Is language’s goal to destroy itself?

“…Language can produce effects of two quite different kinds.  One of them tends to bring about the complete negation of language itself.  I speak to you, and if you have understood my words, those very words are abolished.  If you have understood, it means that the words have vanished from your minds and are replaced by their counterpart, by images, relationships, impulses…The person who does not understand repeats the words, or has them repeated to him.”

- Paul Valery, “Poetry and Abstract Thought: Dancing and Walking”

“‘Creation by potential’ is a form of composition in which the writer literally does not know what is going to happen next, a technique that precludes the very possibility of foreshadowing, structure, and closure.  Events are necessarily caused only by prior events and by present chances, and not by a future to which everything is invisibly tending.”

- Gary Saul Morson, The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel, pg. 163

When you talk about others (gossip), do you do so so that you can figure out what is permissible?  What is allowed in this society?  So that you can hear how people react to an individual’s behavior, and then use this information to inform your own life?

H. Porter Abbott’s thoughts on narrative closure:

“…We tend to think of narratives that close the issues they raise, or at least close them too easily, like satire or children’s fables, as lesser works - with modes like advertising and propoganda, which seek to close unequivocally, as works somehwere near the bottom…

What we can say is that closure is something we tend to look for in narratives.  We look for it in the same way that we look for answers to questions or fulfillment to expectations.  This would appear to be a natural human inclination.  For this reason, the promise of closure has great rhetorical power in narrative.  Closure brings satisfaction to desire, relief to suspense, and clarity to confusion.  It normalizes.  It conifrms the masterplot.  At the same time, we don’t want closure too quickly.  We seem to to like the experience of remaining in doubt while moving toward closure…But then, to complicate matters even further, some of us can find closure where others cannot.  In other words, we read in different ways.”

- pg. 64, Abbott, Cambridge Introduction to Narrative

Narrative closure involves the fulfillment of readerly desires.  But, as Abbott argues, it is often unclear to what extent, when, and how readers want their desires to be fulfilled.  There is variation among readers.  We want satisfaction, but at the same time, we want desire, we want to want.

Eerily similar to what many individuals want in love - in life. 

“The man who lives and dares to think

Will scorn his fellow-men at last;

For him who feels, the troubled days

Arise like phantoms of the past.

All vain illusions and regret,

Repentance gnawing at the heart,

The serpent sting of memories

Long banished from the mind beget

A certain charm in conversation…”

- Ch.1, 46, Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“Christine threw her head back and scanned the ceiling as though searching for a new language to make herself understood.”

- pg. 94, Toni Morrison, Love

“Her life was an urgent, desperate struggle to justify her life.”

- pg. 79, Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illimuniated

Sometimes I think the entire process of writing fiction involves contemplating the extent to which you are writing about yourself.  

…which is the foundation of Biographical and New Historical approaches to literary analysis.  And the antithesis of New Criticism, etc.

The German word for “history” is “Geschichte” which also means “story,” “tale,” or “narrative.”  

This is entirely appropriate to the field of historical studies, for it wears away the privileged status “history” frequently takes on, as one, complete, true, relation of events.  ”Geschichte” replaces this single, apparently comprehensive compilation of ‘facts’ with the notion that multiple narratives and perspectives exist.  And, most importantly, that whatever narration is given is merely a story or a tale.  It is not ultimate.  One narrative is never ‘more true’ than another.  It is very much like reading any book - you only ever receive the author’s perspective.  Thus, “Geschichte” acknowledges the limitations of history, while the word in English - “history” - disregards them, by often pretending to be fully complete.