Humans use mostly language to
communicate. There are of course other modes of communication that they use,
but to only a limited extent. For this reason some tend to think that language (which
is not really created by humans but is basically an “object” of nature, as Noam
Chomsky has so persuasively argued) exists for communication; with a little
reflection we can see that this idea is clearly unsatisfactory. We use flowers and
leaves for many purposes but to say that these exist so that we humans can use
them is being not just illogical but extremely arrogant as well. What is it if
not sheer arrogance if one believes that nature exists for the use of humans?
This is essentially what Bertrand Russell had observed more than half a century
ago in a similar context. It is sometimes said that language is used, not for
communication alone but for self-expression as well. When one uses it for
self-expression, one has no intention to share with anyone what he expresses. But
isn’t self-expression itself a kind of communication, an interaction with the
other - a philosophically inclined person would ask - between the self and the
soul? As for those who cannot accommodate soul in their view of things, there is
the inner voice which most, more often than not, tend to ignore and sometimes
only grudgingly listen to? But why think of all this, when we have an excellent
example in the form of a shy young person who writes soulful poems but does not
share them with anyone at all? While composing them he might (in fact, does!) have
somebody in mind who inspires his poetic self and to whom his literary output
is secretly dedicated. But there isn’t even communication intention in this
case, let alone communication. But here too one can argue, using “communication
between body-soul/ inner voice” as a kind of template, that the poetic outburst
of the poet-lover is indeed an event of communication between him and his living
inspiration, no matter that the latter is never going to read his poems since they
would head into the wastepaper basket minutes after they come to exist.
Umberto Eco thinks that language
use is for communication alone. One always writes for others, none of whom
barring a few, one would ever get to know. The ancient Indian philosopher-poet,
Bhartrihari, had a similar view, only that his reader could be distanced from
him in terms of even place and time, quite a thing to say centuries ago. For Eco,
the one who says that he writes for none but himself is not being honest. There
is only one exception to it, he adds; when one writes his “shopping list”, one
does not have anyone in his mind with whom to share it. It is a different
matter that although they might never acknowledge it, some would be delighted
to read shopping lists of others, for instance, the celebrities!
I am unable to agree with Eco on
the shopping list. During my childhood (that was sixty years ago), in my
village some members of the village “elite” (two or three families out of six
hundred households) would not go to the miserable-looking grocery shop in the
village to shop, but would ask a poor teen aged boy of their neighbourhood, or
better, a pupil of the village “minor” school (from class IV to VII) from a
poor family, to run to the grocer’s and get their stuff for them. The errand
boy was never given a small mint for his effort; he wasn’t given money to pay
the shopkeeper. The shopping arithmetic of errand boys, who could not afford
private tuition which was very much there those days, was believed to be
atrocious. He could not be trusted to
remember all the items needed for the household and the desired quantity of
each. So the elite customer wrote lists and signed them at the bottom: neatly
and unhurriedly - some are as fond of their signatures as a dictator is of the
treasury of his state. The shop keeper
was supposed to pin all such lists, and at the end of a respectable period go
to the elite customer’s house with these to receive payment. He would get his
due on his first visit only if he was immensely lucky. Eco was surely unaware
of such a mode of shopping. In any case, here is a shopping list that was
written for a particular person.
So the shopping list may not be a
real counter-example to the eminent writer’ own general statement. Perhaps we
must not take the “shopping list” so literally, although it was indeed this
particular document that he had in mind. We could view it instead as a symbol
of all those mundane and insignificant things one writes every day, which, in
one’s reckoning, have no value for anyone. In any case, the fact remains that Eco
immortalized the shopping list. As far as I know, before Eco, this little thing
had never appeared in any discourse on communication.
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