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AccueilNumérosVol. II - n°5Un exercice pratique de ré-écriture“I, too, Have Long Digressed”

Un exercice pratique de ré-écriture

“I, too, Have Long Digressed”

Michael Sollars
p. 143-152

Résumé

La cible de cet essai satirique est le problème de l’analphabétisme. Inspiré de l’œuvre célèbre de Swift « A Modest Proposal », cette adaptation contemporaine propose, pour débarrasser le pays des ravages de la pauvreté engendrée par l’analphabétisme, de confier à chaque enfant, dès qu’il commence à marcher, un petit dictionnaire à la place de ses inutiles poupées et ours en peluche. Présent dès les plus jeunes années de l’enfant, le dictionnaire deviendrait ainsi une référence familière et éprouvée avec laquelle l’enfant pourrait tisser des liens similaires à ceux qui le lient à son « doudou ». Dans cet essai à la première personne, la voix narrative est similaire à celle de Swift, et le narrateur, excentrique directeur de dictionnaires, pousse son plan rationnel jusqu’au l’absurde. Cet essai est fidèle au texte polémique de Swift sur la forme, et il emprunte plusieurs approches utilisées par l’auteur pour satiriser l’idée selon laquelle manger les enfants est une solution au problème de la pauvreté pour les familles irlandaises.

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Entrées d’index

Index chronologique :

20th century / XXe siècle
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Texte intégral

1Long ago I was late for a wedding and hurrying to the church at the end of the street when a wizened and eccentric man stepped into my path. Such encounters with these unsavory creatures are not unusual but rather too frequent in this great city. I have developed the needful habit of keeping a few small coins handy for such nuisance encounters. Worthless foreign coins are also useful for these instances. At first I hardly dared to look at this beggar’s face for he could not be but one of the thousands of grimy-faced vagabonds that flood this city’s once enchanted avenues. But this particular miscreant appeared far from the typical beggar. His dress seemed the odd cloak of a Helvetic or Russian harlequin. His clothes—amazingly—were held together with a constellation of bright blue, red, and yellow patches in the front and back.  His hair and whiskers—fine white plumage—stood straight out. He resembled someone from a rare and exotic locale. He was the epitome of Kurtz’ Slavic minion. I was surprised that he asked for nothing; but his dark gaze called my attention for some inexplicable reason. Then suddenly he thrust a small object into my hands and, not uttering so much as a word, danced off in a wind of color.  He vanished like a frightful cormorant.  The street fell empty for a long moment until the clang of church bells broke the stillness. I slipped the book in my coat pocket and hurried to the ceremony.

2The wedding turned out to be one of those interminably long and predictable ceremonies plodding along on the rusty rails of precise protocol. I did not know the young couple well even though I had gone to college with the groom. To be honest, I had attended the festivities for the complementary refreshments.  The young couple, still obviously immature, muttered idealistically personal vows—abominably inscribed, to be polite—promises that will be tested time and again on the battlefield of domesticity. I chuckled as I recalled Irving’s disparagement of Madame’s “petticoat government.” This whole scene, clearly a ludicrous and costly social invention, seemed utterly preposterous.  A great foreign wit by the name of Wilde once quipped, “Always! That is a dreadful word. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.” I wrote this across the elegantly printed wedding program and then recited my own solemn oath never again to attend such ceremonies, regardless of the tempting fare. But then I was startled beyond imagination. Right in the middle of the program stood the word “marraige.” I looked at it repeatedly. How could such an indiscretion have taken place?  And then I glanced around to witness hundreds of these programs as fans flapping and waving their mistake boldly in the pious air. I testily wondered how people could enter into a contract of matrimony if they cannot even spell the abstraction correctly.  A future built on a mistake, I considered, is a mistake of the future. What hope is there for a future if the beginning is irredeemably flawed? An aging gentleman next to me was struggling to stay awake. I wanted to point out to him the indignity of this transgression, but he resisted my interruption and drifted off. Misspellings have incessantly incensed me. I have always been precocious, especially when it comes to the language arts. I remember everything and forget nothing. I find it a blessing.

