Kitabı oku: «Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas», sayfa 7

WOMEN AND LANGUAGE

Women's rôle in the work of civilization is so great that it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the edifice is reared on the shoulders of these frail caryatides. Women know things that have never been written or taught, and without which almost the whole equipment of our daily life would be rendered useless. In 1814, some Cossacks, who had discovered a supply of stockings, drew them on directly over their boots – a general example of our commonest acts, had not women, for centuries of centuries, been the patient teachers of childhood. This rôle is so natural that it seems humble. We are struck only by what is extraordinary. The powerful machinery of a woolen-mill overwhelms us. Who has ever felt moved at the sight of the simple play of a pair of knitting-needles? Yet, compared with these little sticks, the greatest power-loom becomes insignificant. It represents a particular civilization. The wooden or steel needles represent absolute civilization. In every field the essential should be distinguished from the accessory. In civilization women's part represents the essential.

It is easier to feel this than to prove it, for it is a question precisely of those acts which pass unperceived along life's path – of all sorts of things which are never mentioned, because they are not observed or because their importance is not understood. Thus physiology was long unknown, while curiosity was occupied with monsters. The continuous phenomenon ceases to exist for our senses. It was a city-dweller, or a prisoner, or a blind man suddenly restored to sight, who first noted natural beauty. There is an external physiology which disappears in habit. Analyzed, it reveals the most important voluntary act of our lives – voluntary, in the sense that they are contingent compared with the primordial movements of the life of a species; voluntary, if the will be regarded as the consciousness of an unconscious effort.

Whether sense or faculty, speech cannot logically be separated from hearing, but the education of the ear is much less perceptible than that of the vocal apparatus. They can thus be considered separately, or at least without observing a precise order in acquisitions which are entangled like all the activities of life. Moving, hearing, seeing, speaking – all these are connected. Imitation imposes itself upon all the functions at the same time, though an appreciable order of birth can be established for each of them. This order is of little moment in a study where it is question, not of the intelligence which receives, but of the intelligence which gives – of the exterior and not of the interior psychological life.

Speech is feminine. Poets and orators are feminine types. To speak is to do woman's work. Because woman speaks as a bird sings, she alone is capable of teaching the language. When the child attempts to imitate the sounds it has heard, the woman is there to watch him, to smile at him, and to encourage him. There is established a mute working contract between these two beings, and what patience the one who knows displays in guiding the one who tries! The first words pronounced by a child correspond in its mind to no object, to no sensation. The child, at this moment of its life, is a parrot, and nothing more. It imitates. It speaks because it hears others speaking. If the world were silent around it, speech would remain congealed in its brain. Thence the importance of a woman's prattle – an importance far greater than that of the most beautiful poems and of the profoundest philosophies. The function which makes man a man is the special work of the woman. A child reared by a very feminine and very talkative woman is formed rather for speech and, consequently, for psychologic consciousness. Left to the care of a taciturn man, the same child would develop very slowly – so slowly, perhaps, that it would never attain the full limits of its practical intelligence.

Were it possible to assign an origin to language, one would say that woman had created it; but the secret of all origins will forever escape us. Birds sing, the dog barks, man speaks. It is not easier to imagine a dumb man than a dumb dog or a dumb finch; and if these species formerly existed without a voice, it is not easy to see why they should have acquired an organ which many other animals, including the birds of the South Polar regions, get along very well without. If language were learned or acquired – if, in order to recover its first traces, the celebrated roots, it were enough to find the common mother of Latin and Sanskrit, of Greek and of Anglo-Saxon – it is not easy to see why the dog does not converse with his master otherwise than with his tail, his eyes and his yelping. But the dog will never speak, because the genius of an animal species is as rigorously determined as the forms of the crystalline species.

The view that the oldest language was composed of five or six hundred monosyllables, is now without value, though it had a certain force. It gave weight to several hypotheses whose absurdity was not at first evident. Yet nothing had ever been observed in any real language resembling an even unconscious reservoir of roots. Words are born of each other by derivation, coming into the world sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, than the original word. This derivation is always dominated by a real, living concrete sense. No man whose mind has not been spoiled by special studies, has the sense of roots. The ba, be, bi, bo, bu of the alphabets, are, according to the theory, so many roots; but a series of kindred meanings has not been attributed to each of these sounds. They are capable, even in the same language, of expressing them all, either by chance, or according to a logic whose laws are undeterminable.

