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Inhalt
| There's so much that we share / That it's time we're aware |
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| Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira | |
| 2006.08.09 15.08 | |
        Somehow I can't stop writing about Kongresas, but the articles I'm stumbling across are just so astonishingly appropriate to the themes we discussed there, which, coincidentally, happen to be underlying themes surrounding the very concept of "Lithuanianness," understood culturally, ethnically, linguistically, politically, etc. So today, from (where else?) Lietuvos rytas, we're treated to this hilarious monologue overheard by Kristina Sabaliauskaitė in London:„Važiuoju į Getviką, sėdau į tiūbą, bet paaiškėjo, kad ne tokią travelką nusipirkau, tai teko pirkt kitą.It's too bad that my favorite "anglicizmas" in the story, "kok-apas," might be completely lost on a strictly American audience. Nevertheless, just from this opening, it's clear what the article is going to complain about. Still, as I remark on the flip, it's worth reading, and the conclusions point to something that I'm starting to suspect is the hyper-irony of the fight for Lithuanian independence. Lithuanians anglicize astonishingly quickly, even those who have been in England only a short time. Sabaliauskaitė's irritation, however, takes some peculiar twists and turns, especially with the complaint that the anglicizmai enter into Londoner's vocabulary without the attendant improvements in the speaker's actual English: Juk kiek daug pasitaiko sutikti čia mūsiškių, kurie gyvena ne vienerius metus, šnekėdami lietuviškai prismaigsto kalbą „travelkų“, „dei-ofų“, „pei-čekų “ ir „dedlainų“, o nuėję į vietos parduotuvėlę draugui sako: „ė, davaj, kalbėk tu, kalbėk tu...“, nes nesugeba išlementi „Could I have a pint of milk, please?“.As such, Sabaliauskaitė argues for a sort of mutual respect of different languages. Instead of making a mish-mash of Lithuanian and English, one should keep them separate, even avoiding the Lithuanianization of English names (a practice she blames on the Soviet practice of rendering all names in Cyrillic).  Still, eventually, the ideas of porous borders and the small world arise. Sabaliauskaitė fixes upon Heidegger's idea of language as the "house of Being" ("Haus des Seins") (not quite cleanly, from what I gather), and then suggests that the house is something of ourselves that we carry around with us, despite the smaller world, despite the porous borders.The emphasis on how it's small world after all now, though, is the part I want to bring home, since it can envelope a Disneyfication of cultural difference. During one lecture during Kongresas, the speaker presented three different hats, indicating the different hats he wears during his life. The third hat was mouseketeer ears, and he exclaimed that the ears were a signal of his "cosmopolitan" self. There was something astonishingly appropriate about choosing a Disney icon for "cosmopolitanism," since it's not quite an icon of that as much as it could be understood as an icon of globalization, or, more correctly, an icon of American hegemony. Mickey Mouse is not a symbol of the universal (although Benjamin did write about the Mickey Mouse cartoons that "the huge popularity of these films is not mechanization, their form; nor is it a misunderstanding. It is simply the fact that the public recognizes its own life in them."). He is a symbol of American dominance of culture and economy. Mickey Mouse is everywhere, just as English is. Sabaliauskaitė's complaints about English are not at all surprising because they've been rehearsed before—we've heard about the pervasive influence of English on French (le week-end , le chewing-gum), on Spanish to the point of creating "Spanglish," and so on. It's called language contact, and it's unavoidable. Even the pervasive influence of English on Lithuanian was recorded in novels published in the US in Lithuanian. In fact, the presence of anglicizmai was just about the only thing that could get me to read even a few pages of the books my mom would try to get me to read (I find anglicizmai, to this day, genuine and amusing). Further, the novels are only following the tradition of, say, Šatrijos Ragana, who has characters speak with polonicisims in Sename dvare. Whoever is in power has cultural influence that leaks downward. This happens, it could be, especially in the nationalist moment, when, as Gellner notes, the nationalists create a centralized, nationalist high culture that trickles down. Anyway, in the 19th century it was polonicisms. Then came the russification of the language (exemplified by the crossed out мат used in Vienuolio "Paskenduolė"). Now we have the anglicization. Notice, of course, that Sabaliauskaitė (without complaint?) incorporates a number of Russian words (давай, кароче) into her examples of thoroughly anglicized Lithuanian. It starts getting very tricky to handle. Still, the irony I promised, becomes this: during the Soviet occupation, the Lithuanians in diaspora (arrogantly) imagined themselves as keepers of the Lithuanian cultural flame, as the culture was destroyed by the cold-hearted communists. This was pushed to the point where I was slightly surprised as a child to learn that Lithuanians in Lithuania actually spoke Lithuanian (although the older generations here would probably scoff at the notion that the language spoken by the people in Lithuania is "Lithuanian"). Sure, a russified accent appeared, and there was a strong sign of language contact with Russian, but the language existed. The worries, the concerns about a gutted culture seemed to be, rather, for nought—fueling the contempt, in fact, a lot of Lithuanians have for members of the diaspora who come and tell them how to be "real" Lithuanians.  Yet it's now—now that Lithuania has managed to abandon the yoke of Stalinist oppression—that its culture becomes, I wonder, most threatened. What our parents and grandparents fought for, independence and free markets, has come to pass, but in today's economic world, that only accelerates the americanization of a culture. As long as Mickey Mouse was not allowed into the USSR (he will always be the echter Kleinbürger), he was unable to dilute the culture of the various SSRs with his crass commercialist appeal. Now, however, that Lithuania is a chomping-at-the-bit member of the globalized community, the culture will suffer. It has to. Economies of scale dictate that Mickey Mouse will devour Zuikis Puikis every time.So I wonder, then, if Sabaliauskaitė is fighting a winnable battle, encouraging us to try and keep our languages clean. I'd argue that it's totally unwinnable as languages are, if nothing else, really promiscuous ("Bordelle des Seins"?). They sleep around, and they pick up tricks and turns of phrase around the whole world. In fact, English, the language infecting every other language these days, is probably the sluttiest language in human history. So if the battle is unwinnable, is it even worth fighting? I'm not sure. I maintain that, as long as there is a regulating body of the Lithuanian language and that it is an official language of a state, Lithuanian will continue to exist, in some form. It's a question of what the form takes that's the issue—and it definitely does not strike me that it's an entirely good idea to try to finesse the form in some resource-consuming way. "It's a Small World" is, apparently, one of the most translated songs in the world (it'd be interesting to see if it or the Internationale is translated into more languages). But in closing, I'd like to remind you that, as you sit in your boat and watch the happy robots all singing, that, despite their various cultural and racial (and economic? and political? it's been ages since I've been on the ride) markers, you have to remember that what they're singing is, most definitely, in English. You can't stop Mickey Mouse—you can only hope to contain him. |
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| Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2006.08.11 23.03 ) |