Words As World Goggles

What if you don’t just write words, but words also write you? Costica Bradatan, a professor at Texas Tech University, noted recently in the New York Times post “Born Again in a Second Language” that learning to write in a new tongue can can transform an author:

Painful as it can be at a strictly human level, the experience can also be philosophically fascinating. Rarely do we get the chance to observe a more dramatic re-making of oneself. For a writer’s language, far from being a mere means of expression, is above all a mode of subjective existence and a way of experiencing the world.

Often we think of language as essentially conventional and constantly evolving according to human usage. Bradatan’s view, on the other hand, suggests words have an objective and external power to influence our subjective and internal world. Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien believed there was an “absolute language” from which all other languages developed. Some say the languages Tolkien created and his striking ability to name places, things, and people more closely approximate that absolute language than does any existing tongue.

Thus, Gandalf is not just called Gandalf but seems actually to be a Gandalf. In fact, Tolkien fancied that one could infer everything about something from its moniker, if it were named aptly. The name “Hobbit,” for instance, popped randomly into Tolkien’s head, and from that word he discovered the nature of that short, domestic Middle-Earth race.

Perhaps learning a new language shifts one’s identity because it shifts one’s perspective on the universe. Each language might illuminate a different aspect of the same reality, relative to an absolute understanding of reality that belongs to an absolute language. A new language is like a new eyeglass prescription, because the mind’s eye cannot focus on its surroundings directly and from all sides. Bradatan continues in a similar thought:

In a certain sense, then, it could be said that in the end you don’t really change languages; the language changes you. At a deeper, more personal level, writing literature in another language has a distinctly performative dimension: as you do it something happens to you, the language acts upon you. The book you are writing ends up writing you in turn.

The more your read and write, no matter the language, the more you can understand yourself and your relation to the world outside. Words reveal regions of reality the senses alone cannot reach.