The primitive element in speech is not the word but the phrase. Man's spoken phrase is instinctive, like the sung phrase of the bird, like the yelped phrase of the dog. The word is a product of analysis.

In order to give the word priority over the phrase, the older school started from this idea, namely, that the word is created after the thing has been perceived, man acting as a nomenclator, as a professor of botany who gives names to sprigs of moss. The reality is different. The child stammers words before knowing the objects of which these words are the signs. It is possible that man spoke – chattered – a long time before a fixed relation became established between things and the familiar sounds issuing from his mouth.

Thousands of languages can thus have been chattered successively on thousands of territories – languages lacking precision, essentially musical, a succession of phrases in which certain sounds only corresponded to realities; but these sounds, in spite of their importance, in spite of their utilitarian and representative value, may be supposed to have been at first almost as fugitive as the rest of the speech. An unwritten language never survives the generation which created it. Among savages each generation remakes its language so completely that the grandfather is a stranger among his own grandchildren.

If this primitive chattering be admitted, it will readily be admitted also that woman must have had a large share in it, while arousing the mind of the males by her laughter and her attention. Woman has little capacity for verbal innovation. Among so many excellent women writers, none has ever created a language in the sense of which this is said of Ronsard, of Montaigne, of Chateaubriand, or of Victor Hugo; but she repeats well – often better than a man – what was said before her. Born to conserve, she performs her rôle to perfection. Eternally, unwearyingly she rekindles from the failing torch a new torch identical with the old. It is in the hands of women – dancers in life's ballet, or melancholy vestals in deep caverns – that the lampada vitai shine. What woman has been historically, she will always be and she has always been, from before history even.

Certain words became fixed in the primitive chattering. This was the work of woman. Destined to attention by the monotony of her domestic labour,²⁷ she rebelled against the useless renewal of terms. Her life became complicated in those lands where the game was abundant, where nature was fertile. Men's needs increased with their wealth, and with them, woman's occupations. Having to work more, she had less time to listen to songs and speeches. Novelties succeeding each other too rapidly, upset her. She corrected the language of men who, in their turn, became disconcerted. Thus were born the words in common use, and thus the fixed sounds corresponding to realities in man's spoken song gradually grew in number.

Woman, whose memory is excellent, had also, from the earliest times, no doubt, retained the most musical, the most rhythmical parts of speech – some combination of phrases resembling those melopeias repeated insatiably by Negroes. Man created. Woman learned by heart. If a civilized country were one day to reach that state of mind in which every novelty is at once welcomed and substituted for traditional ideas and methods – if the past were to yield constantly to the future – then, after a period of frenzied curiosity, men would be observed falling into the apathy of the tourist who never glances twice at the same object. In order to recover their grip, they would be obliged to seek refuge in a purely animal existence, and civilization would perish. Such a fate seems to have overtaken ancient peoples, so eager to renew their pleasures that their passing has left but hypothetical traces. Excess of activity, far more than torpor, has caused the decay of many Asiatic civilizations. Wherever woman has been unable to intervene and to oppose the influence of her passivity to the arrogance of the young males, the race has exhausted itself in fugitive essays. We can, then, be sure that, wherever a durable civilization has been organized, woman was its cornerstone.

Arising, as a reciter, before the creator, woman formed a repertory, a library, archives. The first song-book was woman's memory, and it is the same with the first collection of tales, the first bundle of documents.

However, the invention of writing came, like all progress, successively, to diminish woman's importance as archivist. Since everything that seemed worth remembering was fixed by signs on durable matter, it became woman's duty and pleasure to perpetuate what men condemned to oblivion. She has performed faithfully a task that matter has almost always betrayed; and so it is that tales which were never written, and which assuredly go back to the earliest ages, have come down to us. Women who had been entertained by them as children, entertained their own children with them in turn. In spite of the efforts of rational pedagogy, which would like to substitute the history of the French Revolution, or that of the founding of the German Empire, for Tom Thumb, mothers still put their good children to sleep with blue story or red, of love or of blood. But this oral literature, whose themes are so much more numerous than those of written literature, has been found to possess the greatest beauty, and consequently a supreme importance. We owe the salvaging of this treasure to woman's conservative genius.

She conserved also the songs, the tunes (and the dances accompanying them) which man sheds at the very moment when he leaves his youth. For him they are futilities, and he never gives them another thought. For woman, they are means of pleasing and she remembers them always. When hope has departed, she falls back upon them to live again the happy days of her youth. Thus do old women keep their hearts young.

