"English Proper"

 

(An Interpretation of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals.)

 

 

 

 

Why do we chose this, this mad task? Or, put differently: "why knowledge at all?" Everyone will ask us this. And we, pressed in this way, we, who have been compelled to interrogate ourselves in precisely this fashion, we found and find no better answer....

-Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, "Our Virtues."

 

 

 

    What does it mean when someone in Scandinavia or on the Continent uses the word "lift," instead of "elevator," when speaking English? or when he goes so far as to say that British English "just" sounds better, is "more refined," "less vulgar" than the English spoken in the New World (where Glasgow and even Liverpool are "New")? when he refuses to reach back into his throat to pronounce the strong, lionesque 'R' of the revolt against the Crown, the 'R' of Joyce and Whitman and the Westward glance -- all because such an 'R' "simply" sounds coarse? The meaning is anything but simple. It expresses a choice forced upon us by the horror vacui of modernity: shall we will to the East or to the West, back towards the morning, towards the ancien régime, or forwards, towards new regimes and new experiments? The meaning of this European taste, of the choice made here, is nothing other than this: "Long live the Queen!"

    The petrifaction of the values, of the "taste" behind these English preferences obscures their true heritage. The petrifaction has gone so far that even where the preferences have begun to change, such as in Sweden, the terms in which they are couched still reflect these ancient values: "I prefer to speak American English because I like the coarse sound of the language, and I don't like bothering about grammar and diction." (Something Americans hear from well-meaning Europeans often.)

    What drives these loves and hates? Whence the extraordinary power which allows these values to exert their hold century after century? A "genealogy" might help us uncover the logos of this power, this genos of taste.

 

*

 

    The logos of English taste spans the trivial and mundane, to the intricate and, if I may, "elevated."

    Let's consider a few examples, beginning with the former sort. One of the bases of the preference, however uncommon today (especially in Scandinavia), is political. The preference is consciously strategic. The goal is to register an opposition to American politics, to reject its arrogant, selfish orientation towards the world, and to oppose even its treatment of its own citizens. Indeed, Americans are too "vulgar" to manage their own democracy.

    While there's nothing wrong with making language choices on a strategic basis like this, the view of America which undergirds this choice is ridiculous, and is the result of a category mistake. Whatever the huge problems with American democracy, America needs to be understood for what it is: a superpower. Indeed, since the close of World War II, it has been the only superpower in the world, notwithstanding the political rhetoric of the 1950's and 1960's. (Sputnik and the World Trade Center attack are merely exceptions that prove the rule of America's invincibility.) Qua superpower, the United States is a political miracle. Nixon resigned. Few have grasped the world-historical significance of this. Can one imagine the leader of the only modern European superpower, The Third Reich, simply resigning if he were caught illegally obtaining information about a political opponent's campaign (to say nothing of being caught turning Jews into soap)?

    In any event, the experience of listening to Continental twenty-something's struggling to speak in the English of Professor Henry Higgins as they discourse on the failure of American politics is surreal, given that the foreign policy of Great Britain is essentially identical to that of the U.S. To take a stance against the U.S. via language preference by choosing the Queen's English is thus utterly incoherent, to say nothing of unimaginative, given the numerous other options: Irish English or Scottish English, or even the English of Eliza Doolittle. (Or, for that matter, why not let go of the idea that native speakers -- whichever ones are chosen -- are the standard-bearers, and, instead, let Continental English develop in a way internal to the lives of those who speak it, choosing whichever pronunciations and idioms fit the local cultures. As it is now, culturally irrelevant rules have compelled those on the Continent, despite their extraordinary gifts and experience with foreign languages, to speak an English which is grotesquely flat and lifeless -- a mutilated, stiff, ungainly trade-language, bereft of all poetry: a kind of European Swahili.)

    (Best of all: let us Good Europeans forget English altogether, and, instead, revive Latin. Or, if we are to let our imaginations roam most freely of all: svenska -- a grammatically simple, yet melodically bewitching language that might, with its hyberborean rhythms and unexpected accents, lift Europe out of its dogmatic slumber. This would be an insane, nearly impossible goal, of course, but, as Nietzsche writes in Jenseits von Gut und Böse, such mad goals -- "tolle Aufgabe" -- may be the only ones we can't avoid, the only ones we can't not choose, can't "unchoose." A Wille zum Englisch is just a Wille zum Gott, a willing backwards in time; a Wille zum Schwedisch would, on the other hand, strike out against the reigning Zeitgeist of Europe, this levelling of difference: a common language, a common currency -- what's next? The United States of Europe? -- all in order to compete, more efficiently, with... The United States of America?)

