T1 - On the Origin of the Video Essay
Yet in all these cases we believe that it is to thelanguage and not to the poet that the main creditis due. The language is the perfect instrument,and in the poet’s hands it is used with perfectpower; but were it not for the original perfectionof his instrument he would be unable to producesuch rich and varied results; he would be unableto place the picture before the eye by bringinginto play that swift and subtle law of associationwhereby a reproduction of the sounds at oncerecalls to the inner eye the images or circumstanceswith which they are connected. In everycase the consummate art and skill of the writerconsists simply in choosing the proper words forthe thought which he wishes to express, whichwords are always the simplest. Appropriatelanguage is and always must be the most effective,and when a writer clearly goes out of hisway to produce an effect he generally loses hiseffectiveness by abandoning simplicity. Howmuch onomatopœia degenerates in a less skilfuland artistic hand we might see in many instances,were not the selection of them an invidious task.
It is wonderful that the knowledge and observationof facts like these did not lead the philologistsof antiquity to a solution of their disputesabout the natural or conventional origin oflanguages. The age of Psammetichus evincedits interest in the question, and if it had beencontent to observe its own experiment, instead ofmaking it the prop to a “foregone conclusion,”philosophers might have agreed, long ago, inbelieving, that man was assisted by nature in thedevelopment of his implanted powers, and that,like every infant of his race, he framed into livingspeech the sounds by which his senses were firstimpressed. When the first man gave names tothe animals, which, as we have already seen, hewas enabled to do by the reasonable use of hisown faculties, and not at the dictation of a voicefrom heaven, he could not have been guided byany principle so obvious, so easy, or so appropriateas an artistic reproduction of the soundswhich they uttered. What this peculiar sound may be, we do notknow, but can hardly reconcile this suggestion ofNodier with the statement, that the name, Hott-en-totis itself onomatopœian, having been givenby the first Dutch settlers, because this clickwould sound to a stranger like a perpetualrepetition of the syllables hot and tot. It is acurious fact that Palamedes is said to have learnt,from the noise of cranes, the four letters whichhe added to the Greek alphabet; and it is certainlya confirmation of these remarks, that although nolanguage possesses in its alphabet a power ofexpressing every possible articulation, yet nonation’s language is quite deficient in the powerof expressing, by imitation, the cries of its indigenousanimals. Wherever the faculty of creating appellationsis still required, we still find a capacity for itsexercise. For instance, it has been asserted that“the day after an army has encamped in anunknown country all the important or characteristicplaces have their names without any conventionhaving intervened.” We find an analogouscase in the fact that the French and English, bycommon consent, called the Turks Bono Johnny;the exact reasons for such a nomenclature wouldbe perhaps difficult to determine, and who shallsay who first used or invented the term? yet itbecame current in a day or two. It is equallydifficult to trace the history and origin of variouspopular phrases which every now and then have abrief run in ordinary phraseology. We have purposely modified our statement ofthese conclusions, because there is too great atendency to general assertions, against which, asW. von Humboldt well remarked, science shouldbe always on its guard. It is a saying ofSchlegel’s, that, so great is the variety of procedurein different languages, that there isscarcely one language which might not be chosento illustrate some particular hypothesis. Forinstance, the sole similarity between Chinese andSanskrit rests in the fact that both aim at thesame end, viz., the expression of thought. Thusonomatopœia is far from being found in all languagesin the same degree, and it is much moreobservable in the Semitic than in the Indo-Europeanfamily, in which, however ancient theword may be proved to be, it constantly bearswitness to those poetic and philosophic instinctsof our race which clearly prove that reason wasnot a slow and painful growth. D'Agata wants more lyrical essays, ones that do not concern themselves primarily with transmitting data--not that they should be pure fiction, but that they can focus on experience and emotion.
The wider ambit allows for some interesting essays here, but also what felt like a lot of extraneous ones--I got the feeling his eye was more on the textbook market. It's weirder, too.
D'Agata's project remains the same: to show the diversity of the essay form, breaking it from what it is accepted as today: a (relatively) short piece with the main goal of communicating information.
Well, therein lies halfthe work of essay writing.
It provides a new way at looking at essays, or rather, the continuation of a rather long tradition that may have been briefly subsumed in the wave of writing that followed the "New Journalists." I'm a fan of New Journalism, an avid reader of David Foster Wallace, but I still found much to recommend in this collection of essays that spans from BCE to the 1970's.
Essays Exploring craft and the writing life
How far the growth of language was affectedby external circumstances,—as, for instance, bythe impress of individual minds, by the aristocracyor even autocracy of philosophic bodies, bythe influence of sex, by the variations of climate,by the convulsions of history, by the slow changeof religious or political convictions, and even bythe laws of euphony and organisation, we mayconsider hereafter; but we must first of all enteron two very interesting preliminary inquiries, viz.,1, How did words first come to be accepted assigns at all? and, 2, By what processes did menhit upon the words themselves? Or, to put thequestions differently: 1, How did various modulationsof the human voice acquire any significanceby being connected with outward or inwardphenomena? and, 2, What special causes led inspecial cases to the choice of some particularmodulations rather than of any other?
You are currently reading Out of Bounds: The Origin of An Essay at .
In short, language is “only divine in proportionto the divinity of our nature and our soul;”it is only a gift of God because the facultynaturally resulted from the physical and spiritualorganism which God had created. This seems amore natural and philosophic supposition thanthe belief that even the embryonic germ of languagewas revealed. The exercise of the facultyin the original utterance of primitive words hasceased to be called into play because it hasceased to be required. We cannot now inventoriginal words because there is no longer anynecessity for doing so. In the same way—as iswell known—a deaf mute when once instructedin an artificial language loses the quick instinctivepower of creating intelligible natural signs.
T1 - “On the Origin of the Video Essay”
Kenko's "Essays in Idleness" is presented as an example of "associative and irregular" writing, without any mention of its reception history in Japan (where it is not famous for those properties, which are given to other texts), or its troubled presentation of gender roles.
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