So, what’s on my mind today? I’ve been thinking about my much beloved, much benighted, and much maligned native land and quo vadis. In his work, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the acclaimed Czech dissident Milan Kundera, writing in exile, recalls a conversation he had with one of his former professors, one of the some 150 history professors who were dismissed from their posts following the Soviet invasion ending the Prague Spring of 1968: “‘The first step in liquidating a people,’ said Hubl, ‘is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around them will forget even faster.’ “‘What about language?’ “‘Why would anyone bother to take it from us? It will soon be a matter of folklore and die a natural death.’ Was that hyperbole dictated by utter despair? Or is it true that a nation cannot cross a desert of organized forgetting? None of us knows what will be. One thing, however, is certain: in moments of clairvoyance the Czech nation can glimpse its own death at close range. Not as an accomplished fact, not as the inevitable future, but as a perfectly concrete possibility. Its death is at its side.” Faulkner in Intruder in the Dust has the boy, from whose viewpoint the tale is being told, ruminate on the nature of his fellow countrymen from “not north, but North” who “looked down on him and his countless row upon row of faces which resembled his face and spoke the same language he spoke and at times even answered to the same names he bore yet between whom and his there was no longer any real kinship and soon, there would not even be any contact since the very mutual words they used would no longer have the same significance and soon after even this would be gone because they would be too far asunder even to hear one another...” Is this is now fait accompli and the language of Faulkner all but become Professor Hubl’s “matter of folklore” and died its natural death. I wonder.
Posted on: Tue, 08 Oct 2013 20:42:58 +0000
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