    Of course, the more common basis of the preference for British English, especially among older generations, is the connection perceived between British English and High Culture on the one hand, and, on the other, New World English and "vulgarity." Even if we could change the terms of the assessment -- eliminating the loaded, prejudicial terms, "high culture" and "vulgar," replacing them with "good" and "bad" -- it would be difficult for many Europeans to make any assessment whatsoever of the culture of the New World, for the simple reason that they are only exposed to the worst of it. I can't count the number of times a European has tried to imitate an American accent, and has sounded like either a Valley Girl, or an MTV VJ. On the other hand, when Europeans try to imitate a British accent, they sound more like the Queen. Why? In part because British television, at least until recently, was largely dominated by the productions of BBC1 and BBC2, non-commercial networks; whereas the American market has always been dominated by commercial networks, which are, by the very nature of commerciality, driven by forces other than quality programming. PBS, the only non-commercial network in the U.S., doesn't have the resources to pitch its shows effectively to European distributors. If the European airwaves were filled with professors from Stanford and plumbers from Liverpool, the view of American culture and American English might be considerably different. Instead, the airwaves are filled with documentaries from Oxford, and, from the U.S., the likes of Ricki Lake. (Sweden is an exception here, as it is in so many other ways.)

    However much the fault lies with American producers and distributors themselves (especially when it comes to film), the attitudes already in place in Europe reinforce the distribution patterns of TV shows and films: why go to see a non-Hollywood American film (if one can be found in Europe)? If we want culture, we see a European film.

    But isn't this a much less complicated matter? Might it be simply that British English is the English taught in most European schools, and British literature is the English literature taught in most European schools? And that the curriculum is structured in this way simply because it's a tradition, and tradition per se has value? No, this is in fact not a simple matter at all, and cuts to the heart of Nietzsche's concern with modernity: why the familiar instead of the unfamiliar? why the old instead of the new?

    "Deviation" is the category within which the values are often expressed with regard to language. It would seem to be that the English of the former colonies is deficient because it has deviated from its "parent language," precisely as the colonies deviated from the Crown politically. American English, Australian and even Irish English, "went West," towards the sinistral. A living language evolves, much like the people in the colonies themselves evolved. British English itself has evolved. Criticizing American English for not being British English is like saying Swedish is inferior to Icelandic because Icelandic is closer to the earlier language from which both Swedish and Icelandic derive. For that matter, it would be like criticizing all languages for being anything more than the scarcely human grunts which first were issued forth eons ago at the dawn of human history. (One pictures a puddle somewhere in Africa during the time when languages began to change and diversify, where a few old men are huddled around, scornfully saying "Grunt, grunt, grunt." Translation: "All these new languages are deficient forms of Gruntian!")

    No, there's no prima facie reason to assume older is intrinsically better than newer, when it comes to language or any other aspect of culture. Under one common reading of Nietzsche, it was one of the goals of the genealogical method to question the idea that origins are somehow better -- because untainted. Indeed a genealogy in a more literal sense reveals the Queen's English to be inbred and stale. The English of the former colonies is on fire with life, constantly in motion. Hundreds of wordsmiths, from Whitman to Plath to Toni Morrison, have enriched the English language as much as anyone since Shakespeare. And thousands of local sonorities have breathed a new life into English. The sumptuous, warbling melodies of a Carolina accent, or the edgy courage that seeps out of a Brooklyn working class voice, have brought a new music to the language.

    The gigantic gulf between the reality of the New World and the absurd platitudes that fly off the tongues of so many Europeans -- "'American culture' is a contradiction in terms," "Americans can't speak English," and so on -- is a measure of the strength of the need being met in the choice of old over new. Indeed, there is a staggering irony in the very interpretative approach used: it is, itself, precisely the opposite of "fine": it is a coarse, blunt sledge-hammer, projecting itself onto that which it bashes, all the while dressing itself up as "finesse."

