolutely illogical justification:bo te nasze imiona przecież pospolite – translated as since our names are completely ordinary. The key word, apart from the conjunction bo (since), is przecież, which implies that what is said is an argument against an earlier view or an explanation of something that should be obvious. The translation renders przecież as completely, and thus weakens the argumentative force here.

5. Conclusions

While the English version of Szymborska’s poem Identyfikacja has the advantage of stressing the woman’s reasonable viewpoint (VP1) by using linguistic means unavailable in Polish, it also somewhat weakens her other, more dramatic viewpoint (VP2). In the translation, the woman’s judgments, the proportions of the reasonable and the tragic elements of her view of reality as expressed in the monologue, shift slightly away from the dramatic. In English, linguistic means that prove more fluent, less stammering, and less argumentative create a linguistic worldview that is less overtly tragic and reveals subtler signs of disintegration. As a general conclusion, it is worth recalling Bartmiński’s definition of the linguistic worldview as “the interpretation of reality encoded in a given language, which can be captured in the form of judgments about the world” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 76) as well as the distinction he makes between the standard and the non-standard linguistic worldview. The extension of the latter proposed here allows treatment of a poetic text as a non-standard linguistic worldview. A comparison of non-standard linguistic worldviews in the Polish original and the English translation, coupled with an examination of the linguistic markers of the two clashing viewpoints (VP1 and VP2) intertwined in the mental-space lattice that constitutes the woman’s monologue, allow for an assessment of translation equivalence.

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References

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2007). Językowe podstawy obrazu świata. Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009). Tekstologia. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Shefflied and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bikont, Anna, & Szczęsna, Joanna. (2012). Pamiątkowe rupiecie. Biografia Wisławy Szymborskiej. Kraków: Znak.

Bock, Philip K. (1992). World wiew and language. In International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Ed. W. Bright (pp. 248-251). Oxford University Press.

Coulson, Seana. (n.d.). What’s so funny?: Conceptual integration in humorous examples. http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~coulson/funstuff/funny.html; accessed May 8, 2012

Evans, Vyvyan. (2007). A Glossary of Cognitive Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles. (1994). Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles. (1997). Mappings in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fauconnier, Gilles, & Turner, Mark. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

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Friedrich, Paul. (1986). The Language Parallax: Linguistic Parallellism and Poetic Indeterminacy. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Libura, Agnieszka. (2010). Teoria przestrzeni mentalnych i integracji pojęciowej. Struktura modelu i jego funkcjonalność. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. (2002). Ed. Della Summers. Harlow: Longman.

Szymborska, Wisława. (2007). Nic dwa razy: wybór wierszy/Nothing Twice: Selected Poems. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Szymborska, Wisława. (2009). Tutaj/Here. Kraków: Znak.

Tabakowska, Elżbieta (1993). Cognitive Linguistics and Poetics of Translation. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.

Underhill, James W. (2011). Creating Worldviews: Metaphor, Ideology and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Chapter 4 What Words Tell Us: Phenomenology, Cognitive Ethnolinguistics, and Poetry1

Irena Vaňková Charles University, Prague, The Czech Republic

1. The Natural World and Its Linguistic Image: “Body, Community, Language, World”

The ground of our human relationship to reality is, from the perspective of phenomenology, the natural world (Patočka, 1992 [1936]). This philosophical point of departure is in obvious agreement with the concept of the linguistic worldview from Polish cognitive ethnolinguistics (Bartmiński, 2009/2012) as well as with the naive worldview from Russian linguistics (Apresyan, 1995). A correlate of Patočka’s natural world is a semantic structure that represents the linguistic worldview in its foundational situation: language having a commonplace connection to reality and language used in everyday, subjectively grounded communication (cf. styl potoczny ‘colloquial style’ as described in Bartmiński, 2001). This type of language is usually opposed to scientific language. Scientific language is marked for objectivity and abstraction, a correlation with intellectual reflection rather than experience, and also the use of terms that are, in contrast with “everyday words,” technically precise and devoid of connotation. The language of science corresponds with a “theoretical world” that obviously represents a non-primary or secondary way of relating to our reality. Objectivizing abstraction removes from things their fundamental human meaningfulness – the very ways in which they figure in our lives and thereby co-create the natural world in which we live.2 In this regard, it is instructive to consider the dictionary definitions of a number of Czech words: slza ‘tear’ is defined as a ‘secretion of the ocular glands,’ vráska ‘wrinkle’ as a ‘line in the skin caused by shrinkage,’ džbán ‘jug’ as an

1 For his encouragement, valued suggestions, and translating patience, the author extends her thanks to David Danaher. 2 Cf. Bartmiński this volume.

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‘oblong, convex container with a handle,’ sestra ‘sister’ as a ‘female sibling.’ True: as many cognitively-oriented linguists have been noting for over thirty years, even traditional linguistics (in this case, lexicography) is not often willing to take into account the basic, pre-reflective horizon of our natural world. Language is unrivalled as form of testimony to our experience of the natural world. What is it that we signify by the words tear, wrinkle, jug, sister? What do these phenomena represent for a human being, and what do they mean to us in the context of a specific language, culture, or human community? The phenomenological argument in favor of a “return to things” can be understood as a challenge similar to the one issued by proponents of cognitive linguistics and ethnolinguistics – in the sense both of a turning away from impersonal theoretical constructions and moving back to reflecting on the primary and natural human relationship to the world, as well as of profiling the ways in which human conceptualizing and understanding (and pre- understanding) are manifested in the context of a cultural community. With differences in emphasis, this approach has been advocated by, among many others, and Mark Johnson (1980), Anna Wierzbicka (1996), and Jerzy Bartmiński (2009/2012). All of these scholars stress the primacy of human experience in its relational or relative aspects: in relation to either a general human (anthropocentric) perspective or the perspective of one linguistically and culturally bound ethnos. We investigate, then, both how people actually are and also how things are “manifested” (as a philosopher might say) to us as human beings and as speakers of a given language. According to phenomenologists, this process takes places through the mediation of our body and senses, as a result of our relationships with other people (in a “community”), and naturally also through language; to this can be added that it takes place also through our continual contact with the whole of the world, which serves as our absolute or ultimate horizon. Jan Patočka wrote that we are anchored in existence in just these four ways: through “body, community, language, world” (Patočka, 1995). Cognitive linguistics, although it draws from other sources and is associated with other contexts, is nonetheless aware, in one way or another, of this phenomenological truth, which means that when we investigate the semantic structures of language with cognitive and ethnolinguistic tools, we are also contributing, as linguists, to phenomenological discovery of the natural world.

2. Things

Things “enter into obviousness,” and therefore they are. To be means to be manifested. We comprehend things through our senses (and not merely through our sense of sight, even though sight is probably the most prominent and

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prototypical of human senses). In a poem entitled The Pink Shrub by the Austrian poet Karel Lubomirski, we read (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 141):

You smell nice Voníš as if you knew jako bys veděl about the blind. o slepých.

Smell is also one of the ways that things manifest themselves to us. In another poem, the same Austrian poet asks (Lubomirski, 2003, p. 99):

Is beauty Je krása the love of things? láskou věcí?

From ancient times, beauty has tended to be associated with liking by means of sensory experiences: the name for the “study of beauty,” aesthetics, derives from the Greek expression aisthétikós ‘that which is perceivable.’ According to Eugen Fink, our relationship to things in the world is dependent upon the ways in which those things meet us (Fink, 1996 [1958], p. 118), and precisely this is the ground of intentionality. The fact that things are sensually perceivable allows us, who are sense-equipped, to also meet them halfway. Perception is, as a result, a two-way relationship between perceiver and perceived, and things exist only in their relation to us.

Things Věci

I adore things, reticent companions, Miluji věci, mlčenlivé soudruhy, because everyone treats them protože všichni nakládají s nimi, as if they are not alive jako by nežily, and meanwhile they live and look at us a ony zatím žijí a dívají se na nás like loyal dogs with focused faces jako věrní psi pohledy soustředěnými and put up with the fact that a trpí, no one talks to them. že žádný člověk k nim nepromluví. They are embarrassed to speak first, Ostýchají se první dát do řeči, they are silent, wait, and are silent still mlčí, čekají, mlčí, and yet a přeci they would so much like to chat a bit! Tolik by chtěly to trochu si porozprávět!

Which is why I adore things Proto miluji věci and the whole world. a také miluji celý svět. (Wolker, 1958)

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In this poet’s (somewhat child-like) anthropomorphization, things are analogized to living creatives that have feelings (of embarrassment) and loyalties (like dogs). Things merely await a friendly gesture from us that would bring them into our world to begin a dialogue and relationship with us. Wolker’s things are “embarrassed to speak first,” and they have to wait to be offered our attention and given permission by us to communicate. As we have seen, however, the phenomenological perspective suggests an entirely different relationship between things and people. Contrary to Wolker, things do speak first to the extent that they manifest themselves to us and, in doing so, offer their existence to our disposal. To be therefore means both to be perceivable and to be perceived. There is an essential difference between a thing in the world and an object (of scientific investigation). To science – which is objectivizing, generalizing, and reductive – a jug, for example, is something entirely different than what it is for us given the horizon of the natural world. The primary and original human experience of the world is thus one of subjectivity, and as has been said, the ground for our experience of reality is the natural world. Objectivity (as the ontological point of departure for science) is bound up with a derived world that is artificially created and therefore “un-natural.” Says Neubauer:

An entity in an objective sense is the exact opposite of an entity that we relate to in the context of the natural world. Human experience in the natural world foregrounds the particular and lively activity of things, their -transcendent openness, and their welcoming, partnerly relationality to other things. (Neubauer, 2001,p. 22)

Heidegger writes that science destroyed things as such and has thereby forced us to distance ourselves from the jug filled with wine and put in its place a hollow space used to hold fluid matter (1993, p. 15).3 Phenomenologists urge a return to the roots of things, that is, to our experience of them. We need to remember how a given thing manifests itself to us in its materiality or its thing-ness. Objects are “indifferent,” and objects come into being through the reduction of things: we abstract away from those very qualities that constitute the essence of them. When we incorporate them into a scientific framework, we

render them descriptively exact, measurable. We designate water as H2O, and in doing so water loses its original nature. Or we derive the characteristics of water from its categorial association with “fluid matter.” But when we need to

3 This study references a Czech-German collection of Heidegger’s late essays (Heidegger 1993), and we are concerned primarily with two of them, both from 1950: “Das Ding” (“Věc”) and “Die Sprache” (“Řeč”).

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put out a fire, we will not be looking for either H2O or the abstraction that is fluid matter. The thing-ness of a thing (how water differs from the abstraction that is fluid matter) carries over also to the word that names it. A word is correlative with the thing it names, and at the same time it has the ability, through connotation, to evoke it, to call it to mind. This is true even more so when we share the word with others, given that language belongs not to “me” but rather to “us” (Gadamer, 1999, p. 27).

3. Things and Words

According to Jungmann’s dictionary (SČN, 1989 [1835-1839]), a thing is anything that can be uttered, called, and named. The fact that a thing is bound up with discourse is also supported, in the same semantic explanation, by an etymological reference: Czech věc ‘thing’ is connected up with the base vět- (cf. odvětit ‘to reply to,’ věta ‘,’ závěť ‘last will and testament’); similar correspondences in other languages are also mentioned: German Sache and sagen, Latin res and reo, and also Polish rzecz in the meaning of Czech věc. Even, then, in language itself we see evidence for the philosophical stance that there is, in the relationship between thing and word, a double horizon of world and language. In the words of Zdeněk Kratochvíl, the word in speech and the thing in the world correspond to each other (1994, p. 50). Further on in his discussion, and in regard to the medieval philosophical dispute about whether Adam has a belly-button given that he was not born like other people, Kratochvíl writes:

Every thing carries with it traces of its naturalness, its origin, its situatedness. Put figuratively, every thing “has a belly-button”… Every thing always has its “belly-button” or something analogically similar; something that points not only to its inception in the sense of its generative emergence, but also to the manner in which this thing is separated off from the background of all Being, a kind of constitutive contrast in relation to its bedrock or surroundings. (Kratochvíl, 1994, p. 44)

It can be added that we could consider every word associated with a thing also to be its “belly-button.” We have “separated off from the background of all Being” the concept as logos, and the thing begins to exist in a human context thanks to its being a word-concept. The word itself then testifies to this in that it also can serve as a trace in a search for a thing’s “naturalness, origin, and situatedness.” (By “thing” is not of course meant only something

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concrete, nor is it intended to be understood exclusively as some kind of substance, even if the prototypical examples might lead us to think so.) We might pause for a moment to consider, in this connection, the motivation behind a linguistic concept. Words are traditionally divided into those that are motivated and those that are not, and this is done in accordance with whether or not we can find indications of lexical meaning in their word-formational structures. For example, the Czech adjective kaštanový ‘auburn,’ which designates a shade of hair-color that is reminiscent of the color of the nuts of the chestnut tree (kaštan in Czech), is motivationally transparent; the same is true for the shade of green in the adjective lahvový, which is unproblematically relatable to láhev ‘bottle.’ On the other hand, the adjective červený, which is for the color red, appears unmotivated to most native speakers, and when they learn that it is derived from the noun červ ‘worm,’ most people are surprised. When, however, they come to learn that our ancestors used worms as raw material to make colored dyes, then – presto! – the word becomes a belly-button of the thing: červený originally meant ‘colored by červ.’ In acquiring a language, children find it difficult to understand unmotivated words, and this difficulty is easy to spot. A little Czech girl might speak o kocouru Vbotáchovi ‘about the cat in the shoes’ because she grammatically declines the phrase v botách ‘in the shoes,’ adding the -ovi ending for an animate masculine singular noun in the locative case, as if it were the proper name of a tomcat from a fairy-tale (i.e., “Puss Intheboots”). Wax crayons (Czech voskovky, from voska, the word for wax) become for her oskovky – because she is trying to speak “correctly” and she thinks that the initial v- is an artifact of colloquial Czech (cf. colloquial Czech vokno ‘window’ in place of literary Czech okno). She does not understand the connections between words because, at least for the moment, she understands the world also only in a partial way. Only with time will she begin to be able to mutually interrelate her world experience with language, and it will become gradually clear to her why one thing is said and not another and what words are connected to. Understanding the world goes hand-in-hand with understanding language. It is also true that when we study a foreign language, words remain for us – for a long time and sometimes forever – mostly unmotivated. They only serve to denote certain strips of reality. Even if we can communicate well in another language – we can “get by” and understand public signs, read menus, and perhaps even comprehend sophisticated texts in our fields – this does not mean that we understand the internal semantic threads running through the language, that we feel in and beyond that language the existence of a coherent world that holds together thousands of such interconnected phenomena. Our maternal or native language is a different matter altogether. In our native language, the correlate of a word is not a concept, but rather experience itself

