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wordsmith : about

“Most citizens still see our contemporary wordsmiths as an independent voice given more to criticizing the established powers than to praising them. And yet it is hard to think of another era when such a large percentage of the wordsmiths have been so cut off from general society and when language has been so powerless to communicate to the citizens the essence of what is happening around us and to us. The workings of power have never been so shielded by professional verbal obscurantism. The mechanics of waste disposal management, opera houses, universities, hospitals, of everything to do with science, medicine, agriculture, museums, and a thousand other sectors are protected by the breakdown of clear, universal language.

Strangely, writers seem unwilling or unable to attack effectively this professional obscurantism. In fact the majority actively participate in it. They claim independence from established authority, but accept and even encourage the elitist structures that literature has developed over the last half century. As indignant individuals they rightly criticize power, but as writers they tend to encourage, through their own use of specialized literary forms, the Byzantine layering of language which divides and confuses our society. They have saved from the writer’s inheritance his desire to speak out in the name of justice, but many have forgotten that this involves doing so first via their writing. In their rush to become part of rational society, which means to become respected professionals in their own right, they have forgotten that the single most important task of the wordsmith is to maintain the common language as a weapon whose clarity will protect society against the obscurities of power. The professional, by definition, is in society. He has his assigned territory over which his expertise gives him control. The writer is meant to be the faithful witness of everyman and should therefore be neither within society nor without. He must be of society – the constant link between all people.”

. . .

“The difficulty with the new devices for communication which crowd the public stage is that they minimize language or trivialize it or simply make no use of it. But you cannot have a postverbal civilization. Language is the one essential element in any society. It enables us to understand organizations and make relationships possible. The word civilization itself rises out of the Roman civil law – the words which organized the relationship between individuals. What the electronic media have done is drown us in the sound of words but remove all sense of their meaning and overall shape.”

. . .

“To expect the [wordsmith] to deal with the dictatorship of reason is to hope that he will turn about and eat his own children. He must not only decide to do it, he must discover how it might be done. Most people now see the Western writer as uninvolved in that world which engages the bulk of the population. He appears to be off in a corner, comfortably shut up in his specialized box. But the writer himself also suffers from being just another expert in our civilization, exercising one of the thousands of professions available to an educated citizen. The complex demands of the publishing industry, the titles, prizes, tenures, grants, and all the other honours he receives, or worst still, does not receive but needs to in order to survive – those are the chains which keep him in place.

In order to become the faithful witness again, he would have to regain the distrust, if not the hatred, of the established structures. He would need to cut away his literary chains and roam about as he once did, sometimes inside society, sometimes outside, seeking to release us from the prisons of the rational language by finding new, alternate models for the imagination. Those writers who are solitary by nature, who walk alone and yet see everything around them, have an initial advantage. But even they have not cut themselves loose. ‘To write in plain, vigorous language… and to think fearlessly,’ Orwell said was his objective. Those skills both strengthen the writer and serve the public. ‘The spare word is the sword,’ wrote Robert Ford, ‘that guards better than silence.’ With those weapons he can warn and win back the tribe to his reflections.

The standard analysis of a trouble society concentrates on its aging structures. Language, however, can be more important than those tangible forms. As time goes by, it is the established patterns of thought, the known arguments, the self-perpetuating truths which become the principal defends of the structures in place. The older and more stable a society, the deeper down into our subconscious stretches the substructure of givens. These are the essential questions which are silently assumed to have been answered before a conversation begins or a word is written. The West has now built up layer upon layer of assumptions which cannot be addressed in any intelligent manner. The active vocabulary needed to question, even to simply discuss them, has withered away.

Worse still, these givens take on an enormous innate power. The last two centuries have fuelled a plethora of abstract givens which float in and out of fashion. Imperialism gives way to Socialist to Fascism to Capitalism to free peoples to free markets, efficiency, competition. Governments take great care to place themselves in chosen positions vis-à-vis these words, as do most organizations and individuals. They may wrap them as cloaks around themselves or heave them like boulders against other men.

There is no longer any need to corrupt the ideas born of reason. Anyone today may use a word such as freedom to mean everything under the sun. It is a concept which now has the intrinsic value of Weimar Republic paper money. There is no longer any emotional or sensible counterfeit detector which goes off when we hear the word incorrectly used.

Where earlier Western societies were built upon military or religious power, reason was constructed upon thought and language. The structures which at first released, then restrained, and now smother us are primarily the abstract manifestations of that thought and language.

There is no way out of the present confusion unless the writer leaves his specialist’s box, abandons her professional privileges, and begins stripping language down to its universal basics; what Mallarmé and Eliot called purifying. Only they can demonstrate the folly of professional dialects which pretend to provide answers to everything, even though those answers reflect no reality. The reality of language is not to be right. The deformation such a hypocritical requirement brings to our essential means of communication can’t help but create a prison for civilization.

The faithful witness, like Solon and Socrates, Voltaire and Swift, even Christ himself, is at his best when he concentrates on questioning and clarifying and avoids the specialist’s obsession with solutions. He betrays society when he is silent or impenetrable or, worst of all, when he blithely reassures. He is true to himself and to the people when his clarity causes disquiet.”

from John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, pp. 538, 571, 574-576

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