    The genea-logy, the "logic of the genus" here is something like "King George ergo King George": one does this enough times, and the result is something much less than that which Nietzsche referred to as "die große Gesundheit": ergo the rays of the sun could kill me, ergo I bleed to death if I'm scratched lightly (does hemophilia lie at the bottom of the value of the "delicate?"), ergo I completely lose my mind, as an unexpected consequence of my culture's attempt to maintain itself through stasis, through preservation, through the fear of foreign elements being introduced into the genus. The self-sustaining emptiness of this "well-bred" logic is reflected in a conversation I had a few weeks ago. "America is superficial, simple, and crude." -What about New York? "That's not really America." -What about Boston? "That's not really America." -What about San Francisco? "That's not really America, though maybe it was a little bit in the 60's" -- and so on, until I was finally told "America is Dallas." This parallels the logic of absolutist racism: "All blacks are intellectually inferior." -What about Cornell West? "He's not really black." -Why not? "Because he's not intellectually inferior."

    The macabre circularity of this logic, again, merely underlines -- given especially that it is spun by people in what is probably the most educated continent in the world -- the depth of the need it serves, precisely the same need met by the ascetic ideal, analyzed by Nietzsche in Zur Genealogie der Moral. As Nietzsche puts in at the beginning of the 3^rd essay of Zur Genealogie, "Was Bedeuten Asketische Ideale?":

 

Daß aber überhaupt das asketische Ideal dem Menschen so viel bedeutet hat, darin drückt sich die Grundtatsache des menschlichen Willens aus, sein horror vacui: er braucht ein Ziel -- und eher will er noch das Nichts wollen als nicht wollen.

 

[That, however, the ascetic ideal has in general meant so much to man expresses the fundamental fact of human willing, its horror vacui: man needs a goal -- and he would rather continue to will nothingness than not will.]

 

    That it is precisely this which is willed: a dying culture which aims only towards itself, the thin lips that move as little as possible when speaking, the tongue that stays meekly in the middle of the mouth, languishing like an embryo in formaldehyde -- that even this can be willed (or at least esteemed) by a whole continent, testifies to the strength of the will itself.

    But there are, of course, other ways of filling the void opened up by the modern collapse of Enlightenment hopes. Instead of willing to the East, coddling the obsession with origins, straining to wrench the hands of time all the way back to the age of regal glory, one could weigh anchor, push off from one's moorings, let go of gravity itself, and follow the sun across the sea. This means, of course, to venture into the unknown: one lives with the horror, not knowing whether it will ever abate.

    The function of the ideology of "taste," then, is to make the choice of avoiding the New World more comfortable: better to turn backwards, unreflectively inwards, than to go West. However dull and phlegmatic the culture of the Crown is, we know what Westward expansion led to: a childish, superficial, all-too vulgar culture.

 

*

 

    Yet might this view of the New World -- above all the U.S. -- have some truth to it? Might this opposition between Old and New be far too simple? Can one seriously maintain that America is not foul -- or, to use a taste-less Nietzschean term: simply "bad" -- in at least some ways? And how "daring" has the New World actually been?

    Many of the first Europeans who went West were simply looking for a new place to "be East," to escape the Enlightenment via a regressive, fundamentalist retreat. There is nothing particularly bold about their motivation. And this history certainly lives on today in the callow Christianity of Kansas or Arizona, housed in "pragmatically" built churches (Catholics in the New World certainly fared better on this score), the architecture of which even a New Worlder is nearly compelled to call "tasteless."

    And even the millions of Americans who call themselves secular -- aren't they, too, no different from the "pale" (that is, English) atheists Nietzsche excoriates so roundly in, for example, Zur Genealogie? Isn't this orientation towards the world precisely why Nietzsche always puts "God is dead" in scare-quotes -- that God has found ways to live on, everywhere, not just in the European attachment to the ancien régime ("good taste"), but in the New World attachment to science and logic, to the dreams of infinite expansion, the dreams of California, the dreams of lifting off from the planet itself, into a nouveau régime, a new Überirdisches: colonies on the moon and Mars and beyond, a continuation of the whole eschatological techno-fetishism which, today, is the ideological grease of the "new" economy? Might "West" just be the inverse of "East" then? Might both the Old and the New represent the same reactive escapism, the same flipping of the pages of the calendar, in an attempt to flee the black hole of modernity, in the one case flipping backwards, towards a pre-Enlightenment fantasy of simplicity and order; in the other case flipping forward, towards a fantasy of redemption in an "other-worldly" future, towards a Cartesianism run amok?