Women do not seem to have had a great share in the invention of tales and of songs. They have preserved, which is a way of creating. Yet one finds, nevertheless, the mark of their mind in certain variants. Their tendency was to tone down the end of a tale, to quiet the effervescence of a song too rollicking. This invention saved the life of many of these small things, by making them available to children, whose memory is an exceedingly sure casket.

Along with literature women saved a whole collection of notions difficult to determine. It is not a question of the long string of superstitions, but of the element of practical science contained in these superstitions, these beliefs, these traditions. To estimate the importance of this chapter of human knowledge, one should make a sort of examination of his own consciousness. Then, after long reflection, he will be able to distinguish between things learned from books, and those which, while never written, everyone knows. What is truly indispensable for the conduct of life has been taught us by women – the petty rules of politeness, those acts which win us the cordiality or deference of others; those words which assure us a welcome; those attitudes which must be varied according to the character and the situation; all social strategy. It is listening to women that teaches us to speak to men, to worm our way into their will. For those alone who know how to please, can teach the art of pleasing.

Even before he speaks, a child knows the value of a smile. It is his first language, and nothing proves that it is absolutely instinctive. The animal has only those attitudes which are the sign of a need. Some are beautiful, some are pretty, but none are voluntary.

The smallest child's smile often veils an intention. Woman has taught it the mystery of exchanges, and the fact that a friendly gesture can win food and other things essential to life. The little girl, better disposed than the boy to appreciate this teaching, knows the value of curving lips and of the wave of her rosy hand, long before knowledge of the vocal signs has permitted her tender brain the most elementary reasoning. It is, then, in her case, pure imitation; but the act is favoured by recollection of the end already obtained by the first attempt, and we have here a very curious and obscure example of an effect determining its cause in physiological unconsciousness.

Since women have little in their lives but passional relations, this very primitive play remains the basis of their social tactics. Men feel progressively the need of complicating this elementary science, but it always remains for them a supreme resource. To touch his conqueror, to please him – such is the last argument of the conquered.

All mimetic art is the work of women. Even when she is silent, a woman continues to speak – often with a sincerity which her words lack. Even when she is motionless she continues to speak, and she is often more eloquent then than with words or with gestures. The form of her body makes her breathing a language. The rhythm of her bosom betrays the state of her soul and the degree of her emotion. No speech finds a man more sensitive. But their eyes have at their disposal a keyboard still more extended, though less effective. With her eyes, with the varied curves of her mute mouth, woman can express her inmost thought. The eye pales or kindles, lifts or lowers its look, and it spells desire or disdain, anger or promise – so many pages understood by man the moment he has an interest in reading them. To these gleams and these movements, the play of the eyelids adds its value. This play is affirmative, negative, interrogative. It utters a short and decisive yes, or a yes of languor and abandon. It questions in the tone of anger or of complaining. It refuses with a half-abrupt closing of the pupil, which veils the eyes without closing them. But how many other shades there are, and how rich in speech the smile is, also! The whole woman speaks. She is language incarnate.

Her children will first be actors. Like their mother, they will learn how to speak at the start with everything that is silent – precious acquisition. Darwin found the first sketch of emotional expression in animals. There is an important element of instinct in the human mimetic. Woman has cultivated these primitive movements, has refined and multiplied them. To the signs of the true emotions have come to be added the signs of the false emotions, and then only has a language been created. Animal expression of the emotions is not a language, for it would be incapable of making believe. True language begins with the lie. There is a real meaning in the famous saying that language was given to man to disguise his thought. The lie, which is the sole external proof of psychological consciousness, is also the sole proof that signs are language, and not unconscious mimetic. The lie is the very basis of language and its absolute condition. Analysis of linguistic facts proves this clearly enough, since every word contains a metaphor, and since every metaphor is a transposition of reality, when it is not a wilful, premeditated falsehood. But, taking language such as it appears to us, and supposing each word to correspond to an object, it may be said that, if there existed a man who had never lied, that man never spoke. It is not, in fact, speaking, to say "I am afraid," or "I am cold," when you are afraid, or are cold. It is expressing an emotion or a sensation by means of verbal signs analogous to the trembling of the animal famished or frozen. But if, on the contrary, denying his emotion or his sensation, the man who is cold says "I am warm," and the man who is hungry says "I am not hungry," he speaks. Whether he employ words, gestures or written signs, it is by this, by the lie – that is to say, by consciousness – that the man is recognized. Lie, let it be understood, here signifies expression of an imaginary sensation. It is a matter of psychology, not of morality – separate domains.

