Carnival

Rolfe Windward (IBALWIN who-is-at mvs.oac.ucla.edu)
Tue, 26 Dec 95 14:57 PST

Ellice and Francoise's comments engender an intriguing confluence in my
mind between the discussions of classroom culture, ideal form, masking/un-
masking and my recent excursions into George Steiner's "After Babel" (many
thanks Jay and Judy: the book, or the 2nd edition (1992) I have at any
rate, is an absolute tour de force). That the primary functions of language
might be creative and hermetic rather than informative is a notion I am
struggling with but apropos the current discussion of carnival it reminds
me of one of my favorite science fiction novellas, Jack Vance's "The Moon
Moth" -- a world where carnival is virtually constant.

In Vance's story, all the denizens (with the possible exception of the
barbaric and cannibalistic Nightmen) wear a mask that both ritualistically
exemplifies their conception of themselves and is simultaneously
sustainable (via voice, music, poetics, and logic) within a society more
than willing to hold the wearer accountable for the congruence of personal
qualities and that projected by the mask. Most citizens possess and wear
more than one mask although most also have a favorite that they may feel
marks their persona and represents their social status most forcefully. To
challenge another's mask can lead to mortal combat; to seek to actually
remove it is a capital offense.

Within this alternative and admittedly somewhat fanciful interpretation, the
problem in classrooms may be that both teacher and student are forced to
wear a mask not of their choosing -- or even that institutional criteria
(e.g., of evaluation) may force an intolerable "unmasking" of the self.
The following from Steiner, concerning both heteroglossia and individual
language use, is illuminating in the contra-respect I think:

"Each different tongue offers its own denial of determinism. 'The world',
it says, 'can be other.' Ambiguity, polysemy, opaqueness, the violation of
grammatical and logical sequences, reciprocal incomprehensions, the
capacity to lie--these are not pathologies of language but the roots of its
genius. Without them the individual and the species would have withered."
p.246

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Rolfe Windward (UCLA GSE&IS, Curriculum & Teaching)
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