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(Neubauer, 1999, p. 88). One aspect of this is perhaps a sensitivity to motivation, which is, starting in childhood, built from the experiential connection between words and their “maternal” reality. Another aspect is our spontaneous ability to understand connotations and allusions that are bound up with words and their associated collocations: our linguistic (sub)consciousness is prepared to react authentically to fine-grained and nuanced semantic distinctions between words as well as to all kinds of wordplay. It is precisely in relation to our native language that we truly experience the natural world. It would be naive to suppose that understanding in and of one’s native language is definitively fixed once and for all. We know from experience that this is not true. We are often – even in adulthood – taken aback by what words or phrases that we had thought we knew actually do mean. For example, while the Czech word hudba ‘music’ is understood as unmotivated, it takes only the sudden realization that it is related to hudení ‘violin-playing,’ which is derived from the verb housti ‘to play the violin,’ to see that hudba is also undoubtedly related to housle ‘the violin as an instrument.’ It is in this way that we begin to understand words against the background of further horizons. In this regard, it is possible to understand how a thing is rendered more material (more “thing-y”) through the prism of the word that denotes it. Closely connected with word motivation, which we have already discussed, is a word’s conceptual construction, which tends to be different in different languages. The Czech word zelenina contains a reference to the color green (zelená barva) of some (parts of) vegetables, and in this form of reference the Czech word, compared with words in other languages for the same thing, is rather specific. The English word vegetables refers to plant growth, and Polish warzywo to cooking. Polish does also have the word zielenina, but it refers, in contrast to the similar Czech term, only to the fresh tops of the vegetables, the parts actually used in the kitchen (that is, the part of Czech zelenina that is really green or zelený). We should be reminded here of Heidegger (1993), who said that naming is a kind of calling out, and calling out brings closer to us the existence of that which had previously not been called. It is this very calling out of something, or calling to something, that represents an evocation of the thing being called. A thing is thus not only designated or denoted by its word, it is also evoked by it. Our discussion has brought us back to phenomenology: a phenomenon is that which appears or reveals itself, and logos is sense-making discourse. Our discussion is then aimed at those things that are apparently obvious and evident, things that no one really looks at or asks about precisely because of the “obviousness” of superficial seeing and understanding. Our task is to discover – through language! – “something that was already here, something that we felt, something that we somehow saw out of the corner of our eye but that we did not

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quite catch, something ‘that has not yet been given conceptual form’” (Patočka, 1995, p. 11).

4. The Thing Called Džbán ‘Jug’ and the Word Džbán

Once again the question of the relationship between thing and word arises: this time, however, more specifically – between the thing called džbán ‘jug’ and the word džbán. Let us consider again a child’s perspective. The world appears richer in meanings to children than it does to adults: children do not yet have extensive experience of life and they direct considerably more attention to the “obvious.” A child’s world is a natural world – a primary, pre-reflective world. The following poem in prose, entitled The Jug, credibly stylizes a child’s perspective; in its formal contours it likewise represents a so-called “poetic definition,” which offers up for our consideration a concrete conceptual explication:

The jug is a big glass bird with a bulbous belly. It has a beak and an enormous ear. It floats in a well and it sinks. I have to immerse my hand deep under the water to pull it out. I scoop up water and the jug breaks out in sweat. The water is so heavy. And so cold. My hands, in which I am clutching it, get suddenly bigger. When I put the jug down on the ground, my hands are little again. It’s too bad that one day the jug will break! (Nezval, 1956, p. 12)

A small child has no need to generalize by searching out a superordinate concept that could be used to categorize the jug. From the perspective of the materiality of the jug (its “thing-ness” or “jug-ness”), superordination is, after all, hardly essential. A linguistic dictionary, in contrast, offers an Aristotelian definition of the word džbán jug as a “convex, oblong container with a handle” (SSČ, 1994): the dictionary generalizes, it uses as its starting point the general concept of “container,” and then looks for additional specifying semantic features (‘convex,’ ‘with a handle’). The child, of course, is thinking of a specific jug and sees it as a profiled participant in a familiar setting and action – as an object that is part of an interesting experience, which is about getting water from a well. The child’s account is full of important sensory references: a poetic description of the jug’s appearance, the intense experience of dipping the jug into the well and the weight and coldness of the scooped up water. We also find here child-like wonder in the form of an optical illusion, and finally an awareness that one

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day the glass jug will break. These details represent the basic elements of the child’s experience with the jug: a summary of how the jug-as-thing looks (how it manifests itself and comes across to the child), what it is used for, the context in which we encounter it, the place it occupies in our world. The word džbán evokes an encounter with a real jug by, in Heidegger’s words, calling it out so that it emerges from unbeing into being. If we want to capture the meaning of the word džbán, then we cannot reduce it to a definition consisting of a superordinate concept along with a few differentiating features. That kind of definition is precisely what Heidegger warns us against: it distances us from the jug filled with wine (or cold water from the well) and replaces it with an abstracted container, the interior space of which is used to hold fluid matter. Thanks to the word (the verbal sign), a thing is “evoked.” The nature of meaning thus conceived points to the unity of cognition and language, to the essential role played by bodily and sensory experience in conceptual formation, to the naturalness of metaphoric and metonymic conceptualization, and also to the “narrativity” of meaning as well as the fact that human thinking is, when all is said and done, “literary” (Turner, 1996). Things have a deep involvement in stories, scripts, and narrative structures.4

5. A Truly Stony Stone, or Why Linguists Should Study Poetry

According to Heidegger, language speaks – that is, words speak. If human beings also speak, we do so only secondarily in answer to the speech of speech – and thanks to the fact that we have listened intently to what words have had to say. Heidegger often added to this that the heart of “speaking speech” – the essence of what words communicate – is revealed most authentically in poetry. Victor Shklovsky argued that art exists in order to give back to us the ability to experience life, to make us once again able to truly perceive things: to make the stone stony (see Mukařovský, 1971). What makes the stone stony? The “stony- ness of the stone” is evidently a matter of the semantic connotations that are bound up with the linguistic utterance. The word stone does not simply designate

4 In the Czech linguistic worldview, džbán is involved in narrative structures through its use in phraseology (including proverbs), collocational phrasings, etc. It is, in this way, symbolically and expressively anchored in Czech culture broadly understood (see Vaňková, 2004). It is interesting to note that one of the expressive features most strongly associated with džbán is its breakability.

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a piece of rock: it does not function merely to denote the thing. According to Heidegger, the word serves to call the thing out from a state of unpresent non- existence to a state of present existence, and this occurs in all of its associated sensory and contextual richness. In the Czech linguistic worldview, and undoubtedly in many other linguistic worldviews as well, a stone is associated with the image of something hard, sharp, immobile, heavy, and cold; a stone is, from a human perspective, a tool, and usually a tool used to injure or do harm. These characteristics of a stone can be (at least in Czech) backed up with connotational evidence, and we have found linguistically systemic data that verifies them (cf. Bartmiński & Panasiuk, 2001): consider, for example, the derivational adjective kamenný ‘stony’ that occurs in collocations like kamenná tvář ‘stone face’ and kamenné srdce ‘stony heart’ (in the sense of ‘hard heart’) and that confirms the connotations of immobility, if not also insensitivity; one verbal derivation kamenovat ‘to stone’ with its connotations of harm, sanction, enmity, unfriendliness; another verbal derivation zkamenět ‘to turn to stone’ with connotations of stiffness that are associated with a strongly felt experience of fear or fright. Verificational evidence is also found in phraseological expressions: spadl mi kámen ze srdce ‘a stone [weight] fell from my heart’ and odvalit někomu z cesty každý kámen ‘to roll away every stone from someone’s path’ in the sense of ‘paving the way for someone.’ Also, of course, in phraseological analogies: být chladný/studený jako kámen ‘to be cold as stone,’ být tvrdý jako kámen ‘to be hard as a rock,’ být těžký jako kámen ‘to be heavy as a stone,’ jít ke dnu jako kámen ‘to drop [to the bottom] like a rock.’ In addition to these “strong” systemic connotations, there are also so-called “weak” connotations that are not confirmed in the language system as a whole but can be conveyed – and understood – textually. We encounter these most often in poetry or in creative texts of all kinds, and usually in contexts that substantiate their communicativity (Pajdzińska & Tokarski, 2010; Tokarski, 2007). The word kámen ‘stone’ appears in poetic texts as a prototypically concrete object, as a basic element found in the world, but also sometimes as an entity endowed with a certain sensitivity to the world or its own inner life that people cannot comprehend. A stone (kámen) can even have its own language and spirituality: Vladimír Holan once wrote a poem called Modlitwa kamene (“The Stone’s Prayer”) that is written entirely in “stone language.”5 These kinds of cases represent implicit polemics with the stone‘s linguistically systemic connotations of inanimacy and insensitivity (cf. Vaňková, 2010). In a similar way, the poet Jan

5 Cf. Pajdzińska this volume for Wisława Szymborska’s poetic elaboration of the characteristics of the stone in Polish linguistic worldview. Special attention is paid to the way the poet contradicts the stone’s feature of ‘muteness.’

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Skácel “questions” connotations associated with kámen in this quatrain:

and you who don’t wish to cast stones a ty jenž necheš kamenovat be like a stone in your heart buď jako kámen v srdci svém so merciful no stone has yet tak milosrdný ještě nikdy cast the first stone nehodil kámen kámenem

(Skácel, 1996, p. 154)

In Skácel‘s polemic with our stereotypical understanding of kámen, he introduces a paradoxical explanation of a stone’s “mercifulness” (milosrdnost), and it becomes a mercifulness that we should take as a model if we ourselves truly do not want to “cast the first stone.” The two sides of this evocative attitude – on the one side the stone’s emotional hardness (mít srdce jako kámen ‘to have the heart of a stone’) and on the other the potential desire to “cast the first stone” (kamenovat), a Biblical activity associated with judgment and punishment – blend surprisingly together in this verse. Whoever is actually “like a stone” (jako kámen) is the very opposite of callous because stones do no harm. Heidegger said that poetry is discourse in its pure form and that poetry conveys most clearly the essence of speech or what speech conveys (Heidegger, 1993). This is obviously similar to the idea encountered in cognitive semantics in connection with the study of meaning potential. Ryszard Tokarski paraphrases Anna Wierzbicka in asserting that it is important not “what an expression means” but rather “what an expression could mean” (Tokarski, 2007), and he then explains why it is important that linguists examine poetic texts. We should understand poetry as the prototypical realm for the occurrence and engagement of textual connotations, and we should therefore take poetry into account when we study meaning. Linguists often consider poetry to be an inappropriate source for their research – it is thought to be the realm of the linguistically exceptional or the linguistically atypical – but it is actually poetry that represents an unparalleled source for investigating “weak” semantic connotations (cf. Pajdzińska & Tokarski, 2010). Various types of connotations are richly realized in poetry: it is possible not only to find them there, but also, given the poetic context, to grasp and interpret them. In this regard, then, we can understand poetry (and artistic writing in general) as the prototypical realm for the evocative realization of discourse potential. There is of course more to it than just this. Artistic texts, as sui generis manifestations of linguistic worldviews, also represent a realm in which specific reconceptualizations and reinterpretations of conventional worlds, stereotypes, preconceptions, and other fixed conceptual interpretations are most often realized. Poetry is the true realm of “metaphors we live by” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff & Turner, 1989: Vaňková, 2010).

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Connotations and reconceptualizations do not appear exclusively in artistic texts, but they do so both typically and distinctively in these kinds of texts, which is why we should consider these texts to be the prototypical realm for their realization. We might recall the words of Jan Mukařovský, writing about language’s “aesthetic function,” although we might also prefer to designate this function by the term aesthetic or cognitive-aesthetic potential of language: “The aesthetic function... is potentially present in every manifestation of language; hence the specific nature of poetic naming lies only in more radical revelation of the tendency inherent in every naming act” (Mukařovský, 1941, p. 188; italics mine). In the foreground, then, are those dimensions of speech – aspects of the text and, in our case, of aesthetic naming – that carry with them an evocation of experiences perceived through our body, senses, and emotions and that lead us, through such an evocation, to reach outward toward our experience of life, that is, toward our human existentiality. When we focus instead on the sign itself (or on the text itself, on naming itself in the abstract), then the text’s relation to our imminently given reality (in rough terms, the denotational or referential relation) is naturally weakened. Put succinctly: the evocative potential of words, which is given in a word’s connotations, predominates over denotation, but this does not happen quite so often in other realms of communication. Artistic texts therefore represent the prototypical realm in which speech is released from its functional servitude: it is not a tool, but a medium through which human existentiality is realized. And this is wrapped up in an enjoyable experience – an experience that questions and problematizes, to be sure, but also one in which free reign is given to play, imagination, and fascination. Even a linguist, much like a poet or philosopher, may be inclined to ask: Who exactly are we as people? And more importantly: if “words speak,” as Heidegger would have it, then what do they tell us? What do they tell us about how we understand the world and all of its parts? What do they tell us about things? What do they tell us about ourselves? We, as linguists, might orient ourselves toward these considerations by taking phenomenological philosophy as our starting point as well as by seeking analytic inspiration in poetry.

