Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

David Allen White: “the ongoing disaster happening in language and in narrative and its replacement by image and visceral incident.” He sets out his biases and doesn't apologize for them: he is a professor of English and a Catholic, and therefore words and the Word of God are the things that he lives and breaths. He points his ire towards television: “we are aware that we live in a world that does worship wealth, that places the material above the spiritual, and we must acknowledge that. But I claim there is something even more insidious going on-that the moving image, the image captured on the screen, can also in one sense be viewed as a graven image, and we live in a world that is coming to worship it. This graven image is finally demonic and destructive and we have been ordered not to worship it.”

White believes that language is the key to humanity, and that because men and men only were granted language, that it is language that makes us special in God's eyes. “Language is necessary in order for man to be a rational creature, and only to man has it been given. Some claim that porpoises and gorillas talk. It is only a sign of how far this has gone when I have to defend the proposition that language is unique to man. For years propaganda has come down that the porpoises are squeaking to each other, that the gorillas are talking to each other, and the chimpanzees can push the right button and get their banana. What we know is that language is special, and it is one of the things that defines man. Beyond being a manifestation of his power to reason, language is there so that we can pray, that we can communicate. We can write beautiful things which appeal to reason, such as poetry, etc. But, perhaps first and most importantly, I defer to St. Paul who tells us that faith itself comes by hearing.” Obviously an expert at using language to instill fear (“propaganda has come down”) and with someone who has a dual interest—faith and profession—to not only preserve language but single it out as the reason for our uniqueness, a little skepticism may be in order. In the paragraph that follows the above, he acknowledges the power that the use of language has in Catholicism.

White bemoans the decreasing importance in having an adequate vocabulary in order for people to express themselves: “Language is deteriorating, vocabularies are shrinking, people are less and less able to express themselves linguistically or have a pool of words to draw on to describe what they think and feel. As a result, in its place, they are often compelled instead to wordless action because they are blocked in their very nature. I suspect it has something to do with why there is an increased level of violence in the world. With words no longer available to us, we act physically because that's what we know and what we've seen.” He does not make a very strong case for the inverse relationship between violence and vocabulary: the words “I suspect” are too weak. It's an attempt to soften a claim, making it less absolute by making it a suspicion so that disproving it would be a less of a blow to his ego. White goes on to bemoan the quality and accuracy of information on the Internet (echoes of Harold Bloom, and is White aware of the irony of appearing on the Internet in order to decry it?) and says that the moving image cannot be considered beautiful because it does not present a story in the same way a book does. Alexander Nehamas, in terms of TV, would probably disagree.

If I could get around the Catholic rhetoric and the disdain for a medium I love—the Internet, but White and I are in agreement to a degree about TV and movies—I probably would have enjoyed this article more. He's right that ours is not a culture which prizes beautiful language, but he didn't do a very good job of proving it.