IMPERSONAL PASSION

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

The worst words revivify themselves within us, vampirically. Injurious speech echoes relentlessly, years after the occasion of its utterance, in the mind of the one at whom it was aimed: the bad word, splinterlike, pierces to lodge. In its violently emotional materiality, the word is indeed made flesh and dwells amongst us-often long outstaying its welcome. Old word-scars embody a "knowing it by heart," as if phrases had been hurled like darts into that thickly pulsating organ. But their resonances are not amorous. Where amnesia would help us, we can't forget.

This sonorous and indwelling aspect of vindictive words might help to characterize how, say, racist speech works on and in its targets. But wouldn't such a speculation risk simply advocating a systematic cultivation of deafness on the part of those liable to get hurt-or worse, be a criticism of their linguistic vulnerability; "They just shouldn't be so linguistically sensitive"? There's much to be said, certainly, in favor of studiously practicing indifference. But the old playground chant of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me" was always notoriously untrue. The success of a tactics of indifference to harsh speech will also depend on the vicissitudes of those words' fate in the world, and that lies beyond my control. I change too. The thing upon which malevolent accusation falls, I am still malleable, while the words themselves will undergo their own alterations in time, and so their import for me will weaken or intensify accordingly. On occasion the impact of violent speech may even be recuperable through its own incantation; the repetition of abusive language may be occasionally saved through the irony of iteration, which may drain the venom out of the original insult, and neutralize it by displaying its idiocy. Yet angry interpellation's very failure to always work as intended (since at particular historical moments, I maybe able to parody, to weaken by adopting, to corrode its aim) is also exactly what, at other times, works for it. In any event, interpellation operates with a deep indifference as to where the side of the good may lie. And we can't realistically build an optimistic theory of the eventual recuperability of linguistic harm. For here there's no guaranteed rational progress-nor, though, any inescapable irrationality. Repetition will breed its own confident mishearing, but its volatile alterations lean neither toward automatic amelioration nor inevitable worsening.

This observation, though, leaves us with the still largely uninvestigated forensics of spoken injury. Pragmatic studies of swearing certainly exist, but swear words as such are not the topic I have in mind. Nor is "righteous" anger. My preoccupation here is far darker, and restricted to the extreme: some sustained hostility of unremitting verbal violence, like the linguistic voodoo which can induce the fading away of its target, a phenomenon which can't be dismissed as an archaism. The curse does work. Verbal attacks, in the moment they happen, resemble stoning. Then isn't it too labored to ask how they do damage: isn't the answer plain, that they hurt just as stones hurt? At the instant of their impact, so they do. Yet the peculiarity of violent words, as distinct from lumps of rock, is their power to resonate within their target for decades after the occasion on which they were weapons. Perhaps an urge to privacy about being so maliciously named may perpetuate the words' remorseless afterlife: I keep what I was told I was to myself, out of reserve, shame, a wish not to seem mawkish and other not-too-creditable reasons; yet even if I manage to relinquish my fatal stance of nursing my injury, it may well refuse to let go of me. Why, though, should even the most irrational of verbal onslaughts lodge in us as if it were the voice of justice; and why should it stubbornly resist ejection, and defy its own fading? For an accusation to inhere, must its human target already be burdened with her own prehistory of vulnerability, her psychic susceptibility; must it even depend on her anticipating readiness to accept, even embrace, the accusation that also horrifies her? Maybe, then, there's some fatal attraction from the aggression uttered in the present toward earlier-established reverberations within us-so that to grasp its lure, we would have to leave a linguistic account to turn instead to a prelinguistic psychic account. Yet here the standard contrast between the linguistic and the psychic, in which we are usually forced to plump for either the unconscious or language, is especially unhelpful. There's nothing beyond interpellation, if by that beyond is meant a plunge into an ether of the psyche as soon as we topple off the ledge of the historical and linguistic. For refusing these thoroughly synthetic alternatives needn't commit us to a belief in an instantaneous, ahistorical impact of the bad word-or to assume some primal word of injury which laid us open subsequently to verbal assault, as if the chronology of harm must always unfold in a straight line of descent.

