Books, Volume 14 #2

Uwe Pörksen, Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language. Translated by Jutta Mason and David Cayley. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995. 103 pp. US$19.95.

"Language," wrote the philosopher Martin Heidegger, "is the house of Being." To grasp the meaning of this still rarefied abstraction, I feel impelled to advance a simpler metaphor: language is a forest. And the author of the brief, incisive essay Plastic Words, Uwe Pörksen, is toiling in the woods, hacking assiduously at the underbrush.

Pörksen, a professor of German literature and language at the University of Freiburg, aims his scythe at a series of about three dozen words that have ground their way into the soil of daily parlance. A small sample includes communication, identity, development, production, relationship and--one of my favourites--structure. The "plastic" of the book's title hints at their ubiquitous use and limitless malleability. They are curiously flat, their meaning opaque. Pörksen analyses some of the essential features of these words. Though they often originate in the daily vernacular, they "pass" through science and, sealed with the new religion's imprimatur, traverse again into the thicket of daily parlance, now endowed with heightened prestige and a different meaning. They have "an inclusive function": that is, they are reductive in character, condensing huge fields of experience to one expression. They are "impoverished in content", "grasp history as nature" and render "speech hierarchial and colonize it, establishing an elite of experts serving as their `resource.'"

One example is sexuality. Believing (mistakenly) that the imagery of natural science corresponded faithfully to how the mind actually worked, Freud adopted its language in sketching his conception of the human psyche. The psyche, the thesis goes, is a closed system of "energy." The id, this energy's ground, is the seat of the sexual. Through the tense interplay of its three parts--id, ego and superego--the psyche's energy is variously "stored" and "released." Under the pretensions of psychoanalysis, however, "sexuality" is reified, serving as an object and explanatory principle to account for the whole of a person's life. Gone is anything remotely resembling the rich and layered chain of Plato's Eros: from the yearning for sexual union and friendship, to community, to truth and art and beauty, to God. The full flower of human desiring, with all its variegated hues, is trampled underfoot by "sexuality" and its bloodless sidekick "sublimation."

This reductive, naturalizing tendency is not confined to psychology, to the conceit of explaining the ineffable narrative of a single life by one or two concepts. It applies equally to history writ large: to the singular, momentous events of both past and present. Here it is words like progress, development, modernization and process, words dear to the cadre of experts in science and economics, that have come increasingly to crowd the public discourse. Under the tutelage of the expert, armed with the lexicon of science, history is naturalized and politics eclipsed. These words, though, suggest not merely movement of a kind but the belief that there is a proper if not an ineluctable march to the course of events. Common moral predicates of good, and wrong or undesirable, are supplanted by the likes of progressive, modern and backward. But there is no mistaking the very distinctive political undertow lurking beneath this river of "modern progress."

Pörksen believes that words both reflect and transform reality. These plastic words, he contends, are the building blocks of a new reality. Their meaning consists in the function they serve, and that function is "to strengthen social hierarchy." Though Pörksen does not state his political allegiances, this is a highly polemical work. Several of his pronouncements leave little doubt as to where he stands. "With a word such as `development,'" he writes, "one can ruin an entire nation." Elsewhere, he highlights the yawning gulf between the average citizen and today's "expert": "The world is a set of stairs. His vantage is from the point of view of those on the top."

This is an invaluable read for anyone who is in the least sensitive about how words are used. If nothing else, Pörksen demonstrates that the invasive and encroaching language of natural science into the daily vernacular has proved to be an unmitigated disaster.

René Fumoleau OMI, Here I Sit. Ottawa: Novalis, 1995. 224 pp. $16.95.

Here I Sit is an imaginative collection of short stories, poems and photos that become unique parables and meditations on life. The author, René Fumoleau, was born in France in 1926 and came to Denendeh (Northwest Territories) as a young Oblate priest in 1953. He has lived with the Dene people ever since--residing in Rádel i Kóé (Fort Good Hope; 1953-60, 1968-69), Déline (Fort Franklin; 1960-68), Sómbak'è (Yellowknife; 1970-93), and finally Lutsel k'è, where he has lived in retirement since 1993.

Fumoleau first earned national respect for his excellent history of native treaties, As Long as this Land Shall Last (1975). He has also produced such acclaimed films as I Was Born Here (1976) and Dene Nation (1979). His skills as a photographer gained particular attention with the publication of the beautiful photo album Denendeh.

Here I Sit reveals René Fumoleau's palpable respect and affection for the Dene people. In all genuine "missionary" work, respect frees up a space for discovery--of the other, oneself, creation and Christ. It is significant that Fumoleau allows and celebrates beauty and humour, allowing the beauty already there and celebrating his own discovery of it. "I felt privileged to witness the deep feelings flowing between mother and child," he writes of a simple encounter in the piece "Muskeg Tea." The humour is quietly present in stories like "Pater Pauperum" (referring to a local bishop's motto meaning "Father of the Poor"). One of the Dene's comments on the motto is brilliant and funny.

"Dene Christmas" is a piece that will serve as a timeless reflection on the meaning of hospitality. It is one of the gems.

Along with his sense of beauty and respect comes a corresponding sense of what destroys community. Fumoleau often refers to the power of greed and overconsumption and acknowledges and names the massive violence of militarism that protects such greed. The poem "Nato" exposes the lying logic of NATO's low-level flights over the land of the Innu of Labrador.

Always between the lines there is snow, wind, sky--the "land." Fumoleau's photos connect the people with the land. When I asked him what the Dene word for respect was, he pointed out that there are no abstract words by themselves. And yet in Dogrib, one of the Dene languages, "Ndè nats'et'i " means "We respect the land." Our own very survival--physical and spiritual--depends on our capacity to learn this radical respect for creation. Here I Sit is a beautiful, unpretentious contribution to our necessary unlearning and learning.

Born in Penetanguishene (Ojibwe for Land-of-the-white-rolling-sands) of Franco-Ontarian parents, Leonard Desroches now resides in Toronto but continues to apprentice from wind, water, birds.... Paul Drolet is a freelance writer living in Montreal.