Докса (Jun 2018)
THE DESTINY OF LANGUAGE IN THE CONDITION OF EXILE (approaches to the problem)
Abstract
The article deals with exile as existential condition in its relationship with the language and the poet as the keeper of language. Based on Joseph Brodsky’s creative heritage, the author shows that exile for the poet is primarily expulsion from the native culture and the native language. The fate of exiled is not given to everybody. The exile is the ultimate lesson of linguistic humility. A person begins to feel himself «a grain of sand in the desert» and finds a special mode of measuring his creative powers - human infinity. Brodsky sees the fertile power of exile in an unprecedented and even lightning acceleration of professional escape into isolation, where a poet is left alone with the language. Moving forward through variety of language spheres and elements, the poet shows how things are there. In order to most closely reflect one or another state of the language, the poet’s soul must fall into that state, be in this state and capture it, perhaps against the personal will, but by the language’s will. The language is despotic; it prescribes what and how to speak. The poet’s craft is to allow the language to speak on its own. There are four modes of exile: initial exile, the birth into the material world as payment for original sin; real belonging to the Jewish, to the nation-exiled (or conscious identification with the Jews); exile from the motherland, or socio-political exile; exile as natural and at the same time - metaphysical condition of the poet. These states strengthen each other. The poet-exiled passes the way from the condition of groundlessness, from the being, lost its meaning, to the beingfulfilled, found its meaning. This way lies through the language, as the necessary purgatory and the only salvation. The ill-fate, a blind trick of fate, through free existential choice, through acceptance of the exile as a punishment and at the same time - as Divine gift transfigures into the destiny, foresight and foreknowledge, both for the poet, and for the language. The destiny of the poet becomes the destiny of the language, and vice versa.
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