Krgryga krrr mimi flssti: are structures of this kind true or false? The question, naïve to a first approximation, is nevertheless crucial to the contemporary linguistics. Indeed, should we consider such “opuses” unworthy of any attention or should we admit that certain patterns to explain their functionality and to substantiate their verity however exist?
The following introductory essay deals with seemingly uninterpretable structures common to the absurd and postmodernist genres.
Semantic rules of any language impose certain restrictions, according to which the elements have but a small quantity of combinatory options, that is, that any deviations will be regarded as strange both by native speakers and by those who know the language to perfection. After all, Noam Chomsky’s well-known structure Green ideas sleep furiously (we will on purpose avoid terms like phrase, sentence or expression here, in order not to produce arguments irrelative to the main topic of our discussion) is perfectly neutralized within the poetic context, where it functions as a true judgment.
Let me briefly remind you of the pattern, through the prism of the microsemantic approach. Though ’green’ and ’ideas’ are contrasted by the opposition /abstract/ vs. /concrete/, ’sleep’ and ’furiously’ by the opposition /quiet/ vs. /passionate/, the decoding is easily reduced to a more sober structure: Immature ideas have not formed yet, but they are up to bursting out very soon [3].
In this perspective, any semantically absurd expression (even if grammatical forms are wrong) can be neutralized via certain interpreting models [4] (on the assumption of the fact that we do know the meaning of every element). Therefore, the categorization, like the one found in the Brazilian samba Cinema novo by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil [5], is easily reconstructed if we involve an extralinguistic code (in this case the very title functions as the “key” to the riddle): Todas e muitas: Deus e Diabo, // Vidas Secas, os Fuzis, // os cafajetes, o Padre e a Moça, // a Grande Feira, o Desafio, // outras conversas sobre os jeitos do Brasil <…> Hitler, Terceiro Mundo, // Sem Essa, Aranha, Fome de Amor… (Much about everything: God and Devil, Withered Lives, a Father and a Girl, a Great Fair, a Challenge, along with other Brazilian discussions <…> Hitler, the Third World, Spiders, and Hunger for Love…)
The categorization, though including seemingly distant elements and hardly relating to any taxonomic class, functions as a true one, if included into the model of the resurrected Brazilian cinematography, where all these elements appear as belonging to the same contextual ensemble (through the afferent sememe ’on the screen’), thus neutralizing such diametrically opposite phenomena as Deus ‘God’ /positive/ and Diabo ‘Devil’ /negative/, Hitler ‘Hitler’ /political leader/ and desafio ‘challenge’ /process/, etc.
The problem, however, becomes more complex, as soon as we come into the evidence of the structures, where no separate semantic interpretation of the elements is possible. A reasonable question arises: Are such structures also sort of a sacral enigma reflecting a specific type of the author’s picture of the world?
Let us throw a look at the passage below, written in the “language” “invented” by Hugo Ball in 1917:
jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla
grossiga m’pfa habla [1]
Evidently, the communicator’s pragmatic intentions are opaque; but does it mean that we are renouncing of any hermeneutical procedures? Of course not. Absurd and postmodernist games of this kind presuppose that the author himself knows (and, as a matter of fact, he is the only one to have cognized that) the real meaning of every element in the structure. In this case, when we are in the presence of the fact that the logical volume and the element coincide (volume α contains one single element A possessing the true knowledge about the structure), everything that remains is to believe the author. Indeed, Russell’s affirmation that any absurd structure leads to any true conclusion becomes entirely grounded by the truth functionality of such seemingly senseless structures within a certain literal genre [2].
Let us therefore summarize the patterns helping us to interpret any abnormal structure. We start by:
- Creating or searching for a scheme/frame/model, within which a semantically illogical structure functions as a true one (newly created categories, like the samba text analyzed above); in case this does not help, we are
- Searching for a counter-example (this procedure for technical reasons is left out here) within the cultural systems, proving that our truth perception varies in time and space (The Earth goes round the Sun vs. The Sun goes round the Earth in Ptolemaic and Copernican systems); if the second principle is of no use, the meaning of the elements having no semantic reference, we finish by
- Accepting the structure as a priori true within the absurd and postmodernist game, where the belief in the author’s omniscience is fundamental.
The pattern suggested above leads us not only to unmasking the Esoteric (encoded in all enigmatic abnormal structures), transferring it into the sphere of the Exoteric, but to creating a new norm, valid sometimes for one single case.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Андреев Л.Г. Сюрреализм: История. Теория. Практика. «Гелеос», М.: 2004.– 352 с.
- Ивлев, Ю.В. Логика: учебник. – 3-е изд., перераб. и доп. – М.: ТК Велби, Изд-во Проспект, 2005. – 288 с.
- Якобсон Р.О. Работы по поэтике. Составление и общая редакция М.А. Гаспарова. Вступительная статья В.В. Иванова. – М.: Прогресс, 1987. – 460 с.
- Lakoff G. Global Rules // Language, Vol. 46, No.3 (Sep., 1970), 627-639
- Veloso C. e Gil G. Tropicália 2: “Cinema novo” (traccia 2)
15 August 2007. – Nizhny Novgorod (Russia)