The Casual Blog

Tag: language

October 22, 2021

New Jersey epilogue: revisiting Roth and Nabokov

Philip Roth’s childhood home in Newark (the yellow house)

While we were in Jersey City last month seeing our marvelous new granddaughter, one afternoon we drove over to Newark to pay homage to one of our greatest writers, Philip Roth (1933-2018).  We found the street where he grew up and parked across from his old house.  Back in his day, it was a working class Jewish neighborhood, and now it’s a working class Black neighborhood. His boyhood home had a plaque honoring him, but otherwise it looked like the other houses. 

We also went to the Newark Public Library to see the new Philip Roth Room.  The writer bequeathed a significant sum and his own books to the library where he spent many hours as a young reader.  We enjoyed looking through his collection and inspecting various personal items, including his manual typewriter.  The curator was a pleasant woman who knew a lot about Roth and his books.  There were no other visitors on the weekday afternoon we were there, but she was hopeful that visits would pick up after the pandemic.  

The Plot Against America, the unexpectedly timely HBO series about fascists who try to seize power in the U.S., is based on Roth’s novel.  It probably inspired some new readers to try Roth, and I hope more will do so.  His books confer the out-of-body travel pleasures of good realist fiction, along with arresting honesty, naughty humor, and a fierce passion.  The physical Newark he grew up in has changed almost beyond recognition, but the sweet, quirky, hardworking place can still be visited in his books, like The Plot Against America and American Pastoral.

On our trip I also finished re-reading Lolita, by Vladimir Nabakov.  I hesitated to re-engage with this famous book, which makes an uncomfortable proposition: that we sympathize with an unrepentant child molester.  There’s moral risk, to say the least.  It casts a hypnotic spell that feels exhilarating as it drowns our sensibilities.  The monstrousness of the narrator is almost obscured by the beautiful and hilarious language.  Nabokov’s close observations of our consumer culture and hypocrisies  cut to the heart.  The book is hard not to love, and also hard to feel entirely good about.

Sally tries to read the plaque. The Roths lived on the second floor.

Having not read Lolita for forty years, I was surprised at how much I remembered, but still, I’d forgotten a lot.  Plus there was a lot I just hadn’t processed initially.  For example, without belaboring the matter, Nabokov makes clear that Humbert H, in addition to being a scholar and old world aesthete, has a history of mental illness, alcoholism, and obsession with violence. 

Side note:  It’s curious how we systematically and unconsciously overestimate the capabilities of language.  Those most accomplished in language may be the most prone to overlooking the vast realm of experience where language is irrelevant, and even counterproductive.  Likewise, intellectuals with strong verbal skills often view  abstractions as superior to the simple and concrete, and easily mistake them for reality.  Thus our leaders zealously pursue reasonable-sounding but impossible goals, such as defeating “terrorism” or “drugs,” at horrific cost.  

But the great works of Roth and Nabokov are a reminder that language can also expand our conceptual world.  Great writers make us question our preconceptions and see new possibilities.  

September 18, 2021

What animals say

I wasn’t planning on sharing any more of my Alaska brown bear pictures, but changed my mind.  Processing the pictures took me to a happy place.  I really enjoyed being with these animals (at a respectful distance, of course), and learning a little about their lives.

This has been a particularly sad week in animal news.  There was a huge bloody slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands.  The U.S. government has authorized hunters selected by lottery to kill some of the few remaining bison at the Grand Canyon.  And as usual, with no headlines, hundreds of millions of farm animals were killed to provide human food. 

The way we think about non-human animals obviously affects the degree of brutality we’re prepared to inflict on them, but it has less obvious effects on how we think about ourselves.  We generally see them as distant and inferior, with no concerns as important as our own, and lacking in our intelligence and cultural achievements.  We attach great significance to their lack of human language.   

But animals teach us something about human language without needing that language.  First, they get along without it just fine.  That is, in the wild they manage to do the same things that are our highest priorities — get food, shelter, reproduction, friendship, community — without human language.  Indeed, it is likely that homo sapiens got along well enough for many tens of thousands of years without the language abilities that we now think of as setting us apart.

So animals demonstrate that language is not really as fundamental to our lives as we tend to think.  Of course, at times language is very useful, and also fun to play with. But while it helps us solve problems, it also creates them.  One example is how easily it creates the illusion of a vast divide between humans and other animals, and how easily it justifies human domination of other groups and forms of life.   

We often forget that words are only symbols, with no fully reliable connection to objects or actions.  No matter how beautifully and elaborately they are grouped together, they can never completely and fully reflect reality.  At their very best they are heuristics, practical shortcuts for thinking and getting things done.  

A merganser family

This shortcutting utility also accounts for a lot of problems.  Our word choices direct focus our attention in one direction, so that we have trouble seeing in another.  Once we’ve got firmly in mind the definition of humans as superior creatures, it’s difficult for us to think about the significance of, say, bears to other bears, or chickens to other chickens.  

A similar problem occurs with racial categories.  Once we’ve concocted a definition of racial characteristics and decided which ones are desirable, we have a hard time not favoring the ones we initially desired.  Language around race is part of how we built our racial caste system, and it also makes it very hard to dismantle it.

This is a problem inherent in the way we usually think.  But it helps, I think, to recognize that language is flexible, not fixed, and our intuitions can help us modify or work around linguistic limitations.  Some part of us already knows, despite the limits of our received language, that our cruelty to animals is wrong, and we have the capacity of finding new ways of communicating and acting on that.