    Furthermore, wasn't it the English who were among the most daring of what Nietzsche calls the Luft-Schifffahrer des Geistes? Wasn't it precisely they who launched so many of these ships?

 

*

 

    Yes, aspects of America are "vulgar," above all its political culture (the Supreme Court's decision in 2000 -- regardless of its basis: vulgarity or superpower indifference -- to terminate vote-counting was unconscionable); America as a whole is not necessarily "daring"; much of American ideology is certainly techno-fetishistic escapism; and it was indeed the English who launched many of these westbound ships.

    But, to respond to the last objection first, while the English, to be sure, launched many ships, it was in order to spread the ancien régime, not to establish a new regime. (The Puritans, who came a bit after the first explorers, were generally not nobility.) The English traveled to spread the English, which means they went West only in form, not in content. The English came to Ireland and immediately started destroying the native language, the native religion, and as many aspects of Irish culture as possible. The Vikings, in contrast, risked the void itself when they came to Ireland. They let their Norse identity dissolve into the culture and customs of Ireland, and became, as the Irish themselves say, "more Irish than the Irish." They weren't looking for a new place to be their old selves, they were looking for newness per se. (They may also have been looking for booty, but then, Vikings will be Vikings.) The thousands of English names in the Northeast United States testify to the English lack of negative capability. Even at their most daring they merely prepended "New" to the old: "New York," "New England," etc.

    To be sure, the Old World, in an unusually undisguised ("unrefined") form, still exists in the New -- especially in America. It exists in the very literalism of its fundamentalist Christianity, and even in the traditions preserved by the old English families of Boston and New York. "Taste" itself has taken root in New England and other parts of the Eastern U.S., to the extent that some Americans not of British decent (William F. Buckley and Madonna, for example) even affect a British accent, thinking that this somehow elevates them -- the latter having done so even before actually moving to London.

    And, yes, where America eschews the Old World in all its forms, it still appears to be merely its inverse insofar as it trades one regime for another before the abhorrent vacuum ("God is Dead").

    But for all the kitschy churches and escapist dreams of planetary colonization, there is also the uniquely American modernism, the fine, glistening blade of Hemingway, Plath, and Eugene O'Neill, who float over a suicidally godless abyss.

    Indeed, it is precisely this which is the brilliance of America: it increasingly contains the tension itself between East and West, between Old and New, and refuses to resolve it in one direction or the other. One hears this in, for example, the restive indecision of the Boston accent, which contains the "vulgar" twangy vowels, yet also the "fine" (mummified, stilled) trailing R ("hAHvuhd yAHd"), a tension which expresses itself nearly everywhere in American culture, in ways obvious and well-known (Ginsberg's "Howl") and in ways indirect and obscure (the underrated film, River's Edge, for example). It's not that West per se is more daring than East. Rather, what's daring is to contain East and West both, in an explosive contradiction, without resolving the contradiction into one pole or other.

    Indeed, there are probably more "good Europeans," in Nietzsche's sense, in the United States than in Europe (and there are no "good Europeans" in Buckingham Palace), for it is precisely in the U.S. where the absence of an identity, an identity grounded unreflectively in history and tradition, makes the productive tension possible:

 

Aber wir, die wir weder Jesuiten, noch Demokraten, noch selbst Deutsche genug sind, wir guten Europäer und freien, sehr freien Geister -- wir haben [diese] noch, die ganze Noth des Geistes und die ganze Spannung seines Bogens! (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, end of Preface)

 

[But we, who are neither Jesuits, nor democrats, nor even sufficiently German, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits -- we still have this, the whole distress and need of the spirit, and the whole tension of its bow!]

