Thursday

Fry on Language

I recently came across this brilliant post on the subject of language by Stephen Fry and since I can never express my own feelings with the clarity and eloquence of the master, I will reproduce a part of his text here. From Stephen Fry's musings on the subject of language:

"I’ve mentioned those French intellectuals the structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more. In life you have to explain wine. You have to explain cheese. You have to explain love. You can’t, but you have to try, or if not try you have, surely, to be aware of the astonishing fact of them. We would never notice if the fat and protein rich food with which cows, ewes and nanny goats suckled their young could not be converted to another, firmer foodstuff that went well with crackers and grapes. We wouldn’t go about the place moaning that sheep’s milk was only of any use to lambs, any more than I have ever heard anyone wonder why pig’s milk doesn’t make a good yoghurt. In fact if you suggest drinking pig’s milk or horse’s milk, people look askance and go “yeurgh!” as if it’s the oddest suggestion they’ve ever heard. We take what nature and custom have led us to accept. As Eddie Izzard pointed out, it’s odd that bees make honey: ‘after all,’ he said, ‘earwigs don’t make chutney.’ And take that arbitrary fruit, the grape: suppose grapes didn’t uniquely transmogrify themselves, without the addition of sugar, into a drink of almost infinite complexity? We wouldn’t wonder at the lack of such a thing as wine in the world, any more than we wonder that raspberry wine (despite the deliciousness of raspberries as fruit) can’t, in the proper sense, exist or speculate on why the eggs of carp aren’t as good to eat as the eggs of sturgeon. But every now and again we should surely celebrate the fact that caviar is so fine, that the grape offers itself up so uniquely, that milk products of three or four species have such versatile by-products for us, that the grain of some grasses can be transformed into bread, that the berry, pod or leaf of this plant or that plant can give us chocolate, coffee or tea, and that while the fuzz of this plant can’t go to make a shirt, the fuzz of that unique one canand the thread of this insect can go to make a tie, while the equally impressive thread, in nature, of that other insect can’t be spun into the simplest handkerchief. Is it weird that silkworms exist or is it weird that only the silkworm will do when it comes to silk and only the cotton plant when it comes to cotton? To put it again, in an accidental line of decasyllabic verse, ‘none would be missed if they didn’t exist’. And if language didn’t elicit pleasure, if it didn’t have its music, its juiciness or jouissance would we notice, or would always be destined to find pleasure in it because that’s a thing we humans can do? Out of the way we move we can make dance, out of the way we speak we can make poetry and oratory and comedy and all kinds of verbal enchantments. Cheese is real, and so it seems, is the pleasure of the text."

His full post can be found at:
http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2008/11/04/don%E2%80%99t-mind-your-language%E2%80%A6/

hmmm... quite a brilliant article and it makes me wonder about those philosophic thoughts which advocate a spartan and austere life, taking the juice out of life itself so that it would never spill on your clothes. Would terming it 'to always err on the side of extreme caution' be right? Is pleasure the most basic human duty? A duty which like all duties is extremely difficult to live up to but whose idea is the idea of a perfect life.

9 comments:

Amit said...

You are getting confused. The paradigm being used here are totally different from one which is used to advocate a spartan life.

The philosophers who talk about the virtues of living a spartan life talk in terms of fleetingness of life compared to endless time in this timeless universe. They consider the indulgence as inconsequential in the larger design of the universe and hence are not really a big fan of that.

The writer on the other hand doesn't care about the larger picture. He likes to derive his happiness from the small things in life and hence the larger picture to him is inconsequential.

so you see those are two completely different things. To think of it, it is almost like the question between the red pill and the blue pill in the movie Matrix. Would you want continue to savor the succulent Tiramisu knowing fully well that 20 years from now you would not even remember that you had Tiramisu on that particular day? Even if you were to remember about it would you be able to say with certitude if that Tiramisu that you ate 20 years ago made any difference in the larger scheme of things in your life? However there is no denying that the Tiramisu that you are eating today is not delicious but does it matter in 20 years or 100 years if it was delicious or not?

Amit said...

Let me clarify that in my opinion both the point of views have their own merits in their own school of thoughts. Although there is very little justification of staying on either extreme i.e., complete hedonism or living the life of an ascetic, I would think the middle ground is probably the best place to stay in this discussion although ironically in this discussion between those two paradigms there is no middle ground. :)

Ankit said...

If you know that that Tiramisu is not going to be of any significance in the next 20 years, why not just eat it? It's generally mighty tasty :). On a serious note, both philosophies see the same futility. One embraces the pleasure; the other eschews it because it's wary of the inevitable pains.

Anonymous said...

In life you have to explain wine...

I remember reading this line sometime back and having what can only be described as that occasional feeling of the existence of Truth. I gave up in an attempt at imagining the level of thought required to arrive at an irony so stark. 'Some slush of rotten fruit is among the better aspects of life', weird once we begin to think of it!

As this quoted line suggests, I think Fry is talking of pleasure, but not indulgence which is what religion has a problem with.

I was once told a religious couplet that points out that honey and silk are nothing but vomit and the covering of a dead body respectivly. I am not sure of the remaining part of that couplet, I think it also reminds us that the milk that we use is stolen from some mother. These are things with which we worship God! Considering these, we can safely assume that religion does not eschew pleasure, otherwise we might have some serious difficulty explaining, among others, Karnatic Sangeet.

Spartan life is required if you want to be a monk, none among us are on that path I hope.

Anurup K.T said...

I so agree with enjoying the Tiramisu today especially when I can never be sure that 20 years down the lane I would be around to think about it or worse unable to have it!

Ankit said...

@Gunti: I don't think religion has a problem even with indulgence but then I'm trying to find the hazy line between pleasure and indulgence. To be as good as say MSS in Karnatic, just pleasure doesn't seem to be good enough. The story of Krishn's childhood is hardly a narrative of restrained enjoyment. But we might just be differing in semantics.

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