DEIXIS

"DEIXIS IS WHAT SPEAKERS DO to locate themselves in space and time, with respect to things, events, and each other. When speaking, it is impossible not to be deictic, not to "be in" the context of one's discourse. Not being deictic is not communicating, not being in a situation, not being. This is what happens in some narratives, whose narrator disappears behind the events of the story and which seem to be deploying themselves without the intervention of any speaker. Such narrative, however, is strictly a written achievement, made possible by the fictional space that writing creates. In oral narrative, it is just as impossible for a narrator to disappear as it is for any speaker, and to discover the signs of that presence is, I believe, an important aspect of the study of oral traditions that have come down tous in the form of text."

Egbert J. Bakker
Homeric Oytos and the Poetics of Deixis
Classical Philology, Vol. 94, No. 1. (Jan., 1999), p. 1.

A Quote from Neil Postman's Book

"I mean by 'narrative' a story. But not any kind of story. I refer to big stories-stories that are sufficiently profound and complex to offer explanations of the origins and future of a people; stories that construct ideals, prescribe rules of conduct, specify sources of authority,and, in doing this, provide a sense of continuity and purpose. Joseph Campbell and Rollo May, among others, called such stories 'myths.' Marx had such stories in mind in referring to 'ideologies.' And Freud called them 'illusions.' No matter. What is important about narratives is that human beings cannot live without them."
- Building a Bridge to the 18th century (p 101) by Neil Postman

The whole chapter (entitled "Narratives") essentially deals with the subject of this blog and the term which I frequently use in writing, "metanarrative." The differentiation between Postman's term and mine is only that my own use is distinguished from approximately five layers of narrative with the metanarrative 'layer' as the top and framed artistic expression as the bottom layer. I'll go into this further in future entries.

Lyotard and Nasta'līq

Lyotard describes the effect of technology on language as a compartmentalization and filtering of data into smaller sound bites. A good example of this data degradation is the attempt to create a typewriter to write Persian scipt [Nasta'līq].

"Monotype's attempt to implement Nasta'līq for photo composer typesetting resulted in a repertoire of 20,000 different glyphs. ... Nastaleeq Typography first started with the attempts to develop a metallic type for the script but all such efforts failed. Fort William College developed a Nastaleeq Type but that was not close to Nastaleeq and hence never used other than by the college library to publish its own books. State of Hyderabad Dakan (now in India) also attempted to develop a Nastaleeq Typewriter but this attempt miserably failed and the file was closed with the phrase “Preparation of Nastaleeq on commercial basis is impossible”. Basically, in order to develop such a type, thousands of pieces are required."

Applications to Comparative Literature:

Between literary works of differing cultures, eras and disciplines it can be assumed that there is data loss in translation. For all of our efforts to harness the power of technology, there are certain aspects of our best translation software and linguistic machinery which will always tend towards the truncation of the speakers full meaning. The objective correlative is conveyed, crossing through this membranes of culture, time and specialty, by appealing to the lowest common denominators of human experience [i.e. suffering, beauty, relationship, spiritualty, creativity, etc.] Only when couched within this Trojan Horse of "common things" can the surprising and mystical element be delivered into the heart of the other. Certainly data loss is inevitable, but the question remains of whether or not the heart of the author remains intact within the skeletal remains of the text.