 

Americans are indeed not "democratic enough": the demos is simply too diverse to be able to come together and krate (and there is no Hitler to extirpate those far away from an ethnic center -- though there are certainly Reagans and Bushes who try, never successfully, to silence dissent). Nor are Americans even "American enough." Indeed, there is no "American" (precisely as there were few Germans in Nietzsche's time, given the fragmented nature of Germany itself). The identity of an American swivels around a hyphen in the void between two disparate histories: one old and often too distant to be relevant, and one so new it is like God moving over the face of the waters. There are only Japanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and so on. Even the original inhabitants of the land need a second term in order to be characterized: "native Americans." America is the tensest bow in history, the infinite priapism of modernity, and the "Noth des Geistes" is as great as that of Ulysses' bow, yet every attempt to point and shoot simply recreates the tension: there is no row of axes to align one's aim; for that matter there is no Penelope, no Ithaca. An Irish-American moves from Boston to San Francisco and doesn't become more American. The hyphen remains, or even multiplies (Irish-American-Californian). It makes no difference if he goes East, "back" to Ireland: he just becomes Irish-American-Irish (an identity painfully sharpened when the Irish call him simply "American"). To choose to be American is thus to let one's identity float: Americans are the Vikings who stay permanently at sea. Indeed, to be American is to be Nietzschean.

    Nietzsche was a good European. He contained, he was, the tension of the bow. ("I am not human; I am dynamite") -- he was precisely the tension contained in today's America. He was obsessed with taste (see especially die Fröhliche Wissenschaft) and aristocracy (Jenseits von Gut und Böse, for example), yet was everywhere looking Westward. He loved Sophocles, yet also loved Emerson. Indeed, each of his texts is structured around this East-West (or ancien-nouveau) opposition. For example, near the beginning of Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, in the very first verses after the Preface, there is a discussion about the value of age and history; and the very end of the book, a section entitled "Lieder des Prinzen Vogelfrei," concludes with a line about reaching out towards the stars.

    And in Morgenröte, the book whose opening words -- "In diesem Buche findet man einen 'Unterirdischen' an der Arbeit, einen Bohrenden, Grabenden, Untergrabenden" -- describe Nietzsche's attempt to move towards roots, a book which is named for the East itself, Nietzsche closes with the opposite movement, in the section mentioned above, entitled, "Wir Luft-Schifffahrer des Geistes!," whose final words are the following:

 

Und wohin wollen wir denn? Wollen wir denn über das Meer? Wohin reisst uns dieses mächtige Gelüste, das uns mehr gilt als irgend eine Lust? Warum doch gerade in dieser Richtung, dorthin, wo bisher alle Sonnen der Menschheit untergegangen sind? Wird man vielleicht uns einstmals nachsagen, dass auch wir, nach Westen steuernd, ein Indien zu erreichen hofften, -- dass aber unser Loos war, an der Unendlichkeit zu scheitern? Oder, meine Brüder? Oder? -- (Morgenröte, §575)

 

[And where, then, do we want to go? Do we want to go over the sea? Where is this powerful longing wrenching us -- this craving which for us is the most important of all desires? Why precisely in this direction, towards the place where, up till now, all the suns of humanity have "gone down"? In the future, will they perhaps say of us that we too, steering towards the West, hoping to find an India -- that it was our fate to be shattered on the infinite? Might this be our posterity, my brothers? Might it?]

 

The Morgenröten -- the England in New England, the York in New York -- keep one end of the bow fast, while the longing for the Abendröten pulls the bow taught. And this tension maintains itself, recurs, eternally.

 

*

 

    What, then, is the meaning of English "Good Taste" on the Continent? What is the meaning of the flaccid 'R' or the use of the word "lift?" It has nothing to do with contemporary politics, nor with the geographical proximity of England to the rest of Europe, nor with the intrinsic sound of British English, nor with any intrinsic value to the "classical." No, it is, ultimately, to make a simple, comfortable choice, instead of choosing choicelessness itself. It is to turn back to the safe familiarity of the ancien régime. It is to reject the mad, tangled, taut beauty of everything West of England: from the beauty of Ireland -- the fertile contradiction between its Catholicism and its bold, resplendent Joycean R -- to the beauty of America, with, on the one hand, its pre-Enlightenment, benighted Bible Belt, and, on the other hand, its fanciful, nihilistic drift, its absence of mooring lines and anchors, its Hemingway's and Plath's and its countless pockets of passionate, dangerously godless culture; its rap, and its free, very free jazz.

    It is, instead, to say: "Long live the Queen!" It is to condone the monotony of George = George = George. It is to say Yes to the pasty face and the powdered wig. It is to hallow the eternal English Garden, where, like the gray fingers knotted around the stained porcelain, everything points unreflectively inward -- aside from the ridiculous, syphilitic pinky, straining to cast itself off from the tea cup.

 

 

Brian Manning Delaney

March 2002, Stockholm

 

(Some typos in print version have been corrected here.)