“The
intellectual is called on the carpet.
What do you mean when you say…?
Don’t conceal something? You talk
a language which is suspect.”
Marcuse
192
Well,
you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you’ve got to
know your place at all times. All right,
now, go on with your speech.”
Ellison
31
Marcuse asserts that language as a
whole has become what he calls a “common language.” That language has been, “pressed into the
straitjacket of common usage, but also enjoined not to ask and seek solutions
beyond those that are already there” (Marcuse 178). Like everything is in a capitalist society,
it must be considered and weighed for its value. All confusion that arises from “symbols,
metaphors, and images” must be eliminated to bring the speech into common
language. And then it can be neatly
packaged and sold off as commodity.
Marcuse sees his (our) society as driven by consumerism/capitalism,
everything has a monetary value attached to it and if one cannot be readily
defined then the system will adept to absorb it. The example of Mother Teresa and how one can
relate a religious figure to the idea of selling a product. This is where language as a whole breaks down
into the common language there can be nothing above the common and it must fit
the mold established by the society speaking it.
The
narrator of the Invisible Man, after many
degrading experiences, gives a speech to the same people who had abused him and
others like him not a moment before. The
people of his race who, “depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign
land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations
with the southern white man” speaks to the degree of not only his physical subjugation
but his linguistic subjugation. There is
no hint of protest against the trials that came before the speech, he takes no
action whether to flee from the scene or to resist in some fashion after the
fact (though that would have likely resulted in his death). Ellison is playing with the same idea of
language construction that Marcuse is arguing, the speech is given with
constant interruptions by the audience to have any word “of three or more
syllables” repeated because it was not the common language. This is the poetry that Marcuse argues the
committee claims to love but that in order to be properly understood the “symbols,
metaphors, and images” must be brought into ordinary language. When Ellison’s narrator misspeaks and
replaces social responsibility with social equality the audience is quick to
question the mistake because where one falls in line with preconceived conventions
the other speaks of protest, unrest, and change. There is no possible use of equality for the
established common language of the listening audience, the committee of
language they have established is one of submission and degradation and the
narrator can only function within that framework. For Marcuse there is no discourse within this
arrangement of committee all of the symbols must mean something and they must
mean the right thing in the proper order.
“Tolerance is deceptive,” there is no meaning but the meaning of the
common. The narrator experience the
hijacking of language and his dependence upon the listeners of his speech for
his “success” later in life, specifically to his ability to attend a
prestigious university. Marcuse and
Ellison point to the control of language as a way to control the individual, if
language can be reduced to the common then the control of people can be just as
simple.
I think it's hard for me to criticize this beyond what was said in class. Seems like we talked about several of these passages and this topic most of the class. I think it would be good to incorporate some of that transcendental language idea that we discussed. I assume, as the novel goes on, that the narrator's language will begin to change and become more uncommon so that may make a good idea for a final project if you were searching for one. Also, I'm not exactly sure what purpose including the Mother Teresa example serves. It was thrown in there, and the idea didn't seem to developed in terms of that being a concrete example. Other than that I really like the idea you went with here.
ReplyDeleteThe conjunction of the two quotes, of course, is fantastic. Excellent work - you were wide awake and thinking hard on that one (even if it seemed like luck at the time that you put the two together).
ReplyDeleteOne thing I felt was missing in the first full paragraph was some kind of sense of what the alternative to common language is - that's important, because we need to think about the common *and* the transcendent in the context of Invisible Man.
I like your analysis of the narrator's experience, although we should keep in mind how clueless he is at this stage - it might be a bit of a stretch to call his speech poetry, although that does *not* mean that he isn't put through the ringer for how he uses language.
The long paragraph could use some splitting up and unpacking, and some time spent on the narrator's language. It's one thing that someone is expected to use "common language", and your analysis here is correct. But for this essay to evolve in Marcusean directions, the possibility, at least, of transcendence would need to be addressed as well. Does the speech contain a nugget of transcendence (despite all his cluelessness) which requires suppression?
The last paragraph is problematic, but this may be your best blog post overall, in spite of that.