If woman is language, she should be lie, and also consciousness. All three are connected and form but one. The first of these points has never been studied, but popular opinion favours it. Not only do women speak more readily than men, they employ a better syntax, a less haphazard vocabulary, their pronunciation is excellent. One feels that language is their element. The second point, the lie, is not disputed; but women are reproached with it, whereas it is the consequence of another gift and, moreover, an assertion of their spiritual nature. Women lie more than men. Then it is because they have a greater sentiment of independence, a livelier consciousness; and here we have reached the third point, without, it seems to me, a minute demonstration being necessary.

The hysterical lie has been spoken of. It is probable that there is an error here, not in the terms, but in the intention which has brought them together. If unconscious life is meant, it is an absurdity. The lie is, on the contrary, the very sign of consciousness, and there can be no lie save where there is full and active consciousness. A distempered sensation, expressed as felt, should not be confused with the intentional travestying of the exposition of a true sensation – the first term of the series with the last. The animal never lies. How could it? It is forced to express its sensation just as he feels it. If it wishes to bite, the dog curves his lips, shows his teeth. If you see it hold back, play the hypocrite, lie, it is because, through its contact with man, it has perhaps acquired a rudiment of consciousness – because its acquired education comes, at such a moment, into conflict with its instinct. Moreover, ruse – especially when applied to defence, or to the search for food – is something quite different from the lie. It is the acute form of prudence. The true lie is purposeless, without other utility than the assertion of a superior detachment. It presents itself as a negation of the ties that attach man to reality, in which respect it approaches poetry and art, of which it is one of the elements. Art is born, like the lie, of a lively consciousness of the sensations and emotions. It declares a state of extreme sensibility, together with a tendency to repel that reality whereby a man's senses were wounded. Art, whatever its form, implies a profound knowledge of the signs, and the will to transpose them, without reference to their customary concordances. The artist is he who lies superiorly – better than other men. If he lies with speech, he is the poet; with inarticulate sounds, the musician; with forms whose attitudes he fixes, the sculptor, and his art is merely the extreme development of the language of motion (of which the dancer represents a very fugitive stage); with lines and colours, the painter, and what does this last do if not restore to primitive hieroglyphics their true aspect and all their natural scope? Art is a language, and it is only that.

But if woman is language, how do women happen to have played so inconspicuous a part in the supreme activity of language? Critics, to flatter them, have alleged some sort of lateral heredity whereby it is demonstrated that, as the daughters of mothers less and less cultivated, going back through the centuries, it is not surprising that their aptitudes are inferior to those of the males. This is not to be taken seriously. For, if it be true that genius and talent are often directly related with anterior cultures, there are also sudden aptitudes developed by the environment. Why should not a girl find this aptitude in her flesh, like her brother? Moreover, for thousands of years now, women have been taught music. Yet it is perhaps the art in which they have least created. The cause lies deeper. Woman is language, but language is useful. Her rôle is not to create, but to conserve. She accomplishes this task marvellously. She creates neither poems nor statues, but she creates the creators of the poems and of the statues. She teaches them language, which is the condition of their science, the lie which is the condition of their art, the consciousness which gives them their genius. When the child, about the age of six or seven, leaves the woman's hands, the man is already man. He speaks, and that is man in his entirety.

Woman's great intellectual task is teaching the language. The grammarians and their substitutes, school-teachers and professors, fancy that they are the masters of language, and that, without their intervention, men's language would perish in confusion and incoherence. They have been maintained for ages in this illusion, yet there is none more ridiculous. Women are the elementary, and poets the superior artisans of language, both unconscious of their function. The intervention of grammarians is almost always bad, unless it limit itself to a statement of the facts – unless it dare restore to the hands of women and of poets an influence which science could exert only with injustice. Here are some children who speak. They are going to school to have a lesson in grammar. They speak, and employ all the forms of the verb, all the shades of syntax, easily and correctly. They speak, but here now is the school, and the master succeeds in teaching them the nature of the imperfect subjunctive. For a function, the pedagogue has substituted a notion. He has replaced the act by consciousness of the act, the word by its definition. He teaches grammar. He does not teach language.