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References

Apresyan, Yuriy D. (1995). Obraz cheloveka po dannym yazyka: popytka sistemnogo opisaniya. Voprosy yazykoznaniya, 1, 37-67.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2001). Styl potoczny. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Współczesny język polski (pp. 115-134). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jőrg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Bartmiński, Jerzy, & Panasiuk, Jolanta. (2001). Stereotypy językowe. In Jerzy Bartmiński (Ed.), Współczesny język polski (pp. 371-395). Lublin: Wydawnictwo UMCS.

Fink, Eugen. (1996 [1958]). Bytí, pravda, svět. Předběžné otázky k pojmu „fenomén“. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Gadamer, Hans. (1999). Člověk a řeč. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Heidegger, Martin. (1993). Básnicky bydlí člověk. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Kratochvíl, Zdeněk. (1994). Filosofie živé přírody. Praha: Herrmann and Son.

Lakoff, George, & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, & Turner, Mark. (1989). More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lubomirski, Karl. (2003). Pták nad hořícím lesem. Trans. R. Malý. Praha: BB Art.

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Mukařovský, Jan. (1941). Básnické pojmenování a estetická funkce jazyka. In Jan Mukařovský, Kapitoly z české poetiky I (pp. 180-188). Praha: Melantrich.

Mukařovský, Jan. (1971). O současné poetice. In Jan Mukařovský, Cestami poetiky a estetiky (pp. 99-115). Praha: Československý spisovatel.

Neubauer, Zdeněk. (1999). Chvála mateřštiny – lingvistický exkurs. In Ivan M. Havel, Martin Palouš, & Zdeněk Neubauer (Eds.), Svatojánský výlet (pp. 87-91). Praha: Malvern.

Neubauer, Zdeněk. (2001). Smysl a svět. Hermeneutický pohled na svět. Praha: Nadace Vize Dagmar a Václava Havlových.

Nezval, Vítězslav. (1956). Věci, květiny, zvířátka a lidé pro děti. Praha: Albatros.

Pajdzińska, Anna, & Tokarski, Ryszard. (2010). Jazykový obraz světa a kreativní text. Slovo a slovesnost, 71, 288-297.

Patočka, Jan. (1992 [1936]). Přirozený svět jako filosofický problém. Praha: Československý spisovatel.

Patočka, Jan. (1995). Tělo, společenství, jazyk, svět. Prague: Oikoymenh.

SČN. (1989 [1835-1839]). Slovník česko-německý. Josef Jungmann. Praha: Academia.

Skácel, Jan. (1996). Naděje s bukovými křídky. In Jan Skácel, Básně II. Brno: Blok.

SSČ. (1994). Slovník spisovné češtiny pro školu a veřejnost. Praha: Academia.

Tokarski, Ryszard. (2007). Konotace – prototypy – otevřené definice. In Lucie Saicová Římalová (Ed.), Čítanka textů z kognitivní lingvistiky II (pp. 13-25). Praha: Charles University Philosophical Faculty.

Turner, Mark. (1996). The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vaňková, Irena. (2004). O věci a slově. Snad jsme tu jen, abychom řekli… In Jaroslava Pešková, Miloslav Průka, & Irena Vaňková (Eds.), Hledání souřadnic společného světa. Filosofie pro každý den (pp. 377-412). Praha: Eurolex Bohemia.

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Vaňková, Irena. (2010). Slovo v poezii. Inspirace kognitivnělingvistické. In Stanislava Fedrová (Ed.), Česká literatura – rozhraní a okraje. IV. kongres světové literárněvědné bohemistiky (pp. 425-437). Praha: Akropolis.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wolker, Jiří. (1958). Host do domu (1921). In Dílo Jiřího Wolkra. Praha: SNKLHU.

Translated by David S. Danaher

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Chapter 5 Ethnolinguistics and Literature: the Meaning of Svědomí ‘Conscience’ in the Writings of Václav Havel

David S. Danaher University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Co všechno dnešnímu světu hrozí, víme velmi dobře, vůle k odvrácení těchto hrozeb je však pramálo. Čili: nestačí říkat pravdu, je třeba, aby se vzpamatovalo lidské svědomí.

We know quite well what threatens our world today, but there is precious little will to deter those threats. Or rather: it’s not enough to speak the truth, it is necessary to awaken our human conscience.

Václav Havel, November 19951

1. Introduction

Of the many paradoxes associated with Václav Havel is one that renders his writing an ideal candidate for comparative ethnolinguistic analysis: Havel is a Czech writer who has achieved world renown primarily through translations of his texts into English. The implications of this paradox for reading Havel have yet to be acknowledged in existing scholarship on Havel. Indeed, many commentators on Havel in the English-speaking world are themselves not proficient in Czech and have operated under the assumption that the translated versions of his texts are canonical. This unconscious assumption fails to raise a question that follows logically from Havel’s paradox: how do the English translations differ from the original texts in Czech and how might these differences influence our

1 This citation is taken from an interview in the magazine Kavárna. Havel’s speeches and other texts as president are available online, indexed by year, at http://old.hrad.cz/ president/Havel/speeches/index.html. Translations from Czech to English are mine (D.D.) unless otherwise cited.

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reading and interpretation of them? Answering this question seems like a proper task for a kind of literary criticism that is grounded in ethnolinguistic analysis. The question has particular relevance with regard to key concepts or key words in the texts – words that represent core vocabulary in Havel’s thinking. While Wierzbicka (1997) uses the term “key word” in application to a language or culture,2 it would also seem productive to apply the same strategy to literature: that is, to search for and analyze words that occupy a key position in a work – or even the entire oeuvre – of a given author because they exhibit a special organizational and semantic potential for that work or for that particular author’s whole system of thought. Given Havel’s paradox, a focus on Havelian key words begs the question of the extent to which the meanings of their English translations are, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, indeed equivalent to the meanings of the Czech originals. To be clear, I do not intend to suggest that this is a question of the translations themselves, and I am certainly not casting doubt on the skills of Paul Wilson, Havel’s main English translator, whose work is exemplary. Indeed, as we will see, the Havelian key word under consideration here – Czech svědomí – has an absolutely stable translation equivalent into English – conscience – that the translator is necessarily obliged to use. Rather, the nature of the question is ethnolinguistic in Bartmiński’s sense of the term in that ethnolinguistics is a discipline that:

deals with manifestations of culture in language… It attempts to discover the traces of culture in the very fabric of language, in word meanings, phraseology, word formation, syntax and text structure. It strives to reconstruct the worldview entrenched in language as it is projected by the experiencing and speaking subject. (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 10)

In this regard, ethnolinguistics has a potentially significant role to play in literary analysis, not only for reading and interpreting literary texts in the context of one culture but perhaps especially for comparing the interpretation of literary works in the original with their translations.3 An application of ethnolinguistic analysis to literature ought to respect the texts as literature and strive to engage with the literary-critical discussion

2 Vaňková (2010) contains a useful discussion of and commentary on Wierzbicka’s understanding of the term. 3 Bartmiński (2009/2012) contains a discussion of comparative ethnolinguistics in chapter 17 where a proposal is made to initiate investigation of semantic discrepancies in terms for values that have sociopolitical or ethical import. Examples given include democracy, human rights, justice, sovereignty, freedom, homeland (p. 220).

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surrounding both the texts and their author. This is quite a different approach from using works of literature as resources in ethnolinguistic analysis proper, a valuable methodology in its own right. In the sense, however, that I am advocating it here, the application of ethnolinguistic analysis to literature may be considered a hybrid discipline in which a literary figure is investigated with help from an ethnolinguistic ground (see Danaher, 2007; Gross, 1997; and Vaňková, 2005). Ethnolinguistics is, then, a methodological tool that can contribute to the ongoing literary-critical dialogue. The result of such an investigation will ideally represent a contribution to both ethnolinguistics proper as well as literary criticism. Ethnolinguistic grounding can open up our reading of a text by developing an understanding of the meaning and semantic potential of key words in it, which has implications for criticism at the textual level (the aesthetic organization of the text) as well as at the personal level (the reader’s response to it).4 Put another way: if defamiliarization is one of the main functions of literature, then it is helpful to know the starting point of that process or the “familiar” meaning that the work of literature seeks to reshape and reframe; such an awareness helps us arrive at an appreciation of the literariness of the author’s project and allows us to better visualize our personal relationship to that project. The literary-critical discussion may benefit from an ethnolinguistic approach because familiarity – which comes into being through the interplay of language and culture – is the very thing that ethnolinguistics seeks to uncover and describe. More specifically and in the context of the present contribution, I will show that the status of svědomí as a key word in Václav Havel’s writing and thinking is essentially a response to the ethnolinguistic claim that cultural concepts have cognitive reality (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 13). Key words in Havel’s writings and thinking are not difficult to identify,5 and they tend to be key in the broader sense of extending across a range of texts and time periods. They are words that Havel continually returns to because they act as metaphysical touchstones in his thinking. Svědomí, especially in its relationship to a kind of responsibility (odpovědnost) that lies at the core of human identity, is one of those words.6 It is a key word in Havel’s pre-1989 so-called “dissident” essays and forms the central motif of his 1984 essay entitled Politika a svědomí (Politics and Conscience). It is one of a handful of words that comprise the core vocabulary in his philosophical letters from prison (Letters to Olga) written in

4 See Danaher 2002, 2003a, and 2003b for examples. 5 See Danaher (2010b) for an exploration of three such words. 6 Danaher (2010b, pp. 253ff) sketches an approach, amplified here, to svědomí as a Havelian key word.

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the late 1970s and early 1980s. Although not represented verbally, conscience – as Havel understands it – is arguably a major theme of his plays, which often prefigure the more rationalized explications of the same themes that we find in the essays. Finally, conscience is also a touchstone concept in Havel’s post-1989 presidential speeches and other texts (1989-2003), which Havel conceived of as a coherent collection with later speeches building upon earlier ones (and, we might add, the post-1989 texts as a whole building upon Havel’s pre-1989 writings). In analyzing Havel’s reframing of the meaning of svědomí and its relationship to, on the one hand, the conventional Czech understanding of svědomí and, on the other, English conscience, I will first trace the development of Havel’s thought and only then provide a comparative ethnolinguistic account to ground it. Havel’s approach to svědomí will be captured in a sampling of key contexts from his pre-1989 essays, in the relationship between the “voice of Being (hlas bytí)” and svědomí as developed in Letters to Olga, and in contexts from his post- 1989 texts that reinforce and extend these considerations. In the comparative ethnolinguistic analysis, I will focus on the etymologies of svědomí and conscience and the bearing that they have on the contemporary semantic value of each word in Czech and English respectively, on one common metaphorical conceptualization associated with both words, and finally on scholarly – as well as naive – evidence that speaks to each word‘s meaning.

2. The Literary Figure: Svědomí as a Havelian Key Word

In his 1984 essay Politika a svědomí (Politics and conscience), Havel problematizes the contemporary meaning of the word by arguing that modern man has privatized conscience by locking it up in our bathrooms and thereby cutting it off from engagement with the world. Conscience – and the responsibility that ought to come naturally with it – is reduced to a personal matter or what Havel calls a “phantom of subjectivity” [přeluda subjektivity] (1991, p. 255; 1999, 4, p. 425). An echo of the conscience-in-the-bathroom image appears in the essay Thriller, written about the same time, where Havel imagines modern “demons” in business attire who inflict moral ruin on the world as the “gods” sequester themselves in the “refuge” of individual conscience: “Démoni si prostě dělají, co chtějí, zatímco bohové se plaše skrývají v posledním útulku, který jim byl vykázán a který se nazývá lidské svědomí” [“The demons simply do what they want while the gods take diffident refuge in the final asylum to which they have been driven, called human conscience”] (1991, p. 288; 1999, 4, p. 510). A privatized and personalized understanding of conscience – a conscience

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seeking refuge from the world – is decidedly not what Havel intends to invoke when he writes dramatically of the need to “awaken our human conscience” in the citation that serves as epigraph to this chapter. Havel is not the only modern intellectual to have raised the question of the privatization or individualization of conscience. Jedediah Purdy, for example, has noted that in the American cultural tradition, “free conscience” came to be understood as “being true to oneself,” which risks both failing to look beyond oneself and thereby falling into a solipsism “that is often as banal and derivative as it is self-impressed” (2010, p. 21). In more hard-hitting terms than Havel, Purdy wonders “whether the spirit of conscience that Burke called ‘the dissidence of dissent’ has arrived at the end of history as full-blown narcissism” (p. 22). In Politics and Conscience, Havel places the phrase lidské svědomí ‘human conscience’ at the very end of the essay as the culminating term in a rhetorical question that he leaves for the reader to ponder: does not hope for a better future, Havel asks, lie in making “a real political force out of a phenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power – the phenomenon of human conscience?” (1991, p. 271; 1999, 4, p. 445). The essay as a whole defamiliarizes our conventional understanding of conscience and specifically its relationship to politics. By liberating conscience from the confines of the individual mind – by freeing it from Purdy’s narcissism – Havel presents a possible way out of the existential crisis that engulfs the modern world. The groundwork for Havel’s reframing of conscience in the essays of the mid- 1980s was laid in his 1979-1983 philosophical letters from prison, published in 1983 as Dopisy Olze (Letters to Olga), in which ruminations on svědomí comprise a central theme. Foreshadowing the bathroom image, Havel notes that conscience as an active force in the world is but a shadow of what it ought to be: it has become perfunctory, ritualized, a mere formality. The crisis of the modern world is a crisis of human identity and human responsibility, but Havel insists that an “orientation toward Being” – which conscience somehow embodies – has not disappeared. After all, “who would dare to deny that they have a conscience?” (letter 142). The “voice of Being” has not died out: “we know it summons us [že nás volá], and as human beings, we cannot pretend not to know what it is calling us to [k čemu nás volá]” (letter 142). We have many ways in the modern world of drowning out that voice (“[i]t is just that these days, it is easier to cheat, silence or lie to that voice” [letter 142]), but no matter how badly we behave, there is always a voice in some corner of our spirit saying that we ought not to have done so. Indeed, throughout the letters Havel emphasizes the dialogic nature of conscience and its inherent relationship to what he terms the “voice of Being” [hlas bytí]. This frees conscience from its cage of narcissism as conscience is understood to be not so much an inner, personal voice but rather an internalized manifestation of the voice of Being itself. In letter 139, Havel claims that while

