Colorless Green Ideas

"A noun causes a verb causes another noun. (Add adjectives to taste.)"

~Lerer, "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language"

"When you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that come after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty"

~Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography

          Statistically speaking, language is a miracle.  Out of the infinite combinations of words and letters and sounds comes some form of sense that is intelligible.  We can try to speak gibberish, but as long as syntactic structure is retained, we will make some kind of sense.  An odd, Carrol-ian, Stein-ian, sense, but we can never divorce words from their structure or meaning.  In poetry, "colorless green ideas" can "sleep furiously," and the brain does not revolt, even though we know that "colorless" and "green" negate each other, and "furiously" is not an adverb one would usually use to modify "sleep."  Even words that are made up can be put into sentences and still make sense: you can read "Jabberwocky" and know that "mimsy" is an adjective and "borogove" is a noun, despite the fact that their semantic meaning is perfectly opaque.  This idea of an internal grammar fascinates me, and only increases my wonder at the human brain and its most marvelous and mutable invention: language.

          This is particularly interesting to me after taking a linguistics class last semester.  Learning how language structure works, and how inherent it is to everything we say or write, and how different languages use these structure patterns differently, opened my eyes to how truly inventive the human race can be.  The fact that we can use things as wildly variable as Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet to get across the same meanings is amazing.  Equally amazing, though, is how fast language can develop.  Lerer mentions in "Gertrude Stein: The Structure of Language" that a two-year-old learns a new word every two hours.  I remember reading a newspaper article years ago that cited a study positing that children's supposed grammatical errors when learning to talk (ex: double negatives) are actually testing out different possible language patterns in order to find the right one.  

          The one story that has hit me the hardest, though, is Lerer's description of the students at the school for the deaf in Nicaragua.  These students were able to create a language from nothing: they didn't even have the sounds that most people with spoken language are able to experiment with.  Instead, they were able to codify a set of gestures that had meaning to them, and create their own sign language.  Successive generations were able to take the language to a higher level of complexity, to add verb agreement and distinct parts of speech.  A groundwork having been provided, they were able to create their own grammar structure.  There is some controversy about whether this sign language arose entirely independently, but it is still a beautiful example of the triumph of the human desire to communicate.

          From here on out, I will try to ask "did that make sense" less often, and "what does that mean to you" more often.  I'll try out some of my own linguistic experiments, and see where they lead me.  I might create the next "quiz" or "chortle," or stumble on some equally cogent phrase for something never before seen. From new words to new worlds isn't that terribly large of a jump, especially for Homo mendax, man the storyteller.

Curiouser and Curiouser...

"Life, friends, is boring."

~John Berryman, Dream Song 14

          On reading this poem for a second time, images of boredom and what we associate it with appeared to me, as if projected on a mental screen.  Sherlock Holmes, from the new BBC series, languishes on a sofa, repeatedly declaring he is bored while shooting a smiley face into the wall of his flat; Prince Leonce, from Büchner's play Leonce und Lena stretches out on a bench, declaring that everything humans do is out of boredom; and of course, students in a lecture lean on their hands and stare into space as their eyes glaze over.  Life may be boring, but boredom, friends, is interesting.

