One of the things Noam Chomsky did to revolutionize
linguistics was to point out that you could make sentences that were grammatically
correct but did not make sense. His observation freed linguists to devote their
attention to grammar without worrying about meaning, as they had tended to
do. An example he used is this sentence:
“Colorless ideas sleep furiously.”
It seems to me that when Chomsky asserts
this he is using ‘make’ in a narrow sense. The phrase “make sense” for him
means something like ‘to harmonize rationally with the speaker’s notion of the
world.’ But ‘make’ can also mean create, and ‘make sense’ can mean create
meaning.
I once had a teacher, Yousel Rogat, who suggested
that any metaphor, as opposed to a simile, behind the scenes evokes a universe
in which the metaphor is literally true. If you say, “life is like a
nightmare,” you point to certain resemblances that you might be able to list. “If
you say, “life is a nightmare”, you evoke a universe of darkness and suffering
where sordid details struggle for realization.
So it is with Chomsky’s own sentence. If you speak it from the narrow, Chomskian
perspective, then you say nothing about ideas or about sleep or about fury. But
if you take ‘make’ in the sense of create, you have a resonant image of ideas,
some reified (because they might have color), but without color and at once
somnambulant and raging. And it does seem relevant to me that Chomsky is himself
a furious wielder of abstract ideas intended to rouse others from complacency
time after time.
And so it is with Paul Celan. His poems
for the most part do not make sense in the narrow Chomskian definition.
Here's
pelt sky. Even now
a
clear wing writes
I,
too, remember,
dust-
colored
one, arrived
as
a crane
But they make a great deal of sense by
creating meaning. Of course I’m reading
in translation, but I doubt knowing German would make any difference. In fact I
think the German inclination to create new words by joining old ones freely
lends it self to this sort of sense making. You can put two words together in a
way that does not harmonize rationally with the world, as you know it, but does
create a new sense, a new batch of meaning.
This generation of meaning is one thing
that makes Celan so exhilarating to read, and, in his context so moving. You are
constantly involved in making sense. Reading
this book is a long struggle in which you time after time are forced to make (create)
sense based on the chimeric materials Celan provides you. Nourishing your mind
in the background as you work is Celan’s tortured history, his upbringing as a
German-speaking Jew in what had been part of Austria, was then Romania and is
now the Ukraine; the death of his mother in a concentration camp; his tormented
attempts to recreate his nationality and his identity; his deep involvement
with the German language though he was a Jew suffering horrors enacted by
Germans; his eventual suicide. It is the history of a chimeric identity and the
poems are chimeric. That the evocation
is mostly of tragedy and suffering does not make it less wonderful because it shows
the capacity of the human mind to work with such dark material, and come out
richer in meaning.
I like this idea of "making (creating) sense". Better correct a typo, though. "Celan" not "Clean" — unless you're trying to create a new sense.
ReplyDelete