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the hlas bytí informs the voice of conscience, it is greater than that personal voice. At the same time, the personal voice of conscience manifests the interconnectedness of two worlds, the world of man (the concrete human here and now) and the world of the transcendental (of God, of the absolute). These worlds are one and the same, but our access to Being is necessarily grounded in the former: “Being is one, it is everywhere and behind everything; it is the Being of everything and the only way to it is the one that leads through this world of mine and through this ‘I’ of mine” (letter 139). Conscience is internal to the individual only in the sense that its personalized voice represents a concrete realization of the transcendent voice of Being: rather than saying that conscience (Being) is in us, it would be more true to say, in Havel’s interpretation, that we are in conscience (Being). Havel’s focus on the voice of Being in its relation to conscience is not surprising given Heidegger’s influence – largely via Jan Patočka, Charter 77’s philosophical godfather – on Czechoslovak dissident intellectuals. According to Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s later writings are unusual in the Western philosophical tradition for Heidegger’s emphasis on hearing over seeing as a primary metaphor for thinking: “Metaphors drawn from hearing are very rare in the history of philosophy, the most notable modern exception being the late writings of Heidegger, where the thinking ego ‘hears’ the call of Being” (Arendt, 1978, p. 111).7 Havel seems to have borrowed Heidegger’s metaphor of the “soundless voice of Being” and elaborated it in his treatment of conscience. In Letters to Olga, Havel hangs his philosophical argument concerning conscience on one concrete and rather trivial experience: you are in an empty night tram and have to decide whether or not to pay the fare for the ride. Your “voice of conscience” is activated, and Havel insists that the resulting inner dialogue takes the form of an exchange between your ego and a “partner” that is outside of your ego and therefore not identical with it:

This “partner”, however, is not standing beside me; I can’t see it, nor can I quit its sight: its eyes and its voice follow me everywhere; I can neither escape it nor outwit it: it knows everything. Is it my so-called “inner voice”, my “superego”, my “conscience”? Certainly, if I hear it calling me to responsibility [slyším-li jeho volání k odpovědnosti], I hear this call within me [slyším toto volání v sobě], in my mind and my

7 In this connection, Arendt notes the Jewish tradition of “a God who is heard but not seen” and compares Hebrew truth, which is “heard”, versus the Greek vision of the true (1978, p. 111). Some implications of Arendt’s statement with regard to the ethnolinguistics of the senses are discussed in Vaňková 2007 (pp. 176ff) and Vaňková et al. 2005 (pp. 98, 109, 132).

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heart; it is my own experience, profoundly so, though different from the experiences mediated to me by my senses. This, however, does nothing to alter the fact that the voice addresses me and enters into conversation with me, in other words, it comes to my “I” – which I trust is not schizoid – from the outside. (letter 137)

One thing seems clear to Havel: that our “I,” if it has not completely suppressed its orientation toward Being, “has a sense of responsibility purely and simply because it relates intrinsically to Being as that in which it feels the only coherence, meaning and the somehow inevitable ‘clarification’ of everything that exists… because it hears within and around itself the ‘voice’ in which this Being addresses and calls out to it [kterým ho toto bytí oslovuje a volá]” (letter 137).8 Commenting on Havel’s understanding of the relation between conscience and responsibility, Radim Palouš has written that Havelian responsibility exerts an “ever-present claim” upon us and that this claim “may be expressed as the ‘mere’ voice of conscience” (Palouš, 1997, p. 171). Havel insists that we rely on this voice as a moral instinct. It represents something simultaneously inside and outside of us: “Indeed, it is through conscience that a demand to be in harmony with the world’s moral order is exerted upon us” (Palouš, 1997, p. 171). Conscience initiates a dialogue with Being. Havel’s reframing suggests a latent dramatic potential in the voice of conscience and its relation to the voice of Being. The “absolute horizon” of meaning – the voice of Being that “calls out [volá]” to us – is “present in us not only as an assumption, but also as a source of humanity [zdroj lidskosti] and a challenge [apel]” (letter 95). Conscience is a uniquely human experience that serves as a challenge or appeal [apel], and this is a characterization that explicitly references Havel’s dramatic style, which is associated with the “theater of the appeal” [divadlo apelu].9 (This leads us into another argument – that Havel is primarily a playwright because theater of the appeal is the genre that best expresses his approach to meaning and the key role that conscience plays in it – but one that would be more profitably undertaken in another venue.)

8 In an earlier letter, Havel defines responsibility [odpovědnost] in terms of being responsible to or for something else (one responds or odpovídá) that is usually concrete and immediate, although not only so. The “particular incarnation” of one’s responsibility does not exhaust the matter: “there is always something ‘more’, something ‘outside’, something that transcends [přesahuje] it,” and sometimes we call this feeling “conscience,” and in doing so “we localize it within ourselves” (letter 109). 9 For an account of Havel as playwright with a discussion of his association with “theater of the appeal,” see Rocamora 2004.

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By the time Havel becomes president, first of Czechoslovakia and then of the Czech Republic, his conceptual reframing of svědomí has been established. The presidential speeches and other published texts from this time reinforce and extend this reframing, continuing to insist on the importance of conscience (as Havel describes it) for confronting the existential and moral crisis that defines the modern world. A non-exhaustive list of post-1989 contexts that reinforce and extend his reframing would include the following:

(1) The argument that conscience ought not to be understood as “psychologized” or “localized” in our minds is reinforced in, among others, a speech at the University of Malta (Valetta), where Havel notes that svědomí is activated when we fail to do something good or when we do something wrong. This, however, is a psychologized characterization of conscience as a mere sentiment “as if conscience was a particular segment of our brain, identifiable within a certain area, or some kind of singular feature of a human being” (Valletta 2002). The reality is more complicated: responsibility means “awareness [jsme si vědomi] that there is someone who watches us,” and we are “intrinsically conscious of that silent eye and relate to it.”

(2) In place of psychological localization, the dialogic aspects of conscience are described in a 1991 speech before a joint meeting of the Czechoslovak parliament (Vystoupení ve federálním shromáždění, 24 September) where Havel emphasizes both that svědomí is activated in any kind of dialogue and that dialogue means both speaking and listening.10 This sentiment is echoed a decade later in a speech given in New York when Havel states that although each of us may have a conscience, not all of us heed its voice and many of us have become skilled at deceiving it.

(3) Conscience as a point of access to the transcendent is consistently reinforced (for example, in the major international speeches given at Asahi Hall in Japan in 1992 and George Washington University in 1993). It is subjectively through our individual consciences that we establish a connection with the metaphysical order that both includes and transcends us. In a 1996 speech at Trinity College, Havel quite explicitly defines conscience and responsibility as “a certain attitude of man toward that which reaches beyond him, that is, toward infinity and eternity, the transcendental, the mystery of the world, the order of Being.” This sentiment is echoed in his 1999 speech at Macalester College where conscience is equated with a moral order that promotes love for fellow humans.

10 This speech is available only in the original Czech.

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(4) A final theme reinforced in the post-1989 texts is that conscience is the hope for the future, a sleeping force whose potential has yet to be tapped: “A conscience slumbers in every human being, something divine. And that is what we have to put our trust in” (Harvard University 1995).

(5) Havel extends his pre-1989 account by granting conscience a key role in bringing down the socialist regimes in Central Europe (Davos 1992) with the corollary that an understanding of politics as moral conscience was what the post-1989 East could offer the West (Warsaw 1999). For Havel, this was, in fact, the true meaning and lesson of the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and elsewhere: “Our fundamental experience has taught us very clearly that only politics that is preceded by conscience really has any meaning”11 (Warsaw 1999).

(6) A further extension derives directly from the argument made in Politics and conscience (as well as in a number of Havel’s plays): that the technological, scientific age of humanity – an age that privileges explaining over understanding12 – lacks a conscience in the sense that Havel conceives of it. In a speech in February 1990 to commemorate the anniversary of the 1948 communist-party putsch in Czechoslovakia, Havel notes: “Science [věda] does not have a conscience. It is certainly beautiful and important…, but the human spirit is not mere rationality [rozum]. It is judgment. Deliberation. Conscience. Decency [slušnost]. Tact. Love for those close to us. Responsibility. Courage. Stepping away from the self. Doubt. Even humor”13 (Prague, 25 February 1990). In other speeches, Havel similarly suggests that human conscience lags behind technological and scientific knowledge, which may very well be the modern world’s defining dilemma.

(7) Havel’s final post-1989 extension is his suggestion that conscience plays the same key role in shaping modern democratic political communities that it played in the dissident era under socialism. Democracy is defined as an “unending journey” and a “constant appeal [trvalá výzva] to the human spirit and human conscience” (Prague, 12 March 1996). The task of Europe – the meaning of which ought not

11 The English version of this speech online has a serious mistranslation, rendering the original Czech “politika, které předchází svědomí” as “politics that precede conscience,” which is the exact opposite of the intended meaning. 12 For a discussion of the dichotomy between explaining and understanding that underlies much of Havel’s thinking, see Danaher (2007). 13 A translation of this speech is not available.

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to be reduced to cooperation on economic and political matters – is to once again find its conscience and sense of responsibility in the world (Aachen 1996). Cultivating this extended understanding is the chief responsibility of intellectuals, who are the “conscience of society” (Wellington 1995).

By way of summing up Havel’s reshaping of the meaning of conscience over the course of his literary and political career, we might look back at the epigraph to this contribution, in which he plainly pins hope for the future of humanity on the awakening of “human conscience.” What Havel means by this is just what we have explored in this section on conceptualizing conscience as literary figure. The awakening of human conscience – and Havel frequently insists on the adjective “human” in reference to conscience as if to continually emphasize the responsibility that having a conscience places on us as human beings14 – presupposes a reconceptualization of its spiritual and cultural meaning. While a degenerate understanding of conscience – that ultimately leads to solipsism – localizes it in the individual’s mind as an exclusively internal dialogue, Havel imagines conscience as a transcendent dialogue with Being – an appeal for engagement in and with the world – that has the potential to be a game-changing political and moral force. If lexis is a classifier of social experience that “provides access to the conceptual sphere, to the realm of ideas and images important in a given culture” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 17), then Havel seeks to influence the cultural sphere through a careful and systematic redefinition of the meaning of human “conscience.” The status of svědomí as a key word in Havel’s thinking is therefore a response to the ethnolinguistic claim that cultural concepts have cognitive reality. The extent to which Havel’s redefinition of svědomí differs from the conventional meaning of the concept remains, however, to be determined. In other words, if Havel defamiliarizes, then what is his starting point, the familiar ground? And to extend this line of thinking: is that ground the same for Czech svědomí as it is for English conscience? These are essentially ethnolinguistic questions, and it is to them that I now turn.

14 Indeed, the adjective lidský (along with the derived word lidskost) represents another key word in Havel, especially in his post-1989 texts: in the presidential speeches, Havel uses this adjective in combination with over one hundred different nouns. Translating lidský into English is not as straightfoward as it might seem since its meaning can subtly blend the meaning of the two separate (although obviously related) English words human and humane. See Danaher (2010a).

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3. The Ethnolinguistic Ground: Svědomí and Conscience Compared

In comparing Czech svědomí with English conscience, we first note that they are, etymologically speaking, parallel: each has a prefix meaning with (s- and con- respectively) attached to a suffixed root with the original meaning of knowledge (-vědomí and -science).15 The origin of both words implies a form of mental deliberation that comes “with knowledge” of the world, and this brings them close to Havel’s extended definition: conscience establishes a relationship between ourselves (our inner voice) and events in the world at large (the voice of Being). In other words, conscience responds to questions that are raised by our experience in and knowledge of the world: what we know should therefore be closely related to what we do and how we act (Saul, 1997, p. 181). The etymological identity already exposes, however, a crucial difference in how the words resonate in each language: the Czech root for “knowing” (-věd-) is more etymologically and semantically transparent in a host of other common words related to knowledge, consciousness, and awareness than the comparable English root (-sci-), which, if anything, might tend to associate English conscience with a particular – scientific – kind of knowledge. A partial list of Czech words where -věd- is immediately perceivable and where a connection between svědomí and knowing or awareness is therefore strongly felt include the following: vědět ‘to know’ (Polish wiedzieć), věda ‘scholarship, science’ (Pol. wiedza), vědomí ‘consciousness’ (Pol. świadomość), povědomí ‘awareness’ (Pol. świadomość), and uvědomit si ‘to realize, become aware of’ (Pol. uświadomić sobie). By comparison, the -sci- in conscience is conceptually opaque: even the connection between conscience and consciousness is, at best, only tenuously felt. Whereas Czech has one root that serves as a semantic locus for many experiences of “knowing,” the multiplicity of English roots for “knowing” fails to activate a connection between conscience and Being that Havel privileges and extends in his interpretation. A crucial concept in the Czech vědomí-svědomí nexus proves to be the Czech terms for witnessing: svědek ‘witness’ (Pol. świadek) and svědectví ‘testimony’ (Pol.

15 Etymological and lexical information on svědomí is taken from Gebauer (1970), Jungmann (1989 [1835]), and Machek (1968). In Polish we encounter a somewhat different situation. The word świadomość follows the same etymological path as conscience and svědomí, but it means consciousness or awareness. In Polish, conscience is sumienie, which consists of the now unproductive prefix są- ‘with’ and Old Polish mnienie (thinking or conviction: cf. Greek mnéme ‘memory’ or Latin men, mentis ‘reason’). I am grateful to Adam Głaz for this clarification.