3I had just graduated from the most prestigious university in the city and become employed as a lexicologist for a leading publisher of reference texts a few months before the wedding. I was pleasantly assured by my senior editors that I had the correct temperament and disposition for the demanding position. That my memory was without bounds and perfect—I knew practically every word in the current lexicon—was to my credit.

4Growing restless, I felt the stranger’s book in my coat pocket and allowed it to occupy my attention. I thought with certainty that it would be one of those self-serving religious volumes handed out on street corners by the faithful who accost others at random. But oddly it was a reference text, a worn pocket-sized lexicon readily available in any second-hand bookshop for less than a dollar. I thought there might be some scribbling of interest or amusement concealed within its covers, but I found no handwritten notes squirreled away on its pages. I didn’t have to trouble myself to ensure that the word marriage had been misspelled, as my education in etymology never leaves me in error. There seemed nothing startling about the book except in the manner in which I happened to acquire it from that haughty denizen of little or no importance.

5All of these thoughts long occupied my attention, for when I looked up again people were filing out of the church, the bride and groom having already departed. I was slightly embarrassed and hurried to depart from the now almost empty church. But as I rushed out, a loud, thundering voice, echoing throughout the great cavern of the church, bellowed towards me. A caretaker was calling to ask if I had forgotten something. Even more embarrassed, I swept the book from his out-stretched hand and scurried out into the blinding noon light.

6These encounters—the harlequin and marriage—occurred over thirty years. I was sipping coffee in my apartment overlooking the river when I noticed an obituary about the wedding couple in the morning paper. I had not had a single thought about the man and woman in all these years.  There was some suggested innuendo or rumor about a double suicide or murder-suicide that was orchestrated to occur on the very day of the couple’s anniversary. One was extremely invalided and the other suffered from the final stages of Alzheimer. From the poorly written article—pronouns without clear antecedents—I could not tell who had suffered from which ailment. “What a numbskull writer!” I barked like a wounded dog. “He should be thrashed for failing to use words precisely, especially in an obituary.” I decided immediately that the writer should be the recipient of one of my most derisory missives.

7I am caustically annoyed when I see words misused in books, magazines, advertisements, billboards, menus, and in other print forms. If I discover a word ill treated on a menu, I will correct it without hesitation. Magazine and newspaper editors constantly hear from my pen. Once in the world’s largest chain bookshop I happened to notice that the bookseller’s staff had placed small lettered signs that read STATIONARY in not one but numerous places where their envelopes and writing papers were displayed. I hurried to retrieve a dictionary from the store’s shelf and stormed the service desk to confront the young clerk. “It is here in the dictionary, for verification,” I inveighed as I shoved the book under her eyes and explained the store’s egregious error. Unperturbed, the clerk seemed more discombobulated that I was troubling her with my petition than the error with the signage. I was stupefied by how a bookshop would condone such mindless behavior. Weeks later when I returned to the same bookshop I discovered, to my chagrin, that STATIONARY still held its prominent position for the public’s gape.

8On one of my rare outings to a nearby coffee shop, I found that someone had scribbled on a wall notepad near the cash register “Sieze the Day.” Utterly annoyed, even though the author’s intentions were perhaps laudable, I took out my pen and hastily crossed out the misspelling and rewrote the word “Seize.” I also wrote, “To be more precise, one with any learning should use the Latin expression ‘carpe diem.’” The next day I returned to see if the original author had accepted my counsel. To my dismay, the anonymous author had written scurrilously “F OFF” in large bold letters. These are only a few of the innumerable instances that I find myself confronting almost daily in an effort to perfect upon others’ misusages of language. I am also frequently the victim of overhearing the rancorous prattle of jargon and buzzwords from others. I have to bite my tongue not to offer constructive comments on street corners, in elevators, on the subway, and even in the hallway outside my apartment. My mind has become so finely attuned to the perfection of speech and writing that any deviation whatsoever disturbs me.

