Language: The Voice [Is] The Wilderness
Rhetorical devices may be defined in broad (yet clear) terms however, how these devices ‘behave’ within a linguistic environment can’t be universally defined. The environment of the device—meaning, everything from the context of its use to the perception of its consumer—influences whether a simile highlights similarity or difference, and, consequently, whether the meaning it was intended to convey is the one which it does. None of this is to say that language is without any real meaning—language self-evidently holds tangible meaning given that some form of agreed meaning must exist in order for language to function—but, rather, that the elements of language seem to autonomously ‘self-define’ within complex linguistic ecosystems once ‘set free’. Put differently, language is an autopoetic ecology.
For example, consider the following sentences: ‘my dog jumps on me while I’m working, interrupting me as if he were one of my children’, and, ‘my dog loves me like my children, with a complete disregard for when I’m working’. These sentences apply an identical rhetorical device in the comparison of identical subjects and objects—namely, both sentences compare a dog to children through simile. However, due to contextual variance (in this instance, variation in phrasing), a nuanced difference seems to emerge.
In the first sentence, the narrator expresses that a particular action by the dog reminds them of their children but maintains a perspective which affirms the dog is not, in ‘real terms’, a child. Thus, a non-human action turns the narrator’s perspective to, not the human within the non-human but, towards the ‘true’ human that the non-human mimics.
In the second sentence, the narrator acknowledges physical difference between human and non-human but erases emotional difference. Thus, while a difference between the human and non-human remains within the narrator’s perspective, ‘true’ difference between the children and the dog is absent.
In this way, the human relationship to language is one whereby we tend to it like a garden rather than piece it together like a LEGO set. Perhaps, then, the intangible special quality within language we exalt is a subconscious reverence that nothing we are, and nothing we create, untethers us from the natural. We, all of us, and all which may emerge from us, will always exist within an inescapable verdure.
Toby Francis (z5342546)