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świadectwo). The Czech words derivationally conflate knowledge, witnessing, and conscience.16 In Jungmann’s entry on svědomí, the second meaning is listed as svědectví, glossed as Latin testimonium, and it is this witnessing connection that is arguably more activated in the meaning of Czech svědomí as opposed to English conscience. The association of svědomí with svědectví also helps lay the groundwork for Havel’s creative extension of the meaning of the former. Indeed, in an analysis of faith and belief in Havel’s writings, Milan Balabán sees Havel’s concept of the “absolute horizon of Being” as “the most important witness [svědek]... of the deliberations that we have with ourselves on a daily basis” (2009, pp. 43-44): in other words, svědomí – in Havel’s extended philosophical sense – is a dialogue with the svědek of Being, and this is an active kind of witnessing since we, who also belong to Being, both observe and simultaneously participate in it. Although Balabán does not mention it, it would be productive to read Havel’s plays within what might be called a “witnessing framework”: the theater of the appeal activates conscience by transforming theater-goers in the audience into witnesses. The witnessing element in Havel’s dramatic style is embodied in particular by the character of Vaněk, who appears in three of Havel’s plays and has been turned into a theatrical device by other playwrights (Goetz- Stankiewicz, 1987). As Havel himself has said about the “dramatic principle” that is Vaněk:

[H]e does not usually do or say much, but his presence on stage and his being what he is make his environment expose itself in one way or another… He is, then, a kind of “key”, opening certain – always different – vistas onto the world… a kind of catalyst, a gleam if you will, in whose light we view a landscape. And although without it we should scarcely be able to see anything at all, it is not the gleam that matters, but the landscape. (quoted in Rocamora, 2004, p. 381)

If the semantic development of Czech svědomí in relation to other words in the same etymological and derivational network reaffirms a connection to witnessing, the meaning of English conscience seems to have shifted away from the knowledge-witnessing relationship toward the more personalized or privatized understanding of conscience that Havel aggressively polemicizes with in Politics and conscience and elsewhere. This development also seems to have

16 Cf. also the situation in English. The ModE witness comes from OldE witnes ‘knowledge,’ and wit can be linked with the Latin videre ‘see’ or Sanskrit vidati ‘(he) knows,’ which contains the same root as the Polish widzieć ‘see’ or wiedzieć ‘know.’

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run parallel with the narrowing of the meaning of English conscious as outlined in Humphrey (1999, pp. 117ff). Humphrey notes the etymological structure of the word and states that the original meaning of the Latin verb conscire (from which the adjective conscius is derived) was “to share knowledge widely.” As time passed, the usage changed, “and it shifted to mean sharing knowledge with some people but not others, sharing it within a small circle – and thus being privy to a secret” (p. 118). This knowledge circle narrowed even further “until eventually it included just a single person, the subject who was conscious” (p. 118). Humphrey sums up:

Thus, as the English language has evolved (and perhaps as the users of the language have become more self-concerned and introspective), the meaning of the word ‘conscious’ has not only become narrower and narrower, it has in effect turned around. Rather like the word window, which has changed in meaning from ‘a hole where the wind come in’ to ‘a hole where the wind does not come in,’ conscious has changed from ‘having shared knowledge’ to ‘having intimate knowledge not shared with anyone except oneself.’ (p. 119)

The parallel with a privatized conscience (or one that is locked up in the bathroom) is rather striking. At the very least, the narrowing of the dialogic aspects of English conscious – its journey from sharing to not sharing – is similar to the way in which the “voice” of conscience has come to be internalized. Both svědomí and conscience share a conventional metaphorical association with a voice (Uličný, 1999), but the schema suggested by the voice metaphor is open to a variety of elaborations. Is it a voice entirely inside one’s head – an inner dialogue with oneself – or, as Havel advocates, an inner voice that instantiates a connection with the very voice of Being? In other words, we conventionally understand conscience as something internal to each of us, whereas Havel instead argues that we are participants in a dialogue with Being that is activated by conscience. This distinction evokes Erich Fromm’s writing on modern identity and specifically the opposition that he details between, on the one hand, having or using and, on the other, being. Fromm wrote: “Man became a collector and a user. More and more, the central experience of his life became I have and I use, and less and less I am. The means – namely, material welfare, production, and the production of goods – thereby became the ends” (2005, p. 21). In Fromm’s terms, then, a privatized conscience is one that we have and that we use. Opposed to this is Havel’s understanding of conscience – an understanding grounded in the knowing-witnessing nexus – that is much less a matter of practical utility and much more a matter of who we fundamentally are.

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Existing scholarship on the conventional meaning of conscience confirms a tendency toward conceptual narrowing (personalization) and a having/using interpretation. Miroslava Nejedlá (2001) studied the semantics of Czech vědomí (consciousness) and svědomí in comparison with English and concluded in part that English conscience seems to be understood as more of a mechanism than Czech svědomí: with conscience there is more of an element of individual will that makes its function potentially controllable by an exertion of that will (2001, p. 29). This correlates with a sense of duty or moral obligation in conscience, a sense not as strongly felt in the meaning of svědomí. The qualms or prickings of Czech svědomí “are considered to be phenomena independent of the will of the subject who is undergoing them” (p. 30). Perhaps another way of making the same point would be to say that English conscience – in comparison with Czech svědomí – is conceptualized more as an ability, one that we have and that we use. In this connection and in the American context, we might mention Stanley Fish’s recent discussion (Fish, 2009) in the New York Times of the so-called “conscience clause” that allows medical professionals to deny healthcare (for example, contraception) that they believe runs counter to their own moral or religious beliefs. Fish notes that it is so named “because it affirms the claims of conscience – one’s inner sense of what is right – against the competing claims of professional obligations.” He then, however, demonstrates that the meaning of conscience has radically changed over time. Fish cites Hobbes, who had quite a different sense of the word and who argued that considering conscience to be “the private arbiter of right and wrong” was a “corrupted usage” invented by those who desired “to elevate ‘their own… opinions’ to the status of reliable knowledge and try to do so by giving them ‘that reverenced name of Conscience.’” The sense, then, that conscience represents an inner mechanism for determining right from wrong is entrenched in modern English to such an extent that it has become the substance of legal maneuvering, but, at the same time, this entrenched sense is not entirely beyond dispute. Predating and foreshadowing Fish’s discussion of the “conscience clause” is Anna Wierzbicka’s tracing of the historical development of the English concepts right and wrong and the extension of these originally conversational words into the ethical realm – a realm that includes conscience (Wierzbicka, 2006). She argues that the rise of right and wrong is a language- and culture-specific phenomenon, and it sets English apart from other European languages in which good and bad – which have a more general meaning and are less subject to an individual’s will – still hold sway. She writes: “[T]he ascendancy of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ over ‘good’ and ‘bad’ seems to reflect a more rational, more procedural, more reason-based approach to human life and a retreat from a pure distinction between GOOD and BAD unsupported by any appeal to reason, procedures, methods, or intersubjectively available evidence” (2006, p. 72). In Wierzbicka’s analysis, ethical decision-making has evolved into a matter of good thinking (like

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scientific thinking) and interpersonal validation: “It is a rational ethics, an ethics that doesn’t need to be grounded in metaphysics (in particular, in God) but can be grounded in reason” (2006, p. 72).17 The concepts of right and wrong are, in this view, Anglo-cultural constructs (Wierzbicka, 2006, p. 65). When other concepts are defined in terms of right and wrong, these concepts are then imbued with the Anglo-specific associations related to right and wrong. In this regard, Wierzbicka specifically mentions conscience, which is defined in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy as “the sense of right and wrong in an individual” (p. 66). She notes that this was not, in fact, how philosophers who were not speakers of modern English understood conscience, and gives the example of Aquinas: “But for Aquinas, conscience was not ‘the sense of right and wrong,’ but rather the sense of bonum and malum, that is, ‘good’ and bad’… For speakers of most modern European languages, too, ‘conscience’ is usually linked with the notions ‘good’ and ‘bad’, rather than ‘right’ and ‘wrong’” (p. 66). If Nejedlá, Fish, and Wierzbicka are correct, then we could conclude that conventional usage of English conscience strongly implies the kind of understanding that Havel cautions against: it has been privatized and rationalized, reduced to a mechanism in each of our minds that is more or less subject to our control. The conventional meaning of Czech svědomí, however, seems to resist this process whether it be because the concepts of good and bad still predominate over right and wrong (Wierzbicka) and individual will is less emphasized (Nejedlá) or, and this might be stating the same idea in different terms, the relationship between an individual and her or his awareness (vědomí) of the world – a relationship mediated by svědomí and its semantic/derivational network – is more foregrounded. In Fromm’s terms, English conscience privileges a having/using mode while Czech svědomí leaves more semantic space for an interpretation in the being mode – a space that Havel uses to full effect in his conceptual reimagining of the import of svědomí for the modern world. By way of summing up this comparative analysis, we might move away from scholarly investigations and consider naïve evidence of the semantic distinction between Czech svědomí and English conscience. Comparison of the respective English and Czech Wikipedia pages devoted to conscience and svědomí provides

17 Both Wierzbicka’s focus on a “rational ethics” and the notion that English conscience – in opposition to Czech svědomí – might be understood more as a mechanism or ability raise the question of whether reason itself is also a mechanism or ability. It can be and, of course, has been (or conventionally is?) construed as such, but this may very well also be a culturally grounded understanding. For a persuasive counter-argument in the cognitive- linguistics tradition, see Johnson 2007.

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just this sort of evidence and confirms the analysis that has been offered here.18 The English page from the outset defines conscience as “an aptitude, faculty, intuition, or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong”; dialogic aspects of the term are downplayed while its potential link to reason is highlighted (if questioned). A possible feature of the naïve semantics of conscience that has not been considered here – but perhaps ought to be looked at in the future – is its close association to religious or spiritual traditions: this association is given a special status in the English – but not the Czech – Wikipedia entry. In contrast, the Czech page does not mention “right” or “wrong”, and the focus from the outset is on the dialogic aspects of svědomí, which is defined as “vnitřní instance, mlčenlivé volání, které vede soudy člověka o tom, co sám způsobil nebo co se chystá způsobit [an inner authority, a silent calling that guides a person’s judgments about what he or she has done or intends to do].” Beyond the dialogic aspects, there is an emphasis on svědomí as a primarily procedural ability (schopnost) – as “sebereflexe, tj. schopnost uvažovat o sobě samém, podívat se na sebe jinýma očima než je pohled vlastního zájmu a prosazování [self-reflection, ie, the ability to contemplate one’s own self, to look at oneself through eyes other than ones concerned with one’s own interests and with self-promotion]” – and this is not privileged in the English entry. In the procedural part of the definition we also find a suggestion that svědomí inherently involves transcending self-interest whereas in the English entry on conscience, this semantic aspect is not foregrounded in any way other than stating that conscience is associated with “moral evaluations” (of right and wrong). The Czech page also has a section devoted to an etymological breakdown of the word svědomí and in which the vědomí – svědomí relationship is made explicit. This relationship is further underlined by the mention of fixed phrases in Czech that contain both words: for example, the oath uttered when assuming an important office that states that the person promises to carry out the duties “podle nejlepšího vědomí a svědomí” (literally, “according to the best of one’s consciousness and conscience”). English does not have an equivalent. The Wikipedia comparison serves to highlight the semantic differences between svědomí and conscience that we have previously noted. Some of these differences are stark while others are more a matter of nuance or emphasis. Considered together, they demonstrate that the conventional meaning of svědomí – which is

18 The English entry is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience, and the Czech at http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svědomí. Wikipedia entries frequently change, and these pages were last accessed April 4, 2011.

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Havel’s conceptual ground, his starting point – already contains the seeds that will grow into Havel’s defamiliarizing semantic extension: conscience as, potentially, a moral and political force to be reckoned with in the modern world.19 In contrast to the meaning of svědomí, the entrenched meaning of English conscience is decidedly less amenable to the kind of aesthetic extension that Havel has in mind: the conventional understanding of conscience is, in fact, much closer to the privatized, mechanistic conceptualization that Havel sets out to undermine.

4. Conclusion

In other words, the semantics of svědomí provides more fertile ground for Havel’s argument than does the semantics of conscience: the English reader of Havel is obliged to make a greater leap of faith in following the line of Havel’s thinking because conscience is not, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, a semantic equivalent for svědomí. There is a hint of a “transcendent breeze” in svědomí that conscience lacks, and this seems to be true for a range of Havelian key words in comparison with their translations into English (Danaher, 2010b). Havel’s paradox – that he is a Czech writer who has gained world-wide influence as an intellectual through translations of his texts – is a phenomenon that warrants consideration, and ethnolinguistics can provide a methodology to ground the investigation. In conducting comparative ethnolinguistic research, Bartmiński has noted that comparing concepts related to “spiritual culture” presents the greatest challenge:

The comparative procedure is relatively straightforward in the case of objects unambiguously identifiable on the basis of extralinguistic empirical observation, such as the sun, stars, the elements, plants, animals or body parts. It is more difficult in the case of artifacts, such as clothes, prepared foods, kitchen utensils etc., very different in different cultures and environments. The most problematic are components of the spiritual culture, such as political, social or moral concepts and ideas. These are mainly untranslatable, specific to individual cultures and languages. (2009/2012, p. 216)

19 In light of Havel’s argument, should conscience be added to the list of value terms that Bartmiński (2009/2012, p. 220) suggests be ethnolinguistically studied because they have a direct bearing on sociopolitical and ethical questions? If Havel is to be taken at his word, then discrepancies in how we understand the term – and how it functions in both our individual lives and the life of society – may well lie at the heart of the success or failure of politics in the modern world.

