What is this value? This is the best answer I know: “Value does not carry whatever it is written on its forehead. Instead, it transforms each of the fruits of labor into a hieroglyph. In time, man seeks to decipher the meaning of the hieroglyph, to penetrate the secrets of the social creation to which he contributes, and this transformation of useful objects into objects of value is one society’s creations, just like language itself.” The author of this splendid discovery is the sadly ill-reputed Karl Marx. Value as meaning: anyone interested in literature can grasp the common sense of this notion, akin to Keats’s Beauty as Truth and Truth as Beauty. “What imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth—whether it existed there or not,” Keats wrote to a friend. Value then is a metaphor, as are Truth and Beauty. They stand as conceptual realities, things that we know are there, in our flesh and blood, but that, like the thrill of King Lear, cannot be defined more precisely.
A company, an aptly called Anonymous Society, a Multinational, or an Umbrella Organization, is a thing invisible and incorporeal, except in its effects. It has no face, no soul. The “value” of its labors, the meaning of its metaphors is falsely advertised, and it is society’s dull obligation to read its pronouncements closely, over and over again, in order to be aware of their potential harm in which we are, as citizens, implicated.
In March 2000, Paul Stewart, one of the directors of the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, was touring an AIDS clinic in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town. Boehringer is the maker of Nevirapine, a drug used to treat certain AIDS-related illnesses, and Stewart, according to an article by Jon Jeter in the Washington Post (20 April 2001), was in South Africa to prevent the production of a generic version of the drug. At a certain point in the tour, Stewart came upon an emaciated seven-year-old boy alone in a crowded waiting room. The boy was too weak to lift his head, and his chest was covered in raw blisters. Stewart grew pale. “I would like to pay for his treatment, personally,” he blurted out. Wisely, the clinic’s director told Stewart that it was too late for such private emotional responses. Stewart had to do more than address one single heartbreaking case. He had to confront the vastness of the problem, the large moral question, the horror of which the seven-year-old boy was the visible reality, a horror in which Stewart’s company played an intricate part, a horror which Stewart could not change by the expiatory gesture of digging into his pockets.
I am not certain that a piece of writing, any writing, however brilliant and moving, can affect the reality of South Africa’s AIDS sufferers, or any other reality. There may be no poem, however powerful, that can remove one ounce of pain or transform a single moment of injustice. But there may be no poem, however poorly written, that may not contain, for its secret and elected reader, a consolation, a call to arms, a glimmer of happiness, an epiphany. Something there is in the modest page that, mysteriously and unexpectedly, allows us, not wisdom, but the possibility of wisdom, caught between the experience of everyday life and the experience of literary reality.
There is perhaps a metaphor that may conjure up this space between our imagining of the world and the page (from the point of view of the writer) or the space between the solid page and our imagining the world (from the point of view of the reader). In the seventh canto of the Inferno, Dante describes the punishment of thieves who in the looking-glass universe of sin and retribution are condemned to losing even their own human forms and are endlessly transformed into creature after monstrous creature. These transformations happen in staggered stages, gradually, so that at no one time is the agonized soul a single self-possessed shape. And Dante says (this, in Richard Wilbur’s translation):
Just so, when paper burns, there runs before
the creeping flame a stain of darkish hue
that, though not black as yet, is white no more.
Between the blankness of the page and the authoritarian letters in black, there is a space, a moment, a color in which, ever-changing, the writer and the reader both may find illumination just before the meaning is consumed by the flames.
PART FOUR
Wordplay
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 6
The Full Stop
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go
on till you come to the end: then stop.”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 12
DIMINUTIVE AS A MOTE OF DUST, a mere peck of the pen, a crumb on the keyboard, the full stop is the unsung legislator of our writing systems. Without it, there would be no end to the sorrows of young Werther, and the travels of the Hobbit would have never been completed. Its absence allowed James Joyce to weave Finnegans Wake into a perfect circle, and its presence made Henri Michaux compare our essential being to this dot, “a dot that death devours.” It crowns the fulfillment of thought, gives the illusion of conclusiveness, possesses a certain haughtiness that stems, like Napoleon’s, from its minuscule size. Anxious to get going, we require nothing to signal our beginnings, but we need to know when to stop: this tiny memento mori reminds us that everything, ourselves included, must one day come to a halt. As an anonymous English teacher suggested in the 1680 Treatise of stops, Points or Pauses, a full stop is “a Note of perfect Sense, and of a perfect Sentence.”
The need to indicate the end of a written phrase is probably as old as writing itself, but the solution, brief and wonderful, was not set down until the Italian Renaissance. For ages, punctuation had been a desperately erratic affair. Already in the first century a.d., the Spanish author Quintilian (who had not read Henry James) had argued that a sentence, as well as expressing a complete idea, had to be capable of being delivered in a single breath. How that sentence should be ended was a matter of personal taste, and for a long time scribes punctuated their texts with all manner of signs and symbols, from a simple blank space to a variety of dots and slashes. In the early fifth century, Saint Jerome, translator of the Bible, devised a system, known as per cola et commata, in which each unity of sense would be signaled by a letter jutting out of the margin, as if beginning a new paragraph. Three centuries later, the punctus, or dot, was used to indicate both a pause within the sentence and the sentence’s conclusion. Following such muddled conventions, authors could hardly expect their public to read a text in the sense they had intended.