The impact of violence in the present may indeed revive far older associations in its target. An accusation will always fall onto some kind of linguistic soil, be it fertile or poor; and here a well-prepared loam is no doubt commoner than a thin veneer on bare rock. Should we, though, necessarily call such a variation in anger's reception its "psychic" dimension, in a tone which implies a clear separation from the domain of words? There has, undoubtedly, to be something very strong at work to explain why we can't readily shake off some outworn verbal injury. The nature of this strong thing, though, might better be envisaged as a seepage or bleeding between the usual categorizations; it need not be allocated wholesale to an unconscious considered as lying beyond the verbal, or else to a sphere of language considered as narrowly functional. For the deepest intimacy joins the supposedly linguistic to the supposedly psychic; these realms, distinct by discursive convention, are scarcely separable. Then instead of this distinction, an idea of affective words as they indwell might be more useful-and this is a broadly linguistic conception not contrasted to, or opposed to, the psychic. So, for instance, my amateur philology may be a quiet vengeance: my fury may be, precisely, an intense, untiring, scrupulous contemplation of those old words of malediction which have stuck under the skin.

The tendency of malignant speech is to ingrow like a toenail, embedding itself in its hearer until it's no longer felt to come "from the outside." The significance of its original emanation from another's hostility becomes lost to the recipient as a tinnitus of remembered attack buzzes in her inner ear. The hard word reverberates-so much so that it holds the appeal of false etymology (it's easy to assume that to reverberate derives from characteristically self-repeating verbal actions, whereas it meant striking or beating back). That it reverberates, rather than echoes, places it well beyond the possibilities of ironic recuperation that Echo offers; reverberation will only resound, to its own limit. And rancorous phrases, matted in a wordy undergrowth, appear to be "on the inside" as one fights them down while they perpetually spring up again. This is where it's crucial to recall that the accusations originally came from the outside, and the rage they echo was another's rage. But this half-consolation of the realist's recourse to history is not enough. We also need to dedramatize the words as they continue their whirring, and to sedate their bitter resonances in the inner ear's present time. For however does anyone withstand this common experience of being etched and scored with harsh names? One art of survival, I'll suggest, is to concede that "yes, this person really wanted me dead then"; yet in the same breath to see that the hostile wish is not identical with the excessive hostility of the lingering word, which has its own slow-burning temporality. The accuser's personal rage has a different duration from the resonances of the recalled inner word: to be able to separate and apportion these two will help. We'd need to try out some art of seeing the denouncer as separate from the denunciation, while also at its mercy himself. Is there some stoical language practice to counter the property of accusation to continue its corrosive work, even though the accuser may have died years ago? How this might be attempted is ventured in the following discussion, where no kindly strategy of humanizing and forgiving the pronouncer of the bad word or of grasping the special susceptibility of its human target is suggested, but a cooler tactic of enhancing the objectification of the word itself. It's the very thinglike nature of the bad word which may, in fact, enable its target to find release from its insistent reverb.

Accusation Often Lodges in the Accused

There was until recently in Paris, on rue Pave in the quatrime, a decrepit-looking language school which displayed in its window, in English (on a dusty cloth banner, in fifties-style white on red lettering) this injunction: "Don't let the English language beat you-Master it before it masters you." A curious exhortation to have been chosen as a motto by any language school-since for the native speaker the onrush of language is unstoppable, yet the exhortation is also irrelevant for the nonnative, who's never subject to joyous capture by a language not her first.

But what certainly threatens any comforting notion of our mastering language is the gripping power of predatory speech, which needs our best defensive efforts in the face of its threatened mastery of us. It's true enough, though, that not only imperious accusation is apt to indwell. So can lyric, gorgeous fragments, psalms and hymns; beautiful speech also comes to settle in its listeners. There's an unholy coincidence between beauty and cruelty in their verbal mannerisms; citation, reiteration, echo, quotation may work benignly, or as a poetics of abusive diction. If graceful speech is memorable, by what devices do violently ugly and lovely language both inhere; what does the internal strumming of metrical quotation have in common with the compulsions of aggressive speech? Yet perhaps the happily resonant indwelling of lyric may be explained in ways also fitting the unhappy experience of being mastered by hard words far better forgotten. Evidently there exists what we could call "linguistic love," a love sparked and sustained by the appeal of another's spoken or written words-that is, by something in the loved person which is also not of her and which lies largely beyond her control-her language. But if there is a linguistic love which is drawn outward to listen, there's also linguistic hatred, felt by its object as drawn inward. A kind of "extimacy" prevails in both cases. Imagined speech hollows can resemble a linguistic nursing home, in which old fragments of once-voiced accusation or endearment may resentfully or soulfully lodge. Where verbal recurrences are distressed, they are carried as scabs, encrustations, calcification, cuts. If inner speech can sing, it can also tirelessly whisper, mutter, contemplate under its breath to itself, and obsessively reproach itself. It can angrily fondle those names it had once been called. If there's a habitual (if not inevitable) closeness between accusation and interpellation, there's also an echolalic, echoic aspect to interpellation itself. Persecutory interpellation's shadow falls well beyond the instant of its articulation. There are ghosts of the word which always haunt any present moment of enunciation, rendering that present already murmurous and thickly populated. Perhaps "the psyche" is recalled voices as spirit voices manifesting themselves clothed in the flesh of words, and hallucinated accusation may underscore some factually heard accusation. There is in effect a verbal form of post-traumatic stress disorder, marked by unstoppable aural flashbacks. Here anamnesia, unforgetting, is a linguistic curse of a disability. We hear much about the therapeutics of retrieved memory. The inability to forget, too, has been classified as a neurological illness.