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In analyzing terms related to spiritual culture, it is perhaps necessary to delve into literature – and ethnolinguistic literary analysis of the kind exemplified here – to help us better grasp the entrenched semantic value of each term and to help us better perceive its familiar starting point. Literature is, after all, at least partly concerned with reframing entrenched meanings, and I am reminded in this regard of Milan Kundera’s famous assertion regarding the novel: “A novel is often, it seems to me, nothing but a long quest for some elusive definitions” (1988, p. 127).20 If literature reshapes familiar meanings as part of its core mission – and if the cognitive definition itself is, as Bartmiński compellingly argues, a cultural narrative – then an ethnolinguistic approach to literature has a potentially crucial role to play in both ethnolinguistic analysis proper as well as literary criticism. It is in this dual spirit that the present contribution is offered.21

20 Note the recent best-selling epic novel by Jonathan Franzen (2010) entitled Freedom: the novel itself is a narrative reframing of the meaning of this key cultural term in the American context. 21 For supporting my investigations of key words in Havel’s writings, I am grateful to Christopher Ott, Irena Vaňková, Daniel Vojtěch, and to students in my monograph course on Havel at the University of Wisconsin (http://web.mac.com/pes/havel/). Sincere appreciation is extended to the Kruh přátel českého jazyka affiliated with Charles University in Prague for inviting me to present on svědomí and other words in November 2010. Many thanks also to Adam Głaz, Megan Munroe, Ruth Ann Stodola, and José Vergara for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

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References

Arendt, Hannah. (1978). The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace.

Balabán, Milan. (2009). Víra (u) Václava Havla. Praha: Oikoymenh.

Bartmiński, Jerzy. (2009/2012). Aspects of Cognitive Ethnolinguistics. Ed. Jörg Zinken. Sheffield and Oakville, CT: Equinox.

Danaher, David S. (2002). The semantics of pity and žalost‘ in a literary context. Glossos, 3. [http://seelrc.org/glossos/issues/3/; last accessed Feb 19, 2013]

Danaher, David S. (2003a). A cognitive approach to metaphor in prose: Truth and falsehood in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Il’ich.” Poetics Today, 24 (3), 239- 269.

Danaher, David S. (2003b.) Conceptual metaphors for the domains TRUTH and FALSEHOOD in Russian and the Image of the Black Sack in Tolstoi’s “The Death of Ivan Il’ich”. In Robert A. Maguire & Alan Timberlake (Eds.), American Contributions to the 13th International Congress of Slavists (Volume 2: Literature) (pp. 61-75). Bloomington: Slavica.

Danaher, David S. (2007). Cognitive poetics and literariness: metaphorical analogy in Anna Karenina. In David Danaher & Kris van Heuckelom (Eds.), Perspectives on Slavic Literatures (pp. 183-207). Amsterdam: Pegasus. [Also published in Polish as (2006). Poetyka kognitywna a literackość: analogia metaforyczna w Annie Kareninie. Przestrzenie teorii, 6, 277-298.]

Danaher, David S. (2010a). An ethnolinguistic approach to key words in literature: lidskost and duchovnost in the writings of Václav Havel. Ročenka textů zahraničních profesorů, 4, 27-54. Prague: Charles University.

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Danaher, David S. (2010b). Translating Havel: three key words. Slovo a slovesnost, 71, 250-259.

Fish, Stanley. (2009). Conscience vs. conscience. New York Times, April 12, 2009. http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/conscience-vs-conscience/ [last accessed Feb 17, 2013]

Franzen, Jonathan. (2010). Freedom. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Fromm, Erich. (2005). On Being Human. New York: Continuum.

Gebauer, Jan. (1970). Slovník staročeský. Praha: Academia.

Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa. (Ed.). (1987). The Vaněk Plays. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Gross, Sabine. (1997). Cognitive readings; or, The disappearance of literature in mind. Poetics Today, 18 (2), 271-297.

Havel, Václav. (1983a). Dopisy Olze. Praha: Atlantis.

Havel, Václav. (1983b). Letters to Olga. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Henry Holt.

Havel, Václav. (1991). Open Letters. Trans. Paul Wilson et al. New York: Knopf.

Havel, Václav. (1999). Spisy. Praha: Torst.

Humphrey, Nicholas. (1999). A History of the Mind: Evolution and the Birth of Consciousness. New York: Copernicus.

Johnson, Mark. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jungmann, Josef. (1989 [1835]). Slovník česko-německý. Praha: Academia.

Kundera, Milan. (1988). The Art of the Novel. New York: Grove Press.

Machek, Václav. (1968). Etymologický slovník jazyka českého. Praha: Academia.

Nejedlá, Miroslava. (2001). Sémantické pole lexémů VĚDOMÍ a SVĚDOMÍ. Masters thesis: Charles University, Prague.

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Palouš, Radim. (1997). Filozofování s Havlem. In Anna Freimanová (Ed.), Milý Václave… tvůj: přemýšlení o Václavu Havlovi (pp. 162-187). Praha: Lidové noviny.

Purdy, Jedediah. (2010). A Tolerable Anarchy: Rebels, Reactionaries, and the Making of American Freedom. New York: Vintage.

Saul, John Ralston. (1997). The Unconscious Civilization. New York: The Free Press.

Rocamora, Carol. (2004). Acts of Courage: Václav Havel’s Life in the Theater. Hanover: Smith & Kraus.

Uličný, Oldřich. (1999). Hlas svědomí a mluvní akty. Prace filologiczne, 44, 529- 533.

Vaňková, Irena. (2005). Kognitivní lingvistika, řeč a poezie: předběžné poznámky. Česká literatura, 53 (5), 609-636.

Vaňková, Irena. (2007). Nádoba plná řeči. Praha: Karolinum.

Vaňková, Irena. (2010). Buďte v pohodě! (Pohoda jako české klíčové slovo). In Irena Vaňková & Jasňa Pacovská (Eds.), Obraz člověka v jazyce (pp. 31-57). Prague: Charles University Philosophical Faculty.

Vaňková, Irena, Nebeská, Iva, Římalová, Lucie Saicová, and Šlédrová, Jasňa. 2005. Co na srdci, to na jazyku. Praha: Karolinum.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (1997). Understanding Cultures through their Key Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. (2006). English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 6 Cognitive Play in Daniil Kharms’ “Blue Notebook №10”1

José Vergara University of Madison-Wisconsin, USA

1. Introduction

As a master of the alogical and nonsensical, Daniil Kharms forces language into the most unusual of combinations. From his nonsensical poetry and children’s literature to the short Incidents and other prose, he intentionally brings together situations, words, and meanings in odd compositional arrangements. Through this deconstructive, seemingly anarchic method he activates certain linguistic functions and allows his readers to see beyond the logical world and into what he considered the world of true meanings (Kharms & Vvendensky, 1997, pp. 248-250) and the “purity of order” (Kharms, 2001, p. 79-80). The attainment of this higher order comes from a radical rethinking of literature and language as such. For Kharms writing is a performance and reading an event that actively implicates his audience. If we typically use language to construct and to ground ourselves within reality, then Kharms’ language attempts to reverse such a process and reveal the inconsistencies of existence by releasing words from their traditional meaning in this cognitive space. What we see, instead, are the new and explosive meanings created by those juxtapositions. The reader is able to experience the world anew due to Kharms’ awareness of cognitive play. Adopting a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach can help elucidate exactly how and why Kharms’ artistic methods manage to accomplish these goals. Though the language of his Incidents cycle may be straightforward, the intricate manner in which Kharms constructed the texts speaks to a desire to invert expectations and experience on many levels. Neil Carrick has defined Kharms’ prose as a “‘collision’ with a familiar, hackneyed narrative sequence” (Carrick, 1995, p. 708), that is archetypal narratives and literary utterances. Kharms relies on this “pre-text” (a prototype), understood by the reader on some level, to invert

1 I would like to thank David Danaher, Karen Evans-Romaine, and Jenny Jalack for their careful readings of this chapter in its various stage of development.

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the art of writing at large. I argue that his generic and stylistic parodies are in turn supplemented by the parodic treatment of linguistic regularities. In short, an awareness of the cognitive and linguistic tricks that Kharms uses will illuminate the literariness of his prose. These techniques include blending concepts and construals,2 reversing prototypical reading processes, and layering of metaphor and metonymy. Such an analysis provides further insights into the nature of the author’s choices in language and how these impact readers’ intake of the text. Jerzy Bartmiński’s approach to ethnolinguistic analysis has been a vital catalyst in the development of these ideas. Bartmiński has proposed that “culture exists in language and constitutes its inalienable component” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 11). The manner in which we comprehend both texts (cultural artifacts) and the world is thus always linked to the language we use. Moreover, Bartmiński assigns the following elements to the style of a text: “the worldview projected in a given style, the ontological status of that worldview, the rationality and communicative intentions it assumes” (p. 14). Each statement, whether written or spoken, then presupposes a particular conceptualization of reality. Behind this outlook lie the cognitive (or ethnolinguistic) values found inherently in the words one uses. Using “Blue Notebook №10” (Golubaya tetrad’ №10) as a primary case study, I will explore the connections between Kharms’ prose and the cognitive and ethnolinguistic processes at work in order to describe how Kharms manipulates construals for precise aesthetic effect. The cognitive-semantic relationship between the concepts BE and HAVE in Russian plays a most prominent role throughout Kharms’ Incidents cycle, a collection of thirty texts with little in common other than a predilection for senseless violence, unexpected turns of action, and the disorientating jerk of an unresolved ending. As such, I will begin with a short overview of the linguistic details concerning these two concepts – EXISTENCE (BEING) and POSSESSION (HAVING) – in relation to Kharms’ text. My focus will fall on apparently minute details when discussing this connection to Kharms “Blue Notebook №10” more closely, but linguistic analysis reveals exactly why these elements make the text so particularly effective and rich in meaning. After detailing Kharms’ use of BE/HAVE, I will consider additional related forms of cognitive play in “Blue Notebook №10”: the scale of subject definiteness as well as modes of sentence scanning. These considerations will lead naturally to a brief examination of Kharms’ cognitive play in other stories from the same cycle. Finally,

2 Taylor defines construal as the “process by which a given state is structured by a language-user for purposes of its linguistic expression” (2002, p. 589). Each individual “construes” any given phenomenon (a scene, person, object, etc.) in a different manner depending on his or her mental experience. For example, “the lamp may be above the table” or, conversely, “the table below the lamp.” The notion comes from Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar, whose author in a recent publication defines it as “our manifest ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways” (Langacker, 2008, p. 43).

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I will conclude by reflecting on translations of Kharms’ “Blue Notebook №10” in order to further elucidate the cognitive-ethnolinguistic essence of my analysis. Ultimately, I will show how the meaning of Kharms’ texts is not only a product, but inherently a function of his language as well. The meaning or message that Kharms wishes to convey is encoded into the very fabric of his words.

2. BEING and HAVING in Russian

Much has been written about the connection in Russian between BE and HAVE, which may be understood either purely linguistically or from a wider cognitive and philosophical perspective. Here I will provide an outline of materials most relevant to the present analysis. Most importantly, Steven Clancy (2001; 2005) has proposed a semantic nexus for BECOMING-BEING-UNBECOMING that takes into account all the multifarious lexical and semantic notions shared by BE and HAVE. The two concepts are shown to express many categories of meaning. Table 6.1 features a selection of Clancy’s findings.

Table 6.1 The BECOMING-BEING-UNBECOMING NEXUS (adapted from Clancy, 2001)

CATEGORY BECOMING BEING UNBECOMING

MAKE/DO existence BE (UNMAKE) BECOME GIVE, TAKE TAKE, GIVE possession HAVE GET LOSE

creation CREATE EXIST DESTROY

These conceptual items, not always expressed by verbs, make up “the notions most likely to become new expressions of BE and HAVE, as well as the semantic ideas most likely to be grammaticalized as auxiliary verbs” (Clancy, 2001, p. 5). Kharms’ manipulation of construals is rooted in these cognitive-semantic categories, and I will show how his untraditional approach to writing partly gains its effect from an awareness of cognitive linguistic play at the syntactic and lexical levels. Clancy’s nexus will serve as the primary analytical tool toward this understanding. Clancy demonstrates the correlation between the two concepts (see Figure 6.1).3 Among the various Slavic languages, Russian features the most

3 Clancy’s model might benefit from reworking in terms of Fauconnier and Turner’s (2003) theory of conceptual blending, but this falls outside the scope of the present contribution.

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complicated semantic map4 for BE/HAVE. Due to similar mapping in meaning, structure, function and a lack of a clear verbal expression for HAVE, the two concepts are often expressed in the same manner. As will be shown, Kharms’ texts, particularly “Blue Notebook №10,” make use of this blending that allows for an expansion of meaning.

existence abstract idea possession

location/ presence/ position absence location availability

auxiliary impersonal auxiliary modality

copula joining idea relationship BE HAVE

Fig. 6.1 Blended Prototype Model (from Clancy, 2001, p. 4)

A historical analysis of the shift from BE to HAVE for all languages shows that the roots of this blended prototype model lie in metonymy and metaphor, the former a particularly critical device in Kharms’ works. An expression for EXISTENCE can appear “by metonymy, reinterpreted as metaphor, from an expression for RHEMATIC POSSESSION” (Koch, 1999, p. 297). Kharms utilizes such a metonymic and metaphoric link throughout “Blue Notebook №10” with reference to body parts and BEING; this cognitive play elevates, if subtly and at the level of the individual words, the meaning of the whole text and endows it with greater philosophical import. It moves POSSESSION into the sphere of EXISTENCE. These are some of the linguistic nuances that Kharms’ Incidents frequently aestheticize.

