What Orwell can teach us about the language of terror and war | Books | The Guardian

[ish mailian]

I'm always reminded of Slothrop when I read Merton on Vietnam and on
language. In the end, you can't have a dialogue with the devil. You can
only say, Fuck You. Or whatever magical phrase works for you.







However that may be, the revolutionary tactic that tends to harass and
immobilize the Goliath of technological military power and bring it down
largely by its own elephantine weight has at the same time created a new
language that mocks the ponderous and self-important utterances of the
Establishment. This new language, racy, insolent, direct, profane,
iconoclastic, and earthy, may have its own magic incantation myth. It may
be involved in its own elaborate set of illusions. But at least it
represents a healthier and more concrete style of thought. It does not
reduce everything to abstractions, and though it is fully as intransigent
as the language of the Establishment, it still seems to be more in contact
with relevant experience: the hard realities of poverty, brutality, vice,
and resistance.

Yet, flexible though it might be in some respects, it remains another
language of power, therefore of self-enclosed finality, which rejects
dialogue and negotiation on the axiomatic supposition that the adversary is
a devil with whom no dialogue is possible.


WAR AND THE CRISIS OF LANGUAGE

http://www.aloha.net/~stroble/merton2.html



On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 5:29 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

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> http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/12/words-on-war-a-summons-to-writers-orwell-lecture?CMP=share_btn_tw
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> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
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