9I have become so disgruntled over the many decades that I have safely managed to seclude myself almost totally from others. I am well suited to be a recluse. I have managed to arrange my work and life so that I have hardly any direct contact with others. Since my work—the finest dictionary in English in the world—is published only every decade, I have managed to work alone, using email and other written correspondence to communicate with those who are contributors and advisors to the tome. Others are very cautious, even hesitant, to write to me, as I will mercilessly edit their writing, highlighting how they have glaringly misused the language. I am more unrelenting than the most obdurate composition professor. I almost never take phone calls. At home, no one can intrude on my peaceful environment. When I must surface from my seclusion—only every 10 years—I face a fitful situation. It is a frightful encounter to face the moronic press, sign first editions, and lecture about the new edition to simpletons who never open a dictionary. To ease my present fears, I have been concentrating on the future edition due out in another ten years. I have already planned out every letter of the alphabet, week by week, month by month, and year by year. One must be organized.

10Unfortunately, the estimable new edition is scheduled to be released in a few days in the midst of great fanfare, so as I will be compelled to emerge from the safety of my testudinal shell I am expectedly apprehensive. To prepare for these upcoming speeches and lectures, I have been giving this task my undivided thoughts for many months. I have decided to offer a truly modest proposal.

11I have discovered that in this great and wealthy city there exist an unfathomable number of countless poor purveyors of the language. The destitute in economic means are nothing compared to the destitute in language skills. Other noteworthy proposals have been offered in the past by esteemed thinkers to satisfy the economically challenged, but nothing has been proposed for the edification of those linguistically challenged. As I have become after years of dedicated study and work the chief editor of the most prestigious book published, a single text—a veritable Rosetta stone—from which humankind’s infinite galaxies of consciousness are derived, I alone am in the enviable position to suggest a remedy for this grave injustice.

12It is a melancholy experience for those like me who walk through this great city and encounter countless droves of denizens dressed in expensive fashions of all conceivable sorts, but whose utterances are linguistically bankrupt. It is unfortunate especially for me—as this respected lexicon’s chief editor—to have to listen to these linguistically poor who, because of their dreadful deficiencies, must mutter in mindless meter, resort to drab and banal metaphor, split infinities like illiterate woodsmen, and bring disagreement to subject and verb relations. I see this especially in the parents who teach their children the same inexpiable idiomatic word usage that their own parents a generation earlier had spilled on them. It is a Dantesque spiral, a generational trumpery. It is a Hawthornian birthmark—an excruciating imperfection—that must be removed, regardless of the cost. Do not people know that idiomatic and idiotic are etymologically related, as are the offspring of two cousins?

13I have found that there are virtually no citizens of this great nation who lie outside the need of a linguistic therapeutic elixir. Every home should be disinfected from wall to wall of this foul infection of illiteracy. This deplorable state of language has produced division in families, brought strife to friendships, wrought wreckage on student achievement, rendered a deficient workforce, and stagnated the growth of science, commerce, and the arts. Such a widespread malady, if it were a physical cancer decimating the nation to the same extent, would produce a national panic in need of immediate response at any cost. Therefore whoever could find a fair, cheap, and easy method of helping these great many millions of purgatorial souls become sound and useful users of our country’s language would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up before the whole nation.

14As to my own part, having considered this dreadful subject for many long years, and maturely weighed the schemes of other intellectuals (including those who have wrongly set their sights on gambling taxes and tobacco tariffs), I have concluded that there remains only one practical solution.

15There is likewise another great advantage in my scheme: it will prevent those involuntary misunderstandings among people, especially that horrid practice of teachers murdering in rivers of red their inept students’ papers, alas too frequent among us, sacrificing the poor innocent babes. My proposal would soundly eliminate such life-long traumatic memories that originate in the teaching classroom.

16The number of souls in this country is estimated to be two hundred and sixty-five million, all of whom would directly benefit from my proposal. Learned studies by universities and secondary and elementary schools, as well as governmental agencies, document that the millions of empty-headed students who enter and leave these hallowed halls each year possess either marginal or failing knowledge of rhetoric. These paltry results come after an expenditure of uncountable billions of dollars of taxpayer funds year after year.

