While Mantissa provides many scenes that leave themselves available for a close reading, the scene I chose occurs very early on, when "Miles Green" (if that is his real name) awakes from his coma and is just re-introduced into the world and in turn, the world of language.
"Her mouth began to announce names, people's names, street names, place names, disjointed phrases. Some were repeated. He had perhaps heard them before, as words; but he had no idea what relevance they were supposed to have, nor why they should increasingly sound like evidence of crimes he had committed. In the end he shook his head. He would have liked to close his eyes, to have peace to reforget, to be one again with the sleeping blank page of oblivion." pg. 5-6
This passage immediately stood out for me, Green is hearing words that he may know, but really all they are to him at this point are sounds he mildly recognizes. This is an idea that is very interesting to me and I linked to structuralism very quickly. Structuralism looks specifically at the linguistic aspect of a text, the meaning of the language utilized within a body of work and this passage directly applies to that idea. Green has woken from what is assumed to be a coma and has no recollection of his past life, and as we find out, has no understanding of words that once meant something to him. Without a past referent, a meaning that he was once taught and no longer remembers, these words have no meaning to him, they are really just sounds to him, phonetic noises that relate to nothing that he is familiar with.
This scene also led me to think about Saussure's ideas of language as a system of dyads, binary opposites that allow us to understand a meaning. Green has no knowledge of anything at this point, and the words that his wife speaks to him, while he does hear them, might as well be incoherent noises, as he has nothing to refer them against. Not only does he no longer remember the places, people, and things that she is talking about, he doesn't remember their opposites. His knowledge is minimal and we are able to see that words do not have an intrinsic, essential meaning but are formulated in regards to other things, and as Green doesn't know any of these things his wife's attempts to jog his memory might as well be gibberish, as he is completely unable to understand the 'words' that she is saying to him.
Hey! You With the Face!
15 years ago
1 comment:
Great post! I really likes the way that you connected Mantissa to Sausseur's ideas on language. I didn't even think about it when reading, however now that you mention it, I see that it does in fact apply. I think also that you could apply the idea of signifier and signified here. Green has a sense of the signifier, however he can not complete the meaning of the language because he has no past memoris in which to base these ideas. He can not complete the the sign because he has no reference for the signified.
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