3. The BE/HAVE Nexus and “Blue Notebook №10”

I will now investigate the function of the BE/HAVE nexus in Kharms’ story. “Blue Notebook №10” is Kharms at his most playful and serves as the best example of the sort of cognitive manipulations utilized throughout the cycle. He wrote

4 A graphic representation of all possible meanings associated with a term or concept, e.g. BE or HAVE.

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this well-known text in January 1937 as part of the Blue Notebook (Golubaya tetrad’) and later selected it for inclusion in the Incidents (Sluchai) cycle of 1939. It should be noted that Kharms’ so-called mature works, as opposed to his children’s literature, were for the most part not published in Russia until the advent of glasnost’. His drafts and notebooks, which were preserved by family and friends after his arrest in 1941 remain in varying degrees of (dis)order, but Kharms himself collated the thirty stories and drew up a title page for a theoretical future publication.5 The two versions of the text differ in very few ways, perhaps even by just two words. I will first discuss the general nature of the cognitive play in “Blue Notebook №10,” then move on to the significance of changes between the two versions of the text in conjunction with the BE/HAVE nexus. Finally, I will take up the issue of other related forms of cognitive play that Kharms deploys in his story, including shifts in definiteness and inverted sentence scanning. All of this cognitive play, as will become evident, is linked to the BE/HAVE nexus. Only a few lines long, “Blue Notebook №10” stands among the shortest and certainly most famous of Kharms’ works:

Был один рыжий человек, у которого не было глаз и ушей. У него не было и волос, так что рыжим его называли условно. Говорить он не мог, так как у него не было рта. Носа тоже у него не было. У него не было даже рук и ног. И живота у него не было, и спины у него не было, и хребта у него не было, и никаких внутренностей у него не было. Ничего не было! Так что не понятно, о ком идет речь. Уж лучше мы о нем не будем больше говорить. (Kharms, 1997, p. 330)

There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He didn’t have a nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, no spine, and he didn’t have any insides at all. There was nothing! So, we don’t even know who we’re talking about. We’d better not talk about him anymore. (Kharms, 2007, p. 45)

It is a deceptively brief story in which a man exists, and then he does not. When this Incident is examined in conjunction with Clancy’s BE/HAVE nexus,

5 Such an act, given the unlikelihood of Kharms ever being able to publish his stories under the Stalin regime, signifies both his desire to have these stories read in a particular order and the implicit existence of a certain unity to the cycle as a whole.

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however, key nuances can be observed. Kharms begins with the subject: the redheaded man. At the opening of the text the man is complete. He exists, and he possesses certain traits. Kharms has created life through writing. With a few calculated words and several missing limbs, though, everything shifts. Kharms, not without a certain subtle bravado, moves from Clancy’s BECOME to BE to (UNMAKE) in a single sentence. Alternatively, because the BE/HAVE nexus links together conflated concepts expressed by diverse constructions, one could read this as CREATE-EXIST-DESTROY. The lexical expressions of these concepts are limited within the text to the byl and the u nego constructions, but the progression is clear. Kharms moves toward what Matvei Yankelevich calls “annihilation and oblivion” (Yankelevich, 2009, p. 32). He seems to recognize the blend between BE and HAVE and ingeniously uses it to his advantage. Most literally, the redheaded man’s body parts are “not existing” – thus the metonymic line is drawn between BE and HAVE. From a reader’s perspective, the two concepts begin to merge and the absence of a body part slides from simple POSSESSION into the realm of existentialism and the conceptualization of BE. As Clancy has claimed, “the negation of fundamental BEING is simply not expressed lexically and is not a part of our everyday experience of living and interacting with the world” (Clancy, 2001, p. 4). He recognizes that being unable to fill the UNBECOMING category slot for existence feels “rather comforting.” This in itself is a considerably telling comment, as what Kharms accomplishes with his art can be, in fact, exhilaratingly terrifying. A cognitive approach to the absurdist writer allows us to visualize the gap between the world of logic and Kharms’ space of pure order wherein existence is nullified and logic fails to cohere. Where most words fall short, Kharms finds a lexical and syntactic manner in which to express this concept (UNMAKE) that Clancy finds difficult to name precisely – the seemingly contradictory opposite of BEING, of EXISTENCE, of is. The careful reader witnesses the illusory and “undefined” presence of the man’s NON-EXISTENCE through Kharms’ artistic gesture. The exact differences between the two versions of “Blue Notebook №10” remain somewhat unclear due to the inconsistency of published collections. Nonetheless, one thing is certain given the variants and their implications: Kharms was acutely aware of the different construals offered by choices in diction. What I propose below is based on the following distinction:

Blue Notebook version Incidents version (1) Жил один рыжий человек (1b) Был один рыжий человек (2) Ничего у него не было. (2b) Ничего не было!

(1) There lived a redheaded man (1b) There was a readheaded man (2) He didn’t have anything. (2b) There was nothing!

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In regard to the original, the two major differences between Kharms’ drafts illustrate the BE/HAVE blend as concerns the writer’s own intentions, as far as one may say so, rather well. The change from (1) to (1b) or (2) to (2b) modifies the cognitive representation drastically and reveals that cognitive blending was part of Kharms’ “plan” in editing the text. Cognitive Grammar posits that profiling, the process by which an expression’s “specific focus of attention” is derived from its base, is a part of our cognitive organizing of the world and, thus, the way we express what we conceptualize and experience through language (Langacker, 2008, p. 66). Bartmiński likewise stresses the subjective nature of profiling: “The factors which drive profiling are connected with […] subject-oriented categories: someone’s rationality, someone’s knowledge of the world, someone’s system of values and point of view” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 89). He goes on to say that not only does a human organizing figure remain at the center of profiling, but that an entire complex of “culturally established” elements takes part as well. In other words, an author imbues a text with his or her own ideas while simultaneously drawing upon the traditions (linguistic, cultural, syntactic even) that exist in a language. This allows for further of expectations, as is the case in Kharms’ text. When choosing this draft for the Incidents, Kharms placed the redheaded man into a different participatory role – a role in which he lacks any control whatsoever and is subject to the gradual amputation of his body parts. The reader sees this figure, but he is more the textual shell of a man. Craig Hamilton notes that as writers “we can vary the focus of our utterance by putting different participants in different roles” (Hamilton, 2003, p. 4). Precisely so, Peter Stockwell adds, “choosing a patient as the subject (such as in a passive) is a marked expression that requires some special explanatory motivation: defamiliarisation, or evading active responsibility, or encoding secrecy” (Stockwell, 2002, p. 61). In the case of “Blue Notebook №10,” defamiliarization is likely the aim. As a rule, the agent of a standard statement or utterance performs the action, while the patient is the receiver of said action. In the second version of “Blue Notebook №10,” the man is no longer the agent, but the patient and, as such, events happen to him, rather than because of him (Hamilton, 2003, p. 58). He exists in vague terms (“There was”), rather than more concretely and actively (“There lived”). In this story and other Incidents, these techniques – “a manipulation of the reader’s expectations in regard to content, tone and form” (Nakhimovsky, 1982, p. 70) – defamiliarize logical presumptions about language and the standard experience of reading.

4. Scales of Definiteness: Subject and Possession

In conjunction with the BE/HAVE nexus, it will also prove fruitful to consider other forms of cognitive play in Kharms’ story, which will allow us to see how

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Kharms’ language consists of a system of interrelated devices. One such method is linked to Stockwell’s (2002) scale of “definiteness,” according to which the degree of the reader’s familiarity with a text’s subject is tracked. Stockwell states: “Definite subjects (‘The town’, ‘that man’) are generally preferred to indefinites, and specific indefinites (‘a certain Mrs. Jones’, ‘a girl I know’) are preferred to non-specific ones (‘a girl’)” (p. 61). The man in Kharms’ text gradually loses his definiteness, moving from being a so-called “redheaded man” to simply a man and then to the shadow of a person that was once there. And although his lost limbs would seem to distinguish him and give him a certain “definiteness,” this too cannot be, for he is soon transformed into blank, impersonal non-existence. Given these points, Kharms seems to want to present the general concept of MAN. The short text is of course not about any one particular redhead, who in any case is called so only by convention, but the general idea of man who suffers existentially, perhaps because of the divide between the absurd and the so- called “logical” world. Such a sense of “definiteness” can also be observed in the critical difference between (2), in which the man himself “possesses” nothing, and (2b), in which there is simply nothing. It is a slight variation, but for Kharms, a scrupulous writer, each word contributes to a greater meaning. Natal’ya Fateeva, in a study of Kharms’ manipulations of verbal predication for semantic effect, also notes his preoccupation with linguistic play at this level: “Such deviations, irreducible to semantic standards, stimulate a collision of meanings in the text and generate new meanings, based not only on the shift of usual compatibility, but also on an unusual juxtaposition of semantic spaces” (Fateeva, 2006, p. 310).6 At the very least, the version of “Blue Notebook №10” in which “there is nothing” illustrates the totality of the man’s forced disappearing act. If the man possesses nothing, the idea of the man remains; if there is nothing at all, then the man can no longer factor into the equation. It again becomes an existential matter, not one of simple POSSESSION, though the semantic connection between the two in Russian remains clear. The variants illustrate Koch’s metonymic link between POSSESSION and EXISTENCE. Kharms moves from possession of body parts to the non-existence of man, and the BE/HAVE nexus allows him to do so with careful linguistic sleight-of-hand. The progressive lack of body parts is taken to represent a larger non-existence; the man-ness of the redheaded man is lost. Kharms is performing a complex two-fold metonymic operation: the connection between EXISTENCE and POSSESSION inherent in Russian serves to magnify the gravity of the also metonymic connection between the man’s parts and his very conceptualization as MAN. The missing part can no longer define the whole when

6 Unless otherwise noted, translations from the Russian are my own, J.V.

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the man disappears, and as Carrick suggests, the redheaded man is “greater than the sum and the separation of all his parts” (Carrick, 1994, p. 642). By removing the pieces from the entirety, Kharms stakes his claim – in an absurd world, these parts and individual fragments are what truly matter.7 The depth of readers’ construal of Kharms’ text will vary widely depending on the sentence variant at hand. It appears that in preparing this Incident for a theoretical publication, the author hoped to change the reader’s construal into one that more fully acknowledges the existential nature of BE/HAVE, a truly philosophical matter. This can be said with a high degree of certainty. In the margins of the manuscript to “Blue Notebook №10,” Kharms scribbled “against Kant” (1997, p. 474). Hilary Fink notes that Kharms, in line with the general modernist spirit of anti-Kantianism, “proclaimed that the ‘true’ nature of the wor(l)d may only be grasped through the breakdown of strictly rational modes of apprehension, the abandonment of causality, the birth of the absurd” (Fink, 1998, p. 527). The latter version of “Blue Notebook №10” is an enhanced reflection of this deconstructionist approach to writing and points to this polemic with its atypical form and absurdist content. Thanks to linguistic details, “Blue Notebook №10” takes on even more weighted meaning as Kharms makes use of the blended BE/HAVE prototypes. Moreover, it is through such techniques that, as Graham Roberts argues, “Kharms forces us as readers to engage actively with the text, and to re-examine the assumptions which we make in reading” (Roberts, 1997, p. 97). Roberts suggests that Kharms wrote texts that challenged the conception of the writer as the authoritative figure of a text. In particular, he ascribes to this the content and alogical nature of their writings. I would add that central linguistic features, like those involving the BE/HAVE nexus that implicates the reader and forces him/her to actively “co-create” the meaning of the text, play a large role as well.

5. Photograph and Film: Sentence Scanning in “Blue Notebook №10”

Kharms’ cognitive play also involves an inversion of the reader’s natural processes of reading sentences, though this again connects to Clancy’s BE/ HAVE nexus and the way that it is used throughout the story. In what Stockwell calls summary scanning, “attributes are collected into a single coherent gestalt

7 It is these parts that interested Kharms, who saw in the “ of a world that is ‘whole,’” a denial of the “essential role played by its ‘parts’” (Fink, 1998, p. 530).

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that constitutes an element.” Sequential scanning, on the contrary, “happens when an event or configuration has to be tracked” (2002, p. 66). The former involves nominals and stative conditions (BE) and the latter active changes to a state (perhaps HAVE – the completion of coming into possession of an object).8 Here is a summarily scanned sentence: “Daniel is tall and dressed like an English dandy.” The man’s attributes (his man-ness, height, and clothes) – and existence – all congeal in a single, motionless image. Sequentially scanned statements such as “Daniel walked along the edge of the Dom knigi balcony in St. Petersburg,” on the other hand, require the reader to visualize motion or change. The difference between the two can be compared to a still photograph and a dynamic film clip, respectively. The bulk of “Blue Notebook№ 10” is made up of existential or attributive statives, which state a condition and should normally undergo summary scanning. Kharms, however, systematically arranges his text in a manner that inverts this cognitive process and puts words and meanings into conflict with one another. The reader is forced to sequentially scan the story of a man losing his body parts without cause. Kharms first states, “There was a redheaded man,” which naturally implies certain prerequisites: a complete anatomy and a concrete existence. Before the sentence is over, however, the situation starts to unravel. It would be one thing to say, “There was a man who did not have eyes or ears.” It is another to begin with a full body and then to delete parts. In doing so, Kharms shifts from what would under normal circumstances be summarily scanned (an image of a man with or without certain body parts) to a progressively smaller picture taken in through sequential scanning. It requires the reader to see things change gradually, rather than as a series of complete gestalts. Arguably, the difference between variants (1) “There lived a redheaded man” and (1b) “There was a redheaded man” also reflects this change. The concept LIFE calls to mind a progression of events that constantly alter the man in one way or another: life as a collection of “incidents” that make up the individual. Thus, LIFE, and the active process of LIVING, is sequentially scanned. BE, on the other hand, is expressed as “there was” (byl) in (1b) – an instance of summary scanning. This construal suggests a more static situation. By changing

8 The notions of sequential and summary scanning, as used by Stockwell, come from Langacker’s model of Cognitive Grammar: Sequential scanning is the mode of processing we employ when watching a motion picture or observing a ball as it flies through the air. The successive states of the conceived event are activated serially and more or less instantaneously, so that the activation of one state begins to decline as that of its successor is initiated... On the other hand, summary scanning is what we employ in mentally reconstructing the trajectory a ball has followed... The component states are activated successively but cumulatively (i.e. once activated they remain active throughout), so that eventually they are all coactivated as a simultaneously accessible whole. (Langacker, 1991, p. 22)

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this single verb, Kharms makes a major cognitive move. The verb “was” serves to accentuate the inverted nature of the scanning that takes place immediately after when the man’s body parts are gradually stripped away. It is once again the connections between BE and HAVE in Kharms’ text that accentuate and even allow for such a development.

