One day, way back in
the mid-seventies, a self-styled linguist from abroad, whose hatred towards Noam
Chomsky was incomprehensible to us to say the least, was giving us, graduate
students of linguistics, what he called a critique of Chomsky’s linguistics. During
the lecture, he spent some time telling us about how Chomsky was not paying
income tax and how the clever man was gaining from this act in terms of bank
balance and favourable public attention, both. No wonder, he said, that such a
person was doing the kind of linguistics he was doing. We were unimpressed
partly because we failed to see the connection, but far more because Chomsky’s
income, income tax and bank account were of no interest to us in the first
place.
The fact of the matter is this: discussing
an issue on communication, Chomsky wrote in his Reflections on Language that there was a time he was not paying
part of his income tax in protest against some policies of the US government
(relating to the Vietnam War). And like some others too, he used to write a detailed
and careful letter to the Bureau of internal Revenue every year justifying his non-payment
of the same. He was aware that no one was going to read his note and that his
income tax papers might simply be fed into a computer. Umberto Eco’s shopping
list (the subject matter of an earlier post in this blog) and Chomsky’s letter
to the Bureau are similar in that their respective authors believed that neither
piece was going to be read by others, so neither had any intention to
communicate while writing the same. However, differing from Eco and reflecting
on his own experience, Chomsky observed that although sometimes an author may
have no communicative intention while writing something, he would still writes with
sincerity and care, and would not ignore clarity. It is a different matter that
some people do indeed read such writing. In the context of the same discussion in his Reflections on Language, Chomsky said that
he wrote The Logical Structure of Linguistic
Theory as a graduate student assuming that it would never be read by anyone
or would ever be published. We know that it was published twenty years after it
was written. As for its readers, the eminent linguist James D. McCawley told us
in a lecture what was in circulation in the relevant quarters those days,
namely that when it was first reviewed, even the reviewer of the book had not
read it fully. We do not have to take him literally though. In any case, it is
difficult to agree with Chomsky that when he was writing his lengthy manuscript
he was very much aware that it would not be “read by anyone”; every graduate
student writes his thesis for at least his examiners. We of course need not
take his words too literally and interpret “anyone” as “anyone other than the
thesis adviser and the examiners”, but then it makes the point he was making
weak.
An author may not have any
particular individual or any group of persons in mind while writing, but to say
that he writes knowing full well that no one would read his writing is
difficult to swallow, when he does not make his writing completely inaccessible.
There is of course a coherent answer to the question as to why at all, if one
knows that no one is going to read his piece, one writes logically, clearly and
in an intelligible manner. The answer is that it has to do with the personality
of the author. If he is the sincere and responsible type, it would be reflected
in his writing, if he is a bully or a confused person, it will also be reflected
in his writing. It has thus nothing to do with his communicative intention or
the absence of it.
One can never be sure that one’s
writing will never be read by anyone, except when one destroys the same in
time. The well known Indian author, Raja Rao, who wrote in English, left behind
him much unpublished writing which during his life time he probably did not
want to publish for some reason. Now it appears that those who have access are
trying to have some of them published in some form. From the fact that Raja Rao
did not publish them one cannot conclude that he did not want any one to read them ever. If that were his resolve, then he should not have preserved his writing
in the first place. The fact that he did would suggest that he had no problems
if the same were read after his death. Similarly, from the very fact that
Chomsky sent his letters to the Bureau of Internal Revenue one would think that
he certainly would not have minded if someone there read them. One would never be
persuaded to accept the claim that an author wrote for himself, for one’s own
satisfaction or for the fulfilment of one’s creative urge, so long as he
preserves his writing.
That is why the only stuff I
believe that are written without any
communicative intention are the shy, self-conscious, conservative teen aged lover’s
poems or billet doux, which readily end up, torn into tiny pieces, in the
wastepaper basket.
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