17I have been assured by certain corporate and governmental leaders that a young man or woman, before the age of eighteen years old, is no marketable commodity in terms of labor, which is, of course, the primary purpose of our vast educational systems. These adolescents often can neither read nor write expertly enough to be employed in jobs to become buyers of goods on which this great nation solely depends for its inimitable reputation.

18After a thorough consideration of various proposals and suggestions, I shall now express my own rather modest proposal, which I anticipate will not be open to the least objection. I have been assured by a very knowing Brit of my long acquaintance that a young healthy man or woman well schooled in the various forms of rhetoric through an immersion of a daily devotion in a lexicon will by the age of maturity be a saleable commodity to voracious corporations and governmental agencies. I humbly and sincerely propose that every young child, beginning at the age of one year, be entrusted with his or her own personal dictionary that will be constantly carried about his or her person, as is now evidenced by the pointless furry teddy bear or bright-eyed doll.

19I have already computed through the assistance of numerous day-care centers that a toddler can carry about his or her person a small pocket-sized dictionary without any difficulty. The weight of this volume will no more exceed that of the teddy bear or doll. Expert child psychologists further inform me that if children become attached to an object at an early age then they will most likely continue that attachment throughout their life. I have coined this the Lexicon complex.

20Then as the child grows the dictionary will naturally become a familiar book of learning, conveniently available even for bedtime reading by the parents. Throughout the child’s early years, the dictionary will function as a close friend, much better than those blankets or imaginary friends they now seem to find so endearing and fanciful.

21Parents, too, will benefit from helping their children become attached to their lexicons. Those dedicated and doting parents will learn along with the children. They will recall what they have forgotten, learn new words, and be able to delight other adults while at malls or parties by their skillful use of proper vocabulary.

22I have discussed this scheme at length with other loyal thinkers of this country and in foreign capitals, and they have added their expertise in improving upon my proposal. Two ingenious recommendations have proven valuable to my proposal. The first comes from a learned soul in Italy who simply requests that the new lexicon be altared in every hotel room, along with now the ubiquitous Gideon’s volume.

23The second refinement derives from a very esteemed person, a true lover of her country and whose virtues I greatly admire. This fine lady of learning suggests that these dictionary-toting toddlers should be subject to impromptu spelling contests. Designated officials would roam about the streets and shopping malls and target the children like deer. The official would open a dictionary at random and ask the child to pronounce, offer a definition, and use the word in a sentence. Those children achieving success would have their names placed in a favorable file where later they would receive financial rewards for their excellence. Ultimately, the successful would compete in a national language test for sizable cash prizes and scholarships. The unfortunate would have their results recorded for future representation, along with their parents, at special court proceedings.

24Such a system would be a boon to employment in this city and around the country through the hiring of these much needed linguistic officials. It is estimated that more than fifty thousand officials would be required at once nationally, with these salaries paid by the fines levied against those parents who have neglected their children’s learning curves and upward achievement rays. Such a direct cause-and-effect system can be more responsibly tracked than the existent state gambling systems and tobacco judgments that have been lauded over for their promise to improve the nation’s educational system. Other knowledgeable advisors consulted have unanimously concluded that there can be no objection to such a scheme, as those truly concerned and committed parents will not find it onerous but beneficial to the success of the family and state.

25I profess with all sincerity that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the public welfare of my country. I look only to advancing literacy, education, and employment, and relieving the poor and giving much pleasure to the rich. And as I will retire as the editor of this dictionary after the future edition is completed, I stand neither to gain a single cent nor any degree in professional prestige. And as a life-long bachelor who has always abhorred the idea of raising or seeing children under my roof I can benefit neither economically nor professionally from this modest proposal.

26I, too, have long digressed.