          Boredom is a fascinating emotion as it seems to be almost completely internally generated.  It is possible to be bored by something, but even that seems to stem from lack of your own engagement.  In contrast to other emotions such as anger or joy, boredom is signified by a near complete lack of response, of a shutting down of mental faculties.  In Domasio's "Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain" it is posited that emotions and feelings grew out of a need to communicate socially, to convey information to others.  What, then, is the purpose of an emotion or emotional state of immobility and disinterest?  Erich Fromm, in The Sane Society, notes that "Man is the only animal capable of being bored."  Are we so attuned to activity that its lack results in withdrawal symptoms?  Or is it a sign that we are becoming--or have we become-- detached from a world that has ceased to amuse us?  Existentialists might say that boredom is merely a little glimpse into the nothing that our life really is, that we fill it with action and noise to avoid the abyss, trying to find an answer.  
          Boredom is also a great motivator in that it is the most pressing phobia of the world of entertainment.  The greatest condemnation a work, whether print or film, can receive, is the stamp of "boring."  Audience boredom, or the fear of it, is what arguably drives writers, editors, producers, networks, and publishers to constantly search for the new and different, or even just the old in a new sparkly package.  How many times have vampires, or cowboys, fantasy worlds gone in and out of vogue over the years, changing and developing each time.  Could we actually credit boredom with the progress of human society?  Staving of ennui with the printing press, moon landing, and one thousand other events?  Are we that afraid of stagnation?
         My own answer to that is no, except for one thing: perhaps boredom could lead to curiosity.  The idle mind wanders to may strange and interesting places, and once it catches on something, the real fun, so to speak, begins!  Making new worlds and new ideas starts with two little words, and can go anywhere from there.  Take some time this weekend and ask yourself "What if?"  Take a ball of thread or a handful of white pebbles with you though, it's a wide world out there, and you'll never know where you'll end up.  Or not, because sometimes getting lost is half the fun!

Tea and Empathy (or lack thereof)

"The Storyteller ... tacitly trains ... members of the social group to recognize and give priority to culturally valued emotional states." ~Keen, "Theory of Narrative Empathy

          Our topic this week is that of narrative empathy and the theory of the mind. Narrative empathy is the idea that literary works and storytelling in general can generate an empathic emotional response for their intended audience, get them to "feel the pain" of the characters. Many successful works are praised for the extent to which they accomplish this. Others (cough Hemingway cough) can be denigrated because they are seen a not doing enough to spark empathy. But what happens when an author intentionally attempts to avoid arousing empathy in his work? The answer lies in the epic theater and Verfremdungseffekt of Bertolt Brecht.

          Brecht was a German playwright of the early twentieth century and penned such works as The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage and her Children. Brecht tried to keep his plays very much grounded in the intellectual, to try and keep the audience aware that they are watching a play and to make them think about what they see on stage. He was notably displeased when the song "Mack the Knife" from The Threepenny Opera became popular because of the catchy tune, with no regard to the bloody, murderous subject matter. To these ends Brecht created the genre of epic theater.

Epic theater was inteded to contrast sharply with typical "dramatic theater," and was designed to distance both the actors and the audience from the action. This distance and lack of empathy desired by Brecht has been termed the Verfremdungseffekt, or "alienation effect." Prolouges before each scene describe what is going to happen in it, draining the plays of much of their dramatic tension. A recent Michigan State production of Mother Courage used silent animated shorts and boxing ring announcers to this end. Scenes and plotlines in epic theater are often fragmentary, with only loose connections between them. In Mother Courage, set during the Thirty Year's war, years can pass from scene to scene, and the whole play covers nearly the entire war.

          This distance from the subject matter is also applied to the characters and the actors in epic theater. Actors were encouraged to learn their lines in their native dialect, but perform in standard stage German, preventing familiarity with their parts. Characters are very flat, do not change, and are often defined by a single trait. Many non-central characters do not even have names. In Mother Courage, besides the titular woman and her children, only the prostitute Yvette is given a name, the rest of the characters being referred to by profession or rank in the army. Even the central charaters of the "children" (they are at least 18 for the majority of the play) are only allowed the depth a single trait will give them: Eilif is brave, Swiss Cheese is honest, and Katrin is kind. Their mother is given no personal development whatsoever, and arrives at the end of the war the same as she was at the beginning: tough, cold, and almost unfeeling, qualities you needed to survive as a camp follower in that time.

           If all of this distance results in the desired lack of empathy, the audience will leave thinking how horrible it is that war has wreaked this destruction on the world, and that war in and of itself is wrong, unlinked to any personal connection. How successful this is though, I am not sure. Humans are empathic creatures by nature, and will find ways to relate to almost anything.