6. The Reasons for Cognitive Play

We can better understand the purpose of all this cognitive play if we consider Hilary Fink’s three approaches to Kharms’ 1930s prose: “the alienation of man in society, the decomposition of language and subsequent failure of communication, and the general incoherence of a world plunged into the madness of Stalinism” (Fink, 1998, p. 528). I believe that in expressing these themes, among many others, throughout his prose miniatures, Kharms used the more unusual aspects of his language, and a reading of his work through the lens of cognitive ethnolinguistics can offer insight into the results of what has been termed “cognitive play.” Kharms did not wish to shock, but rather to bemuse spectators and defy automatized tendencies in both life and art, especially through writing (Komaromi, 2002, p. 422). As such, Fink is absolutely correct in endowing Kharms’ prose with these broader meanings. The texts that comprise the Incidents cycle deal with the “expression of the absurd split between man and his surrounding world” (Fink, 1998, p. 528), that is, any world that has been castrated through strict everyday logic. In the final analysis, Kharms’ aesthetic and philosophical concerns are reflected in his words. This facet of language is part of Bartmiński’s linguistic worldview, which is “different than the scientific picture of the world” (2009/2012, p. 36). Such a worldview is subjective and permeated with the author’s conceptualization of reality. Moreover, Kharms’ language not only reflects ideas but even allows the author to aestheticize them in stories such as “Blue Notebook №10.” Kharms’ collaborative group, the OBERIU (Union of Real Art), aimed to overcome human logic and its respective idiom by subverting language itself. Aleksandr Kobrinskii has noticed this interest in language as an ontological tool in Kharms’ texts as well as in the mutual concerns of the groups with which he associated:

This suggests that the problem of language as an intermediary between man and the world occupied the other “Chinary,” and they actively discussed it at that time. Anticipating the ideas of Whorf and Wittgenstein, Druskin compared the system of linguistic concepts with a net, with which man covers the world. The net allows for understanding and provides the means for people to communicate with one another, but it also becomes an obstacle to a deeper

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understanding of the world. It is necessary to create a new net in order to see the world anew. Such an understanding, coincidentally, is close to the ideas expressed in the OBERIU declaration – about the necessity to see the world through “naked eyes.” (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 362)

Kharms inverts readers’ expectations in “Blue Notebook №10” both on a structural level and in the fact that by the end no content remains. He manages to present the world and man in a new light through the cognitive play he wields, showing, as Roberts writes, “how at least certain languages can shape [or] transform reality” (1997, p. 145). This, of course, occupies a central position in Bartmiński’s ethnolinguistic worldview – the creative force of language. The BE/HAVE nexus allows Kharms to address this concern by making use of the semantic link between the two concepts, and the redheaded man’s parts, removed with precision by Kharms the writer-surgeon, come to signify much more than simple possession in a story that ostensibly appears to be about just that, but, instead, delves into the existential core of human life.

7. Beyond “Blue Notebook №10”: Cognitive Play in the Incidents Cycle

What follows here is not a comprehensive analysis of the remaining stories in the cycle through the lens of cognitive linguistics, but instead a step in that direction. This sort of analysis reveals how Kharms’ systematic approach to writing is rooted in an understanding of the cognitive and ethnolinguistic nature of language. Kharms makes deft use of not only the BE/HAVE nexus but also other cognitive strategies in the rest of the Incidents, sometimes resulting in a fascinating meta-literary commentary on the themes of cognitive play elucidated above. BE in Russian has also been linked to SEEMING and verbs of position. I will address these connections, along with other types of cognitive play, in two further stories: An Optical Illusion” (Opticheskii obman) and “The Trunk” (Sunduk). First, the BE/HAVE nexus is frequently expressed through the “position” category: STAND UP–STAND–SIT DOWN/LIE DOWN or, alternatively, SIT DOWN/ LIE DOWN–SIT/LIE–STAND UP (Clancy, 2001, p. 5). Generally, BEING is often rendered through the interaction of an individual upon a given space and how s/he occupies it, whether it be sitting, standing, or lying. In “An Optical Illusion” the character Semyon Semyonovich experiences something quite strange related to this linguistic phenomenon:

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Семен Семенович, надев очки, смотрит на сосну и видит: на сосне сидит мужик и показывает ему кулак. Семен Семенович, сняв очки, видит, что на сосне никто не сидит… (Kharms, 1997, pp. 332-333)

Semyon Semyonovich, having put on his spectacles, looks at a pine tree and this is what he sees: in the pine tree sits a man showing him his fist. Semyon Semyonovich, taking off his spectacles, looks at the pine tree and sees that no one is sitting in the tree. (Kharms, 2007, p. 50)

The action repeats itself several times before Semyon Semyonovich “doesn’t want to believe in this appearance and considers it an optical illusion.” Logically it should be the case that the man in the tree either is there or is not. And yet Kharms challenges this idea, much like he does in “Blue Notebook №10.” Kobrinskii has described how Kharms breaks the law of the excluded middle by “introducing the new condition ‘to be redheaded arbitrarily.’”9 Applying the same sort of analysis to “An Optical Illusion,” we see that the construction is very similar: the existence (“is sitting”) of the muzhik achieves a third option in which a spectator’s choice controls reality. Here, Kharms intuitively connects “sits” (sidit) and “no one is sitting” (nikto ne sidit) to BE and, therefore, EXISTENCE. Sitting and not sitting become synonymous with existence and non-existence. By “considering” the fist-waving muzhik an optical illusion, Semyon Semyonovich disrupts a traditional understanding of the world. The man in the tree occupies the same linguistic and metaphysical space as the redheaded man. This, in fact, may be what Kharms himself called the purity of order, a space devoid of logic.10 Again, the Russian language provides him with the means – at least in part – to express this philosophical idea. Examining the text more broadly, we see that Kharms grants Semyon Semyonovich the power of the writer. In terms of participatory roles, the protagonist becomes an agent in control of the patient (the muzhik) (Hamilton, 2003, p. 58). Hence, Kharms arrives at a meta-commentary on the nature of fiction

9 “For example, in logic there exists the law of the excluded middle. Transferring over this law to the situation depicted by Kharms in ‘Blue Notebook №10,’ it can be said that there is the state ‘to be redheaded’ and there is the state ‘to not be redheaded.’ Kharms transforms the two-valued logic into three-valued, introducing the new state ‘to be redheaded arbitrarily [by convention].’” (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 417) 10 “Thus arises that which can be named in Kharms’ own words – ‘the purity of order’ [chistota poryadka]. That is, order which does not depend on any outside conditions or connections.” (Kobrinskii, 2009, p. 429)

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and existence. Whereas the writer-narrator of “Blue Notebook №10” controls the obliteration of the redheaded man, in this story one character manipulates another’s reality. Simply by “considering” the event an optical illusion, Semyon Semyonovich has wielded the power of conceptual EXISTENCE. Kharms activates this function through a series of cognitive moves: the use of the inherent link between POSITION and EXISTENCE, an alternation of the muzhik’s presence in the tree and in reality, and finally the opening of yet another glance into a world of absurdity or nonsense (chush’).11 Much of the same sort of cognitive play continues in “The Trunk” (“Sunduk”). Having placed himself in a sealed trunk, the narrator witnesses a fantastic struggle between life and death. The story’s conclusion remains ambiguous with one of the two in the nominative case: “Значит жизнь победила смерть неизвестным для меня способом.” In English, without the aid of case endings, the English translator must make a choice. This passage typically reads: “That means that life defeated death by a method unknown to me” (Kharms, 2007, p. 55). The English is explicit in its construal of the outcome – an issue I will address in the following section. In the original, however, because Kharms renders the long- necked man an uninvolved patient and observer of this battle between life and death, it remains unclear.12 As an example of a slightly different form of cognitive play that Kharms deploys in this text, we may consider Lakoff’s container metaphor, which also represents the man’s experience within the trunk. Inside, he undergoes some sort of transformation by removing himself from logical reality and placing himself in a space where the metaphorical “battle between life and death” is literalized. Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jörg Schmid write: “Although metaphor is a conceptual phenomenon, we have access to the metaphors that structure our way of thinking through the language we use” (2006, p. 118). Kharms in this manner uses Russian to construct a world in which metaphor bleeds into reality. The ideas LIFE and DEATH exist within the trunk and the man. They are encapsulated in the trunk by the experiment, while the man always contains the potential for both. Ungerer and Schmid continue: “We think of our minds as containers for ideas” (p. 126). The man then is a metaphorical vessel for the two, which adopt more prototypically agential roles than he. His existence is reduced to this precise moment in which he lacks all control. In this way Kharms suggests that within the container (a body) LIFE and DEATH exist beyond human control.

11 On a further level, we can read this text as commentary of the self-deceptive power of logic and the universal human inability to completely comprehend one’s own self and motivations. 12 Kharms himself noted the of his language on the manuscript (Kharms, 1997, p. 480).

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The man’s hands might be forced to move by life and not necessarily by an active desire to live. Death, though, the narrator says, is “naturally…victorious” as if it is a forgone conclusion. Such anthropomorphizing of LIFE and DEATH is not unique. In fact, it is prototypical: LIFE and DEATH as two forces locked in relentless battle. Death takes lives; life favors someone. The multiple cognitive layers Kharms develops in “The Trunk,” however, are exceptional: BE/HAVE blending, container metaphor, agent/patient roles. Kharms deftly places everything, from the existence of the air the man breathes (or does not) to the metaphysical trunk, into question by constantly shifting primary agency among the three parties involved. Moreover, humans as agents typically control ideas, not the other way around. The man only “seems” to understand what has occurred. This verb once again connects with Clancy’s nexus as another expression of BE – things seem to be, seem to exist. The reality of what truly transpires within the trunk remains unknown because there is no solid truth that one may grasp. The man possesses only fallible understanding (kazhetsya), and the trunk creates another instance of the break from the logical world, realized through Kharms’ curious language.

8. Cognitive Analysis of Kharms in an Ethnolinguistic Perspective: Translations and the Encoding of Language

Returning to “Blue Notebook №10,” we may consider the ethnolinguistic implications of the preceding analysis with reference to translations of the text. This will be useful for several reasons. First, it spotlights the dichotomy between Russian as a BE-language and English as a HAVE-language.13 The BE/HAVE nexus, functional in Russian, simply cannot exist in English. Furthermore, a translator’s choices reveal the very ways that we as readers construe a work of literature by opting to focus on one subtext or layer of a work over another. Yankelevich’s collection of translations contains both versions of the story and aligns with the proposed differences elaborated upon earlier. Others, such as Neil Cornwell’s Incidences (Kharms, 2006), either translate (1b)/(2) for the Incidents cycle version or another combination of variants, e.g. (1)/(2b).14 Even translating the cycle’s

13 A Czech translation offers the same HAVE-oriented results: “Byl jednou jeden zrzavý člověk, který neměl oči ani uši… Neměl prostě vůbec nic!” (Charms, 1994, p. 9). 14 This problem is also rampant in Russian editions of the story, which tend to vary widely regardless of which version (Golubaya tetrad’ or Sluchai) is intended for publication.

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title, Sluchai (Случаи), has been problematic; English renderings include: Events, Incidences, Incidents, and Happenings. One can only imagine that Kharms would have been pleased to see such a horde of meaning springing from a single word. In the English translations there is a consistent preference for expressions of HAVE (“He had no X, he had no Y”), and it seems fairly obvious that this would be the case. English, unlike Russian, lacks a way to concisely state what the latter suggests in a sentence such as, “U nego nebylo ruk.” The ambiguity and complicated subtexts are quite literally lost in translation. The Russian can be interpreted as the man possessed no hands, there were no hands existing (near him), or even all at once. The task of the English translator, then, is to determine which meaning – and thus construal – is most vital to preserving the intent of the text, while maintaining the brevity and minimalism of Kharms’ language. This highly complex linguistic task, of course, aligns with Bartmiński’s understanding of the linguistic worldview as “a language-entrenched interpretation of reality, which can be expressed in the form of judgements about the world, people, things or events. It is an interpretation, not a reflection” (Bartmiński, 2009/2012, p. 23). The language Kharms uses in his texts, particularly “Blue Notebook №10,” shows how both writer and reader conceptualize reality through language. A single difference in diction can contribute to a major semantic shift. In this way, Bartmiński notes how the “subject” acts “as the prime experiencing, conceptualising and coding authority” (p. 222). Kharms then pushes his reader in a certain direction with his linguistic choices, and the cognitive processes at work help disclose the larger thematic issues he wishes to explore. Using a cognitive and ethnolinguistic approach allows us to see how Kharms’ language in fact acts less like a mirror and proclaims its own system of devices and referents. It brings together culturally relevant expectations (literary, linguistic, and so on) precisely in order to disrupt and challenge them, and it provides both writer and reader with the power of interpretation.

9. Conclusion

Vladimir Nabokov said that readers should feel good literature as an indescribable tingle in the spine. He proposes reading as not entirely a cognitive task based in brain function, but one that has a more physical, tangible effect – the “highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art” (Nabokov, 1980, p. 65). But the good reader can also sense great literature elsewhere. Kharms, I believe, is felt in the gut. His prose produces the same feeling on the reader as the shift in inertia does on the rider of a roller coaster. Bartmiński champions the “subject,” who is “experienced empirically,” as central to cognitive ethnolinguistics and as long ignored by structural linguistics. This, in fact, lies at the heart of the present analysis. Kharms’ language falls into a

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mutually dependent relationship with the reader. As it challenges us with odd semantics and atypical processes, we interpret it strangely. Without typical grounded causality or a logical reality in Kharms’ texts, we are left with the floor falling out below our feet, plunging toward a hitherto unfamiliar and overwhelmingly disconcerting plane of understanding. His cognitive inversions play a large role in how a reader processes the stories. A better understanding of these elements of Kharms’ Russian can help provide more complete insight into his literary and thematic aims. Though we are not bound to read the Incidents in any one specific way, the manner in which Kharms constructed the cycle leads us down certain paths, at times alogical or circular, that highlight his philosophical concerns and observations.

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References

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