27Last night I went to a restaurant just below my apartment to have dinner while I finished editing the text of my upcoming lecture. Fortunately I was seated at my usual small table along the sidewalk in the open air. The evening was pleasant and quiet, as I was sitting sufficiently distanced from the other diners so as not to be bothered by their mindless chatter. I decided not to even look at the menu for fear that I would find some word or expression amiss and fall into an altercation. I have not been so kind in the past. Instead I ordered a rare grouper—family Serranidae and genera Epinephelus and Mycteroperca—to satisfy my own whim. The waiter was agreeable and even complimented me on my selection. I had brought with me a copy of my pocket dictionary, as I always leave one in place of a monetary gratuity. Some years ago I also developed the habit of giving copies to street beggars. I would help them learn to fish for their own edification. A little later I ceased eating for a moment in order to give my full concentration to my manuscript. The waiter, who had not had the pleasure of serving me before, stopped at my table and asked, “Are you still working on that?” Suddenly I rose from my chair, dropping the pages of my manuscript. I became utterly unbalanced. That expression has become the crude vernacular of servers everywhere regardless of the fare of the restaurant. Feeling my face turn an intense crimson, I was barely able to keep my composure and stave off violence.  Melville’s Budd was not so wise or fortunate. I found my tongue and addressed the waiter in no uncertain terms. “Sir, never use those words in my earshot. It is a vulgar expression and makes no sense whatsoever. What do you mean by the word ‘working’? One eats or dines on a meal, but one works in the office or in the yard. And what do you mean by the relative pronoun ‘that’? I didn’t order anything that you could properly refer to as ‘that.’ Instead you should politely ask, ‘Sir, are you finished with your dinner?’” I did not expect to receive his unconditional appreciation for my clarification, but I was pleasantly pleased that I had not raised my voice beyond the necessary decibel for instructive communication. But when I looked around the other patrons’ glares were burning like hellish flames.  An instant later, a faction of patrons and employees threw me from the restaurant. In a barely audible din, my escorts derided me: “Good riddens and don’t come back!”

28I hurried upstairs to my apartment and slumped onto the couch. When I sufficiently regained my composure, I gazed around the sanctuary of the room. Towering boxes of my new edition, neatly stacked to the ceiling and fresh from the printer, hid the walls. I ran my hands up and down along the boxes, admiring the precious contents. Finally my eyes rested on the open dictionary sitting reverently in the middle of a table under the effulgence of an antique lamp. I snatched up the volume and rushed out onto the balcony. Below the nethermost shades stared up at me from their dark pit. It was then that I let fall the engine of literacy. Words are more than tools; they are weapons. “The word is riddance, not riddens!” The tome rained down like an infernal ordnance, crashing through the clear glass panes overhanging the café and showering glass and its pages everywhere.

29I watch as they fly and tumble and then finally succumb. They drift toward the ground like tired beggars.  These are pages. Pages with words. My words. But they die too. Words do. Dust to dust. In the beginning was the word.  Dust to dust. From in the beginning to dust to dust. But you know that. The same hand that reaches out of the grave hole to draw down the dead is the same hand that reaches across the universe from some unseen massive constellation to summon the dead elsewhere. Eternal pulling or demand. It is this clenched fist acting sightless and soundless that snares these airborne pages. None of these thoughts matter without words. There seems to be no reason why one page settles here or there. Although their fall appears random, some certain order—however indecipherable—has circumscribed the rise and fall of these pages. But there they lie.  Quiet like angel mirth. Yes, in the beginning was the word. Words of a lecture I was to soon deliver have now quieted to a final rest on the floor. Rest—a long sleep—cradled me too.

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Référence papier

Michael Sollars, « “I, too, Have Long Digressed” »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, Vol. II - n°5 | 2004, 143-152.

Référence électronique

Michael Sollars, « “I, too, Have Long Digressed” »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. II - n°5 | 2004, mis en ligne le 02 novembre 2009, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/2915 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.2915

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Auteur

Michael Sollars

Prof. (Texas, USA)
Michael D. Sollars is a professor of English at Texas Southern University, USA. His research interests include modern drama, surrealism, and eighteenth-century satire and parody. He is working on a biography of Eugene O’Neill.

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