If language spills to flood everywhere, if it has no describable "beyond," such a broadly true claim can't tell us exactly how it operates on its near side and why its apparent innerness is so ferocious. The reach of a malevolent word's reverberation is incalculable; it may buzz in the head of its hearer in a way that far exceeds any impact that its utterer had in mind. Yet its impress may be weak. Or it may feed melodramas of an apparent addiction to domestic-as-linguistic violence: imagine someone who habitually ends up in a position of pleading with those deaf to all her appeals to act humanely, when it was long clear that they would not do so, yet at those dark moments it seemed to her that her whole possibility of existence was at stake in extracting a humane word from them, although in the past this had always proved impossible. She compulsively redesigns a scenario in which her question "Am I a bad person?" can be asked and answered in its own unhappy terms; for she cannot get her ancient interrogation taken seriously by someone who's not already her opponent; anyone else would rephrase her question, returning it to her to demonstrate its hopelessness. Only she can undo it. Meanwhile if she persists in posing it as it stands, it will only receive an affirmative answer. Then must the force of "the psychic" be isolated here, if the unrelenting person to whom she presents her hopeless appeal is always rediscovered with a terrible reliability, if some damaging interlocutor conveniently appears and reappears for her-while she, the impassioned questioner, labors as if to discover grounds for believing, despite her own sound memories of actual events, that such cruelty could not really have happened?

To continue in this (fatally exhilarating) vein of psychologizing speculation-the capacity of lacerating accusation to indwell may be such that while its target is fearful that it may be true, she's also fearful that it may not be true, which would force the abandonment of her whole story. As if in order to "justify" the decades of unhappiness that it has caused her, she almost needs the accusation to be correct-as much as in the same breath, she vehemently repudiates it. Perhaps she would rather take the blame on herself for the harm of the past, because it has already and irretrievably been visited upon her, than to admit it had happened arbitrarily, in that she was then (as a child) truly helpless, an accidental object lying in the path of the assault. Perhaps the need for the accusation to be true, as well as to be simultaneously fought against, is in part her wish to have some rationale, and hence less of frightening contingency as the only explanation for the damage. Perhaps her pleadings for exoneration are also pleadings to have some logic underlying the blame laid bare, so that at last she can grasp and understand it. Hence her tendency to ask repeatedly, "But then why am I, as you tell me I am, an evil person?" There is an anxiety of interpellation, in which its subject ponders incessantly to herself "Am I that name; am I really one of those?" Her query, while it interrogates the harsh attribution, stays under its rigid impress. She needs to find those to whom she can address it and have it taken seriously, despite its capacity to provoke their irritation; this is why recalcitrantly obdurate people will always prove her "best" (that is, least malleable) addressees. She is reluctant to be emancipated from her distressing situation, only because that rescue would makes retrospective nonsense out of a wrong that she was forced to live out as if it had a rationale. Her attachment to the apparent truth inherent in her damnation (even while she nervously denies it) is that in order to make sense of the misery it has caused, she must know it to have been deserved. To have that mimesis of logic taken away from her in retrospect, to be shorn of its "necessity" in the name of her own emancipation is hard-despite the fact that she also profoundly disbelieved in it. For a long time she has struggled intently to convey intelligibility to the damage in the moment that she underwent it, as if there had to be a truth in it. This is a difficult point, and I'm not hinting at any masochistic notion of hers that her pain is deserved, is her own fault-but am simply describing her wish for there to have been some necessity to it, in order to justify it in retrospect.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from IMPERSONAL PASSIONby DENISE RILEY Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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