Language is a function. Grammar is the analysis of this function. It is as useless to know grammar in order to speak one's native tongue, as to know physiology in order to breathe with one's lungs, or to walk with one's legs. Compared with the rôle of the ignorant mother who plucks, like a flower, the first word blossoming on her child's lips, the teacher's rôle amounts to almost nothing. It is the mother herself who sowed this word which has just bloomed. For, if language be a function, it must be given the material on which to work. A woman's idle chatter, differing so slightly from that of the little girl talking to her doll, is the child's first lesson, and the one whose importance surpasses every other. Words are so many seeds which will sprout, grow and come to fruition in the young brain. Without this ceaseless random sowing, the child's linguistic function would remain inert, and only vague and perhaps inarticulate sounds would issue from its lips. It has sometimes been wondered what language children, brought up together beyond reach of the human voice, would speak. Perhaps they would speak none at all. It is a question that no one can solve. At all events, they would speak merely a rudimentary language – that is to say, one too rich, variable and entirely unknown. For innate roots exist no more than innate ideas. The child does not create his language. Still less does he secrete his language. He learns it. He speaks the way people speak about him in his cradle. He is a phonograph and at first functions no less mechanically. Before he is able to situate verbal signs with reference to the objects represented, he possesses them in great quantity, but in confusion, pell-mell. Later he will learn to utilize this wealth. Since he knows, on the one hand, the words and, on the other, the objects, the operation of combining them in his memory will be of the simplest, most natural order. The woman directs this combination joyfully, and she admires herself in her admiration of the child's progress. She believes that the double acquisition of the word and of the object is made exclusively at her command, and that fills her with pride. Thus, ignorance of the child's psychological mechanism assures the teacher's success.

Later, as poet, story-teller, philosopher, theologian or moralist – as creator of values, in Nietzsche's very forceful expression – the child will usually employ in her honour this language that he receives almost entirely from woman. The larger part of literature is the indirect work of woman, made for her, to please or to pique her, to exalt or to decry her, to touch her heart, to idealize or to curse her beauty and her love. The two sexes had to be thus profoundly dissimilar, foreign, opposite, for one to become the other's adorer. With equality of tastes, of needs, of desires, bodily differences would not have sufficed, nor the injunction of the species. Humanity could perpetuate itself without love;²⁸ but love would have been impossible without the radical divergences which render man and woman two mutually mysterious worlds. Only the unknown can be adored. There is no longer a religion where there is no longer mystery. In all societies, so long as she is young and beautiful, woman, even when a slave, is the mistress of civilization. The poets, inspired by her grace, heighten this supremacy by making her the theme of their songs; and poetry, which had, at first, no other aim than to tell the joys of possession or the pangs of desire, completed its evolution by creating love. For love, with all the sentiment, the passion, the dream, the happiness, the tears which this word implies, is at bottom a verbal creation and the imaginative achievement of the artists of language.

It is through poems, tales, traditional narratives, that ordinary man, inclined to enjoyment only, has learned to love, to enhance infinitely his commonplace joys and futile sorrows. Let us repeat here Nietzsche's saying – the poet has been the creator of sentimental values. But almost as soon as created, they have escaped him. Possessing herself of these new values, woman has turned them into instruments to assure her sovereignty. She has, in all simplicity, culled the fruits of language, her work.

How love has evolved under this domination, with all the benefits which have accrued from it, would be a long chapter in the history of civilization.

1901.

Note. – Philosophic deductions are of value only if they agree exactly with science; but then they have a value. I have therefore availed myself of the opportunity to complete the note on a previous page, concerning the lie considered as a vital reaction. Here is the scientific statement of the question:

"M. R. Quinton has been led, in the course of his investigations, to recognize that all living beings are divided into two great physiological groups, which correspond exactly to the two anatomical groups: Invertebrates and Vertebrates– The first, and lower group (Invertebrates), always in equilibrium with the environment, supporting all the exterior conditions, however unfavourable; the second, and higher (Vertebrates), not accepting these conditions, reacting against them, always in disequilibrium with the environment, maintaining internally the saline concentration of their origins, in opposition to the sea, which becomes more concentrated, or to fresh water which loses its salt; maintaining, moreover, its original temperature in opposition to a terrestrial environment which grows colder, lying to the environment, in short, in order to maintain its most favourable conditions of life. The lie, of which we speak, is only the psychological form of this reaction, on the part of the Vertebrates, against the hostility of the environment."

The obscure terms in this note (saline concentration, temperature of the origins) are explained in M. Quinton's